last year, Triangle of Sadness’s cinematographer, Fredrik Wenzel, described the film’s 15-minute vomit sequence as “kind of beautiful to watch, like a ballet”. The visceral descent into madness that takes place during a captain’s dinner onboard a luxury yacht will conjure less elegant associations for some, but few will forget the scene easily.
Worse still, the crew and guests attempt to maintain decorum through it all, their polite chit-chat and the tinkering of fine china only adding to the horror. While the yacht’s passengers have left dry land in search of escapism, they cannot stop the muck and mire from seeping in. Triangle of Sadness’ shit, piss and vomit-filled crescendo is the tip of the iceberg of a recent boom in chaos-at-sea entertainment. Between Bravo’s nautical reality hit Below Deck , Tanya’s grisly voyage on season two of The White Lotus, the gripping season two finale of Succession and Anna Delvey’s bad boat etiquette in Inventing Anna, audiences are being saturated with television about rich people going through it on luxury yachts.
Despite the beauty of their surroundings, onscreen yacht-hoppers are often in distress, whether at the hands of fabulous and secretly murderous gay men, the imminent corporate equivalent of a man overboard or a hand grenade hurled by pirates.
The ill-fated dinner aboard Triangle of Sadness’ luxury yacht: a ‘shit, piss and vomit-filled crescendo’.While the definition of superyachts and the even larger megayachts are disputed – perhaps, like porn, you know it when you see it – we can all agree they function as a middle finger to the proletariat: a space for the wealthy to flaunt their privilege away from prying eyes .