Lauren Greenfield (2018)

The documentary photographer and film-maker Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles (2012) left you wondering what it would have amounted to without the dramatically helpful intervention of the global financial crisis of 2008.  The discursive Generation Wealth, Greenfield’s first feature-length film since, gives a clue.  The title, while suggesting a potentially large subject, implies a reasonably clear thematic focus.  The documentary that follows is all over the place.   Greenfield’s ‘generation’ turns out to be a collection of people of widely varying ages, whose aspirations and attitudes she has looked into since the early 1990s.  Generation Wealth is also, in large part, an autobiographical piece even though Greenfield’s personal priorities are seemingly very different from those of most of her subjects.  About halfway through, she justifies her meandering approach, explaining in voiceover that she’s come to realise that ‘wealth’ is whatever a person feels confers ‘value’ on their lives.  According to this specious and, from Greenfield’s point of view, convenient definition, wealth can mean earning megabucks or having a body makeover or (as in her own case) being addicted to your work.

Near the start of Generation Wealth, Greenfield says:

‘I’ve been a photographer for twenty-five years, with my lens focused on wealth.  I noticed that no matter how much people had, they still want more.  … I want to figure out why our obsession with wealth has grown.’

This is an early example of one of her most persistent and exasperating narrative traits:  use of the undefined first-person plural.  Does ‘we’ mean humankind?   In the course of its travels, Generation Wealth drops in on Russia and China, to glean evidence that a tradition of totalitarian socialism has served to increase materialistic appetite.  (The Chinese vignettes, while supplying ludicrous comedy, focus predominantly on social pretension rather than avarice.  At an etiquette school, the students learn the correct pronunciation of designer labels – Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton – or how to eat a banana or an orange ‘elegantly’; ie with a knife and fork.)   In Iceland, Greenfield talks with a fisherman who became a banker during the country’s short-lived economic boom and, after the crash, went back to fishing.  There are (far too) many interviews with Florian Homm, the disgraced former business tycoon and investment banker now back in his native Germany.  I can’t bring to mind any other coverage of western Europe, let alone Africa or most of Asia.  But even if ‘we’ refers exclusively to America, the definition is obviously way too broad.

In spite of her later expansion of the meaning of her film’s key word, Greenfield has evidently majored in examining acquisitive natures.  She has chosen to have her ‘lens focused on wealth’:  a different focus would have produced a different picture.  Her own father is an immediate case in point.  Early in Generation Wealth, Sheldon Greenfield, an academic in the field of health services, confirms to his daughter that, when he got a place at Harvard, it was, for his immigrant parents, ‘the fulfilment of the American Dream’.  The moral education he received from his father stayed with Sheldon:  trying to improve the lot of other people is still important to him, in spite of what he sees as cultural shifts in the reverse direction since the 1980s.  Greenfield’s father appears only once more in the film – much less often than her mother, the academic psychologist Patricia Marks Greenfield.  There seem to be two main reasons for Sheldon’s relatively minor role.  First, his altruism is unhelpful to the main thrust of Generation Wealth (muddled as it is).  Second, Patricia (whose perma-smile is increasingly defensive) matters more:  her devotion to research at the expense of time spent with her daughter predicts Lauren’s own guilty conscience about neglecting her two sons.   When Sheldon does finally reappear, it’s only to say that, while he recognises there’s no such thing as a perfect balance, he thinks Lauren errs too much on the side of film-making rather than family.

The longer the film goes on the more it illustrates another form of self-indulgence on the part of the woman who made it.  Greenfield says she wanted to understand why she was drawn to exploring wealth.  She grew up in the seventies and early eighties in Venice, Los Angeles, a place with a strong cultural, even bohemian, image but not the most ‘exclusive’ area of LA in terms of the price of the houses its citizens lived in or the cars they drove.  Her parents paid for Lauren to go to a high school most of whose pupils enjoyed a more lavish lifestyle.  Having made this connection, Greenfield lets it go, impatient to get on to the drama of her personal vs professional life dilemma.

Her sons Noah and Gabriel, fifteen and ten respectively, are likeable and, in different ways, highly articulate about both the effects of their mother’s frequent absences and the competitive legacy of having, like her, two Harvard-educated parents.  Other elements of this domestic set-up, at least with hindsight, are inadvertent self-satire.  Frank Evers, to whom Greenfield is married, is shown to have supported her from the very beginnings of her career.  As that career has developed, Evers appears to have become a selfless homemaker, looking after the boys, enabling his wife to realise her creative interests, keeping the family together (Greenfield’s own parents separated while she was still at school).  On the way back from the cinema I googled Frank Evers, just as a matter of interest.  His Wikipedia entry describes him as ‘an American businessman, the CEO of INSTITUTE/The Story Institute and the President of Evergreen Pictures’ (who produced this film).  That doesn’t mean he isn’t a fantastic husband and father too but the omission of any reference in Generation Wealth to Evers’s commercial activities hints at how much the people behind it take for granted their extraordinary socioeconomic privilege.  In her most egregious ‘our’, Lauren Greenfield refers back explicitly to The Queen of Versailles and says that she saw the collapse of David and Jackie Siegel’s project as a ‘symbol of our collective greed’.  You feel like shouting ‘Speak for yourself!’ even before Greenfield puts up a bit of footage of people whose properties were repossessed following the 2008 crash.  These are people who, unlike the Siegels, simply wanted to own a home to provide security for their family.

For all her expansive understanding of ‘wealth’, Lauren Greenfield, as in her previous film, seems preoccupied with ostentation, whether it’s the gold-covered penthouse in Trump Tower or the results of a working-class woman’s cosmetic surgery.  To an extent, that’s a natural consequence of working in a visual medium and, to be fair to Greenfield, she herself seems to like a good number of her interviewees.  She must know, however, that a high proportion of the audience that goes to see Generation Wealth will find what’s on display, whether in the form of property or self-realisation, ‘obscene’ – because of what it signifies, yes, but also because it looks cheap and nasty.   As in The Queen of Versailles, there’s a pathetic quality to much of what we see and hear – right from the moment at the very start of the film when the Chinese etiquette teacher fails to get her tongue round ‘Vuitton’.  In most cases, the results of spending a fortune on improving personal appearance or décor are awful to behold.  This emphasis on the external runs the risk of reducing the ‘obsession with wealth’ to a matter of taste.

These visual examples, of course, can also be read as emblems of decadence.  One of Greenfield’s estimable interviewees is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Chris Hedges (a quote from whose book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning supplied the epigraph to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker).  According to Hedges, ‘societies accrue their greatest wealth at the moment they face death’.  For a while, Greenfield looks set to pursue the theme Hedges has suggested.  Trump puts in a couple of appearances (in one of them, we see the Siegels, late of Versailles, leading the cheers at one his rallies).  The score, by Jeff Beals, reinforces the apocalyptic mood.  Perhaps the most bizarre feature of Generation Wealth (though the competition is keen) is that, in the closing stages, Greenfield is at pains to suggest that several of her subjects have learned there’s more to life than money, usually in the form of children.   Examples include the mad-eyed but eventually moist-eyed Florian Homm (though his son doesn’t seem so sure that his father’s a reformed character); an alarming woman financier who thinks it ‘un-American’ to discourage rampant selfishness but whose priorities, she says, are very different now that she’s finally (also tearfully) a parent.  Even the mother of Eden Wood, the infant star of a reality television show called Toddlers & Tiaras, has seen the error of her ways now that little Eden has proved such a money-spinner.  The accompanying music obligingly switches to green-shoots-of-hope trills.  Lauren Greenfield, having given her own conscience a good workout, seems to have decided that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

24 July 2018