Mailing List
Sign up for updates in your city.
The Plot to Make You Shop
Submitted by KAT on Wed, 12/05/2007 - 9:55am.
“The Story of Stuff” is a sly short that offers a crash course in consumption; it’s like a sermon from Reverend Billy, a lecture from Bill McKibben, and a rant from James Kunstler rolled into one and made fun (well, OK, as fun as an analysis of our crass consumer culture can be.)
Eco-activist Annie Leonard’s breezy presentation is a compelling blend of facts, figures, and animated stick figures that traces the path—and the carbon footprint—of all the crap we buy, from inception to incineration. She charts our rising consumption and a corresponding decline in happiness, and exposes the post-World War II mindset that made us a nation of lemme-have-it lemmings with a 1955 quote from a retail analyst named Victor Lebow:
“Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
Lebow’s dream of a consumer-based culture started to look more like a nightmare a couple of decades later—or a horror movie, anyway. “Dawn of the Dead,” George Romero’s classic zombie sequel, was inspired by a 1974 visit to the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania, one of America’s first sprawling shopping complexes.
As Romero walked through the mall, he was struck by:
…the blank, expressionless faces of the mall's shoppers as they shuffled throughout the indoor shopping center. Romero made the connection between the mall's patrons and his own zombies almost immediately, likening the droning consumers — with their insatiable and driving desire for materialistic gratification — with that of his own cannibalistic creations and their driving need for consuming human flesh, each motivated by a singular fulfilling need.
The Story of Stuff has its share of Gore, too. Like An Inconvenient Truth, its goal is to inform and inspire, and it does so beautifully. Yes, it seems like we’re drowning in an ever-rising waste stream, but Annie Leonard shows us that we don’t have to go with this flow. Thanks to those masters of the snappy, socially conscious short at Free Range Studios for tossing us this lifeline.
It's a great little film. I've put a permanent link to it on The Slow Cook blog
Post new comment