A new spate of films stars not people but consumer products.
Your standard-issue Hollywood biopics foreground people caught in the wheels of history. We meet titans of industry, genius mathematicians, brave astronauts and dogged journalists. We hear stories of fearless, unyielding figures whose visions changed the world. Some, like presidents and generals, already know their own importance; others still think they’re ordinary. But the stories generally revolve around people and events, showing us how laws were changed, wars won, villains defeated.
Lately Hollywood has landed on an effective variant: Hey, remember this old thing?
This type of film is not new, precisely, but this spring is staggeringly replete with examples. “AIR,” directed by Ben Affleck, tells the story of Nike’s game-changing sponsorship deal with a rookie Michael Jordan and the world-conquering shoes that emerged from it. “Tetris” does the same for the titular video game, which farsighted 1980s capitalists managed to license from the Soviet state. “BlackBerry” offers a raucous, satirical history of the Canadian tech company whose cellphone went extinct. And then there’s “Flamin’ Hot,” a drama about the former Frito-Lay employee who claims — highly dubiously, according to Los Angeles Times reporting — to be the creator of the addictively spicy red-dusted Cheetos.
These movies are not about people or events that changed our scientific or political reality; they are interested in men (and yes, I do mean just men) who changed our consumer reality. The protagonists here are white-collar functionaries who carry leather briefcases to work. They are corporate middle managers and marketers and brand gurus. They scream into phones, scrutinize contracts and sift through webs of licenses and sublicenses. Their world isn’t always depicted as glamorous; “AIR” has Matt Damon don a fat suit to play a schlubby, basketball-obsessed divorcé. But these are stories in which businessmen are the heroes. They are the people who got the job done, if the job was selling millions upon millions of units to grow a major corporation’s market share.
Yet it’s not even right to say these brand-o-pics focus on the men. They are, above all, centered on the objects. Movies have told the stories of market-movers before, but Hollywood’s most recent biopics of Steve Jobs were not called “iPhone 1” and “iPhone 2.” Ray Kroc’s franchising of McDonald’s is dramatized in a movie called “The Founder,” not “Big Mac.” It’s in these new movies that the consumer product itself truly becomes the star around which human stories revolve.
Their cumulative mood is resolutely frothy: poppy 1980s bops, eight-bit graphics, white-collar sharks gnawing on the geeks. For any child of the era, this is yet another casual stroll down memory lane — one in which, yet again, memory lane is flanked by endless billboards of retro brands. The objects in these films, after all, are not just products; they signify a specific slice of a time, perhaps a specific type of childhood. Like all brands these days, they are signposts we use to navigate the world, orienting ourselves socially, signaling our identities.
They are interested in people who make the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more.
This experience of consumption is precisely what the films promise audiences. In both “BlackBerry” and “AIR,” the executives are consciously trying to tap into questions of consumer desire and identity. “AIR” could even be seen as an origin story for the very concept of brand-as-identity, an innovation it seems to admire. “BlackBerry,” shot in vérité style, is more sour on the idea. Glenn Howerton plays Jim Balsillie, depicted here as the raging id of the company, barking orders at his sales force: “You’re not salesmen anymore,” he says. “You’re male models. I want you at every country club, yacht club, tennis club. Wherever the elite go, you go!” The phone’s function is no longer the point. “When they ask you, don’t say, ‘It’s a phone that does email,’” he says. “It’s not a cellphone — it’s a status symbol.”
Writing in Playboy in early 2014, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek mused on our experience of brands and “the mysterious je ne sais quoi that makes Nike sneakers (or Starbucks coffee).” I don’t know whether Ben Affleck ever read that article, but there’s a strange level on which his film repeats, again and again, something Zizek imagined about Nike. If such a company were to outsource production to overseas contractors, design to design firms, advertising to ad agencies and distribution to retailers, what would be left? “Nike would be nothing ‘in itself,’” Zizek wrote. “Nothing other than the pure brand mark ‘Nike,’ an empty sign.” In “AIR,” it is Damon’s character — Sonny Vaccaro, a marketing executive — who finds a new answer. His radical idea is to commit the entire basketball budget to Jordan. Nike, he says, must tap into something deeper, to turn a shoe into a man and a man into a shoe. The vice president of marketing is puzzled: “You want to anthropomorphize a shoe?” The film leaves it to Jordan’s mother, played by Viola Davis, to underline how that’s done: “A shoe is just a shoe,” she says, “until my son steps into it.”
“BlackBerry” is caustic, while “AIR” is, ultimately, a feel-good celebration of the brand-identity revolution that changed sports forever. “Tetris” feels more confused. (We watch Henk Rogers become a millionaire by getting the Soviets to license some handheld-gaming rights, but whether Nintendo or someone else gets them feels more meaningful to Rogers than to consumers.) While watching each of the three films, though, I found myself thinking about the words etched on the backs of so many devices: “Designed by Apple in California/Assembled in China.” Each of these stories is interested in the inventors and innovators who create the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more. In “AIR,” the only real acknowledgment of this comes from that vice president of marketing, who expresses mild ambivalence about Nike’s factories in Taiwan and South Korea — a confusing gesture in a movie about a company that, in 1998, had its real-life chief executive lament that it had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.” This year, in Michigan, Times reporting found underage factory workers who said inhaling the dust from producing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos left their lungs stinging.
Feelings about this spring’s eruption of brand flicks have been mixed. In The Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan called this spate of product bios “great news,” expressing hope that “AIR” might open the door for more footwear-origin stories. (Why not Uggs or Birkenstocks?) In the opposite ideological corner, you’ll find Boots Riley, the leftist musician and filmmaker (“Sorry to Bother You”), arguing on Twitter that commodity flicks are Hollywood’s effort to “push back on radicalization of the working class.” It’s certainly possible that these movies expose something vapid about our consumer society — say, our readiness to attach our humanity to empty slogans or to praise “visionaries” whose vision isn’t about fighting injustice or reaching the stars but merely selling us tons of plastic.
Still: All these brand films, and all the reviews of them, seem to acknowledge the same point. The day-to-day texture of our lives, they suggest, may be dictated less by brave explorers or crusading lawyers and more by people with office jobs who make products and then make us want to buy them — people whose decisions shape our habits, our choices, our sense of ourselves. The part these films do not yet fully agree on is whether this fact is worth celebrating or deeply depressing.
Source photographs: Apple TV+; Amazon Studios; William West/AFP, via Getty Images.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
