Queen Latifah’s Last Holiday is the Anti-Capitalist film we all need right now
Ring in the New Year with a Poulet Tchoupitoulas you’ll never forget.
New Year’s traditions are funny. We hork down lentils and grapes to bring about a fruitful year, all to the sound of Auld Lang Syne or someone ringing a doorbell 108 times for some reason. My own personal tradition is a little different, each year while I fight off the night’s hangover and lament my inability to procure a single New Year’s Kiss I watch the 2006 classic film, Last Holiday.
The film follows Georgia Byrd, played by Queen Latifah, as she is terminally misdiagnosed with Lampington's disease. With the little time she (thinks she) has left, Georgia plans to spend every dollar she has scrupulously saved on a luxury holiday in Europe before she dies.
At first glance, the film seems to celebrate the frivolities of an upperclass lifestyle, and posits that: to live a fulfilling life one must truly embrace the tangible pleasures that can only be achieved through capital. When Georgia stops being a frugalista, and starts “balling out,” so to speak, her quality of life greatly improves. We see this when Georgia upgrades her plane ticket to first class, and her accommodations become comically improved.
There is also a racialized component to her treatment, but through her proximity to wealth, she is almost able to “rise above” the racial discrimination and expectations she is met with as a Black woman. I think this is an important scene especially as more Black actresses like Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer discuss the pay disparity they experience, even now, as intersectional minorities. In this way, you can be “first class,” but to many, it will mean nothing if you aren’t also white.
When Georgia buys a new, noticeably flashier and more expensive, wardrobe in Prague, the hotel guests suddenly see her as more deserving of their attention and adoration. It is important to note that her makeover never made her more worthy or good, she was already all those things long before her specialized montage set to a Gwen Stefani song. The makeover also brings up the question: if you can change what is on the outside so easily, if it really is just clothes that separates us, doesn’t that also devalue it or discredit its importance? It’s just stuff.
We are so often shown that money can buy happiness, or at very least, money will make people treat you better. Just think of how happy Jeff Bezos must be, or choose any two of the Kardashians like a You-Pick-Two from Panera, (a restaurant I can’t imagine either mogul even knowing about) their lives must be a non-stop bliss-fest.
When you look a little closer however, you find that this luxury lifestyle, as presented in this film, is less revered and applauded, and instead serves as an indictment of Capitalism as a whole. The only reason that Georgia is able to enjoy even the slightest modicum of comfort she finds, in what she thinks are her last days, comes as the result of her liquidating her entire savings and quite literally being used up by Capitalism and then discarded. Reminder: the system will use your labor until you have nothing left, and what you’ll get in return for years of back-breaking service is hardly enough to cover your medical bills. Forget going on an actual vacation or enjoying any the beautiful things in life.
I’ve always felt that beauty is wasted on the rich.
Last Holiday supports this claim most clearly through the symbol of food, and the ways in which rich and poorer people interact with it. For Georgia, it is a work of art, something that brings communities together — a sharing of her love. She cooks for her young neighbor, exposing him to a culture different from his own as guided by a very of-the-time Emeril Lagasse. (Bam!) In this way, cooking is representative of family and how food is the ultimate form of showing care and love for another person. In contrast, the rich diners like Kragen, his mistress, and Senator Dillings require alterations on every meal. Something that Chef Didier (“Oh Chef Didier, you crazy!”) finds highly inconsiderate and demeaning. Their treatment of Didier is a bastardization of the time-honored relationship between the cook and the eater. The interactions between the rich group also serve to highlight the class disparity found even at higher levels. Didier is reminded that Capitalism has afforded him some higher rank as a distinguished chef at this premier restaurant, but to the uber-rich he is nothing more than a service worker, not unlike the ones you’d find at a Panera Bread.
(Sorry, I’m really tearing into Panera lately. It’s just so emblematic of American food culture right now, but feel free to sub it out with any other similar chain if you’re a die-hard “Bread-Head” or still sippin’ on their Charged Lemonades.)
Food acts as the purest symbol of humanity in this film, and is used throughout to distinguish between the gilded pleasures of the rich and the simple human joys that are found in a home-cooked meal. Even in a restaurant like the Grandhotel Pupp, substitutions are needed for every meal, as it is shown that those who have everything can hardly enjoy the beautiful things right in front of their noses. These are, after all, the same people who walk by lobby frescos without a second thought. Whereas, as an outsider to this culture, Georgia is enamored with it all. She never had the chance to experience these things, which makes them all the more impactful for her.
We further see the failings of Capitalism most clearly in Georgia’s job at Kragen’s department store. She is hard-working and clearly devoted to her job, even going so far as to cook her own samples using the department cookware for her community to enjoy. Yet still, she is unable to achieve out of the situation she is in. We see her boss listening to the idle self-help entrepreneurial blather of Matthew Kragen (a Trump type) as he espouses his rules for success. If you want to be a billionaire like him, you simply have to work hard. But, if the system worked as this myth of the billionaire claims, then wouldn’t Georgia be the kind of person who would be favored?
The film pulls no punches at revealing the ways in which our governmental systems are failing its own people, all while sheltering the worst kinds of individuals like Kragen. As many of us find ourselves unable to look away from the countless injustices happening in our own world, we may feel powerless. However, feeling powerless actually just reinforces the myth of the American Dream and its Capitalistic cause. If enough people feel they have no voice and no way to escape their generational cycles of poverty, then the only way one can feel empowered is through engaging with capital in the same way that the uber-rich do. Maybe, like Georgia, you can’t afford your life-saving procedure, but you probably can buy a Stanley cup, and that may scratch the same itch.
This is the power of wish-fulfillment narratives. You are told that your life will be better if you make more money, you are told that it is good to aspire to becoming an entrepreneur or a #GirlBoss. We spend so much time working towards getting to an imaginary “top” that we never stop to question why we are working within a system that requires so many to be disenfranchised. For many, the deck is already stacked against them and there really may be no way for you to ever “pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” And this is not a flaw in the system, it is just a feature of it working as it always has and always will. Forever churning out lifetimes of misery until you are too sick or old to work any longer, all while the 1% get to enjoy their private bunkers and jets.
This would be a dour ending for any film, lest of all a 2006 rom-com with all its own tropey trappings (see: the stereotypically Indian Dr. Gupta and the constant moralizing over sexuality) and as such much of the plot is tied up fairly neatly. But what the film does offer as a salve to Capitalistic oppression, is living life to its fullest — changing your “book of possibilities” into a “book of realities.”
Perhaps the film falls short of radicalizing the masses, I can’t imagine much by way of a French Revolution stemming from this, or any, Queen Latifah film. Okay, maybe Hairspray. But what Last Holiday does good to remind us, is that your company does not have your best interests in mind, billionaires do not have your best interests in mind, institutions and systems do not have your best interests in mind, the only one who really cares is LL Cool J.