Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [38]
It’s a Gaming Ship: Consumption and Leisure
While for Marx bourgeois identity is primarily marked by one’s status as a member of a capital-owning class, within the world of the Bluths we see bourgeois identity in the practices of consumption and leisure. What the Bluths buy—expensive conditioner and diamond dust crème (Lindsay), furs and jewelry (Lucille), $5000 suits—C’mon! (George Sr. and later Gob)—as well as how they buy it (at expensive boutiques, the most exclusive hotels and restaurants)—are a means of making visible the wealth (or illusion of wealth) they have. Indeed, their consumption reveals a preoccupation with frivolity: the Bluths, in the words of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), are only interested in taking care of the luxuries and expect the necessities to take care of themselves.
The Bluths are masters at offering reasonable-sounding justifications for their unreasonable purchases. When George Sr. buys a hot tub for the attic, both for his aches and to provide a method for cooking dinner, he can’t fathom that this purchase might be a poor, short-sighted investment. Indeed, the attic didn’t turn out to be the “party hang-out” that he had envisioned.
The way the Bluths spend their time also identifies their class status. While daily work clutters our lives, the Bluths’ days are filled with leisure. Constant parties at Lucille’s townhouse that celebrate events not worth celebrating (“You’re killing me, buster”), Spring Breaking for weeks at a time (and referring to this time of year as “the holidays”), shopping sprees and fancy restaurants, all these things contribute to a life spent playing hard rather than working hard. Indeed, even the Bluths’ labor practices (what they do for work) look like leisure practices (what the rest of us do for play). Tobias’s acting career, Buster’s years as a graduate student and areas of study (cartography? Native American tribal ceremonies?), and Gob’s magic tricks (or rather, illusions) don’t really provide a wage or fulfill a social need. The Bluths engage in low-stakes, low-responsibility activity subsidized by the family’s considerable assets. To top it off, many times these activities are illegal (the family’s shoplifting in “Not Without My Daughter”), destructive (Gob blowing up the yacht in “Missing Kitty”), and immoral (just think of all the doves, rabbits, and chickens who have sacrificed their lives for Gob’s magic shows).
The Bluths’ relationship to real labor is equally troubling. During the Bluth Company’s crunch time on a new housing development, it comes to Michael’s attention that his mother and siblings have been receiving paychecks for years without doing any work for the company. To remedy this, Michael puts Lindsay in charge of the office and Buster and Gob on the construction site. The only family member who finds that he enjoys manual labor is Buster, and even then it’s because the process offers him a sense of novelty and whimsical camaraderie (“I love it here! And the language these guys use! Rough. One of these guys told me to take my head out of my bottom and get back to work. My bottom!”). Meanwhile, when Gob takes up the workers’ plight as his own and organizes a work stoppage, Lindsay retaliates by presenting Lupe’s family (who thought they were being taken on a vacation trip to Catalina) as scabs. Seeing the Bluths forced to work for the first time in their lives quickly turns into watching them do everything they can to avoid actually working. These shenanigans are the privilege of privilege: if the Bluths were working class—or even middle class—they wouldn’t have the choice of “opting out” of labor practices in the ways that they do. Indeed, if we think about who in the show actually