Lifestyles of the rich and worthless

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Most sources credit Jean-Jacques Rousseau with writing, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” No one knows for certain whether he actually coined the phrase “eat the rich,” but it’s historically accurate to trace its pedigree to the era of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.

More than 230 years later, Rousseau’s possibly apocryphal observation has evolved into an injunction, and even an entire genre of hyper-popular entertainment. Google around a bit on the concept and you’ll find dozens of think pieces analyzing the phenomenon of “eat the rich” films and TV series, with typical examples including The Triangle of Sadness, the Glass Onion mini-franchise, Parasite, The Menu and Saltburn on the big screen, and Succession, Beef and The White Lotus on the small.

The White Lotus promo image. Courtesy photo

These media properties have a few critical things in common: super-rich, loathsome people are put in situations where their wealth can’t protect them from themselves or others, highlighting the essential bankruptcy of their lives and very souls, often with embarrassing, grotesque and/or fatal results. In most cases, their financial lessers are either the architects of their downfall or suffer at their hands before coming out (relatively) on top.

Of the most often referred to series in this Jacobin milieu, The White Lotus is the deftest, but also on the list should be The Righteous Gemstones — both streaming with new seasons on Max (and, coincidentally, each with Walton Goggins as a central character).

Ending its third season on Sunday, April 6, The White Lotus plops uber-wealthy louses in some exotic locale where they’re sequestered in a luxury resort bearing the series’ title and reveal themselves to be human garbage in various ways. Season 1 was set in Hawaii, Season 2 in Italy and the current season is centered on a “wellness” retreat in Thailand (full of the most psycho-socially unwell people on Earth).

The individual details are mostly irrelevant — every season plays out pretty much the same — with a sickening parade of indulgences, casual cruelties and toxic entitlement visited on guests and servants alike (though this season especially benefits from Parker Posey as the oblivious pill-popping wife of a swiftly unraveling white collar criminal and mother to a trio of poisonously pampered kids with weird sexual energy. Also Goggins as an existentially shattered middle-aged man on a mission for vengeance. Why he’s at The White Lotus-Thailand is still a mystery). 

What sets The White Lotus apart from other offerings in the genre is the exploration of class and space. 

The resorts in the series are colonial outposts for the rich and worthless, which, despite their exclusivity and lavishness, inevitably leave their guests even more miserable than they were when they arrived. They don’t belong there, and the friction between their internal vileness and the external beauty of their surroundings leads to combustion and a terrible reckoning.

However, The Righteous Gemstones provides even more grist for the Robespierrean mill. 

Focused on the Gemstone family of mega-church evangelists in a fuzzy Southern Baptist/Prosperity Gospel denomination, it focuses on wealth-addled monsters but throws in dynastic dynamics (akin to Succession), as well as a hellfire-hot critique of the hypocrisy and absurdity that is inevitable with the unholy union of religion and capitalism.

While the characters of The White Lotus simply have too much money for their or anyone else’s good — and therefore unfortunately familiar — the Gemstone clan and its hangers-on are over-the-top personalities who more often than not spill into caricature. 

By the current fourth season, patriarch Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) has washed his hands of the chintz-and-glitz empire he and his-late wife built and handed the keys to his sociopathic kids (played by series creator Danny McBride, Edi Patterson and Adam DeVine). Thrown into the mix are the kids’ deranged spouses and partners, and their Uncle Baby Billy (Goggins), who steals every scene he’s in as the sidelined-but-still hustling snake oil preacher with designs on taking over as head of the family from his absent brother-in-law Eli — or at least getting a piece of the Gemstone wealth.

Meanwhile people are betrayed, some get shot, others get kidnapped, stuff blows up, things are smashed with a monster truck and all the mayhem leads straight back to the pulpit. 

As with The White Lotus, the Gemstones have no business being in their environment — in this case, a church. Every word they utter and action they take is a blasphemy to their self-professed faith, and no one is innocent.

Which is a point made by more than a few observers of “eat the rich” media.

“[T]hese stories are presented in a manner that is descriptive rather than proscriptive,” Current Affairs wrote in the 2023 article, “Why Media Conglomerates are Spoon-Feeding Us Anti-Capitalism,” by Sean McDowell.

That is, everyone is miserable — both masters and slaves — but there’s never any call to action to improve the lot of the latter and rein in the excesses of the former. Rather, McDowell argues, entertainment titans like Max realize there’s a market for hating the billionaire class and are cashing in on it with stories that revel in exposing the moral decrepitude of the .01% and punishing them for it, but without outright calling for revolution.

That’s a point made by Kelsey Eisen in a 2024 piece for Coveteur.com titled “Are We Actually Ready to Eat the Rich — Or Do We Just Love Watching Them?”

“[Media conglomerates] know the content is just lip service to a concept, presented to a society that has yet to take more than minimal baby steps towards real political change in that arena.”

That may be true of The White Lotus, which has ended all of its previous seasons with the rich getting their just desserts, though the underlying structures of their hideousness remain unchanged. The titular resort chain is still very much in business, after all, meaning it has plenty more clientele ready to sail in on mega-yachts or touch down in private jets and choppers.

“‘[E]at the rich’ media is less of a political statement and more of a soothing concession,” Eisen wrote. “In picking the uber-wealthy as the villains, it lets the viewers be both culpable consumers and guiltless heroes. It’s basically class-anxiety pornography, pure catharsis without a real message or call to action.”

The Righteous Gemstones is different. Rather than amorphous “bad rich people,” it explores a specific group of bad rich people who do a specific thing: exploit religion for profit. Meanwhile, it also has the long-form luxury to weave real emotion into its characters. While all are heinous in their own ways, they also exhibit some glimmers of humanity, which both complicate the audience’s feelings about them and throws how disreputable and offensive their schtick is into even starker relief.

In that alone, The Righteous Gemstones provides the most “proscriptive” take on eating the rich. That is, stop going to their church because they’re crooks — as apt a message for our oligarchic day as any you’ll find on TV.

Stream new episodes of The White Lotus (final episode of Season 3 on April 6) and The Righteous Gemstones (final episode of Season 4 on May 4) on Sundays on Max.