Citadels of Commerce Taking Center Stage
The film world’s budding superstar has a great rack.
Lots and lots of racks, actually. And shelves. Acres and acres of shelves.
The film world’s emerging star is the superstore, the hangar-size apotheosis of American abundance; the high temple of consumerism, avarice, instant gratification; the appealing but benighted notion that it is actually possible in some corners of life to get “more for less.”
The superstore is supremely photogenic. There is no such thing as a bad angle amid the orderly shelves of shiny, colorful merchandise packaged for maximum eye appeal. The clinically bright lighting leaves no discomfiting shadows, no disturbingly darkened recesses. The Muzak oozing from the sound system is, with apologies to Karl Marx, an opiate of the masses.
The superstore steals the show in Mark Romanek’s feature film “One Hour Photo” and nearly manages a similar trick in Miguel Arteta’s “The Good Girl,” albeit on a more restrained scale.
Romanek, who cut his teeth on Nine Inch Nails and Madonna music videos before writing and directing “One Hour Photo,” cannot get enough of the sterile expanses of the SavMart where the film’s protagonist, Robin Williams’ Sy the Photo Guy, processes pictures.
In “The Good Girl,” Arteta’s Retail Rodeo, a dated small-town shopper’s paradise, functions as the visual manifestation of the boredom in the life of Jennifer Aniston’s restless housewife, Justine Last.
In both pictures, the superstore is a paradox. The stores are crammed full of merchandise--toys and computer supplies and makeup and sunglasses--but they constitute visual metaphors for absolute emptiness.
Sy’s life is so howlingly void that he fills up his head and his fantasy life with scenes from the lives of others, in particular the snapshots of the Yorkin family, whose film he develops. Aniston’s bored Justine is looking for a “last best chance.” She needs a nameless something, a wind of change (in the awkward metaphor used in Mike White’s otherwise delicious script). Justine needs an “unlived life” that has nothing to do with what’s available at the cosmetics counter or in the aisle of household cleaning products.
At Salon.com, Charles Taylor suggests that Romanek’s “One Hour Photo” “wants to show that Americans are living in a zombified wasteland of consumer-generated fantasies because they have no identity of their own.”
The film doesn’t quite make the case, but Romanek’s strikingly photographed superstore has drawn comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s space station in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
The superstore has not always been cast in unflattering roles.
In the 2000 movie “Where the Heart Is,” a WalMart becomes a home away from home for a pregnant young woman (Natalie Portman) who has been abandoned by her boyfriend. Portman’s noble but poor Novalee Nation manages to live in the store, where she keeps precise accounts of all the merchandise she borrows so she can pay for it later. She gives birth there.
The superstore hosts another hideaway in 1991’s “Career Opportunities.” Frank Whaley’s Jim Dodge is hired as night watchman. After he discovers Jennifer Connelly’s rich girl, Josie, accidentally locked inside, the pair turn the place into a kind of play land. It’s a “Home Alone” scenario (also scripted by John Hughes) with a Target store standing in for the home.
The superstore, be it a wonderment or a wasteland, has all the makings of a serious superstar. In every performance, it is everything that is right and wrong with American life.
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Deborah Hornblow is a staff writer for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.
