On Pecuniary Emulation, Product Placement, and Film

I've just seen the 2009 film The Joneses, about a marketing company that employs groups of people to act as families in order to sell everything they own, eat, and do to their well-off neighbors. The idea is nothing new, of course: I've just been re-reading The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, who in 1899 wrote that "the currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of a favourable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to futility... coalesces with the incentive of emulation." I can almost imagine that the characters read Veblen as part of their training (which would have been nice to see in the film, perhaps).

The title of the film itself is, of course, a nod to the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses," and in some ways it does critique a society which seems to prize possessions above all else, and the costlier, the more prized. The movie does take a tragic turn as a direct result of this "pecuniary emulation" (to coin Veblen again), and certainly the satire does, at times, come through to the viewer. However, at least as much as The Joneses tried to satirize a love for things over human relationships, it also actually attempted to sell us the products supposedly being critiqued. At one point in the film, David Duchovny's "son" says "doesn't it bother you that we're lying to them?" and Duchovny replies with "I'm not lying, I LOVE this car!" The movie is ultimately little more than one big advertisement for Audi, Ethan Allen, HTC, and dozens of other products the "Joneses" are very happily consuming and selling. It seems to me that a satire would be better served by use of products that don't actually exist in real life, and that this movie is at least as insidious as its characters by pretending to make fun of what it is actually trying to sell to its viewers. I felt slight outrage (while secretly wanting an Audi for myself), and my only consolation in all of this is that the film made far less at the box office than it cost to produce.