Vol. II: Consumerism vs. Freedom

Look around you. You’re surrounded by items that you’ve purchased because you feel like you’ve been told you need them to be happy, beautiful, or complete. Whether you realize it or not, every day you are fed content that encourages you to purchase the nicest items: items that you’re told will help you fit in, make you seem desirable, or fill some void. However, if we’re being fed this ad material and messages that make it seem like we need these material objects in our lives, how much freedom do we actually have when it comes to what we consume and purchase?

Fight Club perfectly carries and exemplifies this message.

What furniture set defines me? We walk through life trying to figure out what material objects can define us and express our individuality, but the irony in that is the fact that everyone ends up buying the same mass-produced items, taking away our “freedom” of expression. Additionally, we subconsciously ingest all of these mass advertisements, making Norton’s character’s struggle with insomnia the symbol for this dissociative reception of media. He literally cannot rest because of the void within him, a void he thinks will only be filled once he’s completed his quest via buying. The accessibility of methods to buy is so high that we constantly fall into the impulses, and as it’s exemplified in the clip, we see the world in “cornflower” blue ties and mass corporation logos and coffee isn’t just coffee anymore, it’s a fancy branded latte. Whether we realize it or not, our freedom to choose what we buy is taken away when we’re surrounded by the same catalogs and brands day after day. It’s a mechanized and pre-programmed funk.

When the man’s apartment blows up, it symbolizes the destruction of his identity. Everything that “defines” him is gone; the damage is irreparable. The empty fridge also demonstrates that no matter how much stuff he owned, he was lonely. No matter how many things he bought, it never fulfilled his lack of human connection and contact. So, purchasing every replaceable object under the sun does not free us from our emotions, it just dulls them for a period of time, but they can disappear in an instant, really giving you clarity on life.

Norton’s character even admits that he saw his collection of material possessions as indicators of his quality of life. His couch, stereo, and wardrobe show that he was so close to being an “adult.” Being respectable, in his eyes, only comes with physical markers. However, Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, has the right idea about these possessions. We don’t live in simplicity and survival mode like our ancestors' past: we live to consume. It’s not murderers or crime or indecency that are going to destroy our society, but the magazines and celebrities that we try to model ourselves after. There’s no such thing as genuine perfection like that displayed in the media, so we need to stop striving for it. Legitimate wholeness doesn’t exist. It’s all mental. We consume things to represent and stress our individuality, but it actually only traps us more within the consumerism cycle. This unattainable goal that we all have as people takes away our ability to live freely, so we must be aware of what we’re doing so, as Tyler says, the things we own don’t end up owning us. 

Another example of consumerism and its consequences regarding one’s freedom is exemplified in the film A Scanner Darkly, a 2006 animated film directed by Richard Linklater starring Keanu Reeves as Robert Arctor, a narcotics cop in CA. Arctor becomes an addict when he is forced to go undercover for his job, muddying his moral waters. 

Reeves wears a suit that masks his identity and makes his undercover job an easier task. However, it’s also a small example as to how his job to fight illegal consumption strips him of his freedom to represent himself. The voice in Reeve’s ear tells him what he should say about Substance D, the harmful drug in the film, in order for society to approve of the way the government is cracking down on it. Reeve’s character has other ideas. He sees the addiction to drugs and their rising rates as a reflection of the government controlling too much of society’s decisions. Like the compulsion to purchase Ikea furniture and name brand items in Fight Club, drugs are a means of rebellion and individualistic expression in A Scanner Darkly. We consume to try and break free, but the consequences ironically lead to imprisonment, which is a total removal of liberties and freedom. Therefore, is it in the government’s best interest to allow everything to be available at our disposal, so as not to make the people want to rebel and resent?

This final scene in the film is the one I find most critical and the one that perfectly encapsulates its message. For some context, Reeve’s character is found to be an addict by his employers and sent to a Substance D rehab facility to do general labor and “recover.” However, when Reeves is in the corn field, all he sees on the ground is Substance D (those little blue flowers). After his interaction with the boss of the facility, it’s clear that Reeves has been given hallucinogens that conceal the reality of the “death rising from the Earth” before him. The complete irony behind it all is that these addicts go to rehab and work to harvest the very drugs that put them there in the first place. It goes to show that in some cases, consumerism (something we have the freedom to do) can end up stripping us of those freedoms. We are controlled by the mass market companies that produce goods, we unknowingly work for them and are just cogs in their machines.

Speaking of Keanu Reeves and technological consumption’s control over our world, The Matrix, a 1999 sci-fi/action film directed by Lana and Lily Wachowski, illustrates what happens when we relinquish our freedom to the technology and electronic devices around us — devices that we’ve created as people to consume, but ones that ironically remove our freedoms once A.I. gets the better of us. 

Morpheus (Fishburne) grants Neo (Reeves) with the power to continue his life as is in the Matrix, the computer-generated system which all of humanity is blissfully unaware of being connected to, or to free his mind and join the real world, even if it isn’t as glamorous. 

We’ve allowed this technology to consume us, to take us over, taking away any legitimate freedom we have. Just because the chemical reactions that the Matrix experiences plant in our brain feel real doesn’t mean that they are real. It’s as easy as being in a dream, but it isn’t real. Different from the conscious awareness of consumption that is faced in Fight Club, Neo and the people in the Matrix are trapped in a product that they didn’t want to buy, nor are they aware of buying in the first place. Morpheus’ pills grant Neo the one “truthful” decision that he’s ever really been able to make, or, if you will, “consume.”

Here, Morpheus brings Neo to the “construct,” a blank slate that comes before code is placed in the mind. It demonstrates the ease with which technology can blindside us, fool us, give us a false sense of security. Like Morpheus says, it blurs the line between what’s real and what we may perceive to be real. It takes away the freedom to genuinely be aware and make decisions. In the Matrix, you can’t choose to live in ignorance and go against the consumption of programs --- it’s thrust upon you whether you like it or not, so what do you really have the freedom to do?

You only have the freedom to train your mind in an attempt to become more self-aware. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden essentially “unplugs” himself by realizing that every piece of media is geared to make us feel like we need materialistic things to fill a void; as a result, he denounces everything of that sort. In a similar vein, Neo must unplug himself from the Matrix system and take Morpheus’ pill to live freely. While it means that he doesn’t get to live in a false sense of security anymore, at least Neo is guaranteed that every decision he makes from here on out is his and his alone. He made sacrifices to obtain that freedom, but he has the benefit of knowing that everything he “consumes” around him is real and not a string of computer code. 

How do consumerism and freedom link in our lives?

While Fight Club portrays a pretty realistic view of how material items can own us, The Matrix’s futuristic idea of technology and A.I. taking over the world isn’t too far-fetched either. The bigger our dependence on consumerism and random goods becomes, the more freedom we have to lose. What we buy and create begins to own us in a variety of ways, from furniture to drugs to computers. Since we’re imperfect beings and driven by the urge to buy the newest, shiniest commodity, we are making ourselves more susceptible to being owned and controlled by the ads and media around us. Be careful what you decide to consume: monetarily, physically, or mentally. They can all target freedom in the long run.