Stereography of Celebration: Perspective and virtual happiness (part 3)

Pascale Pressicaud

Stereography of Celebration: part 1 | part 2 | part 3

Continued from part 2…

Considering the path followed by most pioneering enclaves in the United States within the last twenty years, Celebration still a highly regarded and desired prototype, “a good place to start over again” (Ross, 2000:237), faces the frequent destiny of its peers and blend anonymously within the land of suburbia. Cutting edge technologies will emerge to fuel new utopias and promised lands and the dream of future generations of the American middle class. Like them, I have fallen for the myth of suburbia. Looking at it from above, just as if it was a miniaturisation to house my vintage Barbie dolls, I would be able to survey a perfect symmetry of its residential rows, its homogeneous, colourful and lush courtyards, its pretty houses smartly hidden behind full-fledged magnolia, cypress trees and wisteria. I would be able to notice flawlessly aligned roof lines intercalated with neat sidewalks and most of all, I would be able to admire its resident’s success stories, their highly sociable way of life and alleged happiness. The myth of suburbia projects an instantaneous and desirable illusion of effortless achievement, of comfort and prettiness, of permanence and certainty. Suburbia is the antithesis of the highly mutable and precarious territories that seems to be proliferating outside its perimeter.

The anonymous effervescence, the density, the accumulation of information and its multiplicity disseminated at random by the capitalist factory, the intoxicating visual noise that seems to form a membrane of dust floating above the urban space and that characterises it, have been wiped out from within that perimeter, by an invisible eraser. There are no membranes of dust interfering with the vision of suburbia. It is a prop associated with the photographs and films of the city that have been produced within the past twenty or thirty years. It is also an explanation for my motivations in referring to the style of American TV movies and series, for the illustration of this text. They invariably lack the additional prop, be it for budget reasons or sheer mediocrity. The other element that may have had an influence on the production of the images attached and their style, is that the allure of the myth has coalesced into my need for visual sharpness, accuracy and overall, distinguishable shapes to counteract the indistinct blur that fill my daily environment. Could it be that my visual impair has carved the dynamics of my psychological make up? Or as observed by Jameson “perhaps in a more Western kind of psychoanalytic language – with specific reference to the origins of Freudianism in hysteria – we might think of the new onset of the Utopian process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention of the desire called Utopia in the first place, along with new rules for the fantasizing or daydreaming of such a thing – a set of narrative protocols with no precedent in our previous literary institution” (Jameson, 1994:90).

I do not have any visual attraction for the representation of the indistinct associated with the membrane of dust as defined above. Therefore I could only produce the images that I understand through the language determined by my psychological make up. They correspond to my visual aspirations and reflect my desire to consume the suburban myth.

As for the urban ethnologist of today, explorations are no longer articulated on the axis of the unexpected that contributes to the complexity of the city. Exoticism, enigma and excitement can be extracted from the vernacular and the ordinary. In the perfect symmetry, the standardisation and coherent homogeneity of suburban developments I find more appeal than in the other unpredictable, unplanned and decaying urban landscapes. It is a liberating feeling to be able to discern beauty from within the banal and ordinary and extrapolate new relationships with reality. In a sense, it is also obliterating the fact that, and as Bennett M. Berger puts it, “the whole image of conformity in suburbia closely parallels the older image of the tyranny of gossip in the American small town” (Palen, Flaming, 1972:230).

Conclusion

In the corporate universe, corporate animals are trained to produce profits. It seems only natural, therefore, that a capitalist industry, and the group Disney is one of them, should act towards those ends. The underpinning reason for a project such as Celebration remains a profitable outcome and within this context, it has proven to be a successful venture. Profit is part of an evolutionary process, to sustain self-preservation, corporate entities must expand to be profitable, be it at the cost of their credibility. To which extent can this be tolerated? We have helped the cute little mouse to mature and metamorphose into a voracious carnivore and so have we with the urban sprawl. We have let them progressively impose their will on us in silence. We are the accomplices of their dictate but refusing to admit it, they have to become guilty and we accuse of concealing under false pretend their sinister agenda and, possibly, the germs of repressive and totalitarian ideologies. Did not this resonate strangely like “Peyton Place” and other stories?  Could, therefore, Celebration be the archetype of the  myth of the eternal return has defined by Mircea Eliade?
Fredric Jameson offers a different explanation “as for utopia, it is not so secretly supposed to manifest a will to power over all those individuals for whom you are plotting an ironclad collective happiness, and the diagnosis thereby, in most recent times, acquires a bad aesthetic dimension, as most dramatically in Boris Groys’s remarkable Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, where the dictator is identified as the greatest of modern Utopians and more specifically as a modernist state-craft, whose monumental “Soviet Union” is as grand a conception as Finnegans Wake or A la recherche du temps perdu”. (Jameson, 1994: 53)

In other words, the whole of humankind, and that includes its mascot, Mickey Mouse, is the victim of a system where nobody pulls the strings. But can we just be qualified as its victims? Let us offer an additional determinant by recalling that the population in the United States, whose increasing demands are supported by financial muscle, has kept growing until the 1980s(2). The pattern is actually entirely applicable to the European community, which has seen its demand for goods grow exponentially and in equal proportion to that of the United States for the same period. Could it be then that we also are responsible for our fate? Let us ask Duncan Kerr to provide the concluding lines “Benjamin Disraeli, writer, political thinker and prime minister in Victorian Britain warned that untrammeled capitalism would create a human residue, an excluded underclass, a society of 'Two Nations' - of the rich and the poor” (Kerr, 2001:  ).

(1) Source: John Register’s friend Barnaby Conrad III wrote the essay for his catalogue John Register: Persistent Observer

(2) Source: The Economist

Bibliography