![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
1. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, p. 25.
2. Baudrillard, Pour une Critique de l'Économie Politique du Signe, p. 164.
3. Munro, “Dark Comedy ‘Joneses’ Parodies Obsession With Stuff,” in The Fresno Bee (CA), para 1.
4. Cox, “Consumerism Triumphs in The Joneses,” in The Guardian, para 2.
5. I use this term in the same sense that the historian Lizabeth Cohen has used it (Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America).
6. Wachtel, “Q & A With Director of ‘The Joneses',” in Film Crusade, para 2.
7. It should be noted that the film was originally released in theaters on April 16, 2010.
8. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, p. 26. David Walker also notes that hyper-real fantasies endlessly transmitted by advertisers are metonymic in nature (Walker, “Du Détail au Totalitarisme: Variations sur le Commerce Conquérant chez Le Clézio,” in J.M.G. Le Clézio dans la Forêt des Paradoxes, pp. 111–124.
9. Cline, “Statues of Commodus-Death and Simulation in the Work of Jean Baudrillard,” in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, para 1.
10. The notion of a “purchaser citizen” has been in existence since the 1950s. See Steigerwald, “All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought,” in Journal of American History.
11. Baudrillard, Consumer Society, p. 32.
12. It becomes painfully apparent later in the film that Mick is gay when he tries to kiss Naomi's brother Tim, who reacts rather adversely to these advances. In fact, Tim violently attacks Mick in addition to insulting him with a tirade of homophobic slurs. Mick's true orientation is yet another example that nothing about this family is genuine at all. Given that he must maintain the hyper-real illusion that concretizes his public persona at all times, even Mick's body is not his own.
13. Røyrvik and Brodersen, “Real Virtuality: Power and Simulation in the Age of Neoliberal Crisis,” in Culture Unbound, p. 639.
14. Messier, “Consumerism After Theory: Globalization and the End of Transnational Discourse in Néstor García Canclini's Cultural Empiricism,” in ATENEA, p. 25.
15. My insertion.
16. Kellner, “Baudrillard, Semiurgy and Death,” in Theory, Culture & Society, p. 129.
17. Baudrillard, Pour une Critique de l'Economie Politique du Signe, p. 87l ; translation is my own.
18. Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 165.
19. Baudrillard, Consumer Society, p. 46.
20. Kellner, Baudrillard, Semiurgy, p. 128.
21. Maddox, “Au-Delà des Frontières: Société de Consommation et Ecriture Migrante dans Un Petit pas pour l'Homme de Stéphane Dompierre,” in Revue Voix Plurielles, p. 91; translation is my own.
22. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, p. 14.
23. As Baudrillard explains in Pour une Critique, “ce qui caractérise les media de masse, c'est qu'ils sont anti-médiateurs, intransitifs, qu'ils fabriquent de la non-communication-si on accepte de définir la communication comme un échange” [what characterizes the mass media is that they are intransitive anti-mediators who fabricate non-communication if we accept the definition of communication as an exchange], p. 208; translation is my own.
24. Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 81.
25. Ibid., p, 83.
26. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, p. 145.
27. A later section of this essay will briefly probe the nuances of this tragic character.
28. Crawford, “Selling Modernity: Advertising and the Construction of the Cultureof Consumption in Australia,” in Antipodean Modern (ACH), p.115.
29. I am using this term rather intentionally given that Baudrillard often posits that the modern subject lives in a “post-God” culture where traditional religious rituals no longer have any meaning. Baudrillard asserts that even people who claim to be devoutly religious are deceiving themselves because their real religion is the ideology of consumption. Although many individuals still pretend to profess their faith in a certain religion, Baudrillard affirms that everyone has internalized commercial codes to such an alarming extent that the only religion left is the unending pursuit of meaning and happiness via the accumulation of signs. The philosopher's ideas related to this so-called post-God culture offer a possible explanation for the unfathomable rapprochement between the biblical figure of Jesus who incessantly decried excessive consumption and the neoliberal capitalist way of life. See Barron, “Living with the Virtual: Baudrillard, Integral Reality, and Second Life,” in Cultural Politics.
30. Flood and Bamford, “Manipulation, Simulation, Stimulation: The Role of Art Education in the Digital Age,” in International Journal of Education Through Art, p. 92.
31. Chengbing, “Consumer Culture and the Crisis of Identity,” Journal of Value Inquiry, p. 295.
32. Baudrillard, Consumer Society, p. 50, p. 97.
33. Ibid., p. 103.
34. Ibid., pp. 90–91.
35. For a more comprehensive discussion of this phenomenon that transcends the pragmatic limitations of this study, see Moser, “The Ubiquity of the Simulated Object That Has Consumed the Modern Subject: The Problematic Search for Happiness and Identity in a Globalized, Hyper-Real World,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.
36. Nia, and Baghbaderani, “Consumer Culture in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie,” in Studies in Literature and Language, p. 53.
37. Baudrillard, Consumer Society, p. 29.
38. Ibid., p. 33.
39. See Duncan, “After Happiness.” Journal of Political Ideologies.
40. Gerry Coulter explains that Baudrillard often posits that “all systems create the conditions of their own demise” (Coulter, Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert, or the Poetics of Radicality, p. 1.
41. Cherrier and Murray, The Sociology of Consumption: The Hidden Facet of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, p. 520.