But perhaps there is more to the comment and the act of questioning the place of a Filipino short film in the platform of a vastly popular American magazine. That same year of the film’s circulation, we witnessed the release of multiple “Eat the rich” narratives – films and series that cemented the slogan in the global cultural zeitgeist. Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, and the second season of White Lotus each gained vast moments of online discourse. In each case of popular class critique, the spectacle of extravagance is centered, and the spectacle of poverty is at the margins. These politics of representation, pervading popular “Eat the Rich” narratives suggest that while these narratives self-identify as critical of the rich and the economic accumulations of the Western world, more generally, they nonetheless prioritize the rich as their primary focal point. Indeed, online discourse affirms that while there is a vast market for “Eats the Rich” narratives, perhaps equally, if not more so, there is a market for “Rich Narratives,” alone.

In speaking of the postcolonial and the popular, we might ask: what brown-bodied representations are allowed to occupy white spaces (and on what terms?)? How much space and diversity, that is to say, is there within the ever-popular genre of white-wealthy “self-critique”? The New Yorker’s comments section for the short film, Excuse Me Miss, Miss, Miss, offers a useful commentary on the film’s visual and performative nature. Yet, it also, potentially reveals an unwillingness to share generic space, hence illuminating how “Eat the Rich” narratives have been colonized by the very white, wealthy demographics that are the subject of their critique.

The popularity of “Eat the Rich” narratives may well be attributed to Parasite making a mark in the West, gaining numerous accolades and even doubts from then-President Donald Trump[2]. While movies that portray the intimate master-servant dynamic between the uber-rich and coloured bodies existed before Parasite, the film, arguably inspired a renewed focus on stories about class, particularly, ones wherein the rich are met with a gruesome affair. Confronted with the economic aftermath of the pandemic, and its public illumination of economic precarity and disparity in relation to front-line workers, “Eat the Rich” narratives perhaps offered satiation to a wide, global reckoning with vastly apparent inequity.

Reviewers of “Eat the Rich” narratives, like White Lotus or Glass Onion, have criticized these stories as “empty” (Rajkotwala) or “confused” (Adler-Bell). Jake Bishop notes that the characters are typically “one-dimensional caricatures of rich people…played for laughs. Each one being defined by a different personal flaw such as ignorance, egotism, and arrogance”. Indeed, focusing on the moral failures of rich individuals risk occluding the more pervasive issue of accumulating their wealth on the basis of labouring colored bodies (a dynamic that only gestured, through references to these protagonist’s profiting of weapons manufacturing or the cleaning servers of foreign workers [Triangle of Sadness]). In “Eat the Rich” narratives, the source of such wealth is an opportunity for dialogue and characterization, yet it is never the reason for downfall—a downfall ‘justified’ and ushered by the moral maltreatment of labouring colored bodies. For this reason, the retribution at the end feels hollow: the rich, it seems, fail not because of their active participation in structural systems of exploitation, but because they possess an ordinary spectrum of human flaws.