Everyone wants to be The Joneses

In this blog post I will be talking about conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure in the movie, “The Joneses”. In this movie a self-marketing unit working on increasing the revenue of other companies hires a fake family to promote for their products. The Joneses, who are living the American Dream, come to this neighborhood with the company’s products, fancy cars, clothe. They have to live in a fancy house and get the job of making others want the products they have done. Throughout the movie, we see conspicuous consumption appear when The Joneses wear and use purchases such as phones, jewelry, food, ect, making people around them impressed.



From the readings and especially the movie we watched previously, “Six Degrees Of Separation”, we always see how highbrow culture consumers tend to sell their life style to people of lowbrow culture. Yet, in this movie, we see fake, high social class family trying to sell their lifestyle to their upper class neighbors. “If people want you, they want what you’ve got”, and according to that The Joneses manage to be the most popular and wanted people in the town by making connections with store owners, throwing parties and making friends, impressing them with the things they own and make them want to own those things as well.



The increases in revenues of these companies are measured by numbers, calculations and graphs. Each member of the fake family is asked to get the highest numbers possible. The fake family did not display class and status through the things they have, yet, they also practiced high-culture pastimes as we see the man of the fake family playing golf, and play classical music.



In short, the movie, “The Joneses” shows us how people of highbrow cultures live, and the effect they can have on each others’ decisions. As known such movies are pointed to people of lowbrow culture, but in real life such life style affect people of highbrow culture too.