Market

Market

Volume 38, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2010
Talia Schaffer, Victoria Pitts-Taylor
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

How can we sell you “Market”? How can we avoid selling you “Market”?

In a recent film by Derrick Borte, The Joneses, a high-powered quartet of salespeople posing as a family move into a suburban cul-de-sac. The Joneses perform everyday life as marketing, modeling their corporate-sponsor-provided golf clubs, sneakers, frozen foods, jewelry, and video games. Their identities consist of artfully combined commodities. And their friendships with their neighbors take the form of product emulation; friendship means encouraging others to buy the enviable watch.

What the film shows, in its exaggerated display of “stealth marketing,” is the extent to which daily life and relationships are mediated through advertising; the Joneses simply make explicit what all American neighborhoods experience to some extent. While “keeping up with the Joneses” literally destroys the neighbors, the Joneses themselves are more ambiguous. The film imagines that they can escape their sales-stratified world by embracing true love. At the same time, the last shot is of them driving away in a car that was part of the product placement. In a nod to The Graduate, the Joneses want to escape but have nowhere to go.