Last week, Yvon Chouinard, the billionaire owner of outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia, announced he was transferring ownership of his company to a trust. Going forward, the company’s profits — somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million a year — will be used to combat climate change.
It’s a startling decision. And a rarity among those with extraordinary wealth.
Imagine if a TV series contemplated something similar. Call it the anti-“Succession,” following the fictional lives of a wealthy family that isn’t singularly focused on jockeying for status, but on making the world a better place.
Stories need tension, and if you’re looking to real life for inspiration, some pretty clear fault lines have emerged since Chouinard’s announcement. As one headline put it, “Don’t Rush to Canonize Patagonia.” There are good reasons why this splashy transfer shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value. The trust will be controlled by the family. And that feeds into a larger question: How much power should rich people have to decide our collective fate — even when (on the surface) their aims appear noble?
That’s potentially far more compelling than anything we’ve seen on HBO’s “Succession,” or its cousin on Showtime, “Billions,” or numerous other shows and films fascinated with the super-rich. They all feature first-rate performances and gleaming production design, but the stories ... well, they don’t actually have much to say.
What are the challenges and complications involved in a venture like the one Patagonia’s founder is taking on? What are the debates and internal conflicts?
There could be so much drama — and comedy — in the story of a family that thinks they should be applauded for their efforts, while their critics wonder: Why aren’t you trying to dismantle a primary driver of the climate crisis: The billionaire class itself? That second part is key and it’s so often missing from these kinds of narratives.
If you only center stories on the moneyed, and focus on humanizing them, you’re missing a bigger part of the story: Everyone else affected by the whims of the wealthy.
The tremendous wage gap between corporate executives and their labor force is the subject of the documentary “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales."
It features Abigail Disney, who has been a vocal critic of extreme CEO compensation on one end and poverty wages for workers on the other. The wealthy should be taxed far more than they are, she says — including herself — and it’s a powerful message considering she is the granddaughter of Disney co-founder Roy O. Disney. (Abigail Disney co-directs the film with Kathleen Hughes.)
Disneyland workers, such as full-time custodians in the park, simply aren’t earning enough for food or housing. “I think I should be able to pay my bills on my custodial job,” one of the employees tells Disney. They feel broken by a system that’s supposed to be fair, and so clearly is not. Meanwhile, former CEO Bob Iger made $65 million in one year. Or put another way: A custodian would have to work 2,000 years to take home what Iger made that year.
The three decades after World War II were among the most prosperous in the United States and the existence of a stable middle class — primarily accessible to white people, the film hastens to point out — was something of an anomaly in American history. A lot of that had to do with higher tax brackets for top earners. The author and academic Heather McGhee tells Disney that our current “inequality economy is one that honestly looks a lot more like the Gilded Age and the plantation economy than the one that we associate with the American dream.”
Two of Disney’s siblings, Susan Disney Lord and Tim Disney, are producers on the film and Susan appears on camera briefly as she and her sister discuss the Iger of it all. Susan doesn’t disagree with critiques of his compensation, or the deplorable wages paid to Disneyland workers. Even so, she can’t help but note that Iger is a nice person.
Abigail responds: “My issue is not that he’s not a nice person, and my issue is that nice isn’t enough.”
That’s funny, because my issue is that nice is irrelevant. Corporations don’t need to be “nice” — they need to be entities that don’t base their business models on exploitation. That has nothing to do with nice. When was the last time you saw a law passed or a policy enacted because it was the “nice” thing to do? This is such an absurd conversation they’re having!
Let’s go back to “Succession” for a moment. Even if fictional billionaire Logan Roy and his insufferable children were “nice” to one another, rather than the glorious backstabbers that they are, the very corporate ecosystem they inhabit and maintain has been intentionally set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many. And there are plenty of people who might say: That’s not corruption, that’s good business.
Or as the scholar Nate Holdren recently put it: A business “financially unscathed at the price of other people dying is a successful organization according to capitalism’s social standards.” It’s a model that “selects for anti-social behavior, and this selection pressure acts all the more intensely up the food chain.”
Apple TV+ has come the closest to an actual critique with the Maya Rudolph comedy “Loot,” about a MacKenzie Scott-like divorcee looking to find meaning in her life and do good with her billions.
There’s a great line when the head of her philanthropic foundation offers a blunt assessment of a Sun Valley-type summit: “I don’t love the idea of a conference where 10 billionaires get into a room to decide how the world should be fixed.” Or when someone at a zoning board meeting for affordable housing asks: “Why do you decide what happens to our neighborhood? Is it because you have more money?”
But the series is told primarily from the point of Rudolph’s character, whose thoughts and feelings and growth are prioritized. The show examines what the process of personal change might look like for a billionaire when faced with a sudden crisis of conscience. But it isn’t especially curious about what change looks like when it comes to attempting to reshape the systems around us.
Even so, I admire its attempt to at least think through some of these issues in a lighthearted but sincere way. In the finale, Rudolph’s character takes a bold stand on her billionaire status: “We’re probably the worst people to be talking about changing the world. I mean, why would we want to change a system that lets us live like kings?” And then she announces she’s giving away her $120 billion fortune: “Billionaires shouldn’t exist.”
That line sounds positively radical, if only because over-wealth is rarely examined in anything Hollywood is offering us these days. But we should expect the super-rich to forfeit a bigger chunk of their ill-gotten fortunes (once you’re at billions, the only category that applies is “ill-gotten”) whether it’s through taxes or other projects.
Stories are meant to entertain, but they also tell us something about the world we live in — and what we value.
In the real world, railway workers have been pushing for better labor conditions that would include policies as basic as sick leave. Meanwhile on HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes decided the unscrupulous and obscenely wealthy railroad tycoon played by Morgan Spector would be portrayed as a swoon-worthy underdog to all those nasty old-money snobs — they’re awful too, but the railroad magnate and his wife are just as terrible, even if the show pretends otherwise, while also erasing the lives of the very railway workers who make all that opulent splendor possible.
A recent study from UCLA found that teenagers want something different from their entertainment. Stories about people beating the odds rank higher than aspirational fantasies about people moving through exclusive spaces. The kids know.
Right now, a curious number of TV shows and films are rich people fan fiction. Taken individually, they’re just that: Stories.
But collectively they add up to a trend that seems intended to undermine an alternate way of thinking.
Hollywood should be in the business of not just mirroring our world, but imagining ways we can change it.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Nina Metz is a Chicago Tribune critic who covers TV and film.
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