In the chapter named, The Evocative Power of Things by anthropologist and prolific blogger Grant McCracken in his book called Culture and Consumption, McCracken is concerned with the development of hopes and ideals that manifest themselves into displaced meanings which can take the form of consumer goods or actual locations in time and space (Pg. 104). A culture creates displaced meaning for its hopes and ideals in order to keep them safe from the harsh truths of reality as a way to lessen the gap between the “ideal” and “reality”. He looks at the power of these inanimate objects as physical manifestations or “bridges” to our hopes and ideals and what they can communicate in regard to our individual or cultural values …show more content…
and aspirations as well as what the possible repercussions of attaining these objects of displaced meanings are. McCracken then takes into account the certain implications that these displaced meanings have on the market place and their ability to renew our appetite for goods making us never truly satisfied as well as how businesses exploit these meanings in the advertisements of goods.
Most interestingly, displaced meanings as locations in time and space are often depicted by the mass media. One movie in particular called The Beach is an excellent example of what many in society hold to be their location of displaced meaning, their “paradise”, and what can happen when this ideal is attained. The movie The Beach (2000) with Leonardo di Caprio playing the protagonist named Richard, is about Richard’s, and his newly found friends in Bangkok, search for paradise on an island just the off coast of Thailand called The Beach and their experience in this so called paradise.
We meet Richard upon his arrival to Bangkok. From the start of the film it is easy to feel Richard’s dissatisfaction with the world around him and his yearning to find something “more”. He meets a man in his hotel, who seems to be homeless and mentally unstable, that shares with him information about “somewhere special”, “The perfect beach. Paradise.” He explains that no one else knows about it because it is completely hidden by the sea. It is later described in the movie by some other travelers as a “rural myth” also saying again that, “This beach is perfect.” Here we can see McCracken’s example of what the physical manifestation of much of society’s hopes and ideals into a location that all long for: paradise. When “paradise” is typed into Google images, there is an abundant amount of pictures of beaches, further testimony to this ideal state that has been produced by people and is heavily represented by mass media. As McCracken states, “societies tend to favor their structural opposites when seeking out new locations”. For many societies, the structural opposite is a beach or an island making The Beach the perfect representation of this theory.
After a long and arduous journey, the trio does find the beach they were looking for but it turns out it was not the paradise they had hoped for.
When they reach The Beach they are introduced to the mini society that has made their home there and the culture and rules they live by. They see that the society is so focused on maintaining their happiness they are even willing to exile an injured member just to get away from the negativity. Due to a series of unfortunate events the society is forced to leave their paradise and face the real world once again. It is here we can make a parallel to McCracken’s idea that, “The recovery of displaced meaning has brought tragedy and despair to virtually every culture…”(Pg.108). When Richard asks why the man who gave him the map left he was told, “Daffy left because he felt that in coming to paradise we had inevitably destroyed it.” A purist idea but inevitably true. As soon as the trio had reached their desired paradise, their dreams were eventually ruined by the truth of The Beach. Once one obtains what they thought they wanted and it no longer embodies the ideas and hopes they desired to be realized in this attainment, it destroys that location of displaced meaning, they can no longer say, “if I could just spend my days living on a beach, it would be paradise, then…” (Pg. 113). This is why McCracken states that the attainment of these ultimate representations of displaced meaning is dangerous. In coming to The Beach, the trio put their hopes and ideals “to empirical test”, bringing their fantasyland to the “here and now”, which failed to live up to their expectations
(Pg.112). I was able to find a lot of validity in my own life to the theories proposed by McCracken in society’s tendency to put a deeper meaning to goods or different locations in time and space making them able to communicate non-linguistically a lot about our inner hopes and ideals. I often find myself day dreaming about the day I will attain my masters degree so that it can take me to my dream career, which will ultimately help me achieve my desired lifestyle. In this way I have placed my hopes in the future so that I too can lessen the gap between the “real” and “ideal”. I also see how this is often done by marketers who like to find a common sought after ideal, like having a happy family, and putting that image into a commercial for a family SUV that will supposedly bring you and your family to that happy state.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Beach. Dir. Leonardo DiCaprio. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000. Film.