Generation Wealth succeeds in vignettes, but loses sight of the big picture
The announcement of the (maybe) presidential candidacy for Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in the past few weeks hasn’t garnered the response he’d likely hoped.
For most, it’s one of indifference. He claims that both the left and the right have become too extreme and that he is someone solidly in the middle of both parties, although his biggest gripe with the progressives in Congress is that he might have to pay more in taxes, a decidedly billionaire-like stance that has nothing to do with the majority of the people in the country.
Why Schultz, who has never held public office, is suddenly interested in running the country isn’t hard to figure out. The current president has paved the way for rich idiots to spoil elections with their ego. The inherent blindness of the wealthy and privileged is not exactly a new avenue of discussion.
There has been book after book, study after study, article after article decrying and focusing on excess wealth in the United States. The U.S. didn’t create kings and queens, but it did make that sort of lifestyle more attainable.
Schultz is very much a part of that king-making culture. The obsession with wealth can be found in every avenue of the country, in every class, every community, and every ethnicity.
It’s always existed here—we tend to go through cycles of rapid economic expansion which leads to an increase in the divide between rich and poor.
To say that the U.S. is in a second Gilded Age would be an understatement. Documentary filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield attempts to make a statement about this wealth in her film Generation Wealth, but her outcome is somewhat muddled.
Greenfield got her start photographing and interviewing wealthy children in Los Angeles during the nineties. She focused on places like her own high school, where children like Kate Hudson made their mark by bragging about the fame and status of their parents.
Greenfield comes from a line of privilege herself—her mother was a psychiatrist and her father a physician, both with degrees from Harvard, and her brother is a senior vice president of production at Fox Searchlight pictures.
She rubbed elbows with the very people she made her subjects, likely because of the effect they had on her as a child. Generation Wealth is something of a continuation of her earlier work, where she looks at American culture through the lens of the wealthy and those who aspire to be them.
Her approach is somewhat scattershot—she begins with the children she photographed in the nineties, before jumping into ideas on beauty pageants, pornography, celebrity, plastic surgery, and eventually, her own family.
There’s a connection between all of these things, to be sure. The ideas of wealth and glamor pervade much of American culture and it can be easily argued that each of these subjects is driven by their pursuit. Greenfield makes an admirable attempt at linking them together, but I was never quite sure what she was getting at. I’m not sure she was either.
The result, then, is that the film is an emotional connection of stories of broken individuals damaged by wealth or the pursuit of it. It becomes more of a “look how strange and damaged these people are” film than one that makes a particular statement.
Greenfield is primarily a photographer, a good one it seems, who is capable of telling stories well in a single image. It follows that her films might not have a singular narrative focus. One of her previous films, The Queen of Versailles, had a stronger focus because the subject was much more narrow. That’s likely why Generation Wealth isn’t immediately effective—her subject is far too broad and her thesis far too unclear.
Still, the vignettes and stories found in her film are interesting from a fly-on-the-wall perspective.
At one point, she interviews a young man from a wealthy family whose mother drags him into sexually charged clubs night after night. She asks what he wants to do with his life and he responds: “I’d like to DJ for as long as my fingers will let me. But I’m also big into lizards.”
It’s such a strange answer that you can’t help but laugh.
There are a lot of moments like that one. Generation Wealth is a film heavy on examples but light on conclusions.