This sort of clumsy but canny symbolism also animates The Menu, in which executioner-chef Julian Slowick (a relentlessly dour Ralph Fiennes) orchestrates an evening of Tantalean punishments for his churlish patrons.Īs critics have noted, there is an element of feeble wish fulfillment in these works, an unctuous eagerness to flatter the audience’s moral sensibilities while satiating a furtive lust for class warfare. A grotesque, 15-minute scatological set piece in Östlund’s Palme d’Or–winning, Oscar-nominated satire at sea, during which the passengers of a luxury cruise liner succumb to seasickness after dutifully consuming a gelatinous, seven-course shellfish meal during a storm, is brutally funny. All these films - Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion, Mark Mylod’s The Menu, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, to name 2022’s entries in the “eat the rich” genre - offer moments of slapstick satisfaction. Not that I begrudge anyone their fantasies. They enjoy their lives they are not burdened by guilt or shame the other shoe is never going to drop. The true villains of our time are ensconced in cocoons of comfort, immune to accountability. In film after film, farcically wealthy characters are trapped (usually on private islands and/or boats) without hope of escape and elaborately punished for their moral failings, while we, the audience, are invited to sneer and dared to sympathize. My enemies are in power, but I can picture them in flames. Hell, in other words, is our consolation prize for the futile dream of justice - a damnation deferred. “If there can’t be any hope for us, we can at least hope that one day there will be hopelessness for the destroyers of our hope.” In this context, the promise of otherworldly damnation is a solace. “We need to believe that the powerful can suffer, that they can be humiliated, that they can be made to feel there is no way out,” theologian Adam Kotsko writes of this dilemma. Every day brings more nuanced data about the criminally wealthy, the lives they live at our expense, and the elaborate means at their disposal to escape judgment. Never in human history have we possessed so capacious a knowledge of the various and specific iniquities of the world - and so little hope of them ever being rectified. The existence of hell is a problem for theologians: Why would a just and merciful god create a playground for the perpetual torture of his children? But for the rest of us it’s a comfort. Photo: Fredrik Wenzel/Plattform Produktion
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