The watches and the shirts that are at the center of the universe of capitalism

It's the Rolex.

Few can possess it, but almost everybody ought to desire one in her lifetime.

The Rolex featured recently in an episode (I watched a rerun) of the television serial The Big Bang Theory.

Bernadette, having got a job finding the magic pill for yeast infection, in the R & D department of a big pharmaceutical company, gifts a Rolex to her fiance, Howie. Howie is wonderstruck with the object yet a feeling of envy sneaks in. 

The Rolex corrupts his relation with "Bernie" momentarily with a power complex: Will Bernie now become the "man" of the family?

Switching to reality, two of the bank robbers (a pair of Dominicans from Yonkers, New York) who were involved in the biggest bank heist in human history (it was a cyber-heist), photographed themselves with piles of Rolexes after they stole their share and went on a luxury goods buying-spree in New York City.

These two under-enlightened loafers were merely using the commodity as a thing possessed, something akin in their minds to the classy female "pussy," is my guess.

When the commodity is fetishized by those who have no previous context to attach the commodity to, then it's all vulgarly phallic. But fetishized, it is.

Rolex, as I understand, is more than a watch; according to Karl Marx, it's a commodity, that transcends its use-value and acquires magical, near-theological value.

When inanimate things acquire godly powers, then they become commodities, and just as primitive societies worshipped or fetishized objects, so we, dwellers of modern, scientific, times, fetishize commodities. Yet, the act of fetishizing doesn't regress us into the status of "primitives." The more we worship objects, provided these objects are not mere barks of enchanted trees, or the aroma of monkey-brains, preserved in a jar, the more modern and properly civilized we are regarded as.

That is the precise point of Australian director Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, as film critic A.O. Scott, so finely tells us in his discussion of the rising tide of commodity fetishizm in contemporary American movies.

In the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald was ambivalent about the erotic life of objects, which is a foundation of materialism, excess and greed. That's why Fitzgerald's Gatsby, though he had a life of material excess, is punished with an unattended funeral. Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, the salesman who pined for making it better and bigger every single day of his life, was similarly punished with a thinly attended funeral.

When nobody shows up when you're dead, then it's a sign that nobody cared for you when you were alive.

However, the ambivalence toward the material life is removed from the latest film version of Gatsby.

The Rolex-centered universe is in full panoply through the 3D machinery in Luhrmann's movie. Additionally, and more fascinatingly, the aura of the rolex spreads to shirts. Gatsby enchants both Nick Carraway and Daisy with his collection of the world's "most beautiful" shirts, so beautiful that Daisy cries upon beholding and touching and feeling them.

Sometimes, it's said that Daisy is sexually aroused by the beauty of Gatsby's shirts, and the emotions transfer over onto the collector of those shirts.

I decided to take a look at the famous "shirt scene" from an earlier Great Gatsby (starring Robert Redford as Jay), since the new Gatsby has this scene in 3D and the idea is to enable the audience "feel" the shirts as well, in full, three-dimensional splendor.

Here is the scene:

Daisy is caressing the shirts; in the new Gatsby, she bursts into tears, sobbing into the thick folds of the clothing and saying, "It makes me sad, because I haven't seen such, such beautiful shirts."

A.O. Scott writes that in the novel perhaps the reader could attribute Daisy's tears to other causes as well. And they would be right in their attribution. But in Baz Luhrmann's film, one has no reason not to take Daisy at her word:

One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that "beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann's wildly extravagant adaptation of Gatsby."

Commodity fetishizm, in other words, is at the center of the film.