THE PICTURE OF WEALTH
NARRATING HER DOCUMENTARY GENERATION WEALTH, FILMMAKER AND photographer Lauren Greenfield diagnoses “a shift in the meaning of the American Dream.” The dream had turned “into a quest for fame and fortune, and we had left behind the values of hard work, frugality, and discretion that had defined our parents’ generation.” Greenfield’s ambitious, scattershot movie is a follow-up to her 2012 The Queen of Versailles, which follows Westgate Resorts founder David Siegel and his wife Jackie’s endeavor to construct an 85,000-square-foot house in Orange County, Florida, designed in imitation of Louis XIV’s palace. Generation Wealth strings together an overarching theory of accelerationist affluence by way of revisiting old photographic subjects, including the Siegels. It doesn’t work, but not because it’s asking questions that aren’t worth asking. Generation Wealth sports an Amazon imprimatur, which as good as guarantees an audience of unusually large size for a documentary—the not unreasonable assumption behind the granting of this privilege of widespread streaming availability being, perhaps, a sense that the public’s appetite for conspicuous consumption knows no bounds.
While the spectacle of lavish spending has always had its place in American pop entertainment, that place has conspicuously grown in the course of the 10 years that saw a Great Recession in world markets, Occupy Wall Street, the emergence of the One Percent and 99 Percent as household terms, and the election of a U.S. president whose lone recommendation for the job was his stewardship of a family fortune of literally untold size. Faced with a challenge by a figure who self-advertised as incorruptible by virtue of his ready access to heaps of “fuck you” money, the party of the working man, the Democrats, fought cash with cash, trotting out their own plutocrats: a speech at the Democratic National Convention by the charisma-free Michael Bloomberg (net worth: $50 billion), and a 2015 tax return issued by Warren Buffet (net worth: $84 billion), which proved that the Omaha investor’s charitable contributions for that year nearly equaled Trump’s entire personal fortune. The idea, one supposes, is that a gormless public who would forgive or embrace any of the presidential hopeful’s other glaring inadequacies would draw the line upon learning that he wasn’t quite as rich as he claimed.
If, as Greenfield
