What If This Were Enough? Page 2
In other centuries (and in other lands), melancholy and longing were considered a natural part of the human condition. Now they are a moral failing, a way of signaling to the world that you’re a loser and a quitter. You have to change your attitude and play nicely with others, even if that means bullshitting your way through every interaction. Everyone wants to see you turn that frown upside down. Smiles, everyone, smiles! Like you mean it this time.
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Sometimes I forget that I’m going to die someday, and then BuzzFeed reminds me that death is inescapable. Because in its frenzied onslaught of yellow “LOL”s and “fail”s and “10 Dogs Who Went as a Different Dog for Halloween” lies an existential evasion so strained that it can’t help inadvertently evoking the specter of mortality. The site may have evolved in recent years, blending serious reporting and somber commentary with lighter fare, but its initial, effortfully whimsical tone, its habit of sugarcoating longer, heavier reported pieces with deceptively chipper headlines, and its compulsion to quantify and classify everything under the sun once represented the apotheosis of American trivia-focused escapism, served up with an overabundant garnish of “trashy” and “cute” and “yaaass.”
This explains the feeling of vertigo that a visit to BuzzFeed sometimes induces: the sense that the world is spinning faster and faster, every inch of virgin land filling to its borders with “34 People You Probably Didn’t Know Were on Seinfeld” and “24 Super Cute Drawings of Fashionable Celebrities” and “21 Snoozing Koalas You Want to Snuggle With Right Now.”
The editors of BuzzFeed recognized a long time ago that successful diversion depended on continually toggling its joystick between micronostalgia for the past (“55 Things Only ’90s Teenage Girls Can Understand”) and microexaminations of the latest microtrend (“The ‘Gingers Have Souls’ Kid Just Released a Hip-Hop Music Video”). BuzzFeed could simultaneously pretend that joy was an ever-renewable resource (“13 Cute Kid Vines You’ll Watch Over and Over Again”) while also hinting that our stores of happiness were dangerously low and dwindling (“13 Holidays You’ve Been Celebrating Totally Wrong”).
BuzzFeed so typified a mode of social engagement common to the early 2010s that it inspired The Onion to spin off a parody site called ClickHole in 2014. Where The Onion once lampooned the “area man” argot of local newspapers, ClickHole spoofs the relentless exuberance of BuzzFeed’s nonsensical hierarchies and shrieking enticements. But ClickHole, in spite of its appropriately abyss-conjuring name, can only touch the hem of BuzzFeed’s bizarre signature house style. (ClickHole: “16 Pictures of Beyoncé Where She’s Not Sinking in Quicksand.”) So far, it never fully captures the self-parodying brilliance of the real thing. (BuzzFeed: “22 Celebrities That Look Nothing Alike.”)
And the more time you spend on BuzzFeed, the more the boundaries between “win” and “fail” seem to blur. After a while, it’s impossible not to slip into a dissociative trance, in which you surrender to the allure of a perpetual, trivial nowhereland, nestled somewhere between “15 Cats That You Don’t Want to Mess With” and “44 Hong Kong Movie Subtitles Gone Wrong.”
The past is reduced to a slide show. The future is a YouTube video that won’t load. And the present is a jumble of jaunty yellow buttons blurting “omg” and “awww” and “tl;dr.” What else can we do but click through?
BuzzFeed’s eternal, upbeat present tense exemplifies the frenetic pressures of our current screen-driven moment. Ironically, though, by reinforcing the supremacy of rapidly expiring distractions, the site often incites the feeling that you might be wasting your time on old news. In every “Tell Us Your Zodiac Sign and We’ll Tell You What Alcoholic Beverage You Are” and “17 Pictures That Should Be Considered Crimes Against Humanity,” the site privileges the current moment above all others. But this tireless fixation on novelty now feels familiar and therefore also dated. When BuzzFeed headlines blur into each other, they start to smell like 2011. Isn’t there somewhere else we’re supposed to be?
Its status as prematurely aging novelty makes BuzzFeed the ultimate petri dish in which the queasy mood of the current moment is replicated. No wonder it incites such restless feelings of dread; its repeating message couldn’t be clearer: You are not happy enough. This is not good enough. You need bigger, better, brighter distractions. You need newer flashy “wtf”s and “omg”s. You are running out of time.
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This unnervingly chirpy, rapidly expiring present certainly wasn’t invented by BuzzFeed. It arose as part of a long tradition of manic enthusiasm that can be traced, at least in part, to the dawn of radio—the first popular medium that combined advertising jingles and patriotic slogans and Judeo-Christian optimism into a distinctly American soundtrack of mandatory cheer.
I still remember the sinking sensation I felt as a kid the first time I heard a radio D.J. rave about something called a “Toyotathon.” It was the summer after my parents’ divorce, which my mother kept assuring me was all for the best. That might explain why listening to someone trying to persuade me that a car sale is just like an all-night carnival struck me as just another example of the kind of blatant emotional trickery with which I was newly acquainted.
Soon, the continual stream of pop music and chipper ads that flowed from the radio seemed to form an extended cacophonous jingle of denial, and the incessant clamor of A&W Root Beer ads and Magnum, P.I. opening credits and Hall & Oates songs and ads for Sizzlin’ Summer Sales incited within me a pure blast of sadness. The “Yum, Yum, Bumble Bee, Bumble Bee Tuna” song; the hyperactive leprechaun searching for his Frosted Lucky Charms; the assurance that “Nothing beats a great pair of L’eggs!” had all begun to trigger a haunting sense in me that life could never be as happy and exciting as it pretended to be on TV and the radio. Casey Kasem’s lilting, sentimental speech patterns on American Top 40 started to sound like another form of the catechism we repeated at my Catholic church every Sunday.
Death and disappointment were suddenly everywhere—in the news every night, at the breakfast table in the morning—but rather than acknowledge the burden of such things, we’d all agreed to smile along, taking our cues from Captain Stubing and Captain Kangaroo and Cap’n Crunch. The famous yellow smiley face, that fifty-year-old precursor to BuzzFeed’s yellow buttons, urged us to Have a Happy Day, but it sounded to me less like a request than a command.
And today, as the planet heats to a low simmer and ominous images of polar bears swimming in circles make us feel like the universe’s most reckless zookeepers, admonishments to embrace optimism and cheer and “greatness” are more vehement than ever. It’s as though the gentle reggae strains of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” have been sped up to a ska beat, and both worrying and unhappiness are now treated not just as a taboo but as an affliction you have a responsibility to treat. Curmudgeonly remarks, high-strung habits, and skepticism once merely meant you were a certain type of person, negative but relatively harmless, like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. But these days, “grouchiness” is often encountered as a condition for which you require intervention: a prescription, more meditation, more self-care, a subscription to O, The Oprah Magazine.
Even as depression and anxiety, or else simple dissatisfaction with the state of things, are as prevalent as ever, we are urged to get over these feelings, to recover from them, to bounce back quickly, or else to conceal them. To do otherwise is to embrace the “fail.” You are not following the rules. Start acting like a happy winner or you might become a depressed loser forever.
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The summer after my parents got divorced and my dad moved out of our house, I happened to pick up John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich. It was the first novel that felt real and relatable to me, like being injected straight into the bloodstream of another human being. And no wonder—Updike knew exactly how the intrusions of pop-culture minu
tiae had the power to evoke the cheery dread of Middle America.
Updike’s protagonist, Rabbit Angstrom, is a former high school basketball star who feels hemmed in by the American dream—cornered by his alcoholic wife, Janice, and upstaged by his ineffectual, self-pitying son, Nelson. And every step of the way, Rabbit experiences his entrapment and impending death through the lens of pop trivia, snippets of experience Updike once referred to as “giv[ing] the mundane its beautiful due.”
As a result, the Rabbit tetralogy offers a slow-motion glimpse at the rise of mass culture over the course of three decades. In Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit’s argument with his wife is punctuated by Mouseketeer musical numbers and Tootsie Roll ads. As he drives out of his hometown to escape his crumbling marriage, he’s lulled by commercials for Rayco Clear Plastic Seat Covers and New Formula Barbasol Presto-Lather. In Rabbit Redux (1971), news that Janice might be cheating on Rabbit is interspersed with scenes from a nearby TV, where “people are trying to guess what sort of prize is hidden behind a curtain and jump and squeal and kiss each other when it turns out to be an eight-foot frozen-food locker.”
By Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Updike’s protagonist enters a kind of pop-culture fugue state, in which a ghastly pastiche of gas lines and Chuck Wagon restaurants and Skylab mishaps and Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” on the radio blends seamlessly with his sentimentality and boredom and inescapable fear of death. Rabbit worries that “tomorrow will be the same as yesterday,” and in the background, his mother-in-law’s television blares the latest news of the Iran hostage crisis. The noisy trivia that surrounds Rabbit, with its eternal present-tense merriment, feels increasingly oppressive: “The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.”
Finally, in Rabbit at Rest (1990), cultural tidbits start to take on the same indistinct shape as his own life’s events: “Like everything else on the news, you get bored, disasters get to seem a gimmick, like all those TV tuneouts in football.” As hard as Rabbit tries to beat back his dread with the “win” signifiers of his era—wealth, an affair, a few chummy but superficial friendships, an uneven golf game—none of Rabbit’s fixes last. His powerlessness, his rampant sexual urges, his unrelenting nostalgia for his own lonely past are encapsulated and eventually superseded by a steady flow of trivial distractions. That moment in the novel when a leap of a man into the air on a Toyota commercial (“Oh, what a feeling!”) yields to the cold air above Lockerbie, where Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in 1988, demonstrates exactly how the enthusiasms of American life thinly mask the specter of death. When Rabbit unceremoniously falls dead of a heart attack, it’s clear that this is how most stories will end. Even as he lies dying, his son insists on Frosted Flakes over bran cereals, and the newspaper arrives, blaring “Hugo Clobbers South Carolina.”
Five years after Rabbit at Rest was published, my own father died of an unexpected heart attack. The day after that, Pete Sampras beat Andre Agassi in the finals of the U.S. Open. “You Are Not Alone” by Michael Jackson was the No. 1 song on the radio. Orville Redenbacher died of a heart attack nine days later. Thirteen days after that, O. J. Simpson was proclaimed not guilty by a jury in Los Angeles. The latest news, whether upbeat or ominous, was reported in the same manic, excitable tone, one that was utterly out of sync with my dark emotional state. Sadness is a lonely thing in America. Taking time to reflect means acknowledging that you were once sad, or that you lost something along the way that you might never get back.
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When everything is bent into a jolly shape, everything feels more mournful than it should. This is how the hopeful words of wisdom inscribed on a tea bag slowly take on the weight of an omen, and the funeral dirge and the bubbly pop anthem eventually start to sound like the same song. In its abhorrence of mixed feelings, American pop culture incites mixed feelings, every step of the way. No wonder canny filmmakers and TV producers like Steven Spielberg and Matthew Weiner inserted the ambient glee of Saturday-morning cartoons and radio D.J.s gushing about the weather in order to conjure foreboding and suspense in their work. It’s the same kind of suspense that sets in when you spend too much time on BuzzFeed and its ilk, that manic cheeriness-at-gunpoint feeling representing a pure distillation of the American mood. There are no buttons for “sad!” or “dark” or “melancholy.”
Updike captured the precise ways that our culture kicks up so much private ambivalence and regret without offering a salve for these feelings. But he also illustrated what we stand to lose when we mask our dread with peanut brittle and daiquiris and “If I Didn’t Care” by Connie Francis. Rabbit Angstrom sought salvation from his domestic and spiritual trap, but he never achieved it. He knew there was more to life; he just couldn’t find it. And every time he tried to look for it, everyone around him treated him like he was being selfish, or stubborn, or hopelessly uncooperative.
It’s no wonder that, when Nelson urged him not to die, Rabbit responded with a single word: “Enough.”
the happiest place on earth
No matter how your heart is grieving over the absurd cost, Disneyland has become a kind of mandatory pilgrimage for parents of young children. But even after you navigate the labyrinthine parking structure and slog amid impossible crowds pushing double-wide strollers across miles of hot concrete, even after you stand in the last of a dozen endless lines, all the while fielding existential riddles from your kids like “Why are we still standing here?” and “What are we doing?,” even after you endure a series of lackluster rides that amount to interactive advertisements for undead franchises, no sense of calm and well-being descends. You don’t feel proud of yourself for delivering the dream of Disney to your offspring. Instead, you feel like you’ve yanked your impressionable kids straight into the tyrannically cheerful cult of consumerist culture. As George Clooney’s character tells a young optimist at the start of Disney’s Tomorrowland, “You’ve been manipulated into thinking you were part of something incredible. You thought you were special, but you’re not.”
But your skepticism—like his—is just a setup for that climactic moment when old-fashioned, Disney-style hope wins out. Nearly religious positivity in the face of doom lies at the heart of the Disney brand, after all—which may be why Banksy’s Dismaland, a theme-park homage to dystopian despair that operated in the British seaside town of Weston-super-Mare for a few months in 2015, could incite such a powerful feeling of vertigo. The street artist couldn’t have had better timing: Somehow a company built around a cartoon mouse has miraculously evolved and expanded and weathered countless storms of widespread skepticism, not to mention jacked-up ticket prices, overcrowding, and a measles outbreak in 2014 that didn’t conjure fantasy or frontier or future so much as the perils of life in South Sudan. Along with the huge chunk of cultural mindshare in its pocket (ESPN, ABC, the Disney Channel, Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel), Disney has amassed thousands of sprawling acres of immaculate, branded property worldwide, from Disneyland Paris to Tokyo Disneyland to Hong Kong Disneyland, every foot of it haunted by the triumphant strains of “Once Upon a Dream” or “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” emitting from omnipresent speakers, every sight and sound and sensation a carefully honed feat of interactive advertising that continues to draw in toddlers and teenagers and singles and couples and victorious athletes and dying children alike.
This is exactly the fairy tale that Banksy aimed to disrupt with Dismaland, bleak but unforgettable in its filthy, crumbling concrete spaces, its depressed park attendants clad in mouse ears, its orca emerging from a toilet, its boats full of immigrants circling ghost-faced through a polluted pond. Such images may be simplistic, but they’re meant to hit us at the same simple level that Disneyland itself does. While Cinderella’s corpse hanging from a toppled carriage as paparazzi cameras flash might strike some onlookers as overly obvious, it’s obvious by design. The catastrophes unfolding around us aren’t hard to miss, after all, but we
continue to avert our eyes. As our public spaces worldwide are transformed into matching, carefully designed corporate realms dominated by shiny, flashing screens, the filth of Dismaland feels like the foreshock of looming disaster. Or maybe we’re just being confronted by the disasters that have already started to engulf our world, so omnipresent that no flock of singing birds or merry pirates can distract us any longer. But more than toppled carriages or angry Mouseketeers, it’s the filth of Dismaland that unnerves us the most. This is the reality of suffering that we work so hard to avoid.
This avoidance of grime and discomfort was exactly what Walt Disney had in mind when he dreamed up Disneyland. He wanted to provide a nostalgic passage to small-town America in a time of anxiety, and to embody the adventurous, can-do spirit of the country, back when Americans still believed in its Gilded Age destiny as a city upon a hill, a shining example of liberty and prosperity for the rest of the world to emulate. That notion has long since expired, of course. As J. G. Ballard put it in 1983, the American dream “no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies…It supplies the world with its nightmares now.”
In Disneyland, we recognize the outlines of how privileged America has protected itself from harsh reality for decades, and the ways that some of us have come to prefer these protections, this fakeness, to reality itself. Where as recently as the 1970s many of us decried mass-produced entertainment and the stultifying sameness of corporate-owned spaces, by the 2000s we were humming anthems from Frozen and forsaking relatively lackluster public parks for the much more engrossing modern playground of the Apple Store. Today, even the quirkiest corners of the internet are crowded with full-color, interactive ads for the last corporate commodity we searched for on Amazon or mentioned in passing on Facebook, and now those random searches will result in phone calls from telemarketers who seem to know more about us than we know about ourselves.