Series | »White Lotus« and Co.: Into the murderous abyss

When Devon DeWitt (Meghann Fahy) wanders through the estate of the billionaire Kell family in her tattered clothes after a night in jail, searching for her sister Simone (Milly Alcock), she couldn't feel more out of place. The stately home boasts a perfect lawn, expensive sculptures stand beside the pool, an entire army of staff is busy tending the garden and preparing food, and all the visitors arriving for a gala dinner are dressed to the nines.

The Netflix series "Sirens" explores class barriers, work hierarchies, familial trauma, and care work. Screenwriter Molly Smith Metzler has previously made a name for herself by exploring the social abysses of the American underclass in series format. Sometimes ironically in "Shameless," about a Chicago white-trash family, or more seriously in social realism in the acclaimed series "Maid," about a homeless, single mother. In "Sirens," she portrays class differences with no less poignancy, but focuses on the upper echelons. Sisters Devon and Simone come from proletarian Buffalo and meet again after a long time apart on an estate off the coast of New York, where the rich and famous spend their summers.

The elegant backdrops of large estates and luxurious holiday resorts are currently booming in series formats. The most successful example is the award-winning series "White Lotus," which tells of sex and crime in upper-class resorts. The third season, which premiered this spring and is set on the Thai holiday island of Koh Samui, has even sparked a veritable Thailand travel boom, which is being celebrated on Instagram, where vacationers film and photograph themselves in front of the series' backdrop.

Yet the stories about rich tourists or billionaires living on the island of Nantucket, as in the miniseries "A New Summer," or idling in the vacation paradise of the East Coast aristocracy, as in "Sirens," are anything but worthy of emulation. Often, the impression arises that with this entertaining bashing of the rich, the cultural industry is working on the idea of ​​the one percent, invented by David Graeber to popular and angry effect, standing against the 99 percent, whose representatives are sometimes portrayed somewhat clumsily here.

Riding this wave is the cinematic comedy "Triangle of Sadness," for which Ruben Östlund won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2022. Like the aforementioned series, the film offers a veritable horror factor for viewers, who, as onlookers, are allowed to witness the bizarre social behavior of the rich and famous. What is the appeal of watching rich people supposedly live it up while experiencing one tragedy after another? For example, when Östlund makes everyone vomit at a gala dinner, the dysfunctional family of a financial juggler falls apart in "White Lotus," or billionaires behave like aristocrats towards investigating police authorities, on whose land only what they allow can happen, as in "A New Summer"?

These fictional explorations of upper-class lives almost always lead to deadly and murderous depths. While in "White Lotus," it's the idiocy and impertinence of the rich that lead to people's deaths, in "A New Summer" the subject is a murder committed by a woman who comes from a lower-middle-class background and appears lost, played by Meghann Fahy, the same actress who plays the role of the proletarian sister who intrudes uninvited into the wealthy's resort in "Sirens."

On the one hand, it is probably a simple human fascination with luxurious estates, villas, and vacation resorts that constitutes the appeal of these cinematic narratives, offering the viewer an intimate glimpse into the inner workings of an otherwise closed world, regardless of whether this is realistic or not. On the other hand, viewers experience a comfortable catharsis when they watch the rich, powerful, and beautiful, as representatives of the supposed capitalist dominant subject, commit moral transgressions and, despite all class prejudice, display social neglect and boundless ignorance. It worked in a very similar way in the 1980s, when, in the wake of the neoliberal shift, with "Dallas" and "Dynasty," the stories of the super-rich suddenly flickered into people's living rooms on TV every week, and everyone could watch JR Ewing and his clan upending their dirty dealings. Does this have heightened political urgency today, given the tech billionaires cozying up to Donald Trump? Is there any substantive criticism in this alleged navel-gazing by the rich and ruling class? Or is it just middle-class moral outrage?

It's important to look closely. Series like "White Lotus" and "A New Summer" naturally have socially critical potential because they caricature the absurdity of authoritarian and rigid social orders through the ultimately staid, middle-class everyday lives of the super-rich. Likewise, Liev Schreiber (in "A New Summer") and Kevin Bacon (in "White Lotus"), as billionaires, sit around smoking weed on their estates all day long and say things like, "I donate more money in a month than others earn in their entire lives."

The new Netflix series "Sirens" stands out in this regard. It also explores the work hierarchies and dependencies that accompany these class conflicts. In the story of the two sisters Devon and Simone, it also shows how much longing and desire lie within these dependencies and social hierarchies.

Simone herself never critically questions her exploitation, as she spends the night in bed with her wealthy boss like a cuddly toy during an emotional crisis. Her sister Devon is there for that, but ultimately fails to free Simone from this relationship. All she has to offer instead is the run-down row house in proletarian Buffalo, where her demented father lives, and who needs to be cared for. This is precisely the misery that Simone has escaped through her new dependent relationship. But Simone's super-rich boss is ultimately just a kind of employee of her overly self-confident husband. These series don't really offer an empowering resolution to these dependencies.

But perhaps that's precisely the true appeal of this genre: It depicts and manifests the dilemma of unbridgeable class barriers, which enjoy great popularity as a pop-cultural horror fad. At the same time, viewers can dream a little that they themselves are immensely wealthy and feel good about themselves because, at least morally, their own existence doesn't seem quite as paltry as that of the rich.