This presentation examines the proliferation of tech billionaire retreats as a dominant setting in contemporary film and television, analyzing how these spaces function as both literal and symbolic sites of power, isolation, and potential resistance. From the alpine chalet of HBO's *Mountainhead* to the private islands of *Glass Onion* and *Blink Twice*, screen narratives increasingly position audiences as intruders into the hermetically sealed worlds of the technological elite. These retreats share common architectural features—glass walls suggesting false transparency, industrial minimalism, dungeonlike secured rooms—that encode the contradictions between tech industry rhetoric of openness and the reality of concentrated power insulated from accountability. The presentation explores how these narratives deploy class-conscious protagonists, typically working-class women, who penetrate these fortified spaces and expose the moral corruption within. Drawing on examples including *Triangle of Sadness*, *Made for Love*, and *Black Mirror*'s "U.S.S. Callister," I argue that these stories reflect collective anxieties about technological power while offering fantasies of resistance and revelation. However, as *Mountainhead* suggests, these narratives may ultimately reinforce rather than challenge tech elite invulnerability—the interloper discovers secrets but changes nothing. This presentation considers whether the tech billionaire's lair has become as formulaic as the Gothic mansion, and what this saturation reveals about contemporary culture's ambivalent relationship with technological capitalism and the limits of individual resistance against structural power.

Authors:
Margaret Tally, State University of New York, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Margaret Tally is Full Professor of Social and Public Policy at the School for Graduate Studies of the State University of New York, Empire State College. She is the author of Television Culture and Women’s Lives: Thirtysomething and the Contradictions of Gender(1995). She has also edited three book collections with Betty Kaklamanidou, HBO's Girls: Questions of Gender, Politics, and Millennial Angst(2014), The Millennials on Film and Television: Essays on the Politics of Popular Culture (2014), and Politics and Politicians in Contemporary US Television(2016), The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV’s Third Golden Age(2016) and The Limits of #Metoo in Hollywood: Gender and Power in the Entertainment Industry (2021, McFarland Press).

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