Consider the sudden appearance of a product called full-body deodorant on a store shelf near you. In the past couple of years, newer hygiene brands such as Lume and Mando, as well as legacy giants such as Secret, Dove, and Old Spice, have begun flooding television and social media with a blunt proposition: your armpits were the least of your problems.
The ads promised sticks, sprays, and creams that could combat odor everywhere, from “pits, privates, underboobs, and feet” to the chest and hands. Dermatologists were largely baffled. On both philosophical and practical levels, no, you do not need a full-body deodorant. If you bathe regularly, soap and water will serve you fine. But necessity, as consumer capitalism well understands, has almost nothing to do with it.
This is precisely the kind of moment that Ryan Andrej Lough’s documentary You Need This was made for. Produced by Adam McKay, Lough’s documentary, now streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple TV, traces the past and present of America’s century-long romance with capitalism and the psychic, social, and planetary wreckage it leaves in its wake. It’s “the worst thing to ever happen to our planet,” the film concludes.
What Lough captures particularly well is the roots of mass consumption in the unregulated post–World War II American economy. This system was built deliberately: corporate America, flush with wartime manufacturing capacity at a time when natural resources seemed infinite, turned its energies to persuading citizens that their happiness was inseparable from the next purchase. Some of the same propaganda-like techniques that had sold Liberty Bonds turned its energies toward persuading citizens that happiness was something you could buy one appliance, car, or cigarette at a time.
The desire for cigarettes plays a key role in what comes closest to a single human villain in You Need This. Enter Edward Bernays, the Vienna-born nephew of Sigmund Freud and the man widely credited with…
Auteur: Ryan Zickgraf
