The horror film Blink Twice takes as a theme the barbarism of the ruling class in a way that resonates strongly with reality, finds Mike Wayne 

The crimes of the ruling classes are so vast in number and so multiple in types that at a personal and public level, we hardly have the bandwidth to keep them in a state of ready recollection. Right now, imperialism’s collusion with Israel’s genocidal project in Gaza has rightly shocked vast numbers of people to their moral core. In one of the most famous allegorical interpretations of a work of art ever, the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin read Paul Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novus’ as a warning of the underside of barbarism that accompanies class history. Benjamin reads the Angel in the painting (at a time when the Nazis were on the ascent) as a witness to that barbarism. History is not a ‘chain of events’ but a ‘catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’. 

Our first look at history may induce us to see progress. Blink twice though and you may instead see the undertow of violence and barbarism that accompanies it. This brings me to the new horror film directed by Zoe Kravitz, Blink Twice. There are a number of other recent films of which watching this one may remind you. They are stories of the rich as predatory hunters of the poor and the working classes. Films like Get Out (2017), Ready or Not (2019) The Hunt (2020) and The Menu (2022), whose victims are drawn from the working classes. By far the best of the lot in this genre is a Brazilian film called Bacurau (2019). But all of them are a kind of bearing witness in popular culture to horror, just as Klee’s painting is, according to Benjamin. 

But the reference that really jolts when you think about Blink Twice is not another film, but Jeffrey Epstein’s island, since the location of the film’s action is an island belonging to tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum).  Epstein made his fortune managing the assets of the super-rich. He conveniently died in prison while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. He had already avoided a potentially long-term prison sentence in 2008 after a plea bargain deal with prosecutors that meant he was free to resume his activities after spending thirteen months in jail. He was the owner of Little Saint James, a US Virgin Island property ‘where Epstein is accused of having groomed, assaulted, and trafficked countless women and girls’, noted Wired in an investigation into the visitors who flew to the Island. The list of names ‘connected’ to Epstein includes former presidents, well-known celebrities from the world of entertainment, billionaires, even princes. Rosa Monckton, the former CEO of Tiffany & Co told Vanity Fair in a 2003 article that Epstein was ‘very enigmatic … What you see is not what you get.’ Indeed. Blink Twice. 

Casualties of the ruling-class game 

Even female CEOs, former or not, need not have worried. The rich were not Epstein’s prey, they were his clients to whom he served up the prey. Around forty of Epstein’s victims came from the working-class area of West Palm Beach, near his own Palm Beach mansion which he bought in 1990. Virginia Giuffre, who accused Epstein of pimping her out to Prince Andrew, was herself a victim of sexual abuse as a child. She ended up living on the streets, although by the time she was drawn into Epstein’s web by his personal assistant Ghislane Maxwell, she was working as a locker-room attendant at Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort, a stone’s throw from Epstein. 

It is no accident that the main protagonist of Blink Twice is Frida, a hospitality worker who is all too ready to be dazzled by the world of the rich, the ease, the affluence, the settings, the colours, the clothes, the food, the fun. ‘Are you having a good time?’ Slater King continually asks Frida on the magical island he has swept her off to with her friend on a private jet. For a while she thinks she is, until her friend goes missing. Gradually she discovers that is she forgetting the sexual violence that is actually happening to her every night.  

The ruling classes hope that memories of Epstein, the ‘Lolita Express’ as his private jet was called, his island and his connections with the rich will also be forgotten. But there is a real thread connecting the real-life interpersonal sexual violence of the Epstein case, the fictional story of Blink Twice and others in its genre, and the real-life genocidal violence going on in Gaza. The victims ultimately do not matter. They are the pawns on the great ruling-class chess boards (the game makes a significant appearance in Blink Twice). The moral compass of the ruling classes at a policy level is shot and for many of them, judging by the Epstein case, at a personal level, is no less pathological. Blink twice and try not to forget. As Benjamin said, it is less happy futures that inspire the need for revolution, than redemption for all those victims.