Consider the sudden appearance of a product called full-body deodorant on a store shelf near you. In the past couple of years, newer hygiene brands such as Lume and Mando, as well as legacy giants such as Secret, Dove, and Old Spice, have begun flooding television and social media with a blunt proposition: your armpits were the least of your problems.

The ads promised sticks, sprays, and creams that could combat odor everywhere, from “pits, privates, underboobs, and feet” to the chest and hands. Dermatologists were largely baffled. On both philosophical and practical levels, no, you do not need a full-body deodorant. If you bathe regularly, soap and water will serve you fine. But necessity, as consumer capitalism well understands, has almost nothing to do with it.

This is precisely the kind of moment that Ryan Andrej Lough’s documentary You Need This was made for. Produced by Adam McKay, Lough’s documentary, now streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple TV, traces the past and present of America’s century-long romance with capitalism and the psychic, social, and planetary wreckage it leaves in its wake. It’s “the worst thing to ever happen to our planet,” the film concludes.

What Lough captures particularly well is the roots of mass consumption in the unregulated post–World War II American economy. This system was built deliberately: corporate America, flush with wartime manufacturing capacity at a time when natural resources seemed infinite, turned its energies to persuading citizens that their happiness was inseparable from the next purchase. Some of the same propaganda-like techniques that had sold Liberty Bonds turned its energies toward persuading citizens that happiness was something you could buy one appliance, car, or cigarette at a time.

The desire for cigarettes plays a key role in what comes closest to a single human villain in You Need This. Enter Edward Bernays, the Vienna-born nephew of Sigmund Freud and the man widely credited with inventing the profession of public relations. Bernays understood before almost anyone else that mass consumption required mass psychological engineering and that need had to be constantly manufactured.

His most notorious early triumph came in 1929, when the American Tobacco Company hired him to expand the cigarette market to women, a largely untapped half of the population whom social convention had effectively barred from smoking in public. Bernays’s solution was to reframe the cigarette not as a product but as a symbol.

He arranged for a group of debutantes to march in New York’s Easter Sunday parade, cigarettes in hand, while a press release described them as suffragettes lighting “torches of freedom.” The newspapers obliged and sales followed. That women were being recruited into a habit that would kill many of them was, from Bernays’s perspective, simply not the point.

You Need This also grapples with what might be called the great digital betrayal. In the internet’s infancy, there was genuine utopian excitement about the prospect of a commons built on knowledge and communication, a space that, by definition, you couldn’t buy. The early web was clunky, democratic, and thrillingly noncommercial. That hope, like many others, did not survive contact with capital. The internet did not abolish the shopping mall; it became one, then colonized every pocket, every bedroom, and every quiet moment we once had.

The film’s most alarming segment is about the next frontier of advertising: your dreams. Adam Haar Horowitz, a scientist at MIT, warns of the emerging practice of “targeted dream incubation” in which companies engineer ads into the subconscious through audio and video clips — and, they note, Coors had already tested it publicly in the lead-up to Super Bowl LV to manipulate people to buy their beer. It’s a new incursion so preposterous it was a gag on Futurama twenty-seven years ago. That the final frontier of producing consumer desire could be our subconscious is a scarier thought than any horror film could provoke.

Where the film stumbles slightly is in its prescriptions. Like a lot of documentaries in this genre — call it the Michael Moore school of righteous exasperation — You Need This is considerably better at diagnosis than cure. The closing passages gesture toward enlightened consumption; softer, gentler corporations; and resistance without quite specifying what any of that looks like in a world where the alternative infrastructure barely exists.

There’s also the uncomfortable truth that consumerism persists not only because we are manipulated but because buying things can still feel genuinely pleasurable, expressive, even social. “Humans of the age of affluence,” once wrote French theorist Jean Baudrillard in The Consumer Society, “are surrounded not so much by other human beings as they were in all previous ages, but by objects.”

But perhaps that is also why the documentary lands. It understands that the true scandal is not that people like stuff. It is that an entire economic order has learned to colonize even our most private inner life, until the difference between desire and demand, selfhood and branding, dreaming and shopping, begins to disappear, until something as ridiculous as full-body deodorant starts to feel not just reasonable but inevitable.