In Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil, people give Christmas presents to one another all year long. There is even a group called "Consumers for Christ." The point is obvious: In an advanced industrialized capitalist economy, people must buy in order for the profit engine to run. What better way to do this than by uniting religion with consumption? (Which is not far from some of the practices used by churches today.)
But I think Gilliam has a fair subtler point to make. In the kind of society he portrayed (not one far from our own) consuming erases irrevocably the line between desire and addiction. Or, to put it more bluntly, people have to be made commodity junkies to keep the status quo intact. And I saw his thesis carried out in a very startling way in my nephew Christopher, age 6.
Christopher has an addiction to toys. The source of his addiction can be easily identified: grandparents (and a few other culpable adults). Christmas only worsens the addiction. For the month of splurging after Thanksgiving he has very little on his mind other than what people are going to get for him. At our Thanksgiving dinner he asked me at least three times whether I had done my Christmas shopping for him. Everyone at the table thought it cute; I was worried by his single-mindedness.
On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day itself he exhibited what I can only call symptoms of both overdose and withdrawal: the pure "need" for toys beyond any particular desire for any particular toy; his frantic bustling from gift to gift, never really seeing what he was getting; his inability to concentrate; his mourning that there was no more of the "substance"; his jitters and depression.
The "symptoms" wore off fairly rapidly; after all, it was toys, not cocaine. But I've seen this same intemperate activity every year. He seemed as interested in acquisition as what was being acquired, and he seemed incapable of satisfying himself with what he got. In fact, the only kind of satisfaction I could see him getting was the kind a glutton gets: from quantity, not essence. In other words, he doesn't know how to satisfy himself, only how to "ask for" and "get," which are not the same things at all. And because what he gets does not satisfy for very long, he must get more.
I feel sorry for Christopher because he's been set up. Everyone moans about how rude and antic he is, yet they're right there feeding him, making sure he will never be as well-behaved as they think he should -- a classic double-bind. The roots of various kinds of addictions and neuroses begin with such gift- giving, at least in our society. Gilliam is frighteningly close.
Suck
Anne And Leo