The journalist Chris Hedges argues that throughout time, societies have achieved their greatest wealth at the precise moment that they face imminent death.
He cites ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire as the most apparent examples, but also one that is maybe too close for us to see: our own.
Lauren Greenfield's new film, Generation Wealth, examines this historical moment, not just in the U.S., but globally, from multiple angles to make the case that, as a species, we seem to have become fatally obsessed with getting more.
More money, more stuff, more status, more accomplished, more perfect. In this sense, the title is somewhat misleading: Greenfield's subjects aren't all driven by a desire for financial wealth, but rather a shared pathology of ambition.
She spends the first half of the film establishing these various threads through several subjects who, superficially, bear very little in common.
There's the former hedge fund manager who, after being placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list for defrauding investors of $200 million, went on the lam for five years before getting caught and sent to prison.
There's the school bus driver and single mom who went bankrupt paying for plastic surgery to become "the best" version of herself she could be.
There's the former porn star who tried to commit suicide after gaining infamy as one of Charlie Sheen's lovers, twice reinvented her persona and ultimately moved home and took a minimum-wage job at a tanning salon.
There's the 3-year-old contestant of the reality T.V. show "Toddlers and Tiaras" who is already declaring money to be her primary goal in life.
There's the finance executive who, after devoting her 20s, 30s and 40s to accruing more power and wealth, spent six figures on IVF treatments only to, finally, pay even more for a surrogate.
She says she tries to attend as many of her daughter's activities as possible, except for those where her presence brings no "value add" to the experience.
And there's Greenfield, the filmmaker and workaholic who late in the film turns the camera on herself to examine how she, in her tireless efforts to document sociological phenomena, might not be any different than her subjects.
She may not be in pursuit of wealth or power or beauty, but like those who are, she never seems to have enough of what she's after: material.
Even at the expense of time with her family.
It's an ambitious project, whose intentions are somewhat obscured by these diffuse narrative threads, but Greenfield does an admirable job of tying them together in the second half through voice-over narration and some remarkably candid interviews with her subjects, in which they largely denounce the very things that have dominated their lives, even as some show no desire -- or ability -- to change.
It's an arc that took nearly a decade to capture, and Greenfield says she struggled to pare the film down from a rough cut of 4.5 hours to just under two for the final.
She spent two and a half years on the edit alone.
Like Greenfield's earlier films, namely Queen of Versailles (2012) and THIN (2006), Generation Wealth takes an ethnographic approach that aims to show how we are all complicit in the subject on the screen, denying any comfortable remove that might allow for self-righteous condemnation or judgement.
By making herself a subject in this film, she explores that theme even more explicitly than in past projects.
Her parents and children feature prominently, as does her own career dating back to the 1980s, when she began photographing her peers from the most exclusive high schools in LA, inspired by Bret Easton Ellis's bleak debut novel Less Than Zero.
And yet, no matter how dire the stories Greenfield presents may be, her telling manages not to be depressing. While a detached, sociological curiosity may guide her, Greenfield is, ultimately, a humanist. Perhaps her best-known work is the 2014 #likeagirl ad for Always, which has garnered nearly 66 million views on YouTube for its empowering message that being a girl doesn't have to mean being weak.
This latest project, while far less compact and easy to digest, has some of the same potential to challenge values we have, as a society, complacently accepted.
What might replace them, if we survive, remains an open question.
Generation Wealth premiered to critical acclaim at this year's Sundance Film Festival and opens in New York and Los Angeles on July 20th, followed by additional cities throughout July and August.
