A look at Generation Wealth, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary about addiction and consumerism
“Father of Public Relations” Edward Bernays got women to smoke cigarettes back when it was considered unladylike. The cigarette was a phallic symbol, and the PR stint was genius: suffragettes were given some cigs to light up on their march to convey women’s empowerment. The papers photographed them and published the images — boom, happy tobacco companies.
Since then, marketing, advertising and PR has latched onto a very simple Freudian recipe: sprinkle some libidinal stimulation on anything, and you will get a piping hot consumer.
Ultimately, the power of the commodity as fetish — both as an object of sexualised desire and as an object of worship — is rooted in our sense of lack; we feel that things can give us power and/or value.
The selling strategy has been immensely effective, and a century later, images of extreme wealth and celebrity lifestyles pervade every corner of our media, having stoked a collective obsession with money so acute that we are at “the point of actual and moral bankruptcy.”
So go the words of photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who began taking photographs as a teenager while attending the expensive and exclusive Los Angeles high school of Crossroads in the early 1990s. It was there that she became familiar with the lifestyles of the children of the rich and famous — among them a 12-year-old Kim Kardashian, captured by Greenfield in one of her earliest photographic projects. Twenty-five years, and thousands upon thousands of photographs and interviews later, Greenfield released her documentary masterwork Generation Wealth.
Kim Kardashian, Crossroads High School. Photograph: Laura Greenfield/INSTITUTE
Bus drivers, porn stars and billionaires are the sympathetic figures we get to know through Greenfield’s gentle lens. She weaves anthropology and narrative into an honest, complex exposé of wealthy capitalist societies’ addiction to consumerism. Nobody is immune to this affliction; her canvas stretches to include people from all walks of life — not only those who can afford a life of luxury, but also those who cannot — and that is the point.
In an interview about her film, Greenfield speaks of the huge wealth divide in America: concentration of wealth is at its highest while social mobility is at its lowest. Yet the pervasiveness of media images of luxury and wealth “make people feel like it is normal and that they should have it too.” All the while, there is no relation between what people can afford and what they want.
Greenfield’s trajectory follows the progression of Kardashian-style celebrity culture, where people are adored for the sake of being rich and glamourous. In KK’s case, a sex tape catapults her into fame. The “pornification of culture” finds women especially, looking to sex as a way to bolster their currency; a pervasive phenomenon that manifests in the precocious sexualisation of girls — as seen in toddler beauty pageants.
Then you have the small town girl whose ticket to porn star success is that she has a body that looks prepubescent; she also broke a world-record for the number of men that ejaculated on her in one sitting. She feels positive about the lucrative career she managed to build for herself, and how she made her way out of Nowhereville.
Pageant girl. Photograph: Laura Greenfield/INSTITUTE
The porn star’s ‘better life’ collapses eventually; she is like a player that gets chewed up and spit out by a gambling house — it’s hard to contend that this is a game she could ever have won. Even though her example illustrates an extreme case scenario, the addictive pull of greed at all costs grabs us all to a certain extent. Collectively, we are hypnotised by the fantasy of wealth, mouthing the mantra of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street character Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good,” without quite awakening to its hollow sound…
Is greed the new morality? Donald Trump accessing the high office of the US presidency acclaims wealth as a positive diktat — if he’s so rich, with such an expensive wife, then surely he must be doing everything right. By extension, flaunting one’s money is easily conflated with setting a good example.
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This brings me to a “sort-of-song” I dug out from my archives, that fits the topic well because of its lyrics: “I wear Gucci and Chanel/It don’t mean I’m superficielle” and also, “Vanity is my virtue.” In 2011, I was just discovering songwriting, and making music with my childhood friend Stéphane Lefrançois. In his London studio one night, we recorded this electronic jam, and called it Shut up and Strut It.
Shut Up and Strut It
I wear Gucci and Chanel
It don’t mean I’m superficielle
All this baby is for you
You know I dress it up for you
Vanity is my virtue
I don’t play hard to get
I play never-gonna-happen
Shut up and strut it
Shut up and strut it…..
“Shut up and strut it… Shut up and strut it… Shut up and strut it…” Round and round we go on the “gold plated hamster wheel,” addicts who yearn for the day when consumption will satisfy us — which, by design, it never will.
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Generation Wealth is available for streaming on Amazon Prime — here are the links for America & the UK.
For a fascinating history of Edward Bernays and how he applied Freud’s theories to create modern mass consumer culture, The Century of the Self is a mammoth film, available on YouTube here.
