Eating the elites
Film is fixated on the abject failure of the ultra-powerful, even if it's not sure what we should all do about it
Just like any other modern artform, cinema has always been concerned with what money and power does to the soul. One of the most beloved films ever made is pre-occupied with this concern. You don’t have to go back to the 1940s for this sort of meditation, though. Parasite, just named the best film of the 21st century by The New York Times, is about this very thing as well, even if—in being about it—it’s far more blisteringly furious than It’s a Wonderful Life.
It’s been more than a half decade since the release of Parasite, and I think it’s fair to say that the forces fueling the fury of that film have only grown. Filmmakers, in turn, have had more than ever to say about this subject over the past year. I would expect that to continue for the foreseeable future—both because it takes years to produce a film and because there is zero indication that our “culture of elite impunity” is changing.
Once upon a time (aka 2005), comedian George Carlin quipped that “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it,” to sum up where we the people stand in relation to elites. His incisive pessimism seems to be getting proven right, but, that aside, I find it interesting that, over the course of the last 20 years, this kind of sentiment has leaped from a single countercultural comedian to—this past year—a number of celebrated films. The film industry, after all, has always had a close relationship with power, and defaults to having a vested interest in reinforcing it. That it can’t seem to ignore the pernicious nature of it now, as it is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, tells a tale about how bad things have gotten and shows the real limits of filmmakers to push back. In some ways, all film can do is illuminate, and illuminate it has.
I’m not sure I found any scene from the last year more haunting than the final one in After the Hunt, which brings Carlin’s quip to life. In it, Julia Roberts’ Alma and Ayo Edibiri’s Maggie sit across from the table at a diner years after both were embroiled in a #MeToo-adjacent sex scandal at Yale on opposite sides.
Where once they were lobbing accusations at each other, now they are downright collegial. Neither has paid any real long-term price for their actions despite both carrying real guilt. Indeed, both seem to have benefited materially.
They’re in the club. We ain’t.
The strange bedfellows found in the Epstein files—the Chomskys alongside Bannons—give this scene, and Luca Guadagnino’s film by extension, a remarkable prescience. A scandal only really matters if there are consequences for those involved. Otherwise, it’s merely a spectacle—an empty-calories kind of entertainment.
Other films from 2025 were far more absurdist in their handling of the so-called Epstein class. Bugonia turns Emma Stone’s would-be tech CEO in to a literal alien. Director Yorgos Lanthimos at once takes the doomerism lurking deep within the ostensible missions of Blue Origin and SpaceX seriously, and also has his version of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk lie and manipulate to escape culpability. Gee, I wonder where he got the idea.
Presumptive Best Picture winner One Battle After Another, meanwhile, uses a shadowy white supremacist organization called the Christmas Adventurers Club as a driver of the film’s overall paranoia. When even a would-be agent of the Club, Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, is disposable to those in power, we are, it would seem, all in grave danger.
If director Paul Thomas Anderson captures the paralyzing anxiety of living through such times, then whatever comes next cinematically might do well to diagnose what we can all do to change things. Sure, Benicio del Toro’s Sensei offers a scant bit of a hint, but One Battle After Another ends with its protagonist having barely scraped by, not with him delivering some kind of righteous accountability. Perfidia Beverly Hills’ letter to her daughter admits failure, and in the same breath hopes that “maybe” it will be different for the all-grown-up Baby Charlene. It’s a Wonderful Life, by contrast, uses community and virtue to deliver a decisive blow against the scheming of Mr. Potter.
In this context, it might be 28 Years Later, of all the films released last year, that offers the clearest warning about the status quo persisting. That film isn’t so much about a collective problem facing us as it is about our failure to respond appropriately. In it, a community mistakes self-imposed isolation—avoidance, in other words—for a solution to the threat. All that really does is make you more vulnerable when it eventually comes knocking on your door.