Trump income inequality

Documentary Spotlight: “Generation Wealth”

If you just can’t get enough of gold-plated toilet seats, garish mansions, stretch limos with hot tubs and even a helipad, and Wall Street guys lighting cigars with $100 bills, you’ll probably want to give the new documentary “Generation Wealth” a look: these are just a few of the conspicuous-consumption visuals on display in this film. Of course, if that kind of thing makes your blood boil like it does mine, you still should have a look. This is ostensibly a cautionary tale about America being the latest example of how, like the Roman Empire, “a society accrues its greatest wealth at the moment that they face death.”


Lauren Greenfield at work in the bathrooms of the filthy rich.

Given the seriousness of that supposition, you might expect “Generation Wealth” to adopt a somewhat more urgent tone: especially considering that the man who exemplifies the ugliest aspects of this pathology of greed is currently the U.S. president. Photojournalist/filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, whose previous doc was 2012’s excellent (and similarly-themed) “The Queen of Versailles,” begin documenting the offspring of the L.A. rich and famous back in the 90s. She grew up in Venice, California and her upper middle-class parents sprung for her to attend the tony Crossroads high school in Santa Monica that many of these kids attended. Greenfield has inserted herself into this work to an extent that rather surprised me. She ends up comparing her obsession with her work projects, and the time it takes away from connecting with her children, with her subjects’ infatuation with wealth and status. This diverts from what I thought should be the main theme: how this American preoccupation with the 1% is helping to shred the social and civic fabric of the nation.

There is a lot more to this topic than just the obvious fall-of-Rome optics in abundance here. Very early on we spend some time with the inappropriately glamorous Eden Wood (as the six year-old star of the notorious TV show “Toddlers and Tiaras”) and her dubious mother. That does lead to some talk about how unfettered capitalism ultimately leads to the “commodification of everything,” including the human body (cue the sex-trade workers and prepare the chamber-of-horrors operating rooms of the body augmenters). Likewise, a little sit-down with former hedge-fund crook Florian Hamm, he of the giant cigar and punchable face, does segue into an exposition about how America’s abandonment of the gold standard (followed closely by the Reagan Revolution) led to the country transforming from an empire of production to an empire of consumption in a few short decades—with all the income inequality that goes with it.


When we used to say “this country is going to the dogs” this wasn’t what we had in mind.

“Generation Wealth” may be an engaging film but at the end of the day this is something less than a full accounting of the issue it’s supposedly confronting. Too often these exasperating and borderline pathetic people are allowed to explain away their nonsensical over-indulgence with little or no counterpoint. Real estate semi-mogul David Siegel, whose stymied effort to build an insanely vulgar 90,000 square-foot home was the subject of “Queen of Versailles,” returns here to inform us that in America if you’re not rich you can at least feel rich and if you don’t want to feel rich, “you’re dead.”

Few people who begrudge anyone making a fortune off their own ingenuity and hard work. But Siegel’s condescending and ridiculous declaration speaks a lot to why the U.S. has approached a state of near-oligarchy. Whether it be the ubiquitous media and public fixation on wealth and stardom, or the Republican Party’s cynical assertion that future tax cuts for the uppermost income brackets will benefit the Average Joe once they magically become rich, this mindset has undercut the importance of maintaining a strong middle class as a check on those who would misuse political or monetary power. We’ve been played for a nation of suckers. “Keeping up with the Joneses” may have been daunting but “Keeping up with the Kardashians” is all but impossible


Sorry, but that won’t be nearly enough to buy you’re way out of hell.

“Generation Wealth” really only offers a couple of voices-of-reason and one of them, incredibly, is the problematic Brett Easton Ellis, author of the infamous “American Pyscho.” Sure, there is lip service to the notion that we are losing a sense of our “authentic culture” along with our critical faculties, and have been left to dream that the world owes us a living. Yet by the last reel, Lauren Greenfield’s workaholic/absentee mom issues seem to have been worked out. We see her new deluxe coffee-table photo book (also called “Generation Wealth”) being printed up and watch as she meets up with some of her subjects at the related art gallery opening. While some of these folks have shown some personal growth, the larger societal problem continues apace. Most tellingly, one of them looks at his younger self, partying in a hot tub with the other spoiled kids, and remarks: “Not much has changed.” How true.
–Rick Ouellette

Documentary Spotlight: You’ve Been Trumped

trump1

You’ve Been Trumped
Directed by Anthony Baxter–2011–95 minutes

We are obliged to live in a world with a multitude of political opinions, social attitudes and lifestyle choices. This naturally causes all sorts of random discontents when different values knock against each other. But I always thought there was one thing people all across the spectrum could agree on: that the junior sociopaths that roamed the hallways and recess yards of elementary schools everywhere—calling you humiliating nicknames with no provocation, ridiculing you for being in the bathroom too long, pushing you down in gym class when the teacher had his back turned—would recede from your life by high school at the latest and be recalled with the utmost disdain in adult life if even thought of at all. Boy, am I naïve. Just give this same asshole a trust fund and a tawdry reality TV show and, in an age of celebrity overlords and toxic conservative talk shows, you get people voting for (and even worshipping) the same pathologically insecure bully that would have once pummeled them for the milk money. And for President of the United States!! I don’t believe there’s nearly enough bamboozled voters to elect Donald Trump. But I was also wrong in thinking that nobody would ever pull a lever for a candidate that calls them “stupid” to their face, just like he would have if he knew them in 5th grade.

So the title You’ve Been Trumped neatly sums up this blood-boiling 2011 documentary directed by Anthony Baxter and produced and co-written by Richard Phinney. It’s a gritty, ground-level film witness to Trump’s vulgar tactics on a smaller scale (but blessedly without the misdirected popular support we now see in the States) as we experience Trump pushing through plans to build an enormous jet-set golf resort near a pristine stretch of coastline north of Aberdeen, Scotland. The filmmaker’s sympathies are clear as a group of local residents, who have the audacity to own humble properties in the path of the tycoon’s grandiose scheme, refuse to budge—even in the face of a government Compulsory Purchase Order (eminent domain). The starry-eyed deferment to fame and fortune in its modern media-age manifestation provides the film’s rich subtext.

trump6jpg

The Aberdeenshire regional council at first rejects the plan but after the Scottish Parliament “calls in” that decision, the project is approved, despite the site’s official designation as a grade-one conservation area. Baxter shoots a scene at a Trump-attended groundbreaking event, where fawning local officials and business people realize that their lives are being touched by an actual Celebrity, and one ready to throw a lot of money around. A nearby college, not to be outdone, desperately bestows Trump with an honorary degree even as credible experts warn of the steep environmental cost.

Throughout You’ve Been Trumped Baxter inserts scenes from Bill Forsyth’s amiable (and analogous) 1983 fiction film Local Hero. There, the plans of an American oil baron (Burt Lancaster) to buy out a coastal enclave on Scotland’s west coast and replace it with a refinery are complicated when the hotshot executive he sends there as an advance party (Peter Riegert) is lured by the charms of the village’s slow-lane lifestyle. How quaint. Nowadays, a guy like “The Donald” doesn’t have to waste his time courting skeptical residents. According to him, the property of Michael Forbes, the flinty old-school farmer who’s at the forefront of local resistance, is “slum-like and disgusting” and the man “lives like a pig.” Trump has always liked to come on like a streetwise New Yorker (despite his silver spoon) and his blustering reputation precedes him by a country mile. This kick-out-the-poor attitude is less objectionable nowadays where (notably in the U.S.) a certain obsessive fixation on wealth and fame has elevated the likes of him to an iconic status that often “trumps” any solidarity one may have once felt with the general population.

With the skids greased by the city fathers, who seem to have imported this mindset, Trump quickly moves in. His earthmovers are soon moving “biblical” amounts of sand to make way for the two 18-hole golf courses, depositing one of Britain’s largest sand dune systems next to the homes of those who don’t like him and encroaching on their property lines. In one of the film’s more telling scenes, the local police arrest Baxter (and rather roughly at that) for filming an interview with project opponent Susan Munro, in her own driveway.

TRUMP5

It’s true that for certain socio-political types (like those partial to muckraking documentaries) a figure like Trump will remain an easy target of scorn. He’s the conceited blowhard whose bloated, self-titled building projects blight the old majesty of Manhattan, the condescending candidate whose first (short-lived) run for the American presidency rested on the despicable “birther” platform, the TV host of “Celebrity Apprentice” who gets his jollies watching washed-up stars like Gary Busey and Meatloaf grovel from the other side of a mahogany conference table. To a person like Susan Munro, Trump is no more than someone “with a few pounds in his pocket and a bit of a name.” The question coursing through the film is whether her outlook, serving as a great leveler when multiplied across the body politic, will win out or will more people imagine that they are just a lottery win or reality-show appearance or viral video away from joining Donald in the gentrified ranks of the 1%.

trump7

While the intrepid Baxter is tracking down Trump at press conferences and parliamentary hearings, the opponents attract a group of sympathizers who flock to a protest march and to a Trump-mocking art show held in a barn on Forbes’ farm. One of them is Mickey Foote, who in another lifetime was producer of the Clash’s first album. Now living near-by, Foote speaks knowingly about the limits of Forbes’ newfound local celebrity vs. Trump’s international stature and to what’s being lost in the deal (“a fantastic open space within reach of ordinary people.”) These scenes of citizen camaraderie may be seen as gratifying but one can only be left thinking what the future holds in an age of gaping income inequality that forms the broader background of this theme. While Trump gloats about the few hundred service-sector positions available at his resort, we’re seemingly left with an untouchable upper class run amuck in a return to a medieval-style oligarchy, with government and law enforcement in their pocket. You’ve Been Trumped smartly played out this disheartening scenario in miniature, now a more frightening version is being played out on a much bigger scale.