Watched it last night as well, and I'm confused by the recommendation.
I kind of wonder if people actually read my original post which, in retrospect, would scare me off of a movie more than attract me to it. Oh well.
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A surreal experience is going to Newport, RI and looking at the gilded age mansions. Not so much those mansions (although that's definitely fun), but the ones next to the ones you can tour.
The ones people still live in.
Strangely enough, I grew up in one of those, only in a different state. My dad lived a moustachean existence, which I suppose leads to my skepticism about some of the tenets.
He was an artist who retired relatively early (at age 60, but since he had an interruption to his life due to the war and a mid-life career change, that's pretty early). Like some Moustcheans, he scammed the system and in his version he got a half-cooked up disability claim after ten years of work and claimed a pension until he died 30 years later. People like that is why we can't have pensions anymore.
He profited off real estate in Chicago which was his side gig (and the reason for his stress-induced disability, because teaching at a community college wasn't a hard job in those days), sold his townhouse in Chicago and bought a vast estate so he'd have a place to exhibit his art.
Speaking of excess, the house had been abandoned for ten years by an heiress. She'd married a Russian prince after WWI and divorced him so she could be a Princess. She never married again. Can you imagine? Then she ran her vast fortune which must have been over $100 million back then into the ground. The house was nearly a ruin when my father bought it for a song.
Since we had no money (what he got from his pension and apartment building went into restoring that place), that meant buying clothes at the thrift store (not good for a kid with a funny name and weird parents living in a mansion in the 1980s, let me tell you), having no heat in most of the house (I still cringe when I hear of relatives who say they keep their heat at 65… years of having my room heat at 55 messed me up pretty badly mentally and physically), and doing labor meant to be done by a staff of servants ourselves. The best was mowing the lawn, every two weeks it took three days. Two of those were on the riding mower, one by hand. He sold the house and made a profit, but he would have made the same had he lived in his townhouse.
In a way, however, this points to Generation Wealth being part of a continuum of a need and desire for excess, sometimes masked as other things, such as the need to make art. Watching both Greenwald and her film trainwreck at the end (I wish she'd just filmed herself checking into a cocaine rehab since I sense that's probably in the cards) underscored how excess can take different forms. And that's probably the big lesson of MMM, it's that excess is endemic to our culture and deeply toxic.