Cultural Capital Is No Substitute for Cold, Hard Cash
The rich used to eat, dress, and even speak entirely differently from the masses. Today they wear T-shirts and trainers just like the rest of us. But that doesn’t mean we’re all equal. It only lays bare the real source of inequality: actual money.
Anthony Minghella’s sumptuous drama The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), based on the 1955 psychological thriller by Patricia Highsmith, scans almost as a manual for faking your way into the upper echelons of the American elite. Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a lowly Manhattan piano tuner, dons a borrowed Princeton jacket at a black-tie fundraiser and convinces […]
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