Consumerism

We, as a society today, have fallen victim to the belief that we cannot survive without material possessions. We believe that purchasing these goods and services, whether we even need them or not, will bring us joy and help us become the person we wish to become. The poem ‘Enter Without So Much As Knocking ‘and the movie ‘Fight Club’ criticize what we have become; a society built on a foundation of consumerism. In the movie Fight Club, the narrator states that "Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need." Fight Club, shows how consumerism has weakened the modern male and tells the story of freedom from a society controlled by corporations. Throughout the film, there are many examples of this; Ed Norton's character has no name; he is only referred to as the 90's everyman and the IKEA man, when looking through an IKEA catalogue he asks, "What kind of plates define me as a person." He not asking what personal characteristics and attributes define him but which possession does. Whether we admit to it or not, consumerism controls each aspect of our lives. Materialism goes hand in hand with consumerism. Advertising possesses us to believe that physical possessions equal the highest level of life. In the poem ‘enter with out so much as knocking’ the first thing that the child hears is not a loving mother, but the voice of Bobby. Dawe pretty much tries to sell the child his life by using ‘well-equipped smoothly-run…economy-size’ : which are all commonly used in advertising. A series of imperatives show how controlled each person’s life is; WALK. DON'T WALK. TURN LEFT NO PARKING. Dawe uses these imperatives to show the boy has no freedom to grow into his own person. Colloquialism is used extensively throughout the poem. As he grows throughout the poem, he becomes just like ‘every other godless money-hungry back-stabbing miserable so-and-so’ and has to face the ‘real’ world. He has to be ‘Number One every time’ which is a colloquial expression that means he has to worry about himself before he worries about anybody else. The poem ends with his death.