From Nazi Austria to late capitalist Florida, a list of the shit we list
I. Excerpt from Alien’s My Sheeyit manifesto:
This is the fuckin’ American dream. This is my fuckin’ dream, y’all!
All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit! I got … I got SHORTS! Every fuckin’ color.
I got designer T-shirts!
I got gold bullets. Motherfuckin’ VAMpires. I got Scarface. On repeat. SCARFACE ON REPEAT. Constant, y’all!
I got Escape! Calvin Klein Escape! Mix it up with Calvin Klein Be. Smell nice? I SMELL NICE!
That ain’t a fuckin’ bed; that’s a fuckin’ art piece. My fuckin’ spaceship! U.S.S. Enterprise on this shit. I go to different planets on this motherfucker! Me and my fuckin’ Franklins here, we take off. TAKE OFF!
Look at my shit. Look at my shit! I got my blue Kool-Aid.
I got my fuckin’ NUN-CHUCKS.
Seconds later, Candy and Brit shove two guns into Alien’s mouth. He blows them. Tables are turned, the girls are in control. But more importantly, flipping the prep school rich kid stereotype, so often employed in film to illustrate teenage malaise these Florida spring breakers are not virgins who can’t drive. They are everything Sarah Michelle Geller’s Kathryn wished she could be. “God forbid I exude confidence and enjoy sex! Do you think I relish the fact that I have to act like Mary Sunshine 24/7 so I can be considered a lady? I’m the Marcia-fucking-Brady of the Upper East Side, and sometimes I want to kill myself.”
II. About that Starter Mansion Life:
Halfway through the 2012 documentary, The Queen of Versailles, about Florida billionaire timeshare mogul, David Siegal, and his wife Jackie, and their eight kids, and 19 staff, and caboodle of white fluffy dogs, Jackie returns home to Binghamton, New York to visit family and childhood friends. Reflecting on the Siegal family’s flashy and devastatingly gaudy life, one old neighbor comments “Well the American dream is raising way up above what you started with, and achieving something way beyond what anyone would dream that you would achieve.” And as one of Jackie’s high school friends adds, “Typical middle class America was not going to make her happy.” Happy is an especially off-putting word when describing the mood in the Siegal family – the documentary’s entire tone is mournful. A garage of unused bicycles, a Filipino nanny who hasn’t seen her own kids in 19 years and who lives in what was originally one of the children’s backyard playhouses, and a dead lizard lying limp in its aquarium, starved to death. A house of stuff that teems with neglect.
Later, the crew films the Siegals at Christmas ripping open presents. Jackie’s given David two board games – Risk and Monopoly – both regifts.
III. Ben Affleck as Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street in Boiler Room:
Anybody who says money is the root of all evil doesn’t fucking have any. They say money can’t buy happiness? Look at the fucking smile on my face. Ear to ear, baby. You want details? Fine. I drive a Ferrari, 355 Cabriolet. What’s up? I have a ridiculous house in the South Fork. I have every toy you could possibly imagine. And best of all kids, I am liquid.
IV. $587,412.97 over 2 years AKA Buzz Bissinger’s Gucci addiction:
“I own eighty-one leather jackets, seventyfive pairs of boots, forty-one pairs of leather pants, thirty-two pairs of haute couture jeans, ten evening jackets, and 115 pairs of leather gloves. (…) As a stranger said after admiring my look in a Gucci burgundy jacquard velvet jacket and a Burberry black patent leather trench, 'You don’t give a fuck.'”
Later, he goes on to catalog the brands he owns in alphabetical order. The list reads like a nursery rhyme for Ri¢hie Ri¢h had it starred Harry and Peter Brant instead of Macaulay Culkin.
V. Speaking of nursery rhymes, sorry childhood. Maria’s My Favorite Sheeyit:
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite thingsCream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite thingsGirls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things
VI. SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!
I will not rest until I have you holding a Coke, wearing your own shoe, playing a Sega game featuring you, while singing your own song in a new commercial, starring you, broadcast during the Superbowl, in a game that you are winning, and I will not sleep until that happens.
- Jerry McGuire
VII. Pain & Gain & Gatsby & The Green Light
a) Known for his slow motion, low angle, 360 degree hero shots, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain promises Mark Wahlberg and The Rock as 1990s Miami (Florida, again) personal trainers, and that their American Dream “IS BIGGER THAN YOURS.”
b) Known for his hyper-romantic and hyperbolic style, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsbypromises a scintillatingly void adaptation of Fitzgerald’s American Dream metaphor; The Green Light, likely not so “minute and faraway.”
