Opinion: If we can’t dismantle capitalism, maybe we can eat it instead

Editor’s Note: Sara Stewart is a film and culture writer who lives in western Pennsylvania. The views expressed here are solely the author’s own. View more opinion articles on CNN.

CNN
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How to explain the spate of anti-billionaire sentiment that’s percolated in movies and TV over the past few years? A remarkable number of titles are carving up what’s been called the Second Gilded Age, in which a tiny number of people have amassed a staggering amount of personal wealth. Inflation, the pandemic, wage stagnation and soaring corporate profits seem to have created the perfect environment for class satire to thrive.

Two films this fall, “The Menu” and “Triangle of Sadness,” skewer the billionaire class with particular gusto. They’re the latest entries in a hot “eat the rich” trend in entertainment – though more accurately for these titles, it’s “the rich eat.” Hollywood and its foreign counterparts are showing a marked interest in taking shots at the appetites of the .001 percent – but to what end?

In Ruben Östlund’s brutally funny “Triangle of Sadness,” a male model and his influencer girlfriend take a luxury cruise that goes way off the rails and eventually end up shipwrecked. It’s at its best, if most grotesque, in the middle section, where cartoonishly ultra-wealthy guests end up spewing gelatinous seafood haute cuisine all over, in what feels like a hat tip to Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote. (Seriously, if you’ve got a weak stomach, proceed with caution.) Woody Harrelson pops in as the yacht’s Marxist captain, who drunkenly swaps bon mots about socialism with a Ronald Reagan-quoting Russian manure magnate as passengers reel and retch around them.

“The Menu,” a little less gross, sees Ralph Fiennes playing an imposing, world-renowned chef whose remote island restaurant ends up becoming a trap for his roomful of elite guests. Each course in his tasting menu is a little more out there – his bread course, for example, doesn’t contain any bread, because it’s the food of “regular people” – until the dishes devolve into straight-up violent retribution for the diners’ financial sins.

The year’s most outre entry in this genre, the horror movie “Fresh,” stars…