"Mountainhead"'s Tech Bros Mad-Dog the Planet
"Succession"'s Jesse Armstrong delivers some entertainment almost as distressing as real life now is...
As Jesse Armstrong peopled the "Mountainhead" retreat with the four tech oligarchs we'll be trapped with for an hour and forty-nine minutes as the HBO Max movie debuted this week, their flakey, not-quite-believable bonding brought up a memory.
Perhaps it did the same for you? Many readers who survived the peak recreational drug years—call it the decade that kicked off with a prolonged sniff in 1975—know the effects of cocaine on say, a quartet of…dudes! Typically, the brohams go from snickering in anticipated satisfaction... to cordial back-slapping… to egocentric over-sharing… to grandiosity…to a labored sincerity… and eventually, depending on supply, to fatuous espousals of sincere and lasting friendship.
Now remove the substance, but keep the steps, and you have the jargon-laced assembling of the four bro's in "Mountainhead," as they go from being high on their vast wealth to increasingly odd interactions that just might be adjacent to– um, hate.
Is this any way to position a show in hopes of garnering some Emmys for…Comedy?
Well, bring the press campaign on. It won't be for the laughs, because in the filmic long day's journey into night we watch these four preside, not always realistically, on a program to end the era of nation states ("the old girl") and cyber-fuck the entire world.
It's a tough watch, alright. The daring overreach of "Succession" genius Jesse Armstrong's presentation of "Mountainhead” ‘s 3.5 billionaires is that all the players, introduced in a sequence highlighting their constantly expanding wealth, arrive in a blaze of sophomoric faux-camaraderie and entitlement that reminds one of the aforementioned tooted--up bro's and immediately makes us hate them.
Like certain bond traders (and yes, journalists) of the Eighties when Manhattan Island held sway as the concrete garden of swells, they duel verbally using a reflexive form of invective they anoint as "razzing". The ostensible rationale for gathering is to play poker ( itself a form of adulterated hate, non?), and "No deals, no meals, no high heels" is the formulation. But at once the cracked Venn diagram they share features multiple dealmaking feints and prithee's, a half-buried obsession with the high-heeled women of boardroom and bedroom who seem to loathe them from afar, and Soup's pathetic attempts to bring the buds to table for the meal of line-caught turbot nobody else wants.
This is a zone where Armstong operates very effectively, and we get his celebrated zingers front-loaded, delivered via the 'Montreux Razz Fest' between the `Brewsters'. (The squad's moniker is part of their own lexicon of bro-speak… not unlike, say, wormy Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and his `boofing' prep school buds.)
We will not speak here of the Palo Alto Frosty Pop Tart incident, an especially seamy and rare historical Brewsters footnote.
First to appear among the film's featured quartet of dudes (the fleetingly seen women in the film are there solely to reflect how appalling insipid, if societally dangerous, the men are) is the world's richest man, Cory Michael Smith's Venis. (His name rhymes with menace; Scott played also-douchey Chevy Chase in the "Saturday Night" movie). He has the broad facial planes, the bad-kid mop of dark hair and the fidgety reflexes of his obvious cognate Elon Musk. (Meta's Zuckerberg is another reference point, even as Sarah Wynn-Williams's "Careless People" memoir catalogues the always-be-scaling remorselessness of Zuck and Sheryl Sandberg.)
Ven's just dropped a new "raft" of advanced and unregulated content creation tools, of a sort that lend themselves to creating "unfalsifiable" deepfake videos that surge all but unmonitored onto the world wide web. When his generative AI enables the internet rabble-rousers of the world to spit out too-believable generative AI, things go terribly wrong from Uzbekistan to Gujurat to Argentina—even as ominously, the water supply to the Mountainhead retreat shuts down.
Curiously, the quartet in the hillside mansion start power-tripping—all the way up to thinking of themselves as global fixers. Running like Musk on suspicious fumes, Venis is a bubbling vat of self-regard—and, as we'll eventually realize, self-hate. He has a Zuck-load of arrogance, and may be his own favorite sex partner. "We only got married as a joke," is how he brosplains his recent divorce. (Which might make a good line of spin for the real-life Musk in discussing his current, messy divorce from his faux fried Donald J. Trump.)
If Musks' serial, impregnating hookups are an echo here, so too are the eternal life hang-ups of Valley boys Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson (he of the "Don't Die" app play), just as we see echoes of fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and the purportedly benign AI prince Sam Altman.
Armstrong has advised that elements of Musk as Satan are scattered among the characters (and the same goes for Zuck), but when we see the flaming global and tribal wars and insurrections, even as lethal assaults pepper the headlines, it must be said that the show can be a very unpleasant watch. (Though not quite as troubling as watching Elon live up to the post-DOGE Bill Gates take: "The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one.”)
The rolling apocalypse the rogue web traffic creates turns so widespread is to Venis just a lovely sign of "engagement", and the horrors that spark up on everyone's mobile phones are just great "marketing." Says Venis: "We're gonna show users as much shit as possible, until everyone realizes nothing's that fucking serious. Nothing means anything, and everything's funny and cool."
If audiences as well as some weary dystopia-savvy reviewers have found the film alternately "exhausting" and depressing, it's largely due to having no one to like. As the New York Times opined, the four are "sharp satirical cartoons but not really plausible people." Jason Schwartzman's `Soup' (so called because as only half a billionaire he's the likeliest beneficiary of a soup kitchen) is the whipping boy, so ineffectual that he seems too flimsy to draw us into the enactment of even a broadly farcical would-be felony. His is the last visage Armstrong shares with us; perhaps Soup's giddy smile stands in for how ignorant we all are as to the threats AI is bringing.
A good primer on that cyber-moment is found in Joshua Rothman's current New Yorker piece, which postulates, via level-headed research, that "by the time we're allowed to regulate A.I. it might be regulating us. We need to make sense of the safety discourse now, before the game is over."
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/two-paths-for-ai
The likeliest Emmy candidate of this quartet is Steve Carell as Randall Garrett, now in his silver-haired Fifties and thus nicknamed "Papa Bear". (His swanning pedantry barely masks that he's as crazy as a rat in a coffee can.) If we have our emotional foot in the bucket throughout this show (by contrast to, say, Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy almost making us sob with him as he kneels in the Tuscan dust in the finale of "Succession" 's four seasons), it's because there's no screentime available to use to limn the current quartet's backstory. (Armstrong has confided that the three younger men were, in a more ample draft, part of a Silicon Valley accelerator that Randall funded). Randy is what Silicon Valley denizens call an "evangelist," and if that makes him sound like a kindly figure, Carell does craftily measured job of wheedling us into Randy's headspace as a man with rage issues and a just-re-confirmed terminal cancer prognosis. He's desperate for some breaking-edge tech that will upload his consciousness into immortality in some ginned-up digital grid. (Randall would be the first upload, Venis vows, after testing is done with mice, pigs and "ten morons.”)
When Randall, Venis and Soup figure out Jeff is the "decel" (short for decelerations) in their midst, the screenplay heads into a dwindlingly watchable farcical steeplechase. Thus, here commence some mild spoilers….
We watch grimly as Randall's doctrine of "You're always going to get some people dead," makes a joke of the thought that babies in incubators might perish if these wealth-jaundiced monsters may use their banked levers of industrial power to induce widespread rolling brown-outs. (Anyone else nervous about Musk's control of the Starlink technology?)
Some reviewers have suggested that Armstrong, who with his co-creators has leaned into how the film went from conceptual spark to being completed-in-time-for-the-Emmys-race in six months, was making what one critic called a "palate cleanser" in his body of work, but I sense deeper dramaturgical instincts that spurred that haywire last half.
Perhaps Armstrong was willing to forsake a certain verisimilitude while aiming for a parable on the order of "The Treasure of Sierra Madre"?
Or even—to move John Huston forward from winning writing and directing Oscars in for that 1948 film to "Chinatown" in 1974, has there ever been an incarnation of casual evil better framed than Huston's Noah Cross?
Armstrong has credited several of his "Succession" colleagues as exec producers, though he holds solo credits as writer and (marking his feature debut) as director. As the least pretentious of creators and master of the self-deprecating interview, he might be spooked to hear himself compared to both the existentialist giants—Sartre and Beckett—and the absurdist Ionesco, but all three 20th Century playwrights came to mind in watching the at times slapstick unfolding of the film's latter fifty or so minutes.
To air out some of the fustian tech-speak, the film needed a brat, and the upshot is that only Ramy Youseff's snark-spewing Jeff, presented as the gadfly of the group, wins even temporary affection from us. This is not least because he becomes the mouthpiece—the unfiltered figure who picks up where Kieran Caulkin's Roman Roy left off in "Succession"—of Armstrong's legendarily serrated one-liners. For the first 45 or so minutes, we are eavesdropping on a zinger-charged place where "Succession" always scored mocking laughs. And then—it's as if an elite college entrance essay gives itself over to an account of a paintball-centric bachelor party on molly—it all turns rather self-consciously absurd.
"You only build a pedophile lair once" Jeff mockingly advises Soup the nervous host, "so you gotta get it right." For all his verbal play slaps—"4chan on fucking acid "is how he sees Ven's Traam app– he feels closer to Venis than we may at first surmise. If only to save the world, we hope he'll merge his `Bilter' app with Traam to fight the chaos: "I'm selling a filter for nightmares," he notes, even as his net worth soars in the panic.
We watch the outside world try various entreaties that might unhook the sprawling global breakdown, and even as Venis greets the president's phone call (the man is a "simpleton," such as we now have in real life), with "What's up?," we realize that Armstrong is content to fully be a farceur at this particular stage of the film. (Even in a freewheeling writers' room spitballing session Armstrong might reject the drama that's gone to Trump posting, "I don't mind Elon turning against me.") If the boss dog quartet shows a beastly lack of empathy—remember, that quality with which Musk thinks the world is way oversupplied?—they abide, nay claw remorselessly towards, monetization, obeying their own crackpot justifications. Around the time report comes that the Mayor of Paris has been assassinated, Venis is still crowing about what he calls the outcome, a "slightly gnarly but eventually highly cathartic draining of all this poison."
Yes, it all shades into the absurd—again, a zone not unfamiliar if you've been prepped by Sartre's "No Exit," Ionesco's "Rhinoceros," or Becket's "Waiting for Godot"—but did we really think Armstrong was just musing when he showed us the Roy family? (The reverberation continues, as we know that even at this moment Rupert Murdoch, 94, is actively suing to disenfranchise his offspring.)
"Don't crush me with all that 'founder energy' Jeff had warned Ven as they first hugged out their feud, and such snark is emblematic of the wavering line they walk between `just bro's being bro's' and --well, global annihilation. Perhaps there's no more Armstrong moment than Jeff's reaction to Soup's thought–after a report of a mass incineration of several hundred souls in South Asia—to scale down the bro-hang and "Cancel the deejay out of respect." Jeff agrees, for the most Armstrongian of reasons: "Watching a machete cut thru human flesh is tough– but watching you three dancing on a carpet is a real atrocity."
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