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文章出處 : http://mobile.iht.com/articles/12shopaholic.20136433.xhtml

Calming the voices that scream 'shop!'

By David Colman

Updated:

Feb. 21, 2009 10:00 am (Paris) WORLD SPORTS

OVER the last decade, the term "guilty pleasure" has lost virtually all meaning. What other kinds of pleasures do we have anymore?

But should you want to see a movie that puts guilt and pleasure back together again, "Confessions of a Shopaholic" may be the ticket. It was green-lighted back when consumer confidence still gushed like a Champagne fountain and shopping bags were something to flaunt instead of hide. Now, following on the spike heels of "The Devil Wears Prada," "Sex and the City" and "Legally Blonde," the latest style-centric antiheroine, the shopaholic Becky Bloomwood, arrives on screens Friday, with a credit bubble popped all over her face like so much pink bubble gum.

Many people assume the film's release is terrible timing. If they only knew the truth: Becky does not shop so much as lie, cheat and scheme to keep her secret from being detected. As a comical allegory for the last 15 years, when fashion-mad consumerism, among several other things, drove the world's economy to new heights, the film stirs up prickly issues about the complex interplay of women, fashion, spending and identity.

And as a panicked Becky (who works as a financial journalist, no less) conceals her mounting debt and dreams of a magical bailout, the story has a painfully familiar ring. Frothy as it is, "Confessions of a Shopaholic" glorifies overshopping about as much as "Trainspotting" glamorized heroin.

"I think it's amazing timing!" said Madeleine Wickham, alias Sophie Kinsella, who wrote the original novel 10 years ago. In New York for the film's premiere last week, she agreed to have lunch — and do a little shopping — at what might be Becky's mother ship: Bergdorf Goodman.

"This story is about someone who has too much credit thrust upon her too young, and she goes out and gets loads of lovely shiny things, then she goes bust and has to deal with it," Wickham said. "If we're not all going through that now... " She trailed off. "We're all Becky Bloomwood."

In creating her curious heroine, Wickham, 39, a witty, self-deprecating Oxford graduate, was not appealing to fiction snobs. In the late '90s, she had published a handful of respectable novels about 40-something Londoners. Then one day, she had a brain wave: a book about a shopaholic! She had wanted to write a comedy; here it was. She made up a pseudonym for this side project (Sophie is her middle name, Kinsella her mother's maiden name) and tapped it out in a few months.

The result, published in 2000, has sold three million copies and been translated into 30 languages. Its four sequels have sold 5.3 million more. With three other novels to her pen name, Wickham is now, at Barnes & Noble at least, chick lit's No. 1 best seller.

But with the Shopaholic books, she did something more interesting than reach the top. She took all the stuff that chick-lit novels are about — sex, work, romance and the vagaries of being an intelligent woman in the modern world — and pushed them all out of the way. Then she took chick lit's backdrop of lighthearted consumerism and put it front and center. While sex has been all but denuded of its onetime taboos, candid talk about shopping and debt is a far touchier subject.

"It may seem like a bit of fluff, but it actually expresses a great deal of the ongoing cultural preoccupations and anxieties that have surrounded women and women's association with consumption and shopping," said Rebecca Connor, an associate professor of English at Hunter College in New York. Professor Connor has traced the interaction of women and consumption in literature, even tracking down literature's first shopping spree to 1778, in "Evelina: or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World." (It has a familiar chick-lit ring: 18-year-old Evelina, brought up in the countryside, comes to London, and between social blunders finds herself taken on a strange new activity: going "a-shopping.")

Becky doesn't have weight problems; she doesn't smoke or drink. She doesn't really care if she gets ahead in her career or even if she has a boyfriend. She has one thing on her mind. Like an endearing cross between Madame Bovary and Lucy Ricardo, Becky Bloomwood tries heroically to bail out her ship of debt (even as her stiletto habit keeps poking new leaks left and right). As we hear Becky's stream of justifications as to why she needs to buy that thing right now, we are in fact hearing justifications we use ourselves — and that, until recently, our consumer culture told us as well.

Although we can see how far off the beam she is, she's also on the money. Jen Lancaster, whose book "Bitter is the New Black" detailed her own fall from high-life grace after the dot-com bubble burst, relates wholeheartedly: "When she's shopping and thinks, 'This is the scarf that can make me a whole person,' I've had those thoughts."

If some people are hesitant to credit chick lit with an awakening of a female consumer consciousness, Lancaster is not among them. "I didn't know I needed Manolos until I read about them in Candace Bushnell," she said flatly.

Rarely has overshopping been given the literary dignity to stand more or less on its own, which cannot be said of other forms of excess like sex, alcohol, drugs and gambling, so often memorialized as part of a manly lust for life.

"I am just reflecting what I see, and coming at it with my attitude, which is absolutely guilt-free," said Wickham, who is married with three sons — and knows whereof she speaks. She has gone out for a coffee break and come home with a sequined evening dress; gone out to a museum and come home with a sofa.

At Bergdorf, she did a bit of shopping on the store's colorful fifth floor, finding a Marc Jacobs ruched peach top ($178), a Tahari python-print dress ($348) and a Moschino floral halter dress ($945). Her fatal flaw: "I always buy clothes for when the sun is shining, and I live in England."

In Wickham's books, Becky's shopping is far from a harmless pastime, yet she doesn't have to atone for her sins in quite the way we expect. (In the Americanized film, she is not so lucky: she ends up, of course, in Shopaholics Anonymous, albeit a pretty zany branch.) This, too, is a bit of break from literary tradition in which women who shop on credit pay bitterly.

"Right up to the present day we have a culture tacitly or overtly encouraging women to shop in order to strengthen the economy," Professor Connor said. "At the same time, we've always had male commentators denigrating women for their love of trinkets and their wasteful expenditures."

This was most true in the 18th century, bedeviling characters like Pope's Belinda and Defoe's Moll Flanders; and in the 19th century, when Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, consumers of love and luxury, come to tragic ends. The most women could hope for was to be cast as victims of an evil system, as in Zola's "The Ladies' Paradise," about a greedy merchant who designs a dazzling department store in Paris to overwhelm women into overspending (a 125-year-old parallel to today's easy credit offers).

Most 20th-century novelists focused on women's inner (and sexual) selves rather than the outer self and its trappings. If overt consumption was discussed, it was portrayed as uncouth, the province of a mistress, like Crystal Allen in "The Women," or an arriviste, like Undine Spragg in "The Custom of the Country"; or as insane, as with Nicole Diver's spending spree in "Tender Is the Night."

Becky Bloomwood, however, comes with luggage, not baggage. "I don't step back and judge that character," said Wickham, who made sure that Becky's scheming is offset by a good heart. "She's so flawed in so many ways, I wanted to make her grounded."

Stripped of judgments, Becky conveys to a designer T the crazed psychological profile of the addictive shopper. Not everyone thinks the thrill of buying a dress can compare to a night of whisky, a question now being debated by the editors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, who are not sure compulsive shopping deserves its own diagnosis.

But is a stiletto different? As any addiction researcher can tell you, drugs are merely keys that unlock doors (and chemical reactions), opening up a lovely world where the normal rules of reality (like Visa bills) don't hold sway. And as Becky Bloomwood — or Cinderella — can tell you, if that doesn't describe a perfect new pair of Gucci boots, what does?

"I fall for it every time," Wickham said cheerily. "You know, you hone your style and buy the clothes that reflect who you are, but at some point you think, 'If I only have the right strand of pearls, I, too, will be Audrey Hepburn.' "

For the full fantasy effect, this transformative act is achieved with the wave of that magical wand: the credit card.

"We should really pay cash," Wickham said. "Then it would be real."

The trillion-dollar question: Do we want it to be?