Flying from Sydney to London offers lots of opportunities for watching in-flight movies (over and over again): so here's a film I wouldn't otherwise have watched...
[mild spoilers apply: don't read on if you're easily upset about learning movie plots before seeing the movie; having said that, I'm not really giving all that much away]
The Jones are a model family: we first meet them moving into an idyllic community and getting to know their neighbours. All seems a little too good for a while: but we quickly learn that this veneer is not all it seems: the Jones are actually unrelated to each other; they are a 'family' manufactured by a marketing company in order to promote products to their unsuspecting neighbours. They work by product placement, by encouraging others to push their products, through exquisite parties, through always having the latest and best stuff.
Here, then, is a 'family' at the apogee of consumerism: driven by nothing whatsoever except conspicuous consumption designed to engineer jealousy - and sales. All goes well for a while, then tensions mount
and, as befits a black comedy, the consequences spiral out of control. Tragic events lead some of the characters to reconsider what's important in life - without really concluding that consumption is of itself problematic - as befits a Holywood movie.
The plain 'message' is thought-provoking enough, though falling short of any sort of call to radical action. The mischevious thought that occurs to me, though, relates to the similarities we might see between the Jones's lifestyle marketing, and what some have called lifestyle evangelism. The Jones become apparent friends with many, look out for people of power and influence, and hold memorable parties with the intention of showing off all that's glitzy and expensive in their marketer-designed home.
That really doesn't sound so different to some 'evangelism strategies' we might encounter. Ok, churches don't go to the lengths of manufacturing fake families to achieve this (why bother, when you can be in the business of helping create the real thing), and would indeed eschew falsehood. Well, officially false testimony is out of the question, but there are all kinds of things which tread that line pretty close: whether friendships purely made with ulterior motives, or a variety of 'bait and switch' techniques like 'questionnaire evangelism'.
The Joneses are living the dream - till 'Mr Jones', at least, wakes up from it. May we live the truth, instead.
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