It’s hard to satirise the super-rich. Not that we don’t enjoy trying. The most recent attempt – The Perfect Couple, a murder mystery starring Nicole Kidman set around a mansion in Nantucket, has been at the UK’s top spot on Netflix since it came out last week. The White Lotus is to return for a third season; Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness, The Undoing and Big Little Lies were all runaway hits.
These satires are curious things, though, all of the same pattern. They don’t focus much, for example, on where the money has come from. Instead, they work hard to show us that the 1% are, in fact, flawed: they are lazy, insecure, have affairs, are unpleasant to staff and are – as in other sectors of society – even capable of crime.
As The Perfect Couple’s director, Susanne Bier, put it, on the “dark undercurrents” of her project, “it does suggest that maybe among the upper class this entitlement is not always sympathetic and not always likable”. No! Really?
There are three unspoken premises in TV shows like these. The first is that ordinarily we have the rich on some sort of moral pedestal– high enough to make the tearing down good television. The second is that these people are interesting enough to satirise in the first place. Would we linger so long over the foibles of a group of middle-earners? And there’s a third way in which these social commentaries fall short. A clue comes when we follow one of the detectives in The Perfect Couple. The down-to-earth Dan Carter is supposed to serve as a contrast to the moneyed vipers across the way – but his home is fairly sumptuous, too. This is the point. A laser focus on the mega-rich allows the merely wealthy to see their lives as normal. It lets them off the hook.
The screen reflects the culture. The 1% dominate debates about inequality, and form a reliable punching bag – taxing them more is always popular. Fair enough. But this absolves the upper middle class and the many grades of wealth between, all of whom float far above the average income – and for whom financial penalties tend to be resisted on the grounds that politicians are attacking “ordinary strivers”. These include most of those involved in making this Netflix series and many of those reviewing it: certainly Bier, Kidman and other big names in the cast, currently giving interviews on how they managed to capture the “oblivion of the upper classes”.
Meanwhile, they are helping to encourage the oblivion of the upper middle. Eat-the-rich TV comes alongside a long tradition of what I will call “of course we’re rich, aren’t you?” TV, in which huge, luxury apartments and glittery lifestyles are passed off as ordinary. A small selection of these might include, for example, Friends, Girls, Sex and the City, The Mindy Project, Bridget Jones and every Nancy Meyers movie.
We are now used to seeing so-called everyman protagonists living lives of opulence next to the national average. Refracted through popular TV, everyone lives in a £2m house, except the sociopaths, emblems of inequality, who live in the £20m one down the road. But then the elites are always someone else.
In their excellent new book, Born to Rule, sociologists Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves interview members of the British establishment, each of whom indignantly refuses to accept they are part of any such thing. “Complete rubbish,” says a ‘“visibly offended”corporate lawyer in the drawing room of his seven-bedroom Bloomsbury townhouse. “I’ve never considered myself to be one of the elite.”
One interviewee recalls the embarrassment of feeling like his father was “the poorest parent in St Paul’s”. “None of my friends at Rugby were hunting, shooting types, they were mainly London professionals. So I think I very much thought I came from – not a working-class background – but I absolutely didn’t want to come from, sort of, that background,” says another.
There’s an argument for talking less about the 1% and more about the top 10% – a group big enough to hoard opportunities on a mass scale. This group has disproportionate political influence – almost by definition. It includes all British MPs, most of the top of government, a big chunk of the media and academia, not to mention senior lawyers, consultants and judges. In other words, it dominates the economy, politics and public conversation.
In their book Uncomfortably Off, Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell, claim that the top 10% are also more likely to vote. They also tend not to think of themselves as rich. In one study on the group, respondents claimed they were close to median earners, who earned less than half what they did. Part of the problem is they are almost as cocooned as the billionaires on one of Netflix’s fantasy islands. The social networks of lawyers and doctors tend to stretch up the income scale rather than down. They look upwards, aware their earnings are way below the likes of Elon Musk’s, and are less conscious of the average annual salary, which is about £35,000.
This misconception haunts our politics. The effects could be seen in the outraged reaction to Labour’s 2015 mansion tax proposal for properties over £2m, or its 2019 policy to charge a 45p tax rate on earnings over £80,000, or now, with Starmer’s plan to charge private schools VAT. These policies are not an attack on ordinary people – but the favoured few. You can’t solve inequality by squeezing millionaires alone.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
