Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

Money doesn’t buy happiness. On the contrary, it usually creates problems. As Bryan mentioned in class, “rich people are only interesting if they’re in trouble.” I am currently trying to figure out why society has such a fascination with the wealthy.

 

The Big Sleep is centered on the rich Sternwood family, of which one of the daughter’s is being blackmailed for a large sum of money (this is where the need for a detective comes into play). The rich are always the best targets for bribery and ransom; they can always fork over large sums of money to stay out of trouble, and for some reason, one family member is almost always getting his or her hands dirty.

 

Rich families are never what they ought to be. We talked about how the Sternwood’s are “fallen” characters. The daughters attended good private schools, were exposed to the best educations, yet out of boredom have started to ruin their own lives. They waste away in their giant mansions, throw away thousands of dollars gambling, are promiscuous, and mingle with seedy crowds. Their downfall is their monetary status; they don’t need to work, leaving them an awful lot of free time, and as they say, “an idle mind is the devil’s plaything.”

 

Today we are still obsessed with the rich and famous. Celebrity gossip blogs only feed our hunger. Many spikes in celebrity popularity have to do with some incident they were involved in, whether it’s an arrest, adultery or a DUI. Popularity sky rockets and the person under the lens gets their 15 minutes of extreme stardom. Isn’t it awful how we thrive on other’s sins?

 

Maybe we like knowing that the rich also have hard lives, in which they have to take out the trash and occasionally make the same bad judgments we do.  However, we can watch their flubs get televised and documented, and feel better than we are relatively unknown and that our personal lives are still personal. Money really doesn’t make you happy or your life easier, because when you screw up, (which is inevitable, we’re all human after all), everyone will be watching.

bryce rubin