Gilded Guilt
In the days after Taylor Swift bought the master recordings of her music from the private equity firm that controlled them, girls (and grown women) went to TikTok to express how much this meant to them. Swift had been using this narrative of her exploitation at the hands of music executive Scooter Braun for years to justify rerecording old albums and issuing new versions of older material. The implication was that she had little choice. The boot of capitalism was on the back of her neck. Only by investing in her financially could we all help her get free.
And now, finally, she was. A certified billionaire, she was able to have full control over her music and its use, and to be the only one profiting from her creative output. And the women wept with relief. They recorded themselves crying, dancing, and just staring into the morning sky with expressions of awe.
Because her fans hadn’t just invested in her financially. They had invested in her emotionally, imaginatively, romantically, creatively, and socially. Her happiness was their happiness. Her success was their success. Except the “girl who is going to be okay” (in the parlance of a popular meme) is several thousand dollars poorer from having bought several of the 30+ versions of the new Taylor Swift album as well as exorbitantly priced tickets to her shows, both here and abroad. And that money disappeared straight into the fuel tank of Swift’s private jet.
People have long compensated for the indignities of their private lives by immersing themselves in celebrity culture. The children may be crying from going to bed hungry again, but there’s momentary relief in seeing what a European princess wore to her wedding. With the rise of the billionaire pop star (Swift, Rihanna, and now Beyoncé) and the billionaire pop culture icon (from Elon Musk to Mark Cuban), however, we are more besotted with wealth than ever. And those of us at the bottom of the pyramid scheme of contemporary capitalism are asked to sympathize with our landlords, our oppressors, our employers, and the billionaire signing our deportation orders.
Netflix recently released House of Guinness, the story of one family’s fortune and the struggles it inspired. This follows the hits The Crown, an emotional drama about the English monarchy, and Bridgerton, a frothy romance about the aristocracy. HBO released Mountainhead, a wacky comedy about tech billionaires ending democracy, which was written by the same guy who made Succession, an elevated soap opera about one family’s media empire and its contributions to the end of democracy.
Succession was widely praised for being a “critique” of wealth. Look at these sad, miserable people, incapable of love, the show suggests. Sure, they are able to compensate for the vast void within their souls with power and luxury, but aren’t we all glad we’re not them? As we learned with films like Fight Club (which supposedly critiqued toxic masculinity but mostly inspired the worst men you know to be even worse) and Wall Street (which supposedly critiqued the financialization of everyday life but instead inspired young men to go into finance so they could crash the world’s economy), the silver screen is not an effective medium for critique. After all, if you put people on a screen and make them look hot, pretty, or powerful, viewers will almost always feel empathy for them. Which is how Walter White, the meth kingpin of Breaking Bad, becomes a folk hero to his viewers and how Roman Roy, the sociopathic failson in Succession, the object of sexual fantasy.
Succession and Mountainhead creator Jesse Armstrong said in an interview with the BBC that he keeps making TV shows and movies about the wealthy because it is “a way of expressing a load of feelings about that world and about those men—they’re almost all men in that world—and it’s cathartic.” Catharsis is a strange word in this context, as it suggests a tremendous, aggressive outpouring. What Armstrong’s works do instead is soothe the anxious viewer into thinking that the people who have the power of life and death over them are humans, with real problems, and therefore real feelings.
There is a reluctance to show a character’s purest venality. The most vicious moment in Succession happens in the pilot. During a softball game, Roman Roy singles out one of the spectators—a boy of clearly lower social status—and offers him a check for a million dollars if the boy can hit a home run. When the child fails, Roman rips up the check in his face. Never again would the show delve into the cruelty of the upper class. When Roman later makes a business call that results in a rocket launch explosion that maims several of his company’s workers, the moment is played for laughs. The workers themselves are never shown. Where are the real feelings here?
In the recent Naked Gun reboot, the villain Richard Cane is clearly modeled on soon-to-be trillionaire tech businessman Elon Musk. His fortune comes from a self-driving electric car company, and he has an obsession with male virility. Even though Cane is portrayed as evil and conniving, he is still played by the handsome, elegant, and debonair Danny Huston.
Despite years of Eat-the-Rich–type discourse, we seem to struggle with how money and power operate without falling into either conspiratorial exaggeration (the fantasy of Satan-worshipping elites ritualistically drinking baby blood is centuries old) or fawning admiration for the taste and sophistication of the rich and famous. Both are understandable responses to being aware of the ill effects caused by extreme wealth disparity and simultaneously feeling politically impotent to fix the situation. Both provide soothing stories: If the rich are in league with the devil, that explains why they evade taxation and accountability, and if they are going to turn that wealth into art and glamour, then maybe they deserve to have it. So even as audiences flock to see horror movies where the rich are in fact part of a Satanic empire (Ready or Not) or brainwashing women on a private island (Blink Twice), they can still enjoy something like HBO’s hit show The Gilded Age without fear of cognitive dissonance.
On The Gilded Age, Morgan Spector plays George Russell, a loosely fictionalized version of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. He is handsome and hunky. Tall and dashing. This despite all reports that Frick stood just two inches over five feet. Though personal details may vary, Russell’s involvement in the Homestead Strike of 1892—and the subsequent failed assassination attempt on his life—line up pretty closely with Frick’s biography. Except in one respect: In The Gilded Age’s version of events, our Frick stand-in only orders the Pinkertons to break up the strike because of pressure coming from his advisor. He is reluctant to do so, and he grieves the deaths of the men.
If audiences are going to keep caring about this man’s marital troubles, the unhappiness of his daughter, and the fortunes of his company, then obviously the writers are going to have to deviate from their source material. In 1892, an exasperated Andrew Carnegie asked his business partner Frick to figure out what to do with the workers striking at his Pennsylvania ironworks. His workers’ demands for better working conditions and better pay had led to a stalemate in negotiations over a new contract. When Carnegie Steel refused to agree to the union’s terms, the workers took over the city. And that is when Frick sent in the Pinkertons. Seven workers died, as did a child.
The Gilded Age also deviates from history when it comes to Frick’s would-be assassin, who becomes an almost faceless “anarchist”—just a young, violent man looking for an inappropriate outlet for his grievances. In real life, Frick’s attacker was Alexander Berkman, an intellectual, a political leader, and a man of principle. Though he condemned the senseless political violence that consumed much of the era, from bombings to assassinations, he justified his attack on Frick in letters to anarchist writer Emma Goldman, reasoning that a man willing to order the deaths of his own workers to save some money was a man too dangerous to be allowed to wield power.
These are the sorts of compromises one must make to entertain. But it’s interesting that when it comes to the real, historical figure of Henry Clay Frick, people are just as shy of his dirty record. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that a TV show would shy away from Frick’s involvement in the death of his workers and a child. When The New York Times covered the reopening of The Frick Collection, following a five-year $220 million renovation, art critic Holland Carter first wrote rapturously about the building and all its treasures before noting, in a parenthetical, that Frick was an “adamant anti-unionist.” There’s a difference of scale between opposing collective bargaining and sending in armed troops to handle a labor dispute. But it’s also an example of how easily we overlook the actions of the mega-rich: Where was any mention of how Frick acquired his treasures, of how his brand of Gilded Age industrialism was largely built on exploitation?
Once upon a time, the Frick was one of the few truly restful places in the New York City cultural scene. One could go with the expectation of experiencing some quiet to reflect upon artistic treasures. To melt into the velvet sleeve of Sir Thomas Moore, to feel the desolate loneliness of Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert.
But now, post-renovation, the Frick is bustling. There’s no more time for contemplation. There are people ahead of you and people behind you and you must keep up with the flow to avoid being jostled. I get the impression that fewer visitors are here for the enriching experience of engaging with art history. They’re here to gawk at expensive things. Going through the Frick now is like watching an influencer go through a “haul,” displaying every item purchased during a shopping spree.
This new experience may be more authentic to the man himself. In The Fricks Collect, Ian Wardropper tells an anecdote about how Frick often found himself going up against Benjamin Altman, who had built a retail fortune with the B. Altman department store. When Altman had a gallery space built within his private residence for the display of the Old Masters he had acquired, Frick asked an art dealer to tell him the dimensions of the room. It was reportedly 90 feet long. Frick quickly went about designing his own space—94 feet in length. Unlike Carnegie, who did leave behind some writing about his love of art, Frick mostly seemed to understand the art market as a competition.
For all these industrialist collectors—no matter their personal tastes, and no matter where they donated their holdings after death—there was often another impulse at play. The new American elite looked for multiple ways to alchemize money mined from filthy sources (coke, coal, iron) into the gold of European culture. Daughters were sent off to marry nobles in financial straits (another storyline cleaned up in The Gilded Age), artistic treasures were plundered both in the auction house and in the theater of war, and Americans mimicked Europeans in style, dress, and habit.
When Andrew Carnegie was on his deathbed, regretting his actions and fearing what judgment awaited him in the afterlife, he wrote to his associate Frick asking to meet. Frick replied that they certainly would meet again. He would, he wrote to Carnegie, “meet you in hell.” There is little to suggest that Frick felt any real remorse for his involvement in the Homestead Strike. He was being practical: He leveraged his soul for riches, thus trading any kind of comfortable existence in the afterlife for luxury and power in this one, and he was confident in the deal that he struck.
“The Gilded Age,” and our understanding of it, began as satire but became sincere. The term originated in a novel by Mark Twain, who viciously depicted the greed and excess of the robber barons. The idea was that the shiny layer of gold was only barely hiding the filth that lay beneath the surface. But the men in charge were still somehow flattered by the moniker, and it stuck.
The TV series of the same name is the latest project from Julian Fellowes, who was also responsible for Downton Abbey. Like its predecessor, The Gilded Age shows the entire workings of the wealthy domicile, including the relationship between members of the domestic staff and their aristocratic employers. And though that dynamic was complicated in the early years of Downton Abbey, with the servants sometimes straining against the demands and expectations placed on them, in The Gilded Age, that relationship has all the complexity of a greeting card with a kitten on the front.
In The Gilded Age, unlike Downton Abbey, no one rapes a maid. No one throws a woman pregnant out of wedlock into the street. No one falls ill and is abandoned to their poverty. In fact, the only fraught relationship between employee and employer is due to the employee’s scheming: One of the servants tries to seduce the husband. (He gallantly declines.)
More than that, though, no one on staff has a conversation that isn’t about the employers. The domestic workers are all deeply invested in the inner lives of their bosses, thrilled when good things happen and saddened at setbacks and obstacles. The real-life relationship between domestic servants and the owners of the house in which they work is complicated, of course. A person placed in the role of caretaking often forms emotional bonds that are often quite genuine and strong. A more “realistic” depiction of an aristocrat’s house is not going to be one of pure exploitation and abuse. But when the Black assistant to the white widow starts to express political opinions in the household, it strains credulity when she is instantly encouraged to take time off to become an activist.
The strangeness of these class dynamics—of pure benevolence and tutelage rather than complexity—is all the more disappointing given Fellowes’s previous work. In the 2001 film Gosford Park, which he wrote, the same upstairs/downstairs framework is pricklier. The entanglements are thornier. There is sexual exploitation and scheming and deviance, alongside kindness. Fellowes has thrown all that over for coziness. Given that wealth inequality has only deepened in the intervening years—both since 2001 and arguably, since the Gilded Age itself—it’s fair to ask why.
It’s not that our entertainment has to adhere to a strict social realism. But we have struggled to rein in the worst effects of wealth inequality since the global crash of 2008, and our retreat into these fantasies suggests an exhaustion even at the level of the imagination. It’s not catharsis that Jesse Armstrong and Julian Fellowes bring us. It’s resignation.
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