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Citation: The Economist Jan 3 1998, v345, n8049, p30(1)
Title: Room at the bottom. (class hatred typified in motion
picture 'Titanic')
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COPYRIGHT 1998 The Economist Newspaper Ltd. All rights reserved.
IN ONE of the better scenes in "Titanic", America's latest box-office
sensation, the young artist travelling in steerage (played by Leonardo
DiCaprio), gains an invitation to the luxurious first-class dining room, where
he is duly snubbed by a collection of vain, boorish people who have never done
a decent day's work in their lives. As he takes in the Astors and the
Guggenheims, their cigars, jewellery and empty conversation, he whispers to
the winsome aristocrat (Kate Winslet) who has betrayed her sort in order to be
with him: "Perhaps I was earmarked from birth, and only the scoundrels and
geniuses ever rise out of the class into which they are born."
Actually, Mr DiCaprio, whose artistry tends towards the physical rather than
the poetic (he remarks "This is bad" a lot), doesn't quite say that. The words
come from the working-class hero of "Room at the Top", John Braine's furious
indictment of 1950s Britain. "Titanic" is an exercise in class hatred that few
European socialists would dare to display. The French sometimes still make
films about wicked mine-owners locking out their workers; in "Titanic", the
poor are locked below decks to drown. This is a tale of two ships-one toiling
in the engine room, the other trying on diamonds-accentuated by the convenient
fact that in the film, at least, there are no second-class characters to
bridge the gap. The rich people are all so awful (one even steals a baby to
get put on a lifeboat) that an icy Atlantic grave seems too good for them.
Encouraging poor Americans to bay for the blood of rich ones is something
Hollywood usually eschews. Ironically, "Titanic" was itself, until recently, a
byword for pointless extravagance. But class warfare does no harm at the box
office: the film has already taken in $90m in ten days.
Of course, reading too much into movies can be dangerous. The murmurs of
approval across America as the waters descend on the brandy-quaffing
millionaires (yes, even "Titanic" has to admit that a few of the rich creeps
did let the women and children go first) are not quite the sound of
revolutionary tumbrils. America is still a place where most people react to
seeing a man in a Ferrari by redoubling their own efforts to be able to afford
one, rather than by trying to let down his tyres. Silicon Valley, for
instance, has succeeded in part because nobody there understands the European
notion that people can be "too big for their boots". Great wealth is generally
seen as the by-product of cool ideas being put into practice.
But for how much longer? Conventional wisdom has it that, although income
inequality has risen, the rich behave far less obnoxiously in the 1990s than
they did in the 1980s-the decade when Greed was Good and the Masters of the
Universe (a phrase borrowed by "Titanic") ruled Wall Street. In Beverly Hills
and the Hamptons the wealthy now drive practical Range Rovers rather than
frivolous open-top sports cars. But, with the value of stock-option programmes
now pushing $1 trillion, this cover is wearing thin. Vanity Fair recently
hailed New York as "the champagne city, making the brash consumption of the
1980s look like the depression". Suddenly the talk is of $2,000 bottles of
wine, $13,000 handbags, 5,000 reservation-requests a day at Le Cirque and
people "only being worth 30" (it is unnecessary to mention the million).
With Ronald Reagan no longer in the White House to take the blame, wealth
looks more vulnerable to criticism than it did a decade ago. Wall Street's
long bull run has effortlessly turned many small fortunes into large ones
without many of the beneficiaries raising a finger. Some of the biggest
pay-packets are going to those responsible for the massive corporate
downsizings of the mid-1990s, when many steerage passengers, as well as middle
managers, were cast overboard. The voraciousness of people such as Henry
Kravis, the original barbarian at the gate (who is said to have earned $300m
in 1997), or Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap has helped keep corporate America
competitive; but they are not loved for it.
With a few exceptions, such as George Soros, the new rich have not been
philanthropic. One New York grande dame, while admitting that her own
ancestors were not entirely nice people, points out that they founded
hospitals and museums: "They gave something back-unlike that greedy little
bully a well-known figure on Wall Street who probably deducts the tax on the
charity-ball tickets his wife forces him to buy." Her peers in San Francisco
view the nerds of Silicon Valley, too busy investing in start-ups to worry
about poorer folk, with similar disdain.
One straw in the wind could be Bill Gates. Once a deserving technological
wizard, he is now often depicted as an undeserving monopolist. Michael Eisner,
who recently cashed options worth $565m, is known as much for his pay-packet
as for rejuvenating Disney. Peter Drucker, America's foremost corporate guru,
compares today's tycoons to the Wall Street heroes of the 1920s who became
Roosevelt's "malefactors of great wealth". Few modern bosses, Mr Drucker has
argued, "can even imagine the hatred, contempt and fury that has been
created."
Naturally, this fury could relent. More of the new rich may discover
philanthropy and good manners, just as the Astors did before them. But there
is one difference. Much of the new pain, like much of the new wealth, is being
created not by the rich but by globalisation. Already several
politicians-notably Richard Gephardt and Pat Buchanan, who ranted about
"Goldman and Sachs" (as he called it) in 1996-seem to be taking aim at the
"winner-takes-all society". It is not hard to imagine talk of supertaxes or
higher trade barriers to stop the injustice. But that might turn out to be
like trying to ram an iceberg. At the end of "Titanic" we are told the good
news that Mr DiCaprio's baby-snatching rival shot himself during the crash of
1929. The Great Depression that followed that particular culling of the
undeserving rich also did the poor remarkably few favours.
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