Why Do Rich People In Movies Seem So Fake?
What we get wrong about class -- and why it matters
I haven’t always enjoyed cooking, but recently I have. A big pot of chili bubbling on the stove, a simple lentil soup — things like that. “Grandma food,” my ex used to call it. When I’m in the kitchen these days, I try not to fuss, making big batches that I freeze and eat over days.
A few months ago, when I began apartment sitting for my friends R and H, I also inherited much of the infrastructure of their shared life — their beautiful cast iron pans and handmade plates, a few of their cookbooks, even one of those wooden citrus juicer wands meant for stabbing into half of a lemon. On the fridge, over the burnished metal skin of the refrigerator, they kept a little magnetic whiteboard divided into the days of the week, and under each day there was a space to write what one would eat for Lunch and Dinner. I started planning meals, loosely; I started finding myself fantasizing between meetings about what recipe I’d try next, hand-writing ingredient lists for the grocery store during a break from Zoom. Finally, after years of avoiding my own inability to cook, I found myself dropping into my own kitchen rhythms, chopping parsley as things bubbled, dancing from corner to corner as the stove timer silently kept the score. My comfort in my friends’ space began to become such a reliable dimension of my experience of cooking that I began to think of myself as a “good cook.”
And then I cooked for my parents.
It was on some weekend, up North in my family home — I had gotten it into my head that I wanted shakshouka for breakfast, a recipe with which I had become thoroughly familiar. (In my mind, I thought of the recipe as having two parts, really — one opened a can of tomatoes into a pan and then, at some point near the end, one cracked a few eggs into it. How difficult could it be?) Everything else — the spices, the onions, the herbs, the feta, the bell pepper, the garlic, the parsley and cilantro — would happen naturally, causing no more stir to my process than they would to any “good cook.” I set out my ingredients and I began to work.
I soon began to encounter the need to make a few adjustments. First, it was the pan — not quite the same size, not quite the same material — and then, the heat of the stove itself. I held my hand over the burner, trying to gauge its output, trying to guess how that would change my cooking time. There was salt, but it was iodized table salt — saltier, and with a recognizable bitter kick at the end. I pinched it into my bubbling stew, unsure of how much would be enough. As the cooking unfolded, I found myself negotiating not just with my ingredients but with the space itself — its limits and its predilections, its biases and the charms of its tools. Even though I had grown up there, I had clearly not spent enough time cooking.
By the time breakfast rolled around, I had not made my shakshouka — not really. I had made some over-salty tomato concoction that needed drowning with copious amounts of fresh herb. I watched with a frozen smile as my father dumped more and more parsley into his bowl, politely trying to balance out the too-aggressive flavours. We chewed and mimed pleasure, and then we promptly rushed into the rest of our Sunday.
Maybe there are really two kinds of “good chef” — the strict kind and the lax. In other words, there are those who are good because they have perfected their processes: all of their tools and their ingredients, their sourcing, timing and tested recipes; and then there are those, like my father, who are good because they could fry a gourmet egg on the back of a pot lid. There is excellence, then, that requires a certain context to become evident, and then there is excellence that is resilient, that is adaptable and driven by an understanding of invisible forces that shape the outcome, not the rules. If you are excellent in the first way, it behooves you to control the contexts in which you perform — and if you can control these contexts well, you also come off well. As for the second form of excellence, it often appears latent until catastrophe or circumstance forces a change of context. In this sense, the second type of excellence is much more difficult to spot.
You could extend this idea to many different types of excellence — classical music versus jazz improvisation, the delicate ballerina versus the breakdancer, the statesman with his prepared speech and the neighbourhood organizer. But I want to use it to talk about something else today — I want to use it to talk about class.
As a leftist, class ought to be at the center of how I think about politics: the way certain advantages accrue to those who are already advantaged, and the system is designed to reproduce certain material relationships to the earth, to each other, and to ourselves.
Billie Holiday already had it when she sang, in “God Bless the Child”:
Them that’s got, shall get
Them that’s not, shall lose
So the Bible says, and it still is news
Mama may have
Papa may have
But God bless the child
Who’s got his own
But class is more than just a description of material reality, of who gets to owns more stuff. It is also a social performance and an identity, as we respond to people all of the time based on their presumed class — all without ever seeing their bank accounts. We treat the woman walking down the street with the chihuahua in her purse very differently from the homeless person with her sleeping pitbull, for example. This performative, socially-co-constructed part of class is what is at play in the stories of fake billionaires or scammers like Anna Sorokin — those people who, without being actually materially rich, learn the language and manners of the richesse to such a degree that they are socially inducted into elite circles. These elite circles, in which money runs freely, then bankroll the exploits of the scammer until the entire operation comes crashing to the ground. So which comes first: the money or the manners? In a way, they feed each other — each reinforcing a system in which we learn to read who has and who deserves more.
So much of class, too, is distilled not in current material wealth but exists as pure potential — the ability to be rescued out of bad situations, or to be placed in opportunistic zones. Thus class encompasses also where you live and who you know, who you could call up in a pinch. You may roll your eyes when I say this as a Marxist, but class is truly deeply constitutive of who we are — down to how we think about our time, what it is for (work or leisure?) and who it belongs to (myself or my boss?). In this sense, class is deeply intimate, even if unconscious — and it determines a large part of how our lives are experienced by ourselves, not merely how others experience us.
But for something so important, so deeply constitutive of the fabric of life itself, we do an awful job characterizing it in our culture.
What do I mean by this?
Imagine a sunny day in an American high school — a vintage muscle car pulling up, orange, yellow flame decals over a sky blue base. Out of the passenger window, a young woman leans out, bedecked in a fur robe, long pearl necklace, white-rimmed sunglasses and furry bucket hat. In excruciating slo-mo, she brushes her hair out of her face. As the car rolls to a stop in the middle of the school compound, the woman whines: I said ‘door-to-door,’ Jared!
The woman’s name is Gigi, and this is her entrance scene from the hilarious Olivia Wilde film Booksmart. And if the visual cues coding her as a very, very rich girl are not enough, we are treated to a soundtrack that is more than forthright: money, money / I got money (ooo). But I would argue that we do not need the musician Leikeli47 to tell us about the status of Gigi’s bank account — we already know. We know because she is coded as rich through a set of symbols that has become so ubiquitous in film and visual culture, they have become tropes: pearls and fur, gaudy accessories, a diva’s bad attitude. If anything, Gigi is simply the latest Gen Z instatiation of the “rich girl” phenomenon — chaotic, fun and invulnerable, she spends the rest of the film appearing mysteriously at other people’s parties and distributing designer drugs.
The equation of the material elite with flamboyance is irresistibly persistent in American pop culture. Taylor Swift's "Bejewelled," Tate McRae's "she's all I wanna be," Ariana Grande’s “7 rings,” Mean Girls, even Sam Smith's SNL outfit each reference a constructed sense of luxury built on showy excess. Like a peacock’s ostentatious feathers, we are meant to read this overspill of value as a statement of the unimaginable purchasing power inherent in the bedazzled figure. If this symbolizes a kind of power, it is a the raw primate power of a public surplus. While you struggle to survive, I have more than I’ll ever be able to spend.
But there’s a problem with this: when you really meet rich people, they are nothing like this. In fact, it is very difficult to tell a rich person from an ordinary person just by how they are dressed. After all, if you’re incredibly rich, you stand to have a lot to lose — and often your greatest asset is in fact the anonymity and privacy that allows you to live a life that would enrage others, were it to be lived completely in the public eye. Unlike those who sleep on the street, or even the hyper-visible celebrity, the richest among us have the privilege not to be seen, sometimes even to disappear at will.
And when I say ‘rich’ here, I mean truly upper-class: the elite class, inheriting both generational wealth — say a family business empire and various international real estate holdings — and class connections — say of a political family. In my elite education, I had the strange privilege of calling many of these folks my peers, and in the process, found my own class instincts tested again and again, and proven wrong.
For example — the first truly rich person I knew was a boy in my freshman dorm. I spent the first half of the year thinking nothing in particular of him — curly brown hair, non-descript polos. He was a fine thinker and did his part in class. He dressed, frankly, normally. I only learned later that he came from a prominent business family in whispers between the halls. I remember feeling shocked that I had not detected at all the difference in our class positions. (And to be clear: I do not come from a working class family. My parents were immigrants, but both attained professional degrees. We are solidly upper-middle class. So it is highly possible that, had I been from a working class background, I would have had keener instincts in this department.) I suppose I had expected some small sign — an expensive watch at the very least, or a small sneer of superiority in conversation. Instead, he seemed almost offensively ordinary to me, to a degree that made me feel unsettled.
It’s only now, with the benefit of hindsight, that I can see what might have been the slightest telltale sign — he had a kind of ease to him, a relaxation that at the time I attributed merely to personality. Now, understanding the full context, I can see that some part of it might also have been a feeling of being exempt from playing the requisite games of college — of having safety nets so numerous and unquestioned that he was free, at any given moment, to focus fully on his own ends, his own pleasures, and spare nothing to anxiety.
Then, later in college, I had a close friend — a talented writer, a drifter. Not entrenched in any career path, she seemed bent on making it on her own devices… she had won a prestigious horse race as a teen… she had no fancy for frivolous things and was for the most part, not particularly flush with cash, but she came from a family that could bankroll her in emergencies… and besides that, her family held a position in polite society which inhered in her last name. In her, class manifested in the way she willed her way into classrooms, sidling right up to deans and visiting scholars with a self-assurance that seemed to border on naïveté. And she often got what she wanted — publishing advice, a seat in the seminar — and I could never tell if it was talent or gumption or a heady mix of both. Class will give you that kind of belief. In school, I would receive a rejection from some grant committee and slink back into the undifferentiated shadows, convinced some machine had read the signs with diligence and had bestowed upon me the ultimate institutional truth. I received the pronouncements of our shared institution like a petitioner receives their destiny; she, like a painter receives a wet first draft.
Class, then, might better be understood as a form of contextual stability — the ability to set the rules of the game such that they consistently benefit you. One can excel in the first set of ways — the prepared chef, the ballerina, etc. — because one is assured of a context that will remain fixed: the kitchen with its tools, the shoes and the stage and the lighting. One’s excellence is dependent upon a function of power, and therefore one appears powerful precisely because one has the privilege never to leave the arena where one is strongest.1
I can understand why we aren’t taught to recognize this form of class — on one hand, it’s not advantageous to the rich to be so easily identified, and the culture of the elite has clearly evolved to cover its own tracks. On the other hand, and perhaps more to the point, in a visual culture we can only turn to visual media to depict something that may be fundamentally non-visual. The most important inheritances are, perhaps, attitudinal — but how does one bring that to life on a screen? Richesse may be less about what we wear and more about the safety we feel in the world, the assurance that no matter what happens, we will be able to marshal forces to our aide.
Two summers ago, I spent a few months in Detroit on a solo research project. I lived in a beautiful house in Hamtramck, a little suburb-city nestled into the Northeast corner of the Detroit metro area, in a neighbourhood called Banglatown, surrounded by neighbours and friends. The first week I lived there, I went with my friend A to the local hardware store to get a large industrial garbage can. When we arrived, a boy — about high school age — emerged from the back warehouse and asked what we needed.
When we explained we wanted a garbage can, he guided us back to the high-ceilinged storage zone where racks of product were organized according to SKU tags. He explained that he only had one model of the size we wanted, and that this particular one was missing a lid. It wasn’t designed with a lid, I asked? No, he clarified — it had been designed with a lid, but for whatever reason, they didn’t have the lid in-house. It must’ve gotten lost somewhere. I waited for him to offer to order the lid. Instead, he simply beamed at us as if to say, So, would you like the garbage can? Don’t tell me you were expecting a whole garbage can?
It struck me at that moment that, having grown up in a suburb north of Toronto, and then an even richer suburb after that, I had always expected hardware stores to be well stocked and organized — having parts for each thing and different models arrayed neatly on the shelf. In the background there was always some inventory system, I presumed, humming merrily along as the workers pushed product from aisle to aisle. If something was missing, someone ordered it. And when someone ordered the thing, you expected it to come.
We bought the half garbage can, lidless, and dragged it home laughing.
This summer marked a turning point in my own sense of class — I began seeing my class less as a question of what cars we could afford to drive, or whether we had ever been hungry, and more as a kind of assurance in basic infrastructure. I walked into buildings and expected the water and gas to be functioning perfectly; I trusted the utility companies around me to do their jobs; I never once imagined jerry-rigging my own internet, as J had to do for us, by hot-wiring two cables in the back of the garage when the Xfinity people didn’t show. When I paid for something, I expected it to work for me, whether it was a product, service or person. I expected my money to speak reliably for me, and create for me a life I could actually stand on.
On the sidewalk that summer there was often glass; I never saw anyone from the city come by to clean it up. One afternoon a neighbourhood boy — likely Bengali or Bangladeshi, like many of my neighbours — rode by and his bike chain slipped off its gears. I stopped him and knelt by him on the pavement, pulling the chain back onto the gears as I had done many times for myself growing up. He looked at me with mirthless eyes and thanked me quickly, then rode off. His gratitude was so dismissive it was startling. It was only later that I understood: it wasn’t that he wasn’t grateful. It was that he understood that in this neighbourhood, everything would come back around, and soon I would be the one thanking him, or his mother, or his cousin. The help would be passed around, inevitably; it was how we would all survive.
I tell this story because I think there are, fundamentally, two different kinds of infrastructure: there is the social-material infrastructure that comes with class, in which one can assure oneself of a context unchanging, and therefore one’s excellence in that context — and then there is the natural infrastructure of being embedded in a community, of the open-ended sense that no matter what happens, you will do your best to help and be helped. The poorer one’s neighbourhood is, the more essential the second kind of infrastructure is — one might even say, the more foundational other people become to the basic functioning of your own life. In “The Utopia of Rules,” David Graeber makes a distinction between these two infrastructures by pointing out that they represent two very different types of creativity: the creativity of those in glitzy boardrooms, brainstorming for a living, and the creativity of those who must anticipate the needs and wants of others, and constantly adjust and improve to survive.
I think it is good to learn how to develop this second kind of infrastructure, no matter your station in life.2 And, I think it is also good to question our sense of who is excellent, and what excellence looks like. What is the background to our excellence, and how much power does it take to keep that background in its place?
Finally: if it’s true, as the Christians remind us, that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven, I think it’s right to ask why. One reason might be that richness alleviates us of the responsibility to be fully human — to help in order to one day be helped, to empathize so that one day we might be empathized with. One is lifted, whole and statue-like, out of the froth of human life into some echelon where one has an abstracted kind of force. In that world, the temptation to callousness is intense, as one never has to live with the consequences of their actions: one can always escape. In fact, the ability to escape at any time may be the very hallmark of class itself.
As a teacher, I think we make a fatal mistake when we mislead ourselves about class — about how it works, what it really is, and what it looks like. At the most benign, we may waste our time pretending to do equity work when really we are moving resources around among the elite. At the most potentially harmful, we stand to further skew the systems we live in to the advantage of the elite. Perhaps, in any given situation, we ought to ask ourselves not what people are wearing or what material items they possess but rather: who has the freedom to leave? And who, no matter how wretched things get, will have to stay and live with the consequences?
If we are interested in creating a better world, we must first become better at understanding what advantage and disadvantage actually look like — and who stands to risk the most when we attempt to change the world.
If you liked this essay, you might enjoy reading this essay on innovation (and the two types of creativity), this one on the construction of laziness in a colonial environment, and this one about how identity is complicated by class.
Paid subscriptions don’t get you anything new (yet) but are a wonderful way to support the work. Thank you to all who continue to support me, in ways both old and new, monetary and otherwise.
Discussion Questions
Feel free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, or with other readers in the comments.
How do you think about your own class? How has this changed over time?
What is a form of excellence you have, that relies deeply upon a set context? What about the second form of excellence?
Is having wealth important to you? Why or why not? How would you define wealth?
This kind of power can appear enormous to us, but we can also forget its fundamental vulnerability: like the ballerina, dragged out into the street, power often fails when its familiar implements are not around. On the other hand, illegible forms of expertise — the street chef — shine when contexts change and require quick adaptation. The rats win in the end.
Not only because I think this is a basic ethical capacity, but also because we live in a world that is only going to increase in complexity, chaos and the incidence rate of disaster.
In 2021, I moved from SF to a rural community in Washington where the average household income is $35,786. It immediately made me redefine my definition of wealth. I have never felt richer than the first big winter snow storm knocked out power, and I opened my door to a box of dry kindling on my doorstep. A neighbor knew more than I did how much I would need that kindling--it helped me make fires for days. It broke open the part of me that was desperately needing community, but found it hard to find in the socially-materially-wealthy of SF. I am now more freely giving my time to others, and have felt a growing confidence in my resiliency, like you said, "that is adaptable and driven by an understanding of invisible forces that shape the outcome."
Your last two posts have been so insightful. I was so impressed by your essay on self-care and your critique of the assumption that one could rely on self-love to sustain you that I sent it to my Episcopal priest son because it so reflected the message of the gospels. This essay gave me a lot to think about. I pondered the various kinds of contexts and communities of my eight decades and saw them in a different way. It is such a pleasure to discover in your Substack the kind of public intellectual that I had thought no longer existed.