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It is rare that the old Forbes magazine is at the center of a Twitterstorm, but it is also rare for the venerable financier to put on his cover page a reality TV star of Generation Z and an Instagram icon. These two events occurred this week, while Kylie Jenner, 20, was leading a number dedicated to American women billionaires, her immaculate face accompanied by a lame headline stating that the only thing that was going on was a "black and white" issue. Cosmetics entrepreneur was the youngest self-taught billionaire.
The answer was not exactly the rise of youth approval that publishers were looking for, as many social media skeptics rightly asked for the definition of "self-made" magazine: after everything, it's easier to make oneself. He was born in a huge Olympic and golden renown, rich in the extended Jenner-Kardashian clan. "Welcome to the era of extreme influence," the magazine continues, in a somewhat contradictory way: on Planet Forbes, it seems that fame is only a starting point from which one can recover.
I watched this page badly judged several times as I watched Generation Wealth, the prolific, discursive and largely frustrating photographer-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield analyze the often grotesque roots, symptoms, and fallout of late capitalism – a fictional expansion of ideas explored in his excellent 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles, a venomous portrait of the massively wealthy resort barons David and Jackie Siegel and their obscene material excesses. If Greenfield had created Generation Wealth a year later, Jenner's cover might have slipped into his collage loaded with very bright images, most of them being those of the photographer. We are, however, entitled to a photo of Jenner's half-sister, Kim Kardashian, age 12, part of a rich and early glamorous school clique – one of many Hollywood children whose extreme privilege (wasted in some cases Greenfield, herself a native of Los Angeles, widens her eyes with a pleated forehead.
Rather than Forbes did it with Jenner, Generation Wealth is constantly riding capitalism and fame, whether it's accomplished accomplishments or gutter ambitions. "[There’s been] a change in the meaning of the American dream," notes Greenfield in his own voice. " It's almost as if she had become a quest for fame and fortune. "Her film is full of non-academic and sentiment-based statements – using only a journalistic leader, socialist commentator Chris Hedges, for support them – but this observatio n a fair on which to build a movie. At a time when America is in the corrupt hand of a president whose main qualifications for the Oval Office, at least in the eyes of his devoted followers, are both his great personal fortune and his tabloid fame and powered television, now is a good time to wonder why so much of contemporary society is so exposed to visible manifestations of individual wealth.
Yet the name of Donald Trump is barely mentioned in Generation Wealth, two fleeting appearances in the collective montage of the American capitalist rot of Greenfield – once in pictures of a Trump rally in 2016, in which the faces of the Siegels mentioned above can be spotted grimacing macabre behind him. Maybe Greenfield thought that Trump is such an obvious emblem of America's dangerous monetary fixation that his condemnation of him goes without saying. That said, as Trump's most ardent Republican supporters refuse to be moved even by his far-fetched side with the Russian government on issues of voter interference, it may not be the best moment of history to leave things unsaid "src =" https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0bf79ebcc0e6a757886bb1cc8b361ada46d89310/0_0_3000_2000/master/3000.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto= uSM & size = 12 & did = & s = max 2ea14f0406ec89fef2ed60f6c489c61c "/>
Instead, Generation Wealth focuses on a disparate range of human subjects lower on the capitalist totem, ranging from former business banker Florian Homm – in German exile plush to avoid the Fraud in the United States – to the poor. As Cathy Grant, a bus driver of the working class sank into unmanageable debt and family tragedy after traveling to Brazil for a radically transformative plastic surgery. The thematic thread of capitalist collusion and corruption running through such interviewees – let alone the Trumps and Kardashiannes implicitly implicated in his thesis – is thin enough before Greenfield turns more and more on itself. The second part of the film, in particular, is concerned about the filmmaker's personal and family insecurities, while she wonders aloud whether her own dedication to her rich, substantial, globe-trotting photographer career – at the expense of to be more sacrificing, She is a source of support for her husband and two sons – she can align with the selfish and arrogant principles of late capitalism.
This is a disappointing and surprisingly conservative line of thinking for a film that is often close to a more acerbic diagnosis of the massive moral ruin that sparked the Trump era – one that directs a more sinister judgment to the pawns of the so-called wealth of the generation as its primary facilitators and beneficiaries. As the film focuses on Greenfield's reasonable struggle to balance his duties as an artist, career woman and parent, Generation Wealth falls into its own narcissistic trap, prioritizing the individual over the village: his finale celebrates Greenfield's production. book of the same title.
That the volume in question is the kind of heavy, shiny, coffee table volume susceptible only to honor the tables of the rich is an irony whose film may or may not be conscious. Perhaps you could say something similar, perhaps, for the fact that Forbes praises Kylie Jenner's billions of self-made. Anyway, it will take more than this kind of ambiguity kept to cut the heart of Trump America.
- Generation Wealth is released in cinemas now
