Betrayed by Consumerism
I went to Borders yesterday and bought a DVD. I took it home, planning to watch it. I spent the usual 15 minutes struggling with the absurd multi-layered, hermetic packaging system that has somehow been instituted for CDs and DVDs. This combines the worst qualities of the packaging of medical waste and high-quality shirts. Like medical waste, the DVD is sealed inside several layers of plastic, some of which are thin enough to be almost invisible yet tough enough to be difficult to cut. Like expensive shirts, and there are secondary seals in all kinds of unlikely places (sometimes even under other seals) so just when you think you’ve got the damn thing unwrapped you find another piece of sticky plastic that needs to be removed. (And remember, don’t try using a key or an x-acto knife because you’ll tear the permanent layer of plastic on the DVD case.)
Finally all the packaging was in a semi-invisible pile on the table. I prepared myself to deal with the next bit of crap industrial design, the circular piece of recessed plastic with the ‘Push Here’ button in the middle. This never works properly and you are forced to prise the DVD up from its edge, wondering all the while if it’s going to snap in half before it pops out of the holder.
I opened the case and—to my horror—found nothing inside. There was a little booklet, I suppose, but there was no DVD. Has this ever happened to anyone else? I wonder whether they’ll even believe me when I bring it back this afternoon. A brand new, fully shrink-wrapped and sealed DVD case turns out to have no actual DVD inside. Can you imagine the fun that French cultural theorists could have with an event like this? E.g., Baudrillard:
The DVD is a simulacrum of the movie, which in turn is a simulacrum of the real. Yet here is a new phase in postcapitalist hypersignification, the fourth-order representation of reality where the signifying link has been broken. The simulation seduces but its outcome is not the doubling of representation but rather the natural tendency of hypercapitalism to eliminate the very possibility of representation.
Or maybe Lacan:
In the empty DVD, we see the externalization of the negation of the desire for wholeness. The desired-for fusion with the world that consumption represents is here inverted and its reality is brutally reversed as the hole in the self becomes the emptiness in the box. Jouissance is directly rather than subliminally denied as desire is focused on its tangible absence and not simply, as it always is, on its intangible presence. The chain of signifiers is broken at its strongest link.
Actually, I think I agree with Lacan. The central bargain of consumer society is that the feeling that one’s life is meaningless can temporarily be alleviated by buying things. It’s me who’s supposed to be empty inside, dammit, not the DVD.
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