‘Mountainhead’ and Weightless Storytelling

This enjoyable romp with awful billionaires (and one half-billionaire) would be more effective with a little more chaos.

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I too have a smartphone. I use it to play chess and doomscroll.

Boy howdy is it a good time to abuse the billionaires of the world. There was a time when being a billionaire was seen as an aspirational thing, with the assumption that you had to have done something pretty rad to get that rich¹, like parley a hotness ranking algorithm for college girls into a worldwide social network, or steadily destroying small businesses around the country with predatory pricing and slave wagery fuckery². No longer! These days being a billionaire is kind of embarrassing, and you’re essentially a free target for mockery³.

This is a good thing; rich folks in general should be mocked, and often⁴. And Mountainhead has some very strong billionaire mocking pedigree in the form of writer/director Jesse Armstrong, who created Succession, possibly the greatest billionaire-mocking show of all time⁵. It sports a premise that’s interesting without being implausible: Four incredibly wealthy old friends (Venis "Ven" Parish [Cory Michael Smith], Jeff Abredazi [Ramy Youssef], Randall Garrett [Steve Carell], and Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk [Jason Schwartzman]) gather at Van Yalk’s newly-constructed mountain retreat to have a poker night, a chill evening away from business pressures⁶. But Parish’s new technology has unleashed chaos around the world in the form of deepfakes that are impossible to defend against, and all four have hidden agendas that spiral into violence and conspiracy as the world burns.

On paper, this is good stuff. It’s just real enough to be compelling, just fake enough to be fiction. The idea of four extremely rich dudes deciding to leverage the collapse of civilization from a lavish, remote compound is filled with potential. And the film mostly works on that level, thanks in large part to the performances. The only thing missing is any actual chaos⁷.

Heads Don't Explode Like That

This is me every time The Duchess forces me to travel somewhere.

As the four rich dudes bicker and maneuver around each other, the idea is that Venis’ social media platform is destabilizing the world in real time via its new AI deepfake tools, and the guys go from panic about this to evil plotting as they realize they actually have the resources to shape exactly how the world collapses. This is pretty interesting, because it is pretty much exactly what we all think billionaires would do if society began to collapse, more or less by accident due to their own actions⁸.

The challenge is that these guys are not just at a remote location, they’re at the most remote location. As a result, societal collapse comes in the form of glimpses on the television, third-party reports from social media, and other less-than-compelling forms. There’s absolutely nothing visceral about the end of civilization, and visceral is precisely what’s needed: Visceral, in-your-face evidence of what’s happening⁹. The fact that everything about the end of the world is filtered through these rich asshole doofuses just removes all urgency and sense of real danger. And a sense of real danger would serve the story, especially since the rich asshole doofuses aren’t in any way concerned with the end of the world, and are totally focused on their own interests, whether it’s Venis’ desire to own Jeff’s ass-covering AI tech, Randall’s desire that Venis solve death so he doesn’t have to deal with his terminal cancer diagnosis¹⁰, or Hugo’s lust for his first actual billion so he can join the club. That’s the hook here: The world is descending into chaos, and all these guys care about is their own bullshit—and their money allows them to do that.

But with that chaos so off-screen, it doesn’t land. We never feel what the money is actually protecting them from.

I Think That's Why I'm So Excited By These Atrocities

All I can think of is the difficulty of getting a plumber to come out to this place to snake the 1,200 toilets.

This, of course may be (probably is?) intentional. It could be argued the whole point is that these fuckos are so rich and insulated the end of the world would come to them as a series of distant images, data points, white papers from their underlings. That makes sense—you can definitely make that argument¹¹.

But it doesn’t matter. Reality is often a terrible story, and saying that something is “realistic” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good story. The distant, muffled way the chaos seeps into the story in Mountainhead doesn’t build tension, it isn’t a technique. It’s just weak tea that renders all the action weak as a result. You never quite believe things are really that bad.

You could also try to argue that that is the real point: That maybe these dudes are so disconnected from reality they think the world is ending when it’s really just a Thursday, filled with the usual bombings and riots and stock rugpulls the rest of us deal with on the daily—it’s just that they’re paying attention for once, and they’re as horrified by it as we are. Sure! Why not. But it still doesn’t work, because for that to work we need to see what they see. We need to understand what they’re ignoring¹².

I honestly could never be rich, because of the staff situation¹³. I can’t stand people being in my private space, so even if I was super rich I’d still insist on cleaning the place myself, which would probably be grounds for someone to declare me incompetent¹⁴.

NEXT WEEK: Stick is composed of an epic number of stacked cliches.

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1. Do people still say “rad”? No, don’t answer that. I am still relevant, let’s leave it at that.

2. I am now copyrighting this absolutely brilliant phrase, so when you buy that T-shirt that says DOWN WITH THE SLAVE WAGERY FUCKERY just know you’ll be putting a nickle in my pocket.

3. This feels like a step up in society’s evolution, right? Hating billionaires brings us one inch closer to Star Trek.

4. I say this from the very safe assumption that I will never be rich, so this attitude will never turn into a leopard to eat my face. I’m safe, though. I’m a writer, for god’s sake.

5. He could have retired after this scene aired and no one would have blamed him for there were literally no more worlds to conquer.

6. One imagines them betting entire city blocks of property or megayachts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. When I get sucked into a poker game I weep every time I lose a nickle. We are not the same.

7. They could have just flown me in and paid me a consulting fee. I bring A-level chaos everywhere I go, effortlessly.

8. Although it’s more likely the billionaires all flee to a species-saving ark like in the movie 2012, right? Which they’ve totally already built.

9. I mean, you wouldn’t even need to produce any footage. Just roam around and film what’s actually happening. The chaos is right there for the taking!

10. You know that our only clue that the Rich Fucks have solved death is when Elon Musk continues to look 50 when he’s 105.

11. The worst part of all that is that being a freelance writer I’m probably one of the people writing those white papers, and getting paid pennies a word to create a report titled DESTABILIZING ARGENTINA FOR PROFITS.

12. Us, mostly. I’m increasingly convinced the main benefit of wealth is being able to have less and less actual contact with my fellow humans.

13. Also, the general dumbness and lazy affect.

14. Especially since I’d be cleaning, like, 15 bathrooms so it would more or less become a 24/7 grind.