Mountainhead, the timely new film on HBO/Max by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, is a somewhat satisfying if deeply unsettling sendup of tech-bro oligarchy and the convoluted-logic-as-wisdom rhetoric of their podcasts. And it also manages to draw a strange parallel between these bros and the recently publicly exposed mini-cult — if we can call it that — the Zizians.
Bear with me for a second. First off, Mountainhead is neither a fantastic watch nor an entirely painful one. It is a solid directorial debut for Armstrong, who also wrote it — and this was apparently pitched and all pulled together, complete with a location shoot in a modern mountaintop manse near Park City, Utah, in the last six months. There are a handful of hearty laughs skewering the sheer arrogance an absurdity of these self-anointed masters of the universe, and it all gets taken to a fairly extreme, absurd place [spoilers to follow!].
The film brings with it some of the love-to-hate-them energy of Succession, though with less time for an audience to find anything to be endeared by or relate to in these four tech capitalists — three multi-billionaires and a lowly friend they call "Souperman" or "Soup Kitchen," played by Jason Schwartzman, a "lifestyle app" founder who is merely worth $521 million. And it very much feels like it could have been adapted from a stage play, with just four main actors and shot almost entirely in this one house.
Cory Michael Smith, who recently had a star turn on Saturday Night playing an arrogant and self-satisfied young Chevy Chase, is well cast as the energetic, seemingly sociopathic Venis (looks like "penis," pronounced like "menace"). He can be described as a Mark Zuckerberg type, founder and CEO of a major social media platform called Traam, but more attractive, more blindly confident and maybe more charismatic, and less cautious.
One of Venis's signature lines, as they watch the world burn on their phones: "Nothing means anything, and everything is funny and cool."
Steve Carell plays Randall, whom the other "Brewsters," as the cohort calls itself, refer to as "Papa Bear," and who also gets called "Dark Money Gandalf" at one point. Randall feels like an amalgam of multiple real-life founders and venture capitalists who enjoy philosophizing to anyone who'll listen, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and maybe like a less scrupulous Warren Buffett.
And Ramy Youssef plays Jeff, the youngest of the group and the newest multi-billionaire, whose AI model appears to be the key to solving the deep-fake nightmare that a newly released tool on Venis's platform is causing worldwide.
The four men look on and comment glibly about a rapidly unfolding global crisis that appears — improbably but maybe not! — to stem largely from mobs being motivated by this social media platform, and some hyper-realistic deep-fake videos being created by bad actors. A consequent financial crisis in multiple countries prompts them to begin imagining which countries to summarily take over for their own playthings, starting with Argentina.
In the way of many stageplays, things take a dark and climactic turn after Randall — who, by the way, is eager for a transhuman new world order, aided by AI, because he has some terminal disease — realizes both that Jeff disrespects him as being the first one in the group likely to die, and that Jeff is "anti-progress" because he won't roll over and sell Venis his AI model. Randall immediately begins discussing a plan with the other two Brewsters to kill Jeff and somehow dispose of his body and use their wealth to skirt any consequences, in order to make sure the AI deal goes through.
And here's where the Zizian parallels come in. The group throws around plenty of ideas that would be familiar to the Rationalist movement, which came to be among tech workers in the Bay Area and which spawned this Zizian offshoot, as we've referred to it. Jack "Ziz" LaSota espouses the idea of bifurcated brains, the two hemispheres being able to function independently of one another — sometimes with two different gender identities — and the Brewsters discuss something similar as well.
There's also a complete lack of true morality to their thought processes — Venis even proposes the debatable (to him) notion that other people are real — because of the urgency of addressing some coming change. And at one point, when Randall's undertanding of categorical morality as defined by Emmanuel Kant is questioned, he replies, "I take Kant really fucking seriously!"
In the case of the Zizians, it's the coming singularity and the urgency of protecting humanity that seems to trump any ideas of day-to-day morality — though, admittedly, Ziz is no Kant, and I'm not completely read-up on all her thinking. There is the idea that some brains are inherently bad, and we can see in some of the online evidence left behind by Ziz and others in the group that there's a general callousness toward intellectual weakness and toward people having mental health struggles — which appears to have led, indirectly or not, to a couple of suicides.
As Carell's character blithely quips in Mountainhead, speaking to Venis, "You’re always going to get some people dead."
The Chronicle today delves a bit into the unsolved killings of group member Michelle Zajko's parents on New Year's Eve 2022, in a suburb of Philadelphia. Zajko has written in an open letter from jail that she did not kill her parents, but police consider her a person of interest — and earlier reporting suggests that a former girlfriend of Zajko's left the country after learning that Ziz had allegedly instructed Zajko to kill her.
The group also appears to be more concerned with the morality of killing animals and encouraging everyone to become vegan than they do with individual human lives (maybe to set an example for our robot overlords?) — though only two individuals directly involved with Ziz, Somni Leathem and Suri Dao, so far face murder charges. (21-year-old Teresa Youngblut remains in police custody in Vermont for the January killing of a Border Patrol agent, and the consequent killing of her friend Ophelia Bauckholt, but she only faces illegal gun charges so far. And 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder faces a murder charge for the January killing of Curtis Lind in Vallejo, though he has so far publicly disowned his connection to Ziz.)
Getting back to Mountainhead, it will no doubt be considered among a growing genre of satires about the tech industry in general, which includes the hilarious HBO series Silicon Valley. It also joins another recent genre, as Vulture points out, concerned with "eating the rich," which includes White Lotus, The Triangle of Sadness, and The Menu, as well as Succession.
But, those are all "comedies that assure us the elite are miserable, whether they get what’s coming to them or not; they also allow us to enjoy secondhand experiences of the luxuries they bask in and the terribleness with which they treat other people," Vulture writes. Mountainhead, by contrast, offers no such pleasures, and can feel "like nails on a chalkboard ... because it’s so unrelenting."
