If on its first release you missed the Morgan Spurlock-produced,
Rob VanAlkemade-directed What Would Jesus Buy?, a 2007
documentary about Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, you
can now find it at better video stores everywhere (as well as through amazon.com). The film chronicles a nationwide tour
that Billy, church director Savitri Durkee and the choir itself made
through America the year before – a mission to inform consumers
through guerilla satire about the extent to which corporate America had
undermined the spiritual basis of the Christmas holiday, as well as the
idea of community itself, with a new gospel of consumerism.
If you're converted, the film will preach to you already, but Spurlock
and VanAlkemade have also made a concerted effort to provide some
historical background on the rise of credit industry practices that still
pose a profound threat to the health of American economic life (as this front-page article in last Sunday's New York
Times indicates). At the center of the film however are the Rev
and his choir as they invade the Mall of America and Walmart headquarters
in California to bring enlightenment to Christmas shoppers. It's almost
always very funny, and Billy is a potent, charismatic personality, but we
also get a glimpse of a few intimate moments of private exhaustion and
self-doubt, as well as a bus crash that injured several church
members and had the potential to devastate the tour, before a celebratory
finish at Disneyland in Anaheim on Christmas Day.
Purchase it at amazon.com today. Or, if that's a little too ironic
for you, you can always add it to your Netflix queue, like I did, or borrow it from your local library. I wrote about Billy's
performance at the Spiegeltent for the New York Times in 2006.
