Eat the Rich, but Make It Absurd: What Triangle of Sadness Gets Right About Capitalism. And Why It Hits Harder Now Than Ever

This post contains spoilers

There’s this moment in Triangle of Sadness where a wealthy woman insists the yacht crew take a break and go for a swim, even though they clearly don’t want to. She frames it as an act of kindness, a morale boost. But it’s not about the crew’s well-being. It’s about her own comfort in feeling like a good person.

That scene stuck with me because it mirrors so much of what capitalism trains us to do: to perform care, to pretend power doesn’t exist, to wrap exploitation in a smile and a compliment.

Ruben Östlund’s 2022 film is more than just a satire of the 1%. It’s a slow-burn autopsy of how capitalism scripts our relationships: between workers and bosses, between partners, between humans and our own worth.

I’m not exaggerating when I say it made me laugh, wince, and want to unionize a yacht crew all in one sitting.

At the start of the film, beauty is the main currency. Carl, a male model, is underpaid and insecure, constantly reminded that his value comes from looking good but not taking up space. Yaya, his influencer girlfriend, profits from the same system but understands how to play the game better. Their relationship is transactional from the jump, and Östlund doesn’t let us forget it.

Later, we meet a parade of cartoonishly wealthy passengers: a British couple who made their fortune in land mines, a tech bro who calls himself the “King of Shit” because he sells fertilizer, and a woman obsessed with luxury who demands the ship’s sails be cleaned (despite it being a motor yacht). These aren’t exaggerations. They’re mirrors – grotesque reflections of real power, real exploitation, and real delusion.

But then we get to the infamous dinner scene on the boat – and everything unravels.

It’s grotesque, graphic, and honestly kind of glorious. A storm rocks the yacht while passengers, stuffed with oysters and caviar, start vomiting uncontrollably. Toilets back up. Shit and seawater flood the hallways. People in $10,000 dresses are slipping in their own filth. It’s chaos… and it’s cathartic. Watching the rich suffer through a very literal reckoning with their own excess felt like a twisted kind of justice. For once, they couldn’t buy their way out of it.

And while bodies hit the floor, Woody Harrelson’s character, Captain Thomas Smith, locks himself in his quarters and launches into a drunken intercom quote war with Dimitry, a Russian fertilizer tycoon.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

– Captain Smith (quoting Marx)

“The world will know that free enterprise has found a safe haven on this ship!”

– Dimitry, King of Shit

They’re shouting capitalism vs. socialism while passengers literally drown in sewage. It’s laugh-out-loud absurd and painfully accurate. The captain later admits, “I’m a bad socialist, and a worse capitalist.” Honestly? Same. So many of us are stuck trying to survive systems we hate, trying to hold on to ethics in structures that chew through them. His cynicism is disarming, but also real.

He’s not pretending to be a hero. He’s just naming the rot before it sinks.

One of the most powerful (and least laughable) moments in Triangle of Sadness comes during the storm, when Captain Thomas Smith (played by Woody Harrelson), drunk and barricaded in his quarters, starts naming names. Between slurred Marx quotes and sarcasm, he drops something raw:

“They killed Martin Luther King.

They killed Malcolm X.

They killed the Kennedys…”

It lands like a record scratch in the middle of chaos. And here’s the thing: he’s not wrong.

The U.S. government didn’t just fail to protect these figures. In each case, it was either complicit, infiltrating, or actively working against them:

• Martin Luther King Jr. was relentlessly harassed by the FBI under COINTELPRO. They wiretapped his phones, sent him blackmail letters, and pushed him toward suicide. In 1999, a civil trial jury found government agencies liable for his assassination – confirming it wasn’t just James Earl Ray acting alone.
• Malcolm X was heavily surveilled by the FBI and NYPD. The government stoked division within the Nation of Islam, infiltrated his inner circles, and withheld evidence during the trial of his killers. Two men were exonerated in 2021 after spending decades in prison, and his family has since filed a lawsuit accusing government agencies of orchestrating a cover-up.
• John F. Kennedy was assassinated after clashing with the CIA over Cuba and Vietnam. Over 15,000 records related to his death remain partially classified, fueling suspicions about CIA involvement – especially after JFK expressed his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces.”
• Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968 shortly after winning the California primary and new evidence has cast doubt on whether Sirhan Sirhan acted alone.

So when the captain starts naming these names, he’s not spouting conspiracy; he’s unmasking the empire.

And then he shifts outward. He starts listing countries: Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Libya, Grenada, Nicaragua. Countries where the U.S. installed puppet regimes, trained death squads, orchestrated coups, and dropped bombs – all in the name of “freedom.” He’s calling it what it is: American imperialism.

But the brilliance of the scene is in the setting. He’s speaking this truth while his ship sinks. While the rich vomit. While Dimitry, the Russian oligarch, yells about free enterprise. The empire is crumbling, and that’s when the confession comes. Not in the halls of power, but behind a locked door, half-drunk, over an intercom.

It’s Östlund’s way of telling us: even the truth, when it comes too late, can’t save us.

Naming the rot isn’t enough if the structure is still standing.

After the shipwreck, the survivors find themselves stranded on a deserted island. Suddenly, everything flips. The billionaires are helpless. Their money is meaningless. They can’t fish. They can’t make fire. They can’t even open a bag of chips without assistance. The only person with real survival skills is Abigail, a cleaning woman from below deck.

She becomes the leader. And quickly, she begins to replicate the power structures she once served under. She hoards food. She demands loyalty. She trades resources for sex. She is no longer invisible. She’s in charge. And yet… it’s not liberation. It’s a cycle repeating itself with different faces. Östlund doesn’t hand us a feel-good reversal.

He warns us – the problem isn’t just who holds power. It’s how power is structured. How it commodifies care, exploits labor, and isolates people from their own humanity.

What makes Triangle of Sadness hit harder now is how close it feels to reality.

We’re living in a moment where billionaires fund wars, hoard vaccines, buy up entire neighborhoods, and then post sad-boy tweets about how lonely they are. Jeff Bezos builds dick rockets while Amazon workers pass out from heat. Elon Musk claims “free speech” while suppressing Palestinian voices and platforming racist conspiracies. Bill Gates preaches about sustainability while quietly owning private jets, farmland, and entire food systems.

They’re not just hypocrites. They’re the real-world Dimitrys. Shoveling shit and calling it fertilizer.

And right here in Tennessee, it’s playing out in real time. In Memphis, Elon Musk’s company xAI is building a massive, gas-powered data center that will pollute the air and overburden local utilities – all without community input. Despite overwhelming local opposition, Musk’s team is steamrolling ahead, threatening to burn fossil fuels in a city already bearing the brunt of environmental racism. It’s the same pattern: billionaires exploit land, poison poor communities, and dare us to call it innovation.

In Nashville, billionaires like John Ingram and Bill Haslam bankroll charter schools, privatize public space, and sell gentrification as “revitalization.” They show up to ribbon cuttings while the people they priced out sleep in tents under overpasses. We’re told this is progress. We’re told to be grateful.

Meanwhile, most of us are living paycheck to paycheck, dodging medical bills, watching our communities get hollowed out and our time get stolen. We’re surviving systems that are built to fail us and pretending it’s normal. The absurdity in Triangle of Sadness isn’t exaggerated. It’s just stylized.

The vomit is real. We’re living in it.

The third act of Triangle of Sadness shifts the film from satire to something closer to survivalist parable. It strips capitalism down to its bones and asks: What’s left when the system collapses? Who holds power when money means nothing? The island becomes Östlund’s sandbox for testing how far social hierarchies are willing to bend, or how quickly they rebuild themselves.

One of the most revealing moments comes when Abigail, the former cleaning woman turned de facto leader, says to Carl:

“I’m the captain now.”

It’s a quiet assertion of power, but it lands hard because we’ve seen who Carl is willing to betray just to stay in her favor. Yaya, his girlfriend, is losing him. Not because of love, but because Abigail controls the food. That’s what Östlund gets so right: under capitalism, everything becomes transactional. Even relationships. Even desire.

There’s another haunting moment when Yaya suggests hiking inland to look for help. Abigail hesitates. We can feel her fear – not of the unknown, but of losing the power she never had before. What happens to people who’ve been invisible when they suddenly have leverage? The film doesn’t offer judgment – it just lets the discomfort hang there.

And when Yaya tells Abigail, “You’d make a great assistant,” it’s not just a slip-up. It’s a reminder that even in crisis, rich people still expect to be served.

These aren’t just scenes, they’re warnings. Warnings about what happens when systems collapse without transformation. Warnings about how quickly people (any of us) can replicate the same violence when given the same tools. The island isn’t an escape from capitalism. It’s just a stripped-down version of it.

You can only laugh at absurdity for so long before it becomes unbearable.

Triangle of Sadness is hilarious, but it’s also horrifying – because it holds up a mirror and says: You already know this world. You’ve worked in it. You’ve suffered under it. You’ve played nice in it to survive.

And that mirror is especially sharp for working-class people: folks like me, like my friends, like most of Nashville. We know what it’s like to clean up someone else’s mess, to smile while being humiliated, to be called “essential” and treated as disposable. Watching the rich flail, suffer, and panic is cathartic; not because we’re cruel, but because we’re starved of justice.

In real life, we watch billionaires do harm and face zero consequences. Musk gets away with silencing journalists. Bezos thanks workers “for paying for this” after launching himself into space. And then there’s J.K. Rowling: a once-beloved author who now uses her platform to spread anti-trans rhetoric while claiming she’s the one being silenced.

Rowling built her career on stories about resistance and outsider power… but when actual trans and nonbinary people ask for basic safety, she mocks us online and aligns herself with far-right hate campaigns. Her 2020 novel even features a villain who cross-dresses to commit violence. It’s not just a betrayal. It’s a warning: wealth doesn’t just corrupt – it insulates and radicalizes.

That’s why satire like Triangle of Sadness matters. It doesn’t just mock power. It shatters the illusion that power is natural, deserved, or permanent. And once that illusion breaks, something else becomes possible – something built from the bottom up, not handed down from the captain’s deck.