Lauren Greenfield, a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker from Los Angeles, has chronicled late capitalism’s most bizarre and depressing excesses for over twenty years.
Generation Wealth, her newest documentary set for release July 20, incorporates elements from her past work as well as follow-up interviews with former subjects and some surprisingly personal autobiographical material.
In the film, we meet a former Ms. Florida and her timeshare-mogul husband, who last appeared in Greenfield’s 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles as they struggled to build the largest house in America in the midst of the Great Recession. We see interviews similar to those of 2008’s Kids + Money, in which Greenfield contrasts conversations with lower, middle, and upper-class teenagers from Los Angeles, and in which one girl describes sharing a single bedroom with both of her parents while another explains why it’s okay to spend thousands of dollars on a purse as long as it’s “a classic.” We also see some of Greenfield’s earliest photography from the mid-90s, including shots of a 12-year-old Kim Kardashian at a Bel Air school dance and a 13-year-old Kate Hudson at a nightclub.
But Greenfield doesn’t limit her lens to the U.S. Generation Wealth opens with footage of a group of women at a pricey Chinese etiquette school learning how to pronounce luxury brands like “Versace,” and later, being taught how to politely slice a banana with a knife and fork. Also in China, Greenfield shows us a businessman and his full-size recreation of the White House, the Oval Office of which overlooks a replica Mount Rushmore. In Brazil, Greenfield documents an American school-bus driver getting a boob job and tummy tuck with borrowed money. “Me satisfying my own body issues was the best thing I could do for my daughter,” she says. And in Germany, Greenfield interviews an FBI most-wanted former stockbroker who allegedly defrauded investors of $200 million. He smokes cigars, drinks champagne, and lives free in his home country, which doesn’t extradite its citizens.
from “Generation Wealth – Official Trailer” on YouTube
Greenfield’s subjects are hardly sympathetic. They use money they don’t have on things they don’t need, like plastic surgery, or money they do have on grotesque luxuries, like strippers and yachts. They appear delusional, even soulless, in their lust for money, status, and beauty, until they go too far and realize love and family are more important than anything. For the stockbroking fraudster, this turn comes with a brief stint in prison. For the school-bus driver, it’s her teenage daughter’s suicide. And so on. Love wins, or should have won. Greenfield’s message here is powerful, but it’s presented with little analysis of why 21st-century capitalism’s standards of status and beauty exerted such force on her subjects’ lives in the first place, despite some cursory soundbites from left-wing journalist Chris Hedges.
In the film’s closing sequence, Greenfield asserts that Americans’ obsession with wealth is largely responsible for the election of Donald Trump, but this feels like a reductive and convenient conclusion. The Manhattan mogul image Trump cultivated on The Apprentice surely had an effect on voters who had seen his show, but to use public perception of Trump’s wealth to explain his election is to ignore more important factors—namely, his racist appeals and Clinton’s mediocre campaign. There is a strong instinct in 2018 to relate every single piece of journalism or writing or art to Trump, yet these connections often add little of value. For viewers of Generation Wealth, the inevitable Trump tie-in elicits more of an exasperated shrug than an epiphany.
The most unanticipated parts of Generation Wealth are its autobiographical elements, which tell the intertwining story of Greenfield’s personal and professional lives and include interviews with her husband, children, and parents. After graduating from Harvard, which both of her parents attended, Greenfield worked briefly for National Geographic in Mexico. But she soon returned to Los Angeles to capture, in her words, “the culture I grew up in.” Hence the photos of adolescent Kim Kardashian and Kate Hudson, as well as others of wealthy and aspiring-wealthy teenagers cruising the beach in a convertible, smoking a joint in a hot tub, and entering a limousine on prom night. Greenfield was no Kardashian in high school, but she’s certainly comfortable around conspicuous consumption, having graduated from Crossroads, an upscale private school in Santa Monica. “We found the money,” her father explains, and Greenfield leaves it at that. Her two sons now attend Crossroads, which charges $39,000 per student.
from “Generation Wealth – Official Trailer” on YouTube
In one unsettling scene, Greenfield walks through a self-storage facility when her phone rings and she’s told her son received a perfect score on the ACT. He seems destined to follow in her footsteps as a third-generation Harvard legacy; if not, he’s likely to afford the elite private institution of his choice. Greenfield beams, then returns to work. Minutes later, she’s filming the school-bus driver tearfully sorting through a storage unit full of reminders of her dead daughter.
Despite her Ivy League degree, spacious home in an upscale area of LA, and her children’s expensive educations, Greenfield never considers her own upper-middle-class status beyond saying that her work sometimes keeps her away from family. Because she spends her money on socially-acceptable things like private school and a Prius, Greenfield seems to see her own wealth as unworthy of examination.
This lack of introspection, along with Greenfield’s almost cartoonishly extravagant and delusional subjects, undercuts Generation Wealth’s potential to make a broader, more impactful cultural statement. “I would never spend my money like that,” we say when faced with her subjects’ decadence. It’s easier for us to gawk at others than to examine ourselves.