What american beauty illustrates, with extraordinary clarity, is that rebelling against mass society is not the same thing as rebelling against consumer society. Through his rebellion, Lester goes from being right-angle square to dead cool. This is reflected in his consumption choices. Apart from the new car, he develops a taste for very expensive marijuana—$2,000 an ounce, we are told, and very good. “This is all I ever smoke,” his teenaged dealer assures him. Welcome to the club, where admission is restricted to clients with the most discriminating taste. How is this any different from Frasier and Niles at their wine club?

What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).

The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”

UPDATE: CapLion takes firm exception to the article's attitude toward SUVs and other luxury items. It's clear that the author is no great fan of conspicuous consumption, but I'm not convinced he's agitating for an end to bourgeois commercial culture. His explanation of the capitalist model is without antagonism. It's more a sort of weary indulgence, coupled with an energetic defense against a common misunderstanding of what capitalism requires. True, I'm not sure what to make of that business at the end about legislating away advertising-spawned brand fetishes. But I still think the article fires home some fine points about those who think themselves superior to the "masses" for having bought into the prepackaged and branded rejection of branding.

Just because you're an academic without a consistent point doesn't make you a commie; neither does being a ne'er-do-well intoxicated world-traveling artiste mean you're incapable of gleaning a culture for yourself from the branded mainstream. See this awesome interview with Tony Millionaire of Maakies fame for an illustration of what I mean: a hippie who doesn't get why his interviewer thinks he should be contrite for weeping over Family Circus or having had a hand in Reagan bombing Libya.

(Seriously. Go read it. And read the strip, too, if you like crude scatological comic strips straight out of the 30s featuring absolutely exquisite pen-and-ink background art of pirate ships and flower gardens. I don't understand it at all, but I know what I hate... and I don't hate this.)