The growing gap between rich and poor has created a genre of its own: films and series about inequality are hugely popular.
Inequality is all the rage. In the real world, where the proverbial gap between the poor and the (super)rich continues to widen year after year, any real, non-metaphoric cutting tool would have long since reached its mechanical limits. And in the entertainment industry, where awareness of public frustration with the divide between the “haves,” “haves,” and “have-nots” has unleashed a wave of “unequal entertainment.” What is meant are commercially oriented films and series that not only casually, but explicitly address the drawbacks of modern class society, each with different claims and intentions. It is difficult to say when exactly this genre established itself as such. Its political roots go back to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which in 2011 summed up the unequal distribution of wealth with the slogan “We are the 99 percent.”
Until then, the expression “One Percenter” was primarily known as the nickname of a recalcitrant American motorcycle subculture. Today it mainly represents members of a statistically delimited upper class, which is viewed with suspicion or disapproval from “below”. Scandals like the “Panama Papers” leak and the cascading crises of the last few decades have brought social discrepancies in ownership and agency into the public spotlight even more than usual. Sooner or later, pop culture had to respond. Even though their confrontation with inequality today is different from what it was during the global economic crisis of the early 1930s: back then, comedies about the resourceful poor sought to restore the stolen dignity of the poor and destitute, while cinema left agitprop the class struggle pathetically exploded. Contemporary narratives of inequality adopt a more holistic view: they prefer to paint dialectical images of the complex interrelationship between rich and poor, often in a tragicomic-satirical tone.
