The Store

THE STORE   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

1983

IDEA:  A look at the flagship Neiman Marcus store in Dallas, Texas.

BLURB:  Normally, one would reasonably expect a documentary set inside the confines of a lavish department store to function as fairly straightforward capitalist critique. This expectation seems to be fed during the film’s opening minutes, as an executive extols the almighty importance of sales, and extravagant apparel multiplies through mirrors into ego-affirming excess. But this is a Frederick Wiseman film, so judgment is suspended; any urge toward a polemical indictment is disarmed by mundane observation. In some ways, this approach makes the film’s view of consumer capitalism even more pointed. Instead of facilely underscoring the outrageous materialism of Neiman Marcus so as to land an easy jab at commodity culture, Wiseman simply shows the store in its quotidian workings, its systems and operations totally naturalized by the employees and customers who live by the logics of commerce. Wiseman does not need to insert didactic exposition or juxtapositions (although some cuts knowingly play up human/product parallels) to demonstrate the fundamental strangeness of a massive corporation, to reveal it as a synecdoche, for better or worse, of a culture elaborately constructed for unceasing consumption. Yet nothing here feels insidious, amazingly, not even a final banquet honoring Stanley Marcus held in front of what looks like a giant reproduction of the Vietnam flag. What one interprets as elitist, cultish, dehumanizing, or myopic is merely implicit, delivered by the apparatuses of consumer capitalism themselves.