“The First Film of the DOGE Era Is Here”
It’s late morning on a Monday in March and I’m, for causes I’ll clarify momentarily, in a personal bowling alley deep within the bowels of a $65 million mansion in Utah. Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of HBO’s hit collection Succession, approaches me, monitor headphones round his neck and a large grin on his face. “I take it you’ve seen the news,” he says, flashing his telephone and what seems to be his X feed in my course. After all I had. Everybody had: An hour earlier, my boss Jeffrey Goldberg had revealed a narrative revealing that U.S. national-security leaders had by chance added him to a Sign group chat the place they mentioned their plans to conduct then-upcoming navy strikes in Yemen. “Incredibly fucking depressing,” Armstrong mentioned. “No notes.”
The second felt a little bit bit like a glitch within the simulation, although it additionally pinpointed precisely the type of problem going through Armstrong. I had traveled to Park Metropolis to satisfy him on the set of Mountainhead, a movie he wrote and directed for HBO (and which premieres this weekend). Mountainhead is an bold, extraordinarily well timed undertaking a few group of tech billionaires gathering for a snowy poker weekend simply as one in every of them releases AI-powered instruments that trigger a worldwide disaster. Signalgate was the most recent, most outrageous bit of reports from the Trump administration that appeared to shift the boundaries of plausibility. How can Armstrong probably satirize an period the place actuality feels prefer it’s already cribbing from his scripts?
The movie was billed to me as an try and seize the actual energy and bumbling hubris of a bunch of boastful and rich males (performed by Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy Youssef) who attempt to rewire the world and discover themselves in means over their heads. This was a simple premise for me to purchase into, not simply due to Signalgate, but in addition as a result of I’d spent the higher a part of the winter reporting on Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal authorities, throughout which period DOGE had reportedly made a 19-year-old laptop programmer who goes by the net nickname “Big Balls” a senior adviser to the State Division. In an effort to hold the movie feeling recent on this breakneck information cycle, Armstrong pushed to finish the undertaking on an awfully quick timeline: He pitched the movie in December and wrote elements of the script behind a automotive whereas driving round with location scouts. After we met, Youssef informed me that the “way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall.”
By the point I met Armstrong—affable and easygoing each on and off set—he was unfazed by truth seeming stranger than his fiction. “There’s almost something reassuring about it,” he mentioned. “It’s all moving so fast and is so hard to believe that it allows me to just focus on the story I want to tell. I’m not too worried about the news beating me to the punch.” Numerous his work, together with Succession and a few writing on political satires, comparable to Veep and The Thick of It, draw free and typically shut inspiration from present occasions. The trick, Armstrong informed me, is discovering a “comfortable distance” from what’s taking place in actuality.
The purpose is to let audiences deliver their context to his artwork however nonetheless have an excellent time and never really feel as in the event that they’re doomscrolling. As an illustration, one of many important characters in Mountainhead is an erratic social-media mogul named Venis (performed by Smith), who’s additionally the richest man on the earth. However the comparisons to our actual tech moguls aren’t one-to-one. “I don’t think you’d think he’s a Musk cipher, nor is he a Zuck, but he takes something from him and probably from Sam Altman and maybe from Sam Bankman-Fried,” Armstrong mentioned.
Mountainhead is Armstrong’s first undertaking since Succession. That present’s acclaim—19 Emmy and 9 Golden Globe wins—cemented Armstrong and his workforce of writers because the preeminent satirists of latest energy and wealth. His choice to concentrate on the tech world can really feel like a cultural assertion of its personal. Succession managed to seize the depravity, hilarity, and vacancy of recent politics, media, and moguldom present parallel to the perpetual real-life crises of its run from 2018 to 2023. However whereas Mountainhead has loads of Succession’s DNA—sharing lots of the identical producers and writers, and a few of the crew—it’s far more of a focused strike than the 39-episode HBO present. Moderately than a story epic of unserious failsons, the movie presents a comparatively simple portrait of buffoonish elites who imagine that their runaway entrepreneurial success entitles them to rule over the lower-IQ’d plenty. In some methods, Mountainhead picks up the place a distinct HBO collection, Silicon Valley, left off, exploring the boundaries of and poking enjoyable on the fantasy of tech genius, albeit with a far darker tenor.
The tech guys weren’t imagined to be the following group up within the blender, Armstrong informed me. He was attempting to work on a distinct undertaking when he took an interest within the fall of Bankman-Fried and his crypto empire. Armstrong is a voracious reader and one thing of a media nerd—on set, he joked that he’s in all probability by chance paying for dozens of area of interest Substacks—and shortly went down the tech rabbit gap. Studying information articles became skimming by biographies. Finally, he ended up on YouTube, absorbed by the marathon interviews that tech titans did with Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and the gab classes on the All-In podcast, which options distinguished buyers and Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks. “In the end, I just couldn’t stop thinking about these people,” he informed me. “I was just swimming in the culture and language of these people for long enough that I got a good voice in my head. I got some of the vocabulary, but also the confidence-slash-arrogance.”
As with Succession, vocabulary and tone are essential to Mountainhead’s pacing, humor, and authenticity. Armstrong and his producers have peppered the script with what he described as “podcast earworms.” At one level, Carell’s character, Randall, the elder-statesman enterprise capitalist, describes Youssef’s character as a “decel with crazy p(doom) and zero risk tolerance.” (Decel stands for a technological decelerationist; p(doom) is the chance of an AI apocalypse.)
“There was a lot of deciphering, a lot of looking up of phrases for all of us—taking notes and watching podcasts,” Carell informed me about his speedy preparation course of. After we spoke, all the actors pressured that they didn’t mannequin their characters off particular person folks. However a few of the portraits are nonetheless damning. Youssef’s character, Jeff, the youngest billionaire of the bunch, has constructed a strong AI software able to stemming the tide of disinformation unleashed by Venis’s social community. He has misgivings in regards to the fallout from his pal’s platform, but in addition sees his firm’s inventory rising due to the chaos.
“One of the first things I said to Jesse was that I saw my younger, less emotionally developed self in the level of annoyingness, arrogance, and crudeness—mixed with a soft emotional instability—in Jeff,” Youssef informed me. “He reminded me of me in high school. I thought, These are the kind of guys who started coding in high school, and it’s probably where their emotions stalled out in favor of that rampant ambition.” This halted adolescence was a working theme. On a Tuesday night round 9 p.m., I stood on set watching 5 consecutive takes of a scene (that was later reduce from the movie) the place Youssef jumps onto a chair whereas calling a honcho on the IMF, and begins vigorously humping Schwartzman’s head. The mansion itself is sort of a character within the movie. The manufacturing designer Stephen Carter informed me it was chosen partly as a result of “it feels like something that was designed to impress your friends”—an ostentatious glass-and-metal construction with a personal ski carry, rock wall, bowling alley, and a full-size basketball courtroom.
Carter, who additionally did manufacturing design on Succession, mentioned that it’s essential to Armstrong that his productions are set in environments that precisely seize and mimic the size of wealth and energy of its characters. “Taste is fungible,” Carter informed me, “but the amount of square footage is not.” They knew they’d settled on the proper property when Marcel Zyskind, the director of pictures, visited. “He almost felt physically ill when he walked into the house,” Carter mentioned. “Sort of like it was a violation of nature or something.” The costuming decisions mirrored the banality of the tech elites, with a couple of prospers, like the intense Polaris snowmobile jumpsuits and lengthy underwear worn in a single early scene. “Jesse has them casually decide the fate of the world while wearing their long johns,” the costume designer, Susan Lyall, recounted.
True sickos like myself, who’ve adopted the supply materials and information studies intently, can play the parlor recreation of attempting to decode inspirations ripped from the headlines. Carell’s character has the distinct nihilistic vibes of a Peter Thiel, but in addition utters pseudophilosophical phrases like “in terms of Aurelian stoicism and legal simplicity” that learn like a Marc Andreessen tweetstorm of previous. Schwartzman’s character, Souper—the poorest of the group, whose nickname is brief for soup kitchen—provides off an insecure, sycophantic vibe that jogs my memory of an acolyte from Musk’s textual content messages.
However Armstrong insists he’s after one thing greater than a roast. What made tech billionaires so interesting to him as a topic is their obsession with scale. To him, their extraordinary ambitions and egos, and the pace with which they transfer by the world, makes their potential to flame out as epic as their potential to rewire our world. And his characters, whereas eminently unlikable, all have flashes of tragic humanity. Venis appears unable to attach along with his son; Jeff is wracked with a responsible conscience; Randall is scared of his looming mortality; and Souper simply desires to be liked. “I think where clever and stupid meet is quite an interesting place for comedy,” Armstrong informed me once I requested him about capturing the tone of the tech world. “And I think you can hear those two things clashing quite a lot in the discussions of really smart people. You know, the first-principles thinking, which they’re so keen on, is great. But once you throw away all the guardrails, you can crash, right?”
By his personal admission, Armstrong has respect for the intellects of a few of the founders he’s satirizing. Maybe as a result of he’s written from their perspective, he’s empathetic sufficient that he sees an impulse to assist buried deep among the many egos and the paternalism. “It’s like how the politician always thinks they’ve got the answer,” he mentioned. However he contends that Silicon Valley’s scions may have extra affect than these lawmakers. They will transfer sooner than Washington’s sclerotic politicians. There’s much less oversight too. The innovators don’t ask for permission. Congress must move legal guidelines; the tech overlords simply have to push code to screw issues up. “In this world where unimaginable waves of money are involved, the forces that are brought to bear on someone trying to do the right thing are pretty much impossible for a human to resist,” he mentioned. “You’d need a sort of world-historical figure to withstand those blandishments. And I don’t think the people who are at the top are world-historical figures, at least in terms of their oral capabilities.”
For Armstrong, capturing the humanity of those males paints a extra unsettling portrait than pure billionaire-trolling would possibly. For instance, these males really feel superhuman, however are additionally battling their very own mortality and attempting to construct applied sciences that can allow them to reside without end within the cloud. They’re hyperconfident and in addition deeply insecure about their exact spots on the Forbes listing. They spout pop philosophy however are promoting nihilism. “We’re gonna show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing’s that fucking serious,” Venis says at one level within the movie. “Nothing means anything. And everything’s funny and cool.” In Mountainhead, as the worldwide, tech-fueled chaos begins, Randall leads the billionaires in an “intellectual salon” the place the group think about the methods they may rescue the world from the catastrophe they helped trigger. They bandy about concepts about “couping out” america or attempting to go “post-human” by ushering in synthetic normal intelligence. At one level, not lengthy after standing over a literal map of the world from the board recreation Threat, one billionaire asks, “Are we the Bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?” One other quips: “I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.”
The paternalistic overconfidence of Armstrong’s tech bros delivers the majority of each the darkish humor and the sobering cultural relevance in Mountainhead. Armstrong doesn’t maintain the viewers’ hand, however asks them to lean into the efficiency. In the event that they do, they’ll see a portrayal which may very effectively give crucial context to the present second: a bunch of unelected, self-proclaimed kings who view the world as a thought experiment or a seven-dimensional chess match. The issue is that the remainder of us are the pawns.
“The scary thing is that usually—normally—democracy provides some guardrails for who has the power,” Armstrong mentioned close to the top of our dialog. “But things are moving too fast for that to work in this case, right?” Mountainhead will definitely scratch the itch for Succession followers. However in contrast to his final hit, which revolved round blundering siblings who’re determined to amass the ability that their father wields, Armstrong’s newest is about individuals who already have energy and really feel ordained to wield it. It’s a darkish, at occasions absurdist, comedy—however with the context of our actuality, it typically feels nearer to documentary horror.
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