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In Mountainhead, the Rich Eat Us
There’s no catharsis to be found in the new satire from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong.
Venis (Cory Michael Smith) is the current champion at $220 billion — a smirking sociopath whose social-media company, Traam, has just released a set of deep-fake-enabling content tools whose destabilizing effects on world governments come through via increasingly alarming phone alerts. I don’t think it’s possible to be too hard on technocrats, and Mountainhead makes the wise call to have its characters represent a slew of familiar attitudes, hang-ups, and corporate tendencies without drawing direct correlations to particular real-life figures. The script is dense with nods toward vapid attempts at moral philosophy, comparisons of everyone’s respective sleep scores, having a bifurcated brain, and these men’s desperate conviction that they’re just five to ten years from some sort of transhumanism, a belief that’s especially important to Randall, who refuses to accept that his cancer is terminal.
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