I’m Not Like the Others

1989’s Society is held up as an indictment of the wealthy. But does it let them off too lightly?

by Joe George / Illustration by Sam Hindman

“The Shunting.”

If you’ve seen the 1989 Brian Yuzna film Society, then I don’t need to say anymore. No words I write could match the images filling your head right now: an orgy/buffet of bodies morphing and melting together, all made possible by the gooey effects of special effects legend Screaming Mad George and the red-tinted, dizzying cinematography of Rick Fichter. 

The shunting scene is the stuff of special effects legend, outdoing even Yuzna’s work on the Re-Animator series. But it’s also a problem. Because as impressive as the scene may be, it undercuts one of the movie’s other chief appeals. 

We watch the shunting through the eyes of our hero Bill (Billy Warlock), a handsome white teenaged boy who has been captured by his rich adopted family, parents (Charles Lucia and Connie Danese) and sister Jenny (Patrice Jennings). He’s brought into the parlor of a mansion, not unlike the one he lives in, filled with the social elite of Beverly Hills. Bill stares on helplessly as the participants shed their tuxedos and party dresses to descend upon his classmate David Blanchard (Tim Bartell). Blanchard screams and writhes as the participants devour him, their bodies melding together in a fleshy soup. Billy tries to look away, but high school bully Ferguson (Ben Meyerson) grabs his face and points it toward the crowd. “Didn’t you know, Billy-boy,” Ferguson sneers, “the rich have always sucked off low-class pieces of shit like you.” 

“Didn’t you know, Billy-boy,” Ferguson sneers, “the rich have always sucked off low-class pieces of shit like you.”

Written by Rick Fry and Woody Keith during the final years of the Reagan era and released during George H.W. Bush’s only term, Society follows Bill’s slow realization that the differences between his family and himself go far beyond genetics. While his therapist Dr. Cleveland (Ben Slack) assures him that his feelings of alienation are normal, Blanchard insists that they and other members of high society are planning something incestuous and murderous. Yuzna lets the tension of possible conspiracy simmer for a while, with Bill finding (and mysteriously losing) evidence to indict the conspirators, before exploding with the shunting scene, a moment of sheer spectacle where the upper-classes reveal their monstrous selves. 

Society’s villains make their case plainly and vulgarly, but their argument is the same as the one championed by our real-world upper classes under the catchy, pseudo-intellectual term “Reaganomics”: by rewarding the rich, they claim, those who knew how to spend would spend wisely, letting benefits and money sprinkle down on the middle-class and even the poor. All they needed was the physical and emotional labor of the lower classes to keep things running. 

The shunting scene powerfully combines visual metaphor with social critique, evocative enough to rival agitprop classics like Louis Buñel’s The Exterminating Angel or Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe. It shows in vivid, viscous detail the rich gleefully sucking away the life and flesh of the poor. 

Well, sort of. 

As the shunting begins, Dr. Cleveland tells Bill, “You’re a different race than us, a different species, a different class.” While Yuzna’s shot-reverse shot of the doctor staring down at Bill supports Cleaveland’s claim, it cannot erase what viewers can see with their own eyes: metaphor aside, Warlock—a handsome white Baywatch star—is certainly not a different race than Cleveland or the other privileged people in society. (A few non-white people are visible in the non-shunting seen, but only white people get speaking lines or clear close-up shots).

Metaphor aside, Warlock—a handsome white Baywatch star—is certainly not a different race than Cleveland or the other privileged people in society.

Nor is he separate from his adopted family in any material sense. Throughout the movie, we see Bill drive around in his new Jeep (complete with the vanity plate “HOOPS”), run for student body president at the private and upscale Beverly Hills Academy, and romance other rich, attractive people. Sure, he complains about feeling disconnected from his family and mocks his girlfriend’s social climbing, but he never gives up his material possessions, or even talks to anyone from an actual different class. 

Some of this may be a byproduct of Society’s focused narrative, which devotes nearly 1/3 of its runtime to the shunting scene. The movie is all about getting to that moment, which makes sense—Yuzna prefers to take a surrealist approach, building the movie’s plot out of the effects sequences. 

But by subordinating its point to a narrative designed to prop up special effects, Society dampens its otherwise powerful critique. Rich villains have filled cinema screens for decades, from Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the various depictions of Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor. But none have diminished America’s devotion to capitalism. Society melts away any pretensions of charisma or beauty to reveal the upper classes as those who devour the powerless. Nothing about Yuzna’s portrayal of wealth is even perversely aspirational. The shunting scene churns all stomachs equally. 

Equally among humans, anyway. Although they explicitly state that they aren’t aliens, the high society members aren’t human either. The humans are Bill and his friends, other rich white people who don’t consume Blanchard during the shunting. Bill even gets the girl, somehow convincing beautiful society member Clarissa (Devin DeVasquez) to aid his escape. For all its shocking gore, Society ultimately tells the story of a privileged white guy who joins rich people to fight slime creatures.

In the real world, the rich and privileged aren’t mysterious monsters; they aren’t “other,” and they aren’t unreachable. They are human beings, who openly manipulate social and political forces to maintain power and who need to be stripped from the ability to exploit other people. 

By making the rich inhuman and making the hero a privileged white guy, the film gives the rich an out, offering up the possibility that they can watch the movie and say, “That’s not me. I’m one of the good ones, just like Bill.” Society ultimately lets the rich leave the theater unthreatened, thinking more about the effects in the movie than their effect on the world.  

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