The Divide

A shock­ing sta­tis­tic appears at the end of Katharine Round’s infor­ma­tive doc­u­men­tary: in Amer­i­ca, the rich­est 0.1 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion now owns the same amount of wealth as the bot­tom 90 per cent.

But we knew that already. We knew it in 2009 when epi­demi­ol­o­gists Kate Pick­ett and Richard G Wilkin­son pub­lished ​‘The Spir­it Lev­el’, the book which Round has tak­en as inspi­ra­tion. We still know it in 2016, as the news emerges of obscene sums hid­den in Pana­man­ian bank accounts.

The Divide is not about recog­nis­ing or uncov­er­ing these truths, but human­is­ing them. Round fol­lows sev­en ordi­nary peo­ple on both sides of the Atlantic, from a psy­chi­a­trist work­ing on Wall Street to a care work­er in New­cas­tle. Some live in plush apart­ments, oth­ers on run-down coun­cil estates. But they’re all gov­erned by wor­ries of putting food on the table, giv­ing their kids the best edu­ca­tion they can or keep­ing a roof over their heads.

Some will have no time for the likes of Jen, cry­ing because her son can­not make friends in their pleas­ant, gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty. But impor­tant­ly, Round nev­er tries to manip­u­late us into feel­ing sor­ry for her sub­jects. She sim­ply presents them side-by-side and leaves us to draw the lines.

Fer­tile ground is left unex­plored. Dar­ren, a recov­er­ing alco­holic in Glas­gow, could have had a film all to him­self. So could Kei­th, a vic­tim of Bill Clinton’s ​‘three strikes’ rule who is cur­rent­ly serv­ing 25 years in prison after being caught with a gram of mar­i­jua­na. Talk­ing head inter­views ref­er­ence health issues like obe­si­ty and the influ­ence of race in social divide, but they’re most­ly vague and fleeting.

Per­haps this is for the best. The Divide tells us noth­ing that hasn’t already been exten­sive­ly cov­ered by the lib­er­al media, but it reminds us of some­thing that we may have for­got­ten: the 90 per cent and the 0.1 per cent alike are made of real human beings. As one inter­vie­wee puts it, this isn’t the fault of a few bad apples poi­son­ing the rest of the bar­rel. It’s the bar­rel itself that is poisonous.