The ups and downs of a capitalist society have been at the forefront of the news lately in light of the GameStop short squeeze. A billionaire hedge fund manager cried on live television after having his own stock trick used against him. While mainstream movies tend to avoid making a political statement, some filmmakers have used cinema to critique a society that contains both multi-billionaires and homeless people.
One of the most recent quintessential anti-capitalist satires is Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, which tackles organized labor, corporate greed, and exploitative business practices. But it's not the only film to make pointed commentary on the flawed economic system most of the world subscribes to, a bunch of other directors have lambasted capitalism in movie form, too.
Sorry To Bother You (2018)
Boots Riley was a prominent communist activist before writing and directing Sorry to Bother You as a scathing takedown of capitalism. Lakeith Stanfield stars as a telemarketer who climbs the corporate ladder by using his “white voice” on the phone.
The movie takes a couple of wild turns as his co-workers organize a strike and he uncovers a shocking experiment being carried out by an eccentric CEO.
They Live (1988)
Roddy Piper stars in John Carpenter’s cult classic They Live as a drifter who finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the world as it really is: a bleak, black-and-white dystopia. All the billboards say, “OBEY,” and “CONFORM,” and “CONSUME.”
In addition, the wealthy 1% is really made up of a bunch of aliens who have invaded Earth and brainwashed the 99% with subliminal messages in the media.
The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013)
Martin Scorsese’s biopic of stockbroker Jordan Belfort split critics down the middle, with some feeling it revels in Belfort’s life of excess and others believing its absurd drug-fueled antics are a sharp satirical indictment of the mega-rich.
The final shot of the slack-jawed audience watching Belfort’s seminar acknowledges the ever-consuming public’s role in perpetuating the capitalist machine that creates such Wall Street con men.
Trading Places (1983)
Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy star in Trading Places as an upper-class commodity broker and a lower-class street hustler, respectively, who decide to walk a mile in each other’s shoes.
Each of them gets to see how the other half lives, and there’s a lot of comic material in a privileged, sheltered rich guy learning the harsh realities of life on the street.
God Bless America (2011)
Following his initial career as a stand-up comic, Bobcat Goldthwait made a name for himself as a filmmaker with a string of pitch-black comedies. One of his movies, God Bless America, sees a middle-aged man and a teenage girl bonding over their disillusionment with post-9/11 American culture.
They decide to do something pretty drastic about it: take up arms and go on a killing spree. It’s like Falling Down with the violence and dark humor dialed way up.
Dawn Of The Dead (1978)
George A. Romero pioneered the modern zombie movie with Night of the Living Dead and established the undead as a perfect vehicle for social commentary in its allegories of racism and Cold War-era paranoia.
The director continued to give his zombie stories a satirical edge in the sequel, Dawn of the Dead, which sees a band of survivors hiding out from the flesh-eaters in a mall. Malls are a symbol of capitalism, and the hordes of zombies traipsing en masse into the mall don’t look too dissimilar to how the living flock to the mall in real life.
Killing Them Softly (2012)
When some guys rob a mafia poker game, the criminal underworld’s internal economy starts to crumble and a badass enforcer, played by Brad Pitt, is brought in to get the money back using whatever brutal means necessary.
Writer-director Andrew Dominik used the implosion of the criminal economy as a satirical metaphor for the Great Recession, the effects of which were still being felt when the movie hit theaters in 2012.
American Psycho (2000)
Adapted from the wildly controversial novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho deals with the effect that the capitalist mindset has on people’s mental health as a corporate high-flyer is driven to commit gruesome murders that may or may not actually be occurring.
Christian Bale gave one of his all-time greatest performances in the lead role of vain serial killer Patrick Bateman, while Reese Witherspoon and Willem Dafoe provide strong .
Office Space (1999)
Mike Judge hysterically captured the frustrations of doing a mundane nine-to-five office job in his initially underappreciated satire Office Space. Ron Livingston stars as Peter, a bored office drone who’s sick of his boss lording his power over him, and decides one day to just stop going into work.
Ahead of mass redundancies, Peter teams up with a couple of his coworkers to con the company out of a little money, and they end up accidentally stealing a lot more than they intended.
Parasite (2019)
All of Bong Joon-ho’s movies are about the class divide, but arguably his greatest indictment of economic inequality and the distribution of wealth is Parasite, the first ever non-English-language movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
It tells the darkly comic story of the Kim family, who con their way into jobs with the rich Park family one by one, only to discover some dark secrets that change everything.
