The Joneses: Life in a material world

Since the fifties, the key to suburban living has been keeping up with the Joneses. But just who, exactly, are the Joneses? I can’t say without giving the game away, so look away if you want to be surprised by the plot.

The Joneses are, in fact, way ahead of anything you will ever be. Mrs Jones is Demi Moore, heading up an ideal designer family along with David Duchovny, retired car salesman and failed golf pro, her “’enery the eighth” style ’usband.

Are they too good to be true? You betcha. These real people are living profoundly fake lives — but is it catching? The Joneses are in fact a marketing “unit,” seeded into the poshest of the ’burbs to live out a perfect life style, sowing envy and triggering sales left right and centre. As they work their way through their community’s various sociological subgroups like a toxic computer worm, they are monitored by a sinister Blonde Controller played with coonsummate believability by Catherine Dyer.

The family that gels together sells together. As the good times roll, suburban living becomes a manic Tupperware party on Steroids, saes stats mount on wings of eagles. Human nature will out, however, including the propensity of youngsters, and others, to place their affections where true joys cannot be found. Will the real people win through in the end?

The butt of the joke, which is wry than bellylaugh, is materialism. As the Truman Show and Pleasantville did before it, Derrick Borte’s film deconstructs a whole lifestyle, and raises the most basic question of all — “who’s fooling who?” The wrong aspirations lead to one of the most visually stunning lethal swimming pool shots since the opening of Sunset Boulevard.

Not everything clicks 100% all the time, but enough clicks enough of the time to keep ann audience logged on, and make this a very good, if not a great film. It works on pretty much all levels, narrative, character, place and pace. The Joneses is a great discussion starter that may not make you drop everything and get thee to a nunnery, but if it saves you entirely maxing out your Visa on Louis Vuitton bags and Audis, you’ll be glad you saw it. Four out of five.

Banking: The Way We Were (1964)

Financial Intercourse began
in Nineteen Seventy Nine,
Between the end of Callaghan
and the Flying Lizards’ Line:
I want money, that’s what I want...
What was life like before we entered Mrs Thatcher’s brave new world? Did they have money? And if they did, did most people keep it under the bed?

Well in 1964, bank managers were slightly stuffy people working for low wages in what were often family businesses, some of whom, according to the TV advertising of the day, lurked in people's wardrobes offering financial advice to the family. O tempora! O mores! Rooting in the attic the other day I found a copy of the Twentieth Century for Spring 1964, featuring an interview with the chief cashier of a high street bank on the subject of his career in Banking and its temptations. Read, mark and learn from this delightful vignette of Banking, and the kind of people who did it, 45 years ago, before Fred the Shred and his chums got their grimy hands on our cash:

Today, on £1,240 a year, plus a London allowance, I have reached, at the age of 57, a moderately comfortable level. I rose to be number two man in a five-man branch, and took my present post as chief cashier in a busy commercial branch when I discovered that I was not going to become manager where I was. I have succeeded in making a home, and paying off the house. We have no crying need for any major item of domestic equipment. We were able to buy a washing machine before the war, and five years ago I was able to afford a refrigerator, We have no television, and no desire for one.

I allow my wife £8 a week for housekeeping and £2 a week for herself. My lunches average 5 shillings (25p) a day, and I spend 10s (50p) a week on tobacco, We do not live to a budget - there are no boxes on the mantelpiece. But we do put 5s, a week by for Christmas presents. Our only extravagance is a theatre once every two months, when we have dinner in town. We always have sherry in the house, and a bottle of whisky for medicinal purposes. We do not deny ourselves, But I feel this is a point we should have reached ten years ago. It is only recently that I have been able to gather any savings, and only recently that I have been able to ride out the surprise bill, say, £30 for repairing the chimney, that comes along. Ten years ago we would never have been able to go into a shop and buy there and then something that took our fancy, in the way that we bought a nest of coffee tables last year for £20, and a gas fire to replace a coal grate. As it is, a large part of my salary is set aside for routine bills. I have two life assurances that I took out early in life. They come to £49 a year. My gas bill is £25, my electricity £10, and my coke £12 a year. I have a new suit every year. In the bank you must maintain a certain amount of tidiness. They still say that bank men are the tidiest of office workers, and I know that I have never gone to the office in a scruffy suit. Nowadays we spend £80 on our annual holiday (we never go abroad) and I take a week each year with my mother in Scotland that costs me £25 ...

The way things have turned out has not embittered me, I am just not of an envious nature. I look on that not as a virtue but as just a kind of kink in me. If I had been a bit more envious, a bit more covetous, I would have been more ambitious in life and taken chances with my career; been the kind of man who makes up his mind exactly where he is going, and plans out step by step how to get there - as my son-in-law has. But I do not believe that money is conducive to happiness. That doesn't mean I believe that one should be contented with one's lot in life. But surely happiness to a large extent devolves upon oneself, and on one's immediate friends and relatives, on one's wife and family.

Of course I would have been happier with more money - I would have been able to run a car, to take more expensive holidays, for example - but the lack of money has never tempted me to gamble or be dishonest. I believe a person who would be tempted to embezzlement would be tempted not because of his circumstances but because of his character and failings. I have never gambled, but I spend 5s (25p) a week on the pools, I don't daydream about getting a large win. If I did win a big sum it would make no difference to my way of living at all. I would invest it. It would simply enable me to live a little more comfortably than now - and of course, a man with £50,000 in his pocket can afford to risk expressing his opinions a little more forcibly to his employers.

...A young chap who joins the bank nowadays and finds the work boring after a year or two is not afraid of giving it up. He hasn't the loyalty, the fantastic loyalty,that the older bank officials have. A loyalty bred by their personal upbringing, by living through the depression, by handling a trustworthy job. A loyalty that for so many bank men now reaching their sixties has gone unrewarded.

Everything's amazing, nobody's happy

Ash Wednesday this year the Campaign for Real Ashes reached Stoke Poges, where I was delighted to rededicate St Andrews chapel, near the village centre. We all end up looking silly on Ash Wednesday — a reminder we are, in fact, silly, and not masters of the universe, and this is not the end of history. This is the paradox: we've never had as much amazing stuff, and never been as unfulfilled. If we can’t live by bread (and gadgets) alone, what are we going to live by, and what for? We need to reframe, suggests the outrageous Louis CK:

Advent thoughts from abroad

Great joy on Sunday, to confirm 40 new disciples of all ages in Wycombe and Stewkley. No full script, sorry, but this is what I was trying to say:
In India I met people who are really poor in world terms, and there's no arguing with the figures, but they treated us, freely, with lavish generosity and love. In the poorest homes I met bubbly smiling children, and parents strong in self-respect and family loyalty. Back home I meet people who have everything, but are so damn miserable, cynical, broken in their relationships, and lacking in confidence. So what's world development really about — economics, or relationships, or both? What benefit to grow material wealth in the majority world, if in the process people lose their roots, and community, and capacity to love? What point is there for anyone to have all the things we have, without the human and relational capacity to enjoy them?

They are driving a great four lane highway over 550km from the hi-tech hub of Bangalore to the hi-tech hub of Hyderabad. We drove for hours up an old road, broken and full of potholes, amidst all the paraphernalia of one of the greatest engineering enterprises on earth. Advent is a good time of year to do this! We could see the levels being raised, and whole hills being moved to make a straight highway up through the Deccan plain. Right now cities of a million people, like Kurnool, are barely dots on the map. That is going to change dramatically.
The hallmark of authentic Christianity isn't fine worship, feeling good, big buildings or sound doctrine. It's love that turns the world upside down. That's what they said of the Early Church. Our mission as disciples isn't to get bogged down in peripherals, but to build some kind of highway through every wasteland, economic or human. Somehow we have to find ways to connect material, personal and spiritual, so that people can flourish, and increasingly enjoy what Jesus came to bring, life to the full. We can change the world, like the anti slavers 200 years ago did. It’s what we’re for, and the only way we can find real happiness and a life worth living.

We didn't sing it on Sunday, but rattling for 16 hours up and down the H7 construction project, I did sometimes think of the great Advent hymn we used to sing at school — Visionary stuff in 1870, and closer now than when we first believed.

...he comes to reign with boundless sway,
and makes your wastes his great highway.

Lands of the East, awake,
soon shall your sons be free;
the sleep of ages break,
and rise to liberty.
On your far hills, long cold and gray,
has dawned the everlasting day.

Shout, while ye journey home;
songs be in every mouth;
lo, from the North we come,
from East, and West, and South.
city of God, the bond are free,
we come to live and reign in thee!

Santa says...

Give it a rest this year. At least this is what he was saying, in this very British Lord Kitchener incarnation I saw yesterday morning, sprayed onto a wall (tut tut) near a cash machine in Turl Street Oxford. This could be a good year to beware & think twice about what we're really doing. We'd all be happier if we went modest, and did less of the “Gadarene Swine down the shops” thing. The Canadian Mennonites are appealing to us all to rethink this one a bit. Adbusters tries to help people curb their spending habits and, surprise surprise, has real difficulty getting ads like this published:
This is worth pondering as we try to reclaim Christmas from the wreckage of the “holiday season.”

Punching your way out of suburban captivity

Really Provocative piece on Matt Ritchie's Missional living blog Running with the Lion, about being a Christian:

"The more I read the gospels; the more I try to understand what Jesus was really all about, the more he has the audacity to come into my life and totally screw it up.

He makes me think about every dollar I spend - who is benefitting from it and how?
He makes me reflect on the kind of car I drive and how it affects God’s creation.
He challenges me to make my children into risk-taking disciples, instead of neat, middle-class carbon copies of myself.
He asks me to go places where I am uncomfortable, and to invite people into my house when I’d much rather have a quiet night alone.
He intrudes on my free time and tells me to invest it in the things that matter to him.
He tells me that the politics that seemingly support my interests aren’t necessarily the ones that support his.

Far from being a cosmic Mr. Fix-it, Jesus is taking every priority and ambition that I ever held and - without so much as asking - turning it over like he did the tables in the temple."

I'm reminded of, I think it was Gandhi, saying he'd probably have been a Christian if he'd ever met one.

It's easy to settle for faith as a lifestyle accessory/convenience product — Christianity Lite — and then complain it doesn't work! Perhaps the times this happens aren't signs of Christianity's limitations, but a challenge to open up the full application!

Time for a Bonfire of the Vanities?

This is Neil Boorman.
His Other Bag is a Louis Vuitton.

For the past year he has been attempting to live a Brand-Free life in Modern Britain.

He says he realised he was suffering from "Compulsive Branding Disorder" when he noticed he was buying stuff like a drug, primarily to make him feel good, not because he needed it or even particularly wanted it for itself.

So he gave up buying branded goods for a year. It wasn't easy, and now he's written a book all about the experience. There's also a Website.

1. Is he mad, or are all the rest of us? Why/Why not?
   
   
2. What about Christian Worship and other "brands"? Is the Church becoming infected with consumerism, and do we all need a serious dose of "No Logo" medicine for the sake of our souls?
   At this year's Greenbelt, John Smith sounded a warning call to us all to think this through — Pop McWorship or the Real Thing? — a good but searching listen in the car, I've found.
   
   
3. PS — rescued from the comments below the fold — there's a really interesting discussion of logo/no logo issues in emerging church from P3T3RK3Y5 on Church marketing Lab (Beta).