In Society, the Rich Eat You

David and Linda Howard, the main characters in the 1985 Albert Brooks comedy, Lost in America, begin their adventure by deciding to "drop out of society." They spend a lot of the movie announcing this self-imposed exile to anyone who will listen. But what if David and Linda were never part of society in the first place? What if you and I aren't really part of society either? What if "society" is the exclusive domain of the rich? What if you are no more a part of society than a beef cow?

This type of exclusion is the central theme explored by Brian Yuzna's 1989 satirical body horror film, Society. It tells the story of teenage Bill Whitney coming of age in an affluent Beverly Hills family. Bill is a rather stereotypical jock, often sporting a varsity jacket, and sometimes just a tank top and sweatpants. Meanwhile, the rest of his family always dresses like they are about to be photographed for Rich Douche Magazine. They are what our ancestors might have called highfalutin. Bill doesn't fit in, and suspects he is adopted. The truth turns out to be much, much worse.

"You're a different race from us," Bill is told at one point, "a different species, a different class. You're not one of us. You have to be born into the society." What follows this diatribe is possibly the most disgusting third act in cinema history, and certainly one of the most disgusting I've ever watched, topped only by the infamous coprophagy at the end of Pink Flamingos. "The society" reveals itself as a pack of shapeshifting monsters who don't just exploit the poor, but literally consume them in a gooey, undulating orgy of flesh, slime, and depravity.

The Reagan Revolution was to the 80s as the MAGA movement is to our current moment. This is the decade that gave us Gordon Gekko from the 1987 movie, Wall Street, and the infamous "greed is good" speech. Like Wall Street, along with Lost in America and a lot of others from the 80s, Society was responding to the cultural renaissance of greed, excess, and "rugged individualism" that still plagues us today. But while some viewers of Wall Street came to see Gordon Gekko as some kind of twisted role model, no one has ever made such a mistake with the wealthy villains of Society. In this movie, the rich are not just evil but filthy, disgusting creatures prone to levels of incest and debauchery that no sane human would want to emulate.

The depiction of the wealthy as sexually depraved, parasitic monsters is so grotesque it's easy to overlook some of the other elements of class structure in the film. Making Bill a jock sets him up as an "regular guy" and also serves to subvert audience expectations. The jock bully trope was in full bloom during the 80s, showing up in films like Teen Wolf, Better Off Dead, and of course, Revenge of the Nerds. In one scene we see Bill wearing his varsity jacket on a debate stage being introduced by a cheerleader to an approving crowd. His opponent is a nerdy-looking kid named Marty, who wears a dark blue sports coat and khakis. In any other 80s movie, you would expect Bill to be the bully of this scene, but it is Marty who calls the audience a bunch of morons. Later in the film, Marty will win the second debate by making Bill look insane. The powerful use their resources to manipulate the masses. Bill, the populist everyman, is defeated by Marty, the well-connected elite. The system is rigged.

How much of this was intentional is hard to say. This was the first feature film for screenwriter Zeph E. Daniel (credited under the name of Woody Keith), who would later go on to claim the story was based on his own, real experiences. Not as in, he grew up around rich people and didn't fit in, but rather he grew up around rich people and they literally did blood sacrifices or something along those lines. Zeph now hosts a podcast on Substack where he has espoused MAGA conspiracy theories about pedophilic elites harvesting adrenochrome, etc. Make of that what you will. I'm not sure exactly what happened to him as a child, but if his podcast is any indication, it seems to have driven him a little insane. In any case, it seems more likely to me that he was expressing some horror of his lived experience, rather than attempting a serious dissection of capitalism. Indeed, his original script had the society revealed as some kind of satanic cult, leaning into the Satanic panic of the day.

If anything the movie is anti-elite, which is traditionally a left-wing position. An elite judge offers one of Bills tormentors an internship in Washington, while a police officer literally holds Bill down with a catch pole. Bill's therapist is a member and helps gaslight him into ignoring his suspicions about his family. Today, the MAGA right has co-opted anti-elite sentiment by simply defining elites as anyone with money or power who happens to be left of center. But this is a relatively new development that didn’t really exist in 1989.

Society isn't like the modern "eat the rich" cinema that's become popular in the past few years. A lot of current anti-capitalist films could be seen as examples of Recuperation, where our collective bubbling cauldron of rage is diluted, disarmed, repackaged, and sold back to us as entertainment so we don't start burning things down. Society wasn't made to chase any such trend. There wasn't much of a market in the US for the film when it was released. In fact, it didn't even get a US release until 1991, 3 years after it debuted in Europe. At that time Bush 1.0 was the President and the Reaganomics fever dream still hadn't broken. American moviegoers were being force-fed a steady diet of corporate propaganda, which left them with little appetite for a film like Society to succeed in the States.

Now, more than 3 decades later, Society has claimed its rightful place as one of the all-time great subversive cult classic movies. It is arguably Brian Yuzna's most influential work as a director, once again proving that box office receipts aren't the truest measure of a film's success.