By Victor Greto
Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.
When English model Rula Lenska purred those six words in a commercial during the 1970s, her melancholy face intimately close to the camera’s lens, she spoke as much for the modern consumer culture as for an individual product.
For popular culture expert and author James Twitchell, a professor at the University of Florida, it’s that consumer culture and its drive for luxury goods that have become two of the major driving forces of American culture.
Twitchell’s recently published book, Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury, teasingly challenges a century of sociological thought that has generally looked at American consumerism and luxury as decidedly negative social trends.
Ever since Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” at the beginning of the 20th century, sociologists have more often than not looked askance at the American thirst for consumer goods, even while acknowledging that it has driven the capitalist economy to its current well-developed state.
Veblen had argued that a fundamental shift in the American character had taken place by the end of the 19th century. Before then, American values had been dominated by thrift, hard work and self-denial; by the beginning of the 20th century, a burgeoning middle class of Americans thought it legitimate to both indulge themselves and flaunt their goods.
It was that “conspicuous consumption” which fed the desire for more and more luxury or unnecessary goods.
Or so the more traditional argument goes.
Twitchell agrees with some of this critique.
Luxury, he says, is “one dimensional, shallow, ahistorical, without memory, and expendable. But it is also strangely democratic and unifying.”
Instead of saying that brand-name products only work to trivialize us, Twitchell says they have become the wafer-thin glue that holds an increasingly diverse society together.
In other words, luxury items are the great paradoxes of modern consumer culture, because they are both trivial and profound.
Luxury’s tangible products — from Zephyrhills bottled water to Gucci handbags to Nike running shoes — have become the 21st century’s sacred relics, windows through which we experience contentment, if not transcendence.
Advertising, which Twitchell also calls “storytelling,” acts as the midwife for this transcendence.
Something in Common
One of the more successful if egregious examples of the power of advertising are the tales that have made bottled water a part of the American landscape.
“Holding Evian [bottled water] in your hand is like waving a wand,” Twitchell said. “You are too special for tap water. And this is a desire that marketing can exploit — but not create — by advertising.”
As a culture, he says, we have nothing else in common.
Think about it: Religion? Nope. Philosophy? Uh-uh. Ethnicity? Please.
What are the moral implications of living in an economy so well-developed that many of us earn the essentials for the month (food, shelter) in a week or two? This, while at least one-fifth of the world earns less than a dollar a day?
If you ask Twitchell, the silence is deafening.
“I don’t talk about it,” he said in a recent interview. “We’re not talking about happiness, but something more powerful and intriguing. I don’t know what the moral implications are. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, though. It’s something we need to confront and understand.”
‘It’s Made Us Hated’
Other thinkers agree that understanding consumer culture and the idea of luxury need to be both confronted and understood.
But many have a hard time disassociating the moral implications of a culture that defines much of itself by what it consumes.
Certainly one result of this culture, says Kathy Giuffre, a sociologist and expert in modern media and popular culture, is Sept. 11.
“It’s made us hated the world over,” Giuffre, an associate professor at Colorado College, says, “so people fly planes into the World Trade Center to get back at us for it. It’s a common adage that America is the adolescent of the world, and the spoiled one at that.
“We have to recognize that our level of consumption has implications beyond our own households.”
Twitchell, however, is relentless.
“Those maniacs that drove the planes into the building were as deep into this world as we are,” he says. “If it was the Sun-Sentinel building, they wouldn’t have done it. They understood storytelling, just as we do. Terrorism is a tribute to the power of these stories. In the battle between spiritualism and materialism, materialism never loses.”
Those “stories” to which Twitchell refers is advertising in all of its manifestations, from those ubiquitous 30-second tales of our times that punctuate TV, radio and movies, to highway billboards and the outfield walls at ballparks.
It’s the tale on an endless loop that helps create the desire in us to want a product, that helps create the idea of luxury.
At least that’s the usual explanation, Twitchell says.
The “real work of advertising,” he says, “is not to manipulate the doltish public but to find out how people already live, not to force consumers to accept material against their better judgment but to get in the path of their judgment.”
Does the process work that rationally?
“Most consumers have limited information on what to choose,” says Lynn Appleton, a sociologist at Florida Atlantic University. “Do you know what’s in the cold medication you’re taking? What do you know of the quality of the hair dye you buy?”
What makes Nyquil better than Anacin? Excedrin better than Dristan? Or vice-versa? Advertising. After all, is Nyquil really the best “night time, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever so you can rest medicine”?
“People have always collaboratively constructed illusions about value,” Appleton says. “But there is something different about how value is sold and created in our society: the creation of people who specialize in the manipulation of the desire of others.”
That was the birth of “Madison Avenue” during the 1920s.
“Before, people lived in small communities and lived their entire lives by the same set of people,” Appleton says. “They didn’t dream of what was outside the village. Contrast that with what we call the modern age, in which we can look at and dream about material possessions. We are routinely encouraged to get them.”
That is exactly what drives the economy, says Twitchell, that has propelled our fabulous standard of living: reaching for luxury and brand names, no matter how shallow or fleeting or trendy.
Even the President of the United States encouraged people to mall-crawl after Sept. 11.
Credit or blame a triumphant capitalism — and all of its accompanying social trends.
“Hyper-individualism is one of the trends that such systems produce,” says Appleton. “People who are isolated, who are self-centered, egocentric, emotionally alone, without commitment to anything other than themselves.”
It’s that sort of thinking that Twitchell resists.
“Are we better off for living in a culture in which luxuries are turned into necessities, in which mild addictions are made into expected tastes, in which elegancies are made into niceties, expectancies are made into entitlements?”
Definitely, he says.
“Until there is some other system to codify and satisfy those needs and yearnings,” Twitchell says, “capitalism — and the promise of a better life it carries with it — will continue not just to thrive but to triumph, Muslim extremists notwithstanding.”
Bubble Mentalities
What about those who can’t afford any of this stuff?
“Luxury seems to accent a very basic factor about our lives, the people who don’t benefit,” says Robert Seltzer, a liberal arts professor at Nova Southeastern University. “The people who are not part of this game are simply not players.”
What worries Seltzer, who teaches both ethics and philosophy, is what he calls some of his students’ “bubble mentalities.”
Some of them just don’t “pay attention to the people who are not like them, the people who do not benefit from this kind of society.”
They’ve grown up in a world that understands freedom of choice to mean the freedom to choose between Levis and Wranglers.
“They make assumptions about the people who are not playing the game,” Seltzer says. “They think if people don’t go to college, it was a conscious choice; if they are homeless, it’s a choice.”
Still, it’s a tough sell for some to deny that the desire for brands and luxuries have helped to glue together a diverse culture.
If diversity within the U.S. seems to be spinning us out of control, “consumerism is the gravity that holds the nation together,” says Charles Zelden, a historian at NSU. “We are capitalist first and a democracy second.”
As a result, it’s not just the buying that matters, but the meanings associated with the buying.
“I don’t care what part of the country you’re living in, the chances you’re going to wear blue jeans and a cotton shirt and gym shoes is almost certain,” he says.
When you buy a pair of jeans, you’re expressing “an attitude about the world around you. Originally, they were work clothes that cowboys wore, were durable, practical, associated with the heritage of people going and getting work done.”
Our self-expression is channeled through what we buy, perhaps even more than it is channeled through language and beliefs.
So, when I delicately put on my Fruit of the Loom underwear and Hanes socks in the morning, pull up my Calvin Klein jeans, button down my Van Heusen shirt, knot my Yves St. Laurent tie, lace my Bruno Mali shoes, and then look at myself in the mirror (in profile) and think, Don’t hate me because I’m cool, I’m just expressing myself — in a distinctively modern style.
Even so, with a smorgasbord of prepackaged choices and lifestyles, how do I know which choices are the best for me, that truly express who I am?
“The real trick to freedom,” says Appleton, “is struggling as much as you can to know why you want what you want.”
Only then, she says, are you in a position to make moral choices.
It’s about being deliberately aware of yourself and your surroundings.What about the rest of the world?
“We also have to think of the moral responsibility lying behind our consumption choices,” Giuffre says. “At some level, luxury is about conspicuous waste,” she says. “Think about the ramifications of the choices we make. Think of yourself as a member of a global community rather than a consumer of it.”