MovieChat Forums > The Fever (2005) Discussion > The value of the coat

The value of the coat

posted 15 years ago by ducdebrabant
2 replies | jump to latest

It was interesting to hear Redgrave's voiceover and summation of Marx's view on "the fetishization of commodities." It was (for those who don't remember) that the true value of a commodity is determined by the relationships between the various producers of the commodity, and therefore that the person paying the price is entering that relationship -- whereas the consumer believes that the price is a real thing -- a quality, if you will -- about the garment, and that the garment has a "soul" (an intrinsic worth). The attribution of a soul to a favorite coat, then, he calls fetishization.

Yeah? So what? The unspoken premise is that the fetishization of commodities is a stupid thing for mortals to do. Is it? If you adopt an orphaned baby (surely not a "commodity") from a war zone, about whose history you and the orphanage know next to nothing, you are not entering into a relationship with that child's history, her country, the language of her homeland. You don't know them. You simply start all over, loving and parenting the child.

How can you be in a relationship with a garment's producer, unless you actually choose to investigate the history of the garment? Must you? In the present, the value of the garment is determined more by you -- by your willingness to pay the price of it, and your ability to do so. The relationship between you and the garment determines its value in the present, just as the relationship between you and the adopted child is determined in the present. Do you bond with the child? Do you bond with the coat? If so, you and the coat are starting over, and the past may matter to you (especially if it's a vintage coat) but it need not.

Marx may have thought he was no imperialist, but he went to anthropology and found an analogy supposedly to "primitive" culture in order to ridicule capitalism. But looking down on fetishism is a reflexive modern western habit. If we fetishize our coats, it may not be because we are living in a capitalist delusion but because our modern western delusions have more in common with those of less "sophisticated" societies than we always admit. Perhaps we are destined to fetishize, as part of our human nature. Did Marx fetishize nothing? A book? The reading room of the British Museum? His beard?

May one really not occupy a private space with a garment, without the intrusion of the hypothetical textile worker? May we not give it the value we choose (which may or may not be the price we paid for it)? Who has not said "it wasn't worth the money," or "I simply stole it at that price"? the value of the coat to us will have nothing at all to do with those who made it, if we decide it's completely impractical, impossible to clean, unflattering, and we don't know what the hell we were thinking. Far from taking the price as an intrinsic quality of the garment's soul, and a determinant of the value, we are negating the value entirely. To us it now has no value, to hell with what it cost the sheep farmer to raise the wool.

A human who finds a coat he likes and assimilates it to his lifestyle, who sacrifices a certain sum to possess it, who has a relationship with its softness, its warmth, its style, with how flattering it is in the mirror -- may indeed fetishize that coat, considering it a friend, just as a child will do with a mass-produced doll. Man plays. Man enters into his world imaginatively. Man fantasizes, man daydreams, man anthropomorphizes. Man constructs metaphors. The part of us that in some of us yields the artist rather than the philosopher or historian or economist understands all this.

In the film, Redgrave read that section of CAPITAL and could no longer pass a display of watches without pondering their industrial history. That's all well and good. But it isn't stupid to disregard all that. If you prefer a Rolex to a Cartier (the size, the heft, appeal to you), if you like white gold more than steel, if a particular Rolex seems to call to you -- its design is intriguing and in mysterious agreement with your own taste -- then you will take that watch from the display case with much the same pleasure that you take a puppy from a petshop window. If you pay enough for it that you measure it by the number of time it took you to earn the money, and by whatever you sacrificed to possess it, and if it makes you feel wealthy or privileged or naughty to own it -- then why must its value be seen coldly as the sum of the labor of the gold miners or the watchmakers?

Is it evil to fetishize a wooden idol? I don't think so. Is it stupid? Maybe, but harmlessly. Most of us who fetishize (in Marx's view) a commodity aren't evil either. Or stupid. We're just peopling our inner world with spiritual values, and making them adhere to objects.

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Bipartisanship doesn't mean the losers get half.

[–] lor_ 14 years ago

I enjoyed your thoughtful discussion of the Marxist notion. Coincidentally (especially after reading IMDb comments in recent years), I have concocted my own theory about the fetishism of movie appreciation!

When I was a film critic, a couple of decades back, I was always mystified by the rabid fanbase for kung fu/martial arts movies, the sameness of which made reviewing them rather difficult. Similarly, at all ends of the movie spectrum, from film buffs, to film festival devotees, to my critical colleagues, right down to the average fan, it was always interesting to see how not-so-obvious elements of a film were the key to its popularity (or generating hate-feelings) among different audience segments.

Eventually I have concluded that fans, whether high-brow, middle-brow, low-brow or even no-brow, actively fetishize the elements of a film, especially within a given genre. For pornography this is so obvious that porn videos (or I guess website material for downloading in the modern age) is carefully categorized as if by some porn-Tarantino Wizard of Oz, under convenient fetish headings to guide the would-be fan to his or her preference: B&D, S&M, Gay, Lesbian, Straight, Latex, Spanking, ATM, Interracial, etc., etc. IMDb contributes to this nonsense by classifying 1000-plus softcore videos featuring women being tied up and tortured under the Genre heading of "Adventure"!! (They aren't conventional porn, so don't qualify for the Adult rubric.)

For more mainstream cinema, I think the same underlying impulse is at work. There are the gorehounds, utterly (& inexplicably) fascinated by any sort of ridiculous makeup effect, beginning with Herschel Gordon Lewis right through the bloodletting of recent decades. The fanboys are caught up with CGI and now its culmination post SKY CAPTAIN with AVATAR and the re-launch of 3-D. What we used to call the arthouse crowd is transfixed on minimalist cinema involving landscapes (Angelopoulos, Jarmusch and dozens of other auteurs), while film festival directors/programmers and their sheep-like followers have enshrined chaos theory to endless regurgitation, beginning with the masterworks of Kieslowski and degenerating into not just Tarantino (PULP FICTION) and CRASH but dozens of derivative movies and tv shows (LOST) built around outlandish coincidences.

Taking Italian Cinema as a poster child, it is fascinating how the masterworks from Italy, often unclassifiable in the first place (as witness the seriousness of many Italian "comedies", especially the grotesque vintage work of Lina Wertmuller or Pietro Germi) have mainly been forgotten, but every last violent thriller (cobbled together foolishly under the "giallo" heading) has a following, along with crazed fan bases for '70s cop/action films, '60s Spaghetti Westerns and even the porn of Joe D'Amato and crossing national boundaries Jess Franco. I always watched a vast cross-section of Italian movies as they were released, and never dreamt that someday the films would be neatly segmented into such nonsensical cubbyholes as "Nunsploitation", "Nazisploitation", "WIP", etc. by idiotic future fans, clearly worshiping various fetishes. REAL non-genre movies, that aren't amenable to such coarse tagging, have apparently no residual interest whatsoever. The analogous fetishism in Japanese cinema is obvious, too, as is the discarding of moving but NON-genre films from the '50s and '60s like DOWNTOWN or the work of artists like Kei Kumai and Shiro Toyoda. Subtlety is completely lost on today's buffs, who know anime and hentai crap by heart but have never been exposed to essential cinema masters like Ozu, Mizoguchi, et al.

The old notions of story values, characterization, picture sense, or cinematic "art" in any form has given way to fetishism. Harmless enough, but so childish.

"Three quarters of what is said here can be completely discounted as the raving of imbeciles" - Donald Wolfit in Blood of the Vampire (1958)

[–] EmmaPopell 9 years ago

WoW. These two entries are perhaps the most interesting ones I have ever read on this website. Like chunky delicious candy for my brain, reading the meaning of both your opinions. Thanks!! You both give me very much to ponder.

...and this: "The old notions of story values, characterization, picture sense, or cinematic "art" in any form has given way to fetishism. Harmless enough, but so childish."
from lor_ may very well explain to myself, finally, why all the old movies I love are still better than the new ones. Just wonderful feeling, reading these rich chunky (and correct, imho) thoughts of both of yours!

With our thoughts, we make our World.