As far as I could tell in the movie the rich people were depicted as decent parents if not a bit naive, while the poor family were backstabbing assholes who betrayed their fellow workers (the housekeeper and her husband) because of sheer malice. Not once does the film hint at the underlying economical system as the reason why the rich are rich and the poor are poor.

If you are a socialist, you will (correctly) identify capitalism as the reason for the misery of the poor people in the film, and the rich as part of the bourgeoisie who exploit them. But that isn’t any different than analysing an IRL crime through that lens, the film didn’t help you reach that conclusion, it just presented a scenario.

A chud could easily see the rich family as the honest entrepreneurs and the poor family as poor because of the negative behaviors they exhibited, and there is nothing in the film that would dispute that interpretation.

With the poor family getting punished for their deception, and the son resolving to make money to save his father at the end (presumably through more “honest” means), it even displays the “pull yourself by the bootstraps” belief.

The best case interpretation of the film I can make is that “the rich people should be more conscious of the poor’s struggles, and the poors should stay in their place or risk losing everything” which is pretty reactionary and not the class conscious film many people described it as. I guess you could see the ending as punishment for the class betrayal but I think that’s a stretch.

Am I overzealous in policing the politics of the media I consume to the point of misinterpreting things or finding an even vaguely leftist film that hard?

  • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I think a major thing you’re missing by wanting the rich people to be rude and the poor family to be polite is that these types of behaviours are typically engendered by certain class positions. There are plenty of rich people who are polite, but despite this the rich characters are shown to be exploitative which is more meaningful. If you watch carefully they are assholes, they’re just polite about it.

    We can compare it to Joyce and Evrart from DE. Joyce is polite, but she is a member of the board of the company that said blood-crazed mercenaries to suppress the strike, while Evrart is very slimy and yet he organized this strike and genuinely tries to improve conditions for union members.