I’m sorry (mostly for myself) to report that last week I watched The Menu, the latest in allegedly anti-capitalist works.

It left me even more dispirited than The White Lotus Season 2, which, dressed in Edenic island locations, promises wickedly intimate observations of human venality but eventually leaves us, well, halfway to paradise, with the stunningly banal moral that sex is merely power and relationships only transactional. Also rich people are bad. Yawn. White Lotus at least has decadent quantities of beauty and naked Will Sharpe, but this is not enough to offset the hundred clichéd shots of portentous ocean to let us know that there are, yeah, undercurrents. Gosh, how clever. The Menu also features islands, venture capitalists—whom it has now become safe to villainise—and culinary horror so tedious, the only thing on edge are your teeth. When everyone is served their, you got it, just desserts, we are too bored even to be relieved it’s over. The predictable redeemed character watches the spectacle while eating a cheeseburger. Is that supposed to be us? Oh, how absolutely not discomfiting. This metaphorical moral binary—the ordinary cheeseburger versus gourmet faux fare—suggests there is no possibility for that which is both, beautiful and nourishing. Such are the convenient political self-absolutions of nihilism.