Surprise

We had a surprise party this weekend for Kaitlin* that went pretty well. This party was intended to celebrate Kaitlin’s birthday, but at the last minute it also unexpectedly celebrated her entry into a very important part of our current historical moment in America. We had streamers the colors of the Egyptian flag and golden balloons. We had a doberge cake, which is a beloved artifact of our eight-month-old New Orleans heritage (although visually stunning, almost everyone found the doberge cake to be so overwhelmingly sweet and rich as to be a little revolting -- although that may have been because I bought it at a grocery store bakery). We had lots of famous performers and comedians from the New Orleans comedy scene as well as a few luminaries from the fields of public education and the hospitality industry. There was even an heiress! A friend of mine was hit in the face with a potato at one point, which may have upset him. I got into a heated, drunken argument about the futility of socially conscious consumption as a vehicle for lasting change with a stranger wearing an immaculately groomed goatee.

Here is an excerpt from that article, which I am quoting because I have no interest in reading anything fundamentally different from what I read six years ago in college.

...what we see in films like American Beauty and Fight Club is not actually a critique of consumerism; it’s merely a restatement of the “critique of mass society” that has been around since the 1950s. The two are not the same. In fact, the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for more than 40 years.

That last sentence is worth reading again. The idea is so foreign, so completely the opposite of what we are used to being told, that many people simply can’t get their head around it. It is a position that Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler, has been trying to communicate for years. Strangely, all the authors of anti-consumerism books have read Frank—most even cite him approvingly—and yet not one of them seems to get the point. So here is Frank’s claim, simply put: books like No Logo, magazines like Adbusters, and movies like American Beauty do not undermine consumerism; they reinforce it.

This isn’t because the authors, directors or editors are hypocrites. It’s because they’ve failed to understand the true nature of consumer society.

***

One of the most talked-about cinematic set-pieces in recent memory is the scene in Fight Club where the nameless narrator (Ed Norton) pans his empty apartment, furnishing it piece by piece with Ikea furniture. The scene shimmers and pulses with prices, model numbers and product names, as if Norton’s gaze was drag-and-dropping straight out of a virtual catalogue. It is a great scene, driving the point home: the furniture of his world is mass-produced, branded, sterile. If we are what we buy, then the narrator is an Allen-key-wielding corporate-conformist drone.

In many ways, this scene is just a cgi-driven update of the opening pages of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. After yet another numbing day selling the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler, Harry Angstrom comes home to his pregnant and half-drunk wife whom he no longer loves. Harry takes off in his car, driving aimlessly south. As he tries to sort out his life, the music on the radio, the sports reports, the ads, the billboards, all merge in his consciousness into one monotonous, monolithic brandscape.

It may give us pause to consider that while Fight Club was hailed as “edgy” and “subversive” when it appeared in 1999, Rabbit, Run enjoyed enormous commercial success when it was first published—in 1960. If social criticism came with a “sell by” date, this one would have been removed from the shelf a long time ago. The fact that it is still around, and still provokes awe and acclaim, makes one wonder if it is really a criticism or, rather, a piece of modern mythology.

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*Kaitlin, I thought that it would be ok to use your name since your Blogger username is Kaitlin, but if you'd like you may instead pick from one (just one) of the following handles that I will employ from this point forward: Bess Truman; the Lady Galadriel; Black_Betty; Black_Betty_Bam_A_Lam -- just let me know