The Joneses

The underlying ideas behind Derrick Borte's The Joneses (2009) are clever and mordant. A service representing (and bankrolled by) a consortium of companies and product lines embeds cells into residential areas in the form of atomic family units. Each cell or unit consists of a pair of parents and a pair of children, with perfect gender balance (although this is customized to each market, as flashed on screen during the end credits). Using various marketing (and guerilla warfare) techniques, each unit aims to sell as many products as possible; after a year in each market, the cells are relocated to new areas.

The particular and peculiar strength of capitalism is its ability to absorb almost anything, even insurgency, rebellion and revolution, transforming virtually everything into a commodity for sale. One of the most blatant acts of diabolical capitalistic alchemy is epitomized by the McDonalds marketing campaign of 1986-1987:

At McDonald's, it's Mac Tonight
Come on, make it Mac Tonight

This little ditty takes Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht's "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" / "The Ballad of Mack the Knife," a sharp Marxian critique of modern society first performed in 1928 -- a year before the Great Depression -- and transforms/corrupts it into a tool for selling the Golden Arches during the Ronald Reagan presidency. In the Weil/Brecht song (via Die Dreigroschenoper / The Threepenny Opera), it's not make it Mac Tonight, but Mack the Knife:

And the shark, it has teeth,
And it wears them in its face.
And Macheath, he has a knife,
But the knife one doesn't see.

The premise behind The Joneses is like that. There is the glitter of what you see, and there is the knife one doesn't see. Consume until you drop. Sell until the market is satiated. Capitalists move in and then out, like locusts, to the next big thing. Shop till you drop, and the bubble bursts.  

In the film itself, there is also the story about the members of the "Jones family" (each with a coded celebrity name, played by Demi Moore, David Duchovny, Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth), and the people in their neighborhood (including Gary Cole of Office Space and Entourage) who, through the ripple effect and other marketing tactics, are "inspired" to keep up with them through credit purchases and lines of home equity.

Besides questions about the nature of consumer culture, one is asked to ponder over the meaning of personal identity and the impact of social manipulation and influence.

Let's not forget the idea of Generation Jones (those in the West born between 1954 and 1965), nor Bob Dylan's  "Ballad of a Thin Man" (1965): 

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Today's Rune: Wholeness.