Yeun also plays a minor role in Sorry to Bother You, where (spoilers for a fantastic movie you really should have watched by now) rich people are turning workers into super-strong half-horse creatures, which sounds like something Elon Musk would have already done by now if it was possible. Shockingly, this plan ends up backfiring on them in a pretty violent way. Another WTF one is Velvet Buzzsaw starring Jake Gyllenhaal, where the paintings of an artist who died in obscurity cause modern art pieces to come alive and murder the pretentious art types trying to profit from his work.
Of course, this isn’t a purely American phenomenon: look at South Korea’s Parasite, which starts out as a comedy about a lower-class family scamming an upper-class one but takes a rather dark turn by the end. Other popular movies outside this specific genre that still fit the general “F the rich” mood include Hustlers (no murders, though they get close), Knives Out (the one rich guy who dies is actually not trash), and Joker (there are jokes, but we wouldn’t call it a comedy).
It’s curious that what we’re dubbing “ultra-violent class-warfare dark comedies” suddenly started popping up everywhere in the late 2010s — it’s like screenwriters suddenly decided we were past the point of sending rich villains to luxury prisons with tennis courses like in The Wolf of Wall Street. Even the anti-capitalist masterpiece that is Will Ferrell’s The Other Guys (directed by The Menu, Fresh, and Hustlers producer Adam McKay) was pretty kind to its rich villains. Today, instead of getting a government bailout, the bad guys would have ended up “missing the bushes,” like The Rock and Samuel L. Jackson.
It’s like these movies are a coping mechanism to get us through a world where the ultra-rich keep getting away with their crimes; they’re a way to blow off steam that doesn’t involve learning how to operate a guillotine. This begs the question: would the French Revolution ever have happened if the French peasants had simply started doing plays where someone puts explosives inside Marie Antoinette’s cake? Something to ponder while we wait for Elon Musk to get a $45 fine for his Twitter shenanigans.
Thumbnail: Searchlight Pictures