Jinwoo Park (TikTok) interprets the ending as “the aristocracy destroying everything after hoarding it so that the common people don’t get to have any of it”
I can see that. They take everything they can from the land, using up the precious flowers, leaving none to blossom and release their seeds for the next season. Theirs is a selfish, thoughtless greed that leaves only ruin when they are finished.
I also take it as a misinterpretation on the Count’s part: he fears the approaching people and views them as an army, though they carry no weapons but objects of labor. They are described as not even aiming towards the villa but moving together seemingly without purpose, the way a flock of birds or shoal of fish moves together.
The Count and Countess are so terrified of this other that they will do anything to escape it — anything except change. They know the end is coming, but they barely speak of it, and make no attempt to escape the fate they see coming. Their garden is a place of exclusivity — having it makes them who they are. They cling to what they feel makes them ‘better,’ frittering away their time in paltry hedonism, riding out what they know is the end. Yet when the common people finally arrive, they are disinterested in the villa’s ruins — there is nothing there, either to loot or to experience and enjoy. They have no chance to appreciate what once was.
I take this as the emptiness of the aristocracy inbreeding themselves into hemophilia and fading into poverty and inconsequentiality with the transition from feudalism and rent-based wealth to capitalism and industrialism, with wealth generated through capital and the exploitation of labor. Without investment and innovation, their estates no longer supplied them with the funds needed to sustain lives of luxury. Rather than work, they resisted long past the point of poverty, failing to pay their dressmakers and selling off everything outside their entails while attempting to keep up appearances that nothing had changed. Then suddenly, there’s no more escaping the end of wealth. They are no more special than anyone else.
(I’m reading this through the lens of Britain, as far as I’ve learned through reading historical romances 😂, but I could also see it as the antebellum South and their exploitation of enslaved people.)
