I Click, Therefore I Amazon
The Man Who Shopped Too Much: A Customer Review

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 29, 2007

Click, there goes another twenty-eight --

Click, there goes another twenty-eight --

Click, there goes another twenty-eight bucks!

With apologies to Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen's wonderful "High Hopes," that's a pretty good description of yours truly bankrupting himself on the infernal Internet cash-vacuum known as one-click buying. This is a methodology by which we sheep -- consumers, in the parlance of the business pages -- donate all our monies, our kids' futures, our vacation plans, the hopes, dreams and aspirations of our spouses (I told her she should never have married me!) to a giant corporation run by a Princeton guy in the smuggest city on earth, Seattle. Have you heard of it? It's called Amazon.com.

The way one-click works, if you're from Mars, a Luddite or have a fear-of-machine issue, is too simple. You preload your credit card number and shipping address into the Amazon system -- similar systems can be found on other shopping sites -- trusting them not to sell it to pornographers or Democrats, and they arrange things so that by sliding your mouse to the one-click icon, it then just takes the merest half-inch, one-ounce pressure to purchase, that is, to service your desire. It takes no strength, no wisdom, no forethought, nothing but the raw human impulse to spontaneously acquire. You want, you get, not instantly but within a time frame where memory of impulse lingers, so that when it arrives three days later you won't be thinking "Why the hell did I buy that?" so much as "At last!" -- three days being pretty "at last" in our modern age. They are so smart in the way they cater to human weakness, bad judgment, poor taste.

Agh, how I hate them.

I hate them to the breadth and depth of their knowledge of my weakness, I hate them for the insidious way they have entered my head so as to loot my pockets, wallet and retirement, I hate them for the shrewd psychology of the sheep-class of buyers, I hate them for their snarky refusal to answer e-mail or put a human face on their devilish ways.

You want them to at least give interviews, where Herr Ingineur Dr. Werner Von Grappo-Heime, Amazon director of marketing, says, "Yes, yes, it's so funny to watch these little tiny protoplasms one-clicking their fortunes away for products they absolutely do not need! Ve sit around the office in Seattle, drinking our delicious coffee, laughing at the fools who cannot stop giving us their money, hungering, from the darkest parts of their soul, to denude themselves financially for our benefit. Faster, faster, Dieter needs a new pony!" But no: only corporate silence, superb software, the quiet hum of the efficient future mulching the imperfect present. Here's the scary part: I once toured the building in Seattle. It was full of kids!

Anyway, one-click has ruined me in a number of vile ways; it's the House of the Rising Sun for aging baby boomers. Shoes? Do you really need, does anybody really need, a pair of Polo Italian Party Suedes and a pair of Belgian Party Suedes, especially someone who almost never gets invited to parties? But there they are, gathering dust magnificently in my closet from what I call the Summer of the Shoe. Oh, and they thought I was working hard here at The Washington Post. Look at Steve, the movie critic. What a valuable employee he is, bent over, tappity-tappity-tapping away. What an obedient employee he is.

Yes, during the summer of the shoe, he was utterly obedient -- to Amazon, which cleverly seduced him (that treacherous femme fatale of an innocently labeled "More to Explore" click! or maybe it was "More of Your Favorites" or "What Do Customers Buy After Buying this Item?") over to the Polo Web site -- it's a conspiracy!! At Polo, a virtual slave trafficker in human self-delusions, they threw up gay images of parties in Italy and Belgium where Steve, in his dashing three-piece white linen suit, with his pale yellow silk cravat, his straw Borsalino, his face lean and tan, is always at the center of attention. Oh Steve, you are so witty (click) and, deuce it all, so damned dashing (click!)

But of course, the real subject of this cri de coeur isn't the shoes or the ties or the trench coats or the unworn Armani double-breasted suit in which I would look just like Sonny Crockett, except for the fat and bald part. Nor is it a host of other obsessions that have come and gone, like Japanese swords (expensive), Airsoft BB guns (cool!) and '50s war novels (nostalgic). No, it's the movies.

For it is the movies -- the books about movies and the music from movies and pictures of movies -- that really break your back and leave you spent and broke on the road the next morning, like a sailor who blew all his pay in a whorehouse and now can't even remember if he was sober enough to get the deed done or not.

An example, one of probably close to a hundred since I've joined one-click: I write a piece for The Post about Japanese soldiers who've been so demonized in World War II movies and do a little research initiative into my memory for movies that contradict that cultural paradigm. Out of the files from the early '60s comes a memory of "Red Beach," and star-director-handsome guy Cornel Wilde sitting on the couch next to a black-and-white Johnny Carson talking up his war flick. Dan and Doc and Ed and maybe Zsa Zsa were there too, I think. So I roam over to Amazon, type in "Red Beach," and it politely informs me of my faulty memory: it's "Beach Red," starring Wilde, Rip Torn, Burr de Benning and Patrick Wolfe. There it is. Lord, it's there. Why does it have to be there? Why, why, why?

But it's there and I feel my trigger finger mosey to left-click (well-worn left click, I might add) on my mousy-thing, I feel it yearn and ache to acquire, it has become the whole focus of my being, there's no discipline anywhere on the horizon and I cannot disobey my finger. It controls. It has no mercy and no judgment.

CLICK!

A couple of days later it arrives, along with some other World War II relics from the '50s that I couldn't resist either, like Tony Curtis and Frank Lovejoy in "Beachhead," and does anybody but me remember ultra-cool New York tough guy Frank Lovejoy, who was Lee Marvin before there was a Lee Marvin?

So . . . the anticlimax. The two discs arrive and are dully seated in the DVD player and launched. I make it about an hour into "Beach Red" before the ridiculous '67 haircuts on the GIs pushes me out, and have even less luck with "Beachhead," where Curtis's Bronx accent is too distracting, and I remember a later scene where he swims into the ocean and sinks a Japanese destroyer with a grenade and I somehow don't want to see that. Too '50s. Grenade, destroyer? Nah, couldn't be done; they didn't even do that one in the war comics of the '50s!

It services all your needs, even those you didn't know you had. It takes any whim, turns it to curiosity, then to desire, then to necessity, then to addiction. It takes you out of the now, a large room with many people typing hard, to the wherever, an amorphous, neon twilight of the lurid, the wanton, the craven, the berserk and the heavily armed -- oh, that would be my imagination. But the agile dance of links to links to subjects to genres is something so spontaneous -- it seems to match the rhythm of randomly firing synapses -- that somehow you never know where you're going but when you get there, you realize that's where you wanted to go. I recently voyaged off into the cattle drive known as "Western themes from the '50s and '60s," hardly, I'm guessing, a popular destination.

Somewhere I heard a snatch of Tex Ritter's great rendition of "Do Not Forsake Me," the "High Noon" theme song, and I was from that moment a gone man. I had to hear the whole thing, which, only a click away, I did. It's a great piece of American art, with its broken little squeaks of anguish and its lonely refrains of dread and yearning as a man of duty faces death even though he sure as hell doesn't want to (would you if you were 51 and just married lush, 23-year old Grace Kelly?). Tex gets a dignity and a pain into the words that Fred Zinnemann never got into the movie; in fact, Tex makes a better Will Kane than Gary Cooper ever did.

But . . . that song set me off. Soon I yearned to hear "The Magnificent Seven," "How the West Was Won," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" ("He was the bravest of them all"), and so forth. Unfortunately there wasn't a CD titled "Steve Hunter's Coolest Western Hits" so to hear "Liberty Valance" I had to click either the collected Gene Pitney (after severe brainwashing in the '60s, I couldn't listen to "Town Without Pity" one more time!) or a late James Taylor cover. James Taylor? JAMES *&)({$181}%$#@! TAYLOR! With the high, noble, slightly globed forehead and the thinning hair and the sincere eyes? Are you kidding me? But -- CLICK! -- and James Taylor was at my doorstep in three days and, truth be told, of all the covers of the western songs, his was about the best; he got down and hard with it, and got the melancholy and irony.

But it goes on: To get a first-rate Elmer Bernstein "Mag7" I had to put up with Hugh O'Brian himself singing "The Legend of Wyatt Earp" and no less than Johnny Cash cranking out, in some forgotten and hopefully mean-drunk-fueled recording session at the same time, "The Rebel -- Johnny Yuma." And -- no, no, I'm not going there, I'm not telling any of these fine upstanding Washington Post readers about my next discovery, Marty Robbins and CLICK "Gunfighter Ballads." (Marty Robbins, "Big Iron" and "El Paso," was a great singer, by the way.)

This wisdom, of course, arrives with a cost. You pull into a tollbooth with Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson singing "My Rifle, My Pony and Me," and you get a very strange look from the toll taker.

Recounting this, I'm getting a weird movie vibration somehow. It sounds so familiar, yet so long ago. Let's see: We are now at a place in history and technology where, basically, we can have anything we want with the touch of a button. No, Amazon hasn't perfected Cocktail.com in its "More to Explore" subdivision yet -- oh, thanks, Jeeves, yes, the Makers and Water is just what I clicked -- but it all has the hazy recollection of some . . .

And now I realize: We have become the Krell.

Do you remember the Krell? They sprang out of Fred Wilcox's 1956 sci-fi masterpiece "Forbidden Planet," an advanced race whose members were evidently shaped like a sea elephant topped with Zippy's pinhead. They built the "great machine" which could give them anything they wanted. That is, if they could dream it, if their imaginations could conjure it, the Great Machine in the center of Altair-4 would present it. Here's the laugh: The Krell had discovered everything except the subconscious. They never figured on the rage of the id, the vast hunger of the libido, the power fantasies of the ego and in a single night, their mighty and benevolent civilization was torn down and they were themselves murdered savagely, every last one of them, by the dark killers in the reptile zone of their own ancient brain.

We: Krell.

One-click is having everything, that's what's so subtly disturbing about it. It makes getting too easy, and removes it from the cause-effect grid, from consequence, gravity, physics, morality, even looking for parking.

It's . . . oh, wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it stars the first Leslie Nielsen in his stern commander persona, the great lollipop Anne Francis, a va-va-voom gal with a hint of Bronx toughness underneath, and the great, underrated Walter Pidgeon as the wise but flawed Dr. Morbius. You know, that was a great movie.

CLICK!

Click, there goes another $19.49, plus shipping.