What If This Were Enough? Page 4
Against this cultural backdrop, it’s not hard to understand why Banksy’s Dismaland was painted by its critics as naïve, reductive, repetitive, and deeply uncool, another act of ego-driven attention-seeking. Ben Luke of the London Evening Standard proclaimed that Banksy’s Dismaland was “mostly selfie-friendly stuff, momentarily arresting, quickly forgotten—art as clickbait.” Others emphasized its pointlessness. “[I]f Banksy has the money to make an entire theme park, WHY NOT JUST USE IT TO HELP PEOPLE!?” squawked John Trowbridge of The Huffington Post. Banksy could “fund a school in Africa” or “make a video encouraging the youth to be positive and engaged.” Has there ever been a more Disneyfied vision of what it takes to change the world? Ignore all the bad stuff out there and post a super-inspiring video to YouTube instead.
When Disney CEO Robert A. Iger announced in a May 2015 press release, “[O]ur proven franchise strategy creates long-term value across all of our businesses,” he meant that each zombie franchise—The Little Mermaid, Toy Story, Frozen, Pirates of the Caribbean—encourages us to rewatch those earlier movies, buy more merchandise, return to the parks, bring home artifacts that encourage us to do more of the same. And this formula works: Disney stock hit an all-time high in 2015.
As parents, we resist Disney briefly when our kids are toddlers, but eventually most of us get tired and succumb. There’s just too much Disney in the world to fight it, especially when you think of the company less as Robert Iger and his shareholders and more as Mickey Mouse and Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker. After all these years, Disney still embodies our most dearly held ideals: bravery, honor, and standing up for the underdog. Instead of resistance, we tell ourselves that this must be what happiness feels like: total surrender.
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On the second day of our visit, we discovered that Disney’s California Adventure Park was hot, flat, and crowded. All of the careful design and calming dimensions that made Disneyland feel like a safe, soothing escape from the present were gone, supplanted by loud noises, whizzing gears, and unbroken stretches of pavement that heat up unbearably in the midday sun. After hours of wandering through this maze of shadeless, charmless “amusements,” from the absurdly ugly pink and gray Tower of Terror to the overheated, gasoline-fumed Radiator Springs Racers, our Disney dream was rapidly curdling into a nightmare. So my family and I sought refuge in the dark, air-conditioned theater of It’s Tough to Be a Bug!, which promised kid-focused amusement. There were warnings about big bugs and loud sounds, but come on, how frightening could fake bugs be?
Pretty damn frightening, as it turned out. The show was a blaring, banging gauntlet of surprises designed to scare the living daylights out of the audience, from the animated bugs onscreen who shouted every line to the giant stuffed spiders that dropped from the ceiling and dangled just above our heads, causing both of my daughters to cry softly and shield their eyes with their hands. And just when we thought it was over, a wall in the theater appeared to crumble to the ground with a thundering crash and a giant animatronic grasshopper—Hopper, the tyrannical antagonist of A Bug’s Life—bellowed menacingly at the audience. The moment embodied everything Disneyland was never supposed to be: loud, jarring, dirty, and unsafe.
In that air-conditioned theater, the existential despair I’d been dreading finally arrived, but it wasn’t the micro-horrors of consumerism that brought me there. It was the sudden sense that Disneyland gives us such a clear and disturbing snapshot of where we’ve landed as a culture. We have collectively surrendered all personal agency and control for the sake of a safe, smooth fantasy. Yet in spite of our efforts, here we are living in a world that’s louder, more jarring, and far more dangerous than we had ever anticipated. Corporate escapism can’t insulate us from the ugliness of reality anymore. We’ve been ushered, docile as sheep, into a future that’s far from the one we’d imagined. And now we’re left staring at each other in disbelief, asking, “How did we get here? Who stood back and let this happen to our world?”
Long after the menacing grasshopper goes silent, a terrified toddler in the row ahead of us kept screaming at the top of his lungs. “Don’t worry, it’s not real,” his father told him, but the boy didn’t believe him.
to infinity and beyond
“You can have one girlfriend or three,” my father once told me, “but never two. When two girlfriends find out about each other, you’ve got trouble.” Presumably two girlfriends would gouge each other’s eyes out, whereas three girlfriends might unpack a picnic lunch of tea sandwiches and cherry wine, lovingly braid each other’s hair, and then fall asleep in the sun together.
Just as my father always offered advice that only applied to him (he was recently divorced at the time and had embarked on a lifestyle of juggling as many girlfriends as possible), his approach to such matters was usually more sporting than practical. I often suspected that he viewed dating several women at once (while making sure they never found out about each other) as a worthy goal in part because it was such a difficult one. Even when he appeared to have more than he could handle, he was always on the lookout for fresh intrigue. But any suggestion that he might marry one of his girlfriends was met with an incredulous laugh, followed by a dour look. “Playing house is hell,” he would murmur darkly, as if the entire history of monogamous love were an elaborate game of make-believe.
His alternative to domestic imprisonment seemed to be a never-ending parade of new women: tall and short, blonde and brunette, young and younger. At one point, there was a Big Debbie, a Little Debbie, and a Lawyer Debbie. What could be less pragmatic than three girlfriends with the same name, one of them skilled in the art of argument? But more than convenience or variety, my dad seemed to savor the vision of himself that endless choices implied: He was the master of his own carnal fate, surrounded by an embarrassment of riches.
Although such insatiable conquistador habits might sound borderline sociopathic, his approach to sexual conquest made a kind of twisted sense in the 1980s and ’90s, the glory days of his divorced bachelorhood. An economist who’d long since abandoned Marx for Milton Friedman, he was prone to quoting Gordon Gekko from Wall Street in a tone that implied that the maxim “Greed is good” was less a self-serving excuse than an expression of one of his core values, one that naturally should extend outside the realm of finance.
His real message, as I saw it, was this: The world and everything in it is yours for the taking. Anything and anyone are fair game. You are beholden only to the laws of supply and demand.
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The uneven real-world application of his core philosophy echoes through popular culture today. Although “greed” itself is less baldly embraced than it was a few decades ago, the market principles that my father extended to the realm of love and lust now reach out in every direction. We shop for friends and colleagues on Twitter and Facebook, shop for mates on Tinder, and order everything else we need from Amazon. If the increasing prevalence of open relationships reflects an increasingly liberal society, it also mirrors the ways we’ve applied the everything-all-the-time excesses of the market system to our love lives. For every tier of service, there is a higher tier of service. For every product, there is an upgrade. For every luxury, there is something even more luxurious out there, somewhere. We no longer need to be encouraged to imagine fancier or better or more. The very existence of a given person, place, or thing now immediately conjures a better, more beautiful, more enticing version of the same. We are so conscribed by the market-driven mind-set that we can no longer experience anything outside of the context of “more” and “better.” We can’t take things as they are. We have moved on to the upgrade before we’ve even engaged with what we have right here, right now.
The ultimate fable of this state of being might be Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, that dazzling, witty, nostalgic, emotional horror story that captured the imaginations of a certain set of hip urban types when it a
ired from 2007 until 2015. The show’s protagonist, Don Draper, provoked our interest in part because he offered up a sort of American icon of luminous, condescending masculinity. He was a personification of the fables of high capitalism and the discontents of domestic life, embodying the pleasures and perils of the American dream. While actor Jon Hamm had a knack for telegraphing the conflicted, guilt-ridden underbelly of Draper’s psyche, his real talent lay in signaling the middle-aged ad man’s default state of smooth, swaggery shamelessness. Draper captured the myriad faces of the self-made man over centuries of American history, from the casually destructive impulses of the colonial settlers to the careless conquests of the pioneers to the bold and reckless self-mythologizing initiatives of the Gilded Age.
Yet in spite of his mid-century setting, Draper also presented a very mid-aughts variation on that oft-revived archetype, reflecting the self-consciousness that settled into our bones in the wake of the excesses of the 1980s and ’90s. Even as he masterfully manipulated his way upward from class to class, Draper flinched in shame at his great fortune, which was so often procured at others’ expense.
His realization of the costs of his pillaging might’ve shamed even Jay Gatsby. In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, might as easily be describing Don Draper when he says of Gatsby, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”
This sensitivity is part of what made Don Draper so transfixing: Even in his egocentric plundering of everything in sight, he remained just as vulnerable to the terrors of life as he was to its promises. The deeply unheroic jitteriness at Draper’s core was a big piece of what made Mad Men such an addictive drama in spite of its relatively low stakes. Because, against a pristine backdrop of sparkling cocktails and jazz and miles of immaculate white carpeting, our handsome leading man lacked all faith in himself and was never truly satisfied. When he wasn’t cheating, he was dreaming of cheating. Yet his upgrades seemed to bring him less and less joy. As the beauty and opulence of Draper’s surroundings—his office, his possessions, his harem of women—steadily grew, the satisfaction he took in these things eroded proportionately.
Whether he was flirting with you, hiring you, or marrying you, Don Draper was just not that into you. Swooning over Don in spite of yourself—that was the spectator sport of Mad Men, like gazing at Italian designer furniture you can’t afford. Draper is the $3,000 pink velvet chair that isn’t even comfortable to sit on. But we can’t take our eyes off him. Even though we know he’ll never make us happy, we still like to believe that he might.
Draper had a talent for making a certain flavor of sullen arrogance look appealing—or else his demeanor hinted that happiness itself was overrated, when compared with the allure of brooding. His eyes would go narrow with desire when any woman—his receptionist, his wife, his colleague—put him in his place or, better yet, ignored him completely. He would become openly smug when Megan, his secretary-turned-bride, proved herself an even more efficient and effective version of himself at work. But his face would go flat when she mused about her dreams, or pursued a career path that had nothing to do with him, and therefore didn’t adequately flatter his inflated sense of himself.
Don himself was a luxury that flattered us, the viewers. But his value depended on his indifference and the lack of satisfaction he brought to us. “Maybe you aren’t good enough for him,” we told ourselves, and also, “Maybe you need much more than this. If you can afford something this gorgeous, maybe that means you can afford something even better.”
By the show’s fifth season, as Don Draper did his best to play house, every other character started acting like the Draper of old: cheating, avoiding suburban responsibility, indulging in workaholism, keeping dark secrets. In their attempts to telegraph restless entitlement, though, most of these characters came off like pouty children. Somehow, only Draper could evoke that terrifying state of having it all but needing more. Like so many self-invented men before him, he preferred role-playing to real life. He resented other people for their genuine desires and their humanity. As his business partner Roger Sterling put it, when summing up Megan’s appeal: “She’s a great girl. They’re all great girls. At least until they want something.”
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There’s another version of this narrative, one that’s bleaker, more depraved, and much more popular: the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which has now sold more than a hundred million copies worldwide. The book follows the budding relationship between Anastasia Steele, a recent college graduate who’s still a virgin (in spite of her drag stage name), and a handsome billionaire named Christian Grey. Early in their interactions, Grey insists that Anastasia agree to a dominant/submissive relationship, requesting that she sign lengthy contracts specifying everything from the forms of punishment she’ll endure (leather crops: good; caning: bad) to the amount of exercise she’ll do (four hours a week, minimum). Although she’s intrigued by Grey’s money, his looks, and even his controlling tendencies, Anastasia balks at the contract, is shocked by the S&M equipment in what she refers to as his “red room of pain,” and finds it creepy that he insists on never being touched. Christian Grey, in other words, is like Don Draper with helicopters, chilled white wine, and kinky predilections where the chain-smoking, bourbon, and workaholism would normally go.
Late-capitalist fairy tales that double as sexual daydreams aren’t new. In one version of the story, a wide-eyed mermaid cleverly disguises her essential self and loses her voice in order to win the heart of a prince (The Little Mermaid). In another, a hooker with a heart of gold navigates her way to a happy ending by offering some happy endings of her own (Pretty Woman). Or there’s the sassy secretary who shakes her moneymaker all the way to the corner office (Working Girl).
Fifty Shades of Grey follows this long history of class ascendance via feminine wiles, but does so cleverly disguised as an edgy modern bodice-ripper. Forget that E. L. James’s three-book series captures the intricacies of BDSM about as effectively as a “Whip Me” Barbie doll might. Admirers of the series may credit it with liberating female desire by reimagining pornography for ordinary women (and introducing them to the unmatched thrills of leather riding crops and hard spankings). But the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey isn’t really about dominance or bondage or even sex or love, despite all the Harlequin Romance–worthy character names.
No, what Fifty Shades of Grey offers is a vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American wet dream. Just as magazines like Penthouse, Playboy, Chic, and Oui have effectively equated the moment of erotic indulgence with the ultimate consumer release, a totem of the final elevation into amoral privilege, James’s trilogy represents the latest installment in the commodified sex genre. The money shot is just that: the moment when our heroine realizes she’s been ushered into the hallowed realm of the 1 percent, once and for all.
The fantasy of Fifty Shades certainly isn’t focused on the erotic sublime. In fact, the sex becomes hopelessly repetitive sometime around the third or fourth of the novels’ countless, monotonously naughty encounters. Each dalliance begins with the same come-on: The naïve college graduate Anastasia and the dashing mogul Christian describe their desires to each other with all of the charmless predictability of servers at an Outback Steakhouse. Awkward openers (“I think we’ve done enough talking for now,” “Now let’s get you inside and naked”) conjure the raw provocation of “How about a Bloomin’ Onion to get you started?” Even tougher to take are the coy responses (“Oh my!” “Why, Mrs. Grey, you have a dirty, dirty mouth!” “You’re insatiable and so brazen”), repeated with gusto despite the utter lack of shock value in evidence. Reader expectations tick up ever so slightly as Grey issues some bossy commands—Stand here! Undress! Bend over! Spre
ad your legs!—which seem at first blush to foretell a curve in the carnal road. But no such luck. Give or take a blindfold here or a butt plug there, the same hands explore the same places in the same ways with the same results. After the fifteenth or sixteenth time Anastasia and Christian “find [their] release together,” they start to resemble amnesiacs doomed to repeat the same boring small talk over and over, as if they are meeting for the first time. By the third volume in the series, as every word out of Christian’s mouth (“I see you’re very wet, Anastasia”) still triggers an overheated response from his paramour (“Holy shit!”), readers may find themselves hissing, “Mix it up a little, for fuck’s sake.”
Of course the sex is not the main event. The endless manual jimmying and ripped foil packets and escalating rhythms are just foreplay for the real climax, in which Anastasia recognizes that she’s destined to abandon her ordinary, middle-class life in favor of the rarefied veal pen of the elite. Until then, like a swooning female contestant on The Bachelor, Anastasia is offered breathtaking helicopter and glider rides, heady spins in luxury sports cars, and windswept passages on swift catamarans. She is made to gasp at Christian’s plush office, with its sandstone desk and white leather chairs and its stunning vista, or his spacious, immaculate penthouse apartment, with its endless rooms filled with pricey furniture. She is treated to Bollinger pink champagne and grilled sea bass. She is offered a brand-new wardrobe replete with stylish heels and gorgeous gowns and designer bras. She is lavished with diamond jewelry and flowers and a new luxury car of her own.