I’m an unabashed The State universe fanboy, so it makes sense that I’d disagree with David Wain’s 2012 film Wanderlust having a 59 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I could write about how everything Wain does is good, but I’ll save that for another time. For now, I bring up the Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd romcom because there’s this whole part in it I think about a lot where Aniston and Rudd’s cool New York City couple (George and Linda) are forced to move out of the city and down South into a gaudy McMansion owned by George’s brother and wife (played by the always-hilarious Ken Marino and Michaela Watkins, respectively). Marino is a stereotypical suburban rich guy who probably makes mid-six figures, tucks his polo shirts into his pants, and loves “being a dick to be a dick,” while Linda hilariously suffers in silence. He wants people to know how well he’s doing; the big ugly house is supposed to convey that.
You don’t have to look far to find other examples of men trying to let everybody know that they’re big shots, but I thought about Wanderlust when I read a recent article over at PsyPost about guys who wear clothes with big logos. True, Marino’s character in the film wears Ralph Lauren Polo shirts with the OG smaller logo on the chest, but maybe that’s because he’s not looking for a mate anymore. Daniel J. Kruger of the University of Michigan had the idea that conspicuous consumption—when people show off their wealth through luxury products—might not be a way for people to distinguish themselves as part of a certain class as evolutionary psychologists tend to believe. Instead, Kruger’s theory is that dudes who like big logos are more interested in casual sex and less interested in relationships. A big logo might be a sign that a dude thinks he’s the big dog:
The findings confirmed that larger logos were associated with higher ratings of mating effort and lower ratings of parental investment. Men who owned shirts with large logos were perceived as more likely to pursue short-term sexual relationships and use dominance to gain social status, often through intimidation. In contrast, men who wore shirts with smaller or no logos were rated as more likely to invest in long-term relationships and parental effort, using prestige (cooperation and skill) to gain status.
Bigger is supposedly better, but bigger is often also a sign of douchier. You hear it all the time, especially about men and their need to drive mammoth SUVs or pickups ten miles to their corporate jobs in sterile office parks, but Marino’s Wanderlust character and his house also came to mind. But there was one interesting thing at the end that calls to mind the “quiet luxury” of Succession characters:
One limitation was that the no-logo condition may have been perceived as non-luxury, thus not fully representing a subtle luxury display, which could have influenced participant responses.
Other things
I loved this article by Jeff Weiss on Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. I was Thompson curious as a young lad, but I was never a huge fan like some people. But in 2019, I happened to pick up an old copy of his account of the campaign that led to Richard Nixon’s reelection, and it gave me a newfound appreciation for the writer’s work that often takes a backseat to his lifestyle and addictions. The same went for reading Miami and the Siege of Chicago. I’m not the biggest Mailer fan as some readers of this newsletter may know, but I couldn’t put that book down after I picked it up around the same time when I read the Thompson book.
I want movie theaters to survive as much as the next fan of The Cinema, but they really are trying some embarrassing things to get people to pay for tickets. I didn’t even know about in-lobby pickleball until I read Gabriella Paiella’s article over at GQ that argues going to see a film is already a multi-sensory experience that doesn’t need a bunch of silly extras: “[S]eeing and hearing the movie is good enough.”