In Mountainhead, Jesse Armstrong Asks If We Can Ever Truly Relate to Billionaires

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In a scene early on in Mountainhead, which was released on Max at the beginning of the month, four tech bro billionaires (well, technically three billionaires, and one mere mega-millionaire) stand at the top of a mountain vista and scrawl their net worths on their chests in red lipstick. Then, they holler a mixture of jargony nonsense and personal desires off what feels like the edge of the world, or at least, the edge of their world. The point being: these people are ridiculous. That they have so much power over a world full of people that they can’t begin to understand is even more ridiculous, and also very frightening.

Class satire is a popular topic. It’s been pointed out that many recent films that take aim at class, wealth, or ultra-rich people—for example, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, or Saltburn—are often broad in their commentary, vaguely gesturing towards something relating to class and its ironies and injustices without really saying anything at all. Compare any of the aforementioned films to something like Parasite, which is so sharp and clear in how it pokes at the boundaries of wealth and literalizes the systemic suffering those boundaries create.

Jesse Armstrong, in Succession and again in Mountainhead, seems less interested in the divides of class and more interested in extremely wealthy people as individuals, exploring how such obscene wealth creates certain psychological trappings and distortions in those who hold it. The billionaires of Succession and Mountainhead aren’t just out of touch, they are so out of touch that they cannot conceive of an entire world full of other humans.

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Mountainhead presents the most literal explanation of that idea when one character point blank asks another: “Do you believe in other people?” On the nose? Maybe. But by laying out its terms as quickly and obviously as possible, Mountainhead can then spend most of its runtime watching its despicable characters stew in their own ridiculousness. There is no growth or change for the characters of Mountainhead. That’s the whole point—even a global crisis does nothing to shake the metaphorical and literal mansion on a mountaintop where the billionaires live.

What makes Jesse Armstrong’s satirical writing so compelling is his willingness to get up close to his targets and see them, unflinchingly, for who they are as people. At its best, Mountainhead concerns itself with the minutiae. A sequence where Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the creator of a social media platform circulating catastrophic deepfakes, demonstrates his inability to interact with his own child, is pathetic, funny, and, as one of the onlooking tech bros remarks unsympathetically, “kind of sad.” An in-depth understanding of the emotional stuntedness of the characters makes the satire more incisive and, most importantly, more personal.

A related but more complicated aspect of Armstrong’s satire is its tendency to ask the audience, over and over, whether it’s possible to empathize with its despicable main characters. In Succession, the answer is almost always yes. Not only is it possible; it’s essential. But empathy doesn’t detract from the awfulness of any of the Roy siblings; if anything, the show’s willingness to go so far to paint them as fundamentally, and often relatably, broken people only sharpens the sting of their most overtly villainous moments.

Empathy functions differently in Mountainhead, where the characters are more thinly drawn and subsequently more cartoonish. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the cartoonishness does sometimes push up against moments that otherwise show flickers of humanity. Venis trying and failing to interact with his child, for instance, is an extreme distortion of a struggle to connect that people might recognize in themselves. But when he asks the nanny if the young child, who isn’t yet able to walk, understands that he can counter-offer regarding the start of his nap time, the scene stretches the distortion a little too far. It’s a funny line, but it makes the character feel less real, less true. It takes away from the acute sting of recognition.

By always keeping its characters just past the point of recognition, Mountainhead taunts the audience with the possibility of empathy. Is there anything familiar about the anxieties and hang-ups of these characters? Is familiarity even something that we, as viewers, want from a satire of foolish billionaires who misuse their power? The final act of Mountainhead transforms the film into an over-the-top and ultimately unsuccessful murder mission, as Venis, Souper (Jason Schwartzman), and Randall (Steve Carell) attempt to kill Jeff (Ramy Youssef). The sequence is at times very funny—the three would-be murderers locking Jeff in the sauna and attempting to pour gasoline beneath the door is a comedic highlight—but it’s also frustrating and overbearing, going over the same beats again and again. If there was any expectation that these characters had hidden depth, that there was something more to them, the film’s concluding act firmly denies that possibility—which is maybe the whole point.

There’s a version of billionaire satire that paints the ultra-rich as absurd and laughable figures. The characters of Mountainhead are certainly absurd and laughable, and the film’s tendency to hold them an arms length away from true relatability is thematically appropriate. But the best aspect of the film, and what it might have leaned further into, is the elusive suggestion that its characters are more human than they initially seem. What Jesse Armstrong does so well is show how the most relatable of flaws can be twisted and magnified by obscene wealth. His billionaire characters are most fascinating when they behave as people—people who have been given more power and influence than maybe any person should have—but people nonetheless.