Why did we spend 2022 watching rich people eat in nice places?
In 'The Menu', 'Triangle of Sadness' and 'The White Lotus', an obsession with fine dining and murder reveals the flaws of privilege.
The best of film and TV has an element of social commentary within it, and 2022 has been no exception. This year, one theme stood out to me more than any other: the rich and their relationship with food.
Throughout the year, pretentious (and often bizarre) food has worked as a catalyst, a jumping off point that provides a unique insight into the psychologies of the rich and powerful.
The Menu, Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus all see privileged people eating fanciful food on the finest china, always in the best environments. Food, and where it is eaten, is used to highlight social inequalities and the weaknesses of high society. It’s very entertaining.
There’s a reason this has proven so popular this year. Placing embarrassing caricatures of the rich and powerful onto our screens doesn’t simply tap into larger issues, it’s also frequently very cathartic. We’re allowed to revel in their shortcomings and pitfalls, because they’re all awful.
(Of course, that catharsis has probably got something to do with the fact that these films and shows revolve around the elite dying… food be damned.)
“It’s part of the show. This is what you’re paying for.”
First, let’s see how these dark comedies are connected: The Menu presents us with characters who either have too much money for their own good, or egos too huge to realise how empty their lives are. In Triangle of Sadness, a captain’s dinner on a luxury cruise liner brings out the worst in its affluent guests, and across two seasons, sitting down for breakfast, lunch and dinner at The White Lotus turns into a battleground where barbed discussions of class, sex and infidelity can take place.
All share the same premise—embarrass the rich—and use fine dining as a means of achieving their goal. Some are more successful than others in this regard, but let’s start with The Menu.
Mark Mylod’s black comedy is the least nuanced of the three, but with its harsh satire and Masterchef-like depictions of each course, it’s often the funniest. Eleven people are invited by Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) to the Horthorn, a remote island restaurant where they will be treated to an ultra exclusive dining experience.
We meet a couple, Margot (Anna Taylor-Joy) and Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), on a dock, waiting for the boat that will take them to this exclusive island. They observe the other guests arriving—a food critic who gave Slowik his big break and her editor; a failing movie star who complains to his assistant for booking something so elaborate; regulars Anne and Richard who can’t remember what they’ve eaten on any of their eleven visits (they skip the island tour); and three rowdy tech bros endlessly bragging about their crypto and hedge fund expertise.
You get the picture. They’re the worst.
The film pokes fun at the often baseless fascinations of culinary critics and foodies—at $1250 a head, you’re going to be wowed by a “Breadless Bread Plate with savory accompaniments” that’s actually just five mildly colourful cream dots on a plate—there’s nothing there, but Slowik’s guests are made to see things because they've paid to see things.
It’s only after the fourth course, ‘Memory’, where guests are served tortillas laser-etched with photographs of their infidelities (or, if you’re a tech bro, your tax returns), that some of them realise something is up. Apart from Tyler, of course. He’s a ‘true foodie’ and keeps on eating like nothing’s happening. “It’s part of the show. This is what you’re paying for”, Slowik warns.
But why do the rich need to die in this scenario? Fiennes’ chef puts it bluntly:
“I’ve been fooled into trying to satisfy people who can never be satisfied. But that’s our culture, isn't it? And my restaurant is part of the problem.”
The Menu is a film borne out of spite, existing for one purpose and one purpose only. It largely succeeds at embarrassing its subjects but falls into true absurdity in the last 20 minutes, where there’s a Ratatouille-esque moment that really doesn’t work (much to my disappointment).
Nonetheless, the message of the film is very clear: the people in the room are entitled because they’re rich, and their basest instincts come out not only through the food they eat, but the consequences of that food being taken away.
And so we arrive at Triangle of Sadness.
Unlike The Menu, Ruben Östlund’s film is less concerned with how the elite can be ruined by others and more so with their unique ability to implode due to their own actions.
“Let’s not beat around the bush here. I’m very rich. Oh, I’m so f**king rich!”
A dinner date between Carl (Harris Dickenson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) interrogates gender expectations of money and relationships, exposing Carl as a “bullshit feminist” in the process; drinks on the deck of a luxury cruise-liner encourages reclusive millionaire Jarmo to let everyone know just how rich he is; and lunch in the ship’s dining room allows Carl and Yaya to tout their influencer status (Yaya takes lots of photos of her pasta but doesn’t eat it):
“I’m gluten intolerant”, she tells Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), a Russian oligarch, who later repeatedly mutters, “I sell shit.” with triumphant glee.
It’s easily overlooked, but the simple act of gathering to eat proves furtile ground for Östlund’s characters to flaunt their privilege. This wouldn’t be entertaining without the knowledge that it’s all going to go very wrong before they leave the boat.
Yet, this is only a taste of what occurs at the captain’s dinner.
Let me set the scene: the cruise is swaying violently from side to side courtesy of a thunderstorm and Woody Harrelson’s captain, who insists that “Thursday” (when the low pressure zone is moving in) is the best day to perform his mandatory duties.
Guests are seasick and the food has gone off, because Dimitry’s wife Vera (Sunnyi Melles) has insisted that the whole crew “enjoy the moment” by abandoning their roles and sliding down the waterslide into the sea.
“I really feel like I’ve had one of these mo-ments!” she cries. It’s insufferable.
In the dining room, they are served bad oysters, bad caviar, bad jelly—basically anything that wobbles. Long story short, everything tastes awful and our rich friends suffer for it. And in a surprise to absolutely no one, food poisoning and a swaying ship is a recipe for disaster.
This is when sh*t really hits the fan. (Literally!)
Vera shovels a ludicrous amount of champagne down her throat before vomiting explosively, one guest has a heart attack, everyone is offered ginger candies and lifejackets are deployed in the most hilarious yet disgustingly mean-spirited sequence you’ll see all year.
Luckily, Östlund toes the line between drama and comedy sketch well enough… although even he admitted after screening the film, “Maybe it was too much in the end. I apologized to the audience.” Thanks, Ruben. I’ve just lost my appetite for a week.
(My advice? Finish your popcorn—or more importantly, your champagne—before everything goes wrong.)
There’s one silver lining, though. At least these people are vapid and sleazy enough to deserve everything that’s coming for them. I’ve tried to find some redeeming qualities among them; there aren’t any. So, as Wendy Ide notes in her review for The Guardian, “of course we want to see them punished and humiliated.” And they are—in pretty spectacular fashion!
A drunken fight between Harrelson‘s “shit socialist” of a captain and Burić’s Russian capitalist is just the tip of the iceberg in an incredibly memorable scene—one that exposes, like The Menu, the facade of elite hospitality and entitlement.
It’s a shame that the film’s third act, which I won’t spoil here, fumbles the bag by retreading the themes explored in the first hour and a half with much less nuance. In both films, displacing the ultra-rich from their luxury environments only tells us so much.
Inequality, drama, breakfast and The White Lotus
For a more nuanced portrayal of privilege and an escape from the monotone and often brutal take on the wealthy offered by The Menu and Triangle of Sadness, we can look towards The White Lotus. Helped by its setting and episodic format, Mike White’s anthology series is opulent and alluring in equal measure, playing with our sympathies (or our loathings) for hours on end.
“Just looking at all those sausages makes me wanna puke.”
Where season one is a “serrated dissection of class” set against a luscious Hawaiian backdrop, season two relocates to Sicily, turning its attention to sex and infidelity.
In The White Lotus it’s not so much what is eaten, but where: outdoor dining rooms overlooking crystal beaches, private terraces with ever-flowing alcohol and five star room service are just a few examples of the luxury on display here.
This all appears lovely, but throughout the show luxury is slowly revealed to be a facade for disfunction, corruption and distrust. More often than not, White’s characters are miserable.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that each season opens at the end of the trip with a dead body turning up. As an audience, we spend seven episodes reliving a week’s stay wondering which entitled idiot has a motive to kill, with the knowledge that many of them can’t even hold a steering wheel properly, let alone a gun.
Who could possibly end up dead? Not Jennifer Coolidge, surely. It’s twisted in the best way possible.
In season two there aren’t just new guests, but multiple bodies—this time round, one is found floating in the sea by Daphne (Meghann Fahy), a stay-at-home mum visiting Sicily with her husband Cameron (Theo James), and another couple, Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza).
Hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) tells underling Rocco, “It’s fine. The ocean is not hotel property.” Despite being awful at her job, she’s a delight to watch… especially as she tells her privileged guests to find their own way to a fortune teller.
Beyond the overarching murder plot, the strength of the series lies in its writing: White’s slow, purposeful dissection of class, power, intelligence and financial prowess is what truly propels The White Lotus. It’s doesn’t look like a mystery box, at least from the outside, and that allows us to focus on the complexity of the relationships at hand.
This complexity—and the sheer depth of the characters at play throughout both seasons—makes it difficult to do the series justice with a few mere words. For now I’m going to focus on the two couples mentioned above, because frankly, they’re the most compelling.
To everyone around them, Daphne and Cameron present themselves as the perfect couple, but they harbour significant trust issues and struggle through repeated infidelities even when they’re miles from home.
Meanwhile, Ethan and Harper don’t love each other anymore, but can’t admit it. And in a decision that defies all logic, both couples stick together for the whole week, even as a complex web of cheating and distrust develops.
One night, Cameron hires two local sex workers for a party in Ethan’s room (the two men were roommates in college) and the next morning, Harper finds a condom, thinking it belongs to her husband.
Chaos ensues.
The breakfast table turns into a civil war zone: Aubrey Plaza channels a simmering rage as Harper probes her travel companions with drug related questions, rubbing her hands together at an afternoon wine tasting as she asks the two men if they’ve ever slept together. Nothing is off the cards.
Daphne’s response to infidelity is to suppress it, fixating purely on the superficial—“Just looking at all those sausages made me wanna puke”—while Ethan chooses to simply deny any involvement rather than telling the truth. Forget everything you thought you knew about passive-aggression and power plays. They may be rich, but Mike White goes out of his way to show how human they all are.
At The White Lotus resorts, everyone is flawed, guests and staff alike; anybody can kill, because in some way, there’s something to hate in everyone.
The show, haunted by a delightful moral ambiguity, successfully serves up a rich, complex and satisfying drama: relationship turmoil is reduced to a microcosm of distracting beauty, all while drinking mimosas by the sea.
By this point, you’ve probably realised that throughout The Menu, Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus, the food itself is actually irrelevant—secondary to the vulnerabilities exposed through its presentation and environment.
Just as Triangle of Sadness revels in revealing the flaws of the elite by making them dine together in horrific situations, The White Lotus flips the script by letting its characters dine together in the best places, to much greater effect. By ensuring that the rich feel comfortable in their surroundings, weakness surfaces of their own volition.
The Menu should succeed by combining elements from both of these—it’s a horrific situation within a fine dining experience—but relies too heavily on expository dialogue (nonetheless delivered brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes) to hope for much of an impact.
Eating expensive and exclusive delicacies simultaneously reflects the social issues at the heart of these films and shows while diverting conversation from real areas of difficulty (and that’s exactly the point). CEOs, hedge fund owners, movie stars and the rest all use food to hide behind smoke and mirrors. It’s this multiplicity that makes Mylod, Östlund and White’s work so special.
Their strength lies not in their comprehensiveness—it’s impossible for anything of this nature to be fully comprehensive—but their refusal to shy away from social commentary and their decision to embrace it. Yes, the result is often reductive, leaning into the very tropes they hope to mock, but there’s no denying how immensely entertaining it all is.
If 2022 had to be a year spent watching rich people eating in nice places, at least it was fun.