Author: Spitz, Marc
Category: Other3
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/spitz-marc/page,4,357488-twee_the_gentle_revolution_in_music_books_television_fashion_and_film_9780062213051.html
Disneyland was made to last forever, immune to the vicissitudes of fashion. Built on acres of orange groves near Anaheim, a conservative bastion of Southern California, it was conceived from the start, at the beginning of World War II, as a wholesome sanctum where our values and core freedoms, protected by the loss of young life overseas, would be kept safe, and where children would be encouraged to dream. Walt Disney and his crew envisioned, or “Imagineered,” a haven where employees were mandated to be cheerful and that would suggest simple, rugged, plucky, small-town America: Main Street, U.S.A.
The carnivals that Disney recalled from his childhood were prurient and dirty. Disneyland, and later Disney World in Florida, would be different. Happiness was part of the attraction, as were Mickey and his pals Donald and Goofy and his girlfriend Minnie. Disneyland was subdivided into a series of “lands”: Frontierland. Tomorrowland. A “place” is somewhere that you simply are, but a “land” is a place to explore, in this case without the danger and intrepid spirit that actual exploration requires. None of the corners of the villages were sharp; they were all rounded. The threat of earthquakes was played down, as each structure resembled a kind of large dollhouse. There were no pests, despite the discarding of tons of uneaten food and garbage. The place was artificial and larger than life, rather than reinforced, ready for nature’s hard realities.
Disney, now in his midfifties, became a father figure full of hard-won calm for our newly prosperous but still recovering country. He appeared at movie premieres and on the new medium of television as a smiling, comforting presence. To share in his vision of goodness and innocence over evil, one could, in the TV age, now swear allegiance to Mr. Disney and Mickey Mouse. Unlike the Communist Party, the Mickey Mouse Club was a perfectly acceptable organization and would provide children, and young adults, a sense of both belonging and well-being, for a small price and perhaps a gesture of allegiance (donning a yarmulke-like skullcap affixed with plastic mouse ears).
For adults, to enter Disneyland was to re-enter childhood. Grown-ups were encouraged to take their children, once they had them, and experience that childhood together. Turn on The Mickey Mouse Club, which ran on the ABC network starting in 1955, and you could get a smaller dosage of the highly comforting and perfectly Twee spirit Disney invented and tended. By the 1960s, with the world once again in tumult, Disney’s security force had grown adept at neutralizing those who saw the Magic Kingdom as a metaphor and therefore a perfect place to protest. Today, Disneyland remains a second and often preferable reality, and also an immovable one. Even in the age of terrorism and bag checks, warring and spying, it’s as safe and solid as it was back when it opened in ’55; anachronisms like the iPod are discouraged among the staff, and hot dogs, probably the least safe thing in the park, will always be on the menu.
Two other key keepers of the postwar spirit of hope and invention as a balm for horror and destruction were Disney’s contemporaries: the primly dressed but aggressively wry couple Charles and Ray Eames. The Eameses were dashing, immaculately attired designers, architects, and filmmakers who are most famous for their body-hugging plywood and later plastic chairs, conceived of a series of new kinds of houses, modular and perfect for the returning soldier and the family he would inevitably start. The Eameses themselves—Charles in his tweed suit with pipe and bow tie, and Ray with her smart dresses and pulled-back hair—were Twee Tribe elders. And unlike Disney, who cut a rather conservative figure, the Eameses seemed Twee creatures in themselves, posing together in staged, publicity-type shots atop a motorcycle or pinned by a series of metal racks.
The Eameses were personalities, hosting great, whimsical dinner parties at their dream house in the middle of a wood in the Pacific Palisades up the California coast from Disneyland. They often served flowers as dessert to invited guests. Today Eames is a diluted word, used by eBay vendors to describe vaguely modern furniture, mostly of the Ikea variety, or knockoffs, but in the late 1940s and ’50s and through the ’70s and ’80s, the couple was joined in both a kind of life-as-a-movie sense of theatricality and a commitment to make the new world a more practical and beautiful place. As Wes Anderson’s would be decades on, their clean-cut appearance and sense of palatable but progressive whimsy was catnip to corporate sponsors. As with Anderson’s now-iconic American Express card ad, the Eameses’ most famous film would be short: an innovative piece for IBM entitled Powers of Ten, “a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero.”
The 1977 short begins with a couple enjoying a picnic in a park in Chicago, then zooms out, adding a zero to the distance measurement of the bird’s-eye view over them until the viewer is taken out of the atmosphere and years away at the speed of light—and is then returned to the park.
In the years after World War II and through the horrifying and tense Cold War, the Eameses were among those artists who crucially reclaimed science and technology from those who would use it to destroy cities and people—the “Masters of War” that Bob Dylan would soon excoriate. The Eameses were Masters of Twee by contrast. Their sense of the highly personal craft that was meant for sale and consumption predated the Etsy revolution by a half century.
Of all the champions of sensitivity and gentleness as a weapon, perhaps it was the writers who gave the strongest voice and the most direct succor to the war-wounded. A book, like a Bible, can be held the way a child holds a doll, traveled with and referred to when the room begins to spin with vertigo and dread.
New Englander Theodor Geisel, provides yet another way out of despair and existential malaise, a swirling, colorful, almost violently whimsical proto-Twee pathway. He was already in his forties when World War II hit. Even before the American forces’ engagement, Geisel became noteworthy for his scathing cartoons of Adolf Hitler—such as “Mein Early Kampf,” which portrayed the dictator as a petulant infant in diapers (but with that famous mustache). Geisel even worked with Ferdinand cocreator Leaf on a recurring strip aimed at soldiers that featured a character named Snafu. As the German surrender drew to a close, he was deputized by the War Department to create an instructive film designed to give the Allies a plan for occupying and eventually reconstructing the defeated Reich. Given a major’s rank, Geisel flew to Europe, ending up in Paris to screen the film directed by Frank Capra and entitled, simply, Your Job in Germany. Comparing it to the books of Dr. Seuss is like comparing Disney’s Victory Through Aviation to Peter Pan. It’s as bleak and as practical as film gets. “The problem now is future peace,” Geisel writes. “That is your job in Germany. Lay the groundwork for a peace that could last forever, or just the opposite. You could lay the groundwork for a new war to come!” A typical instruction is: “You’ll see ruins. You’ll see flowers. You’ll see mighty pretty scenery, but don’t let it fool you! You are in enemy country! Be alert.”
Geisel himself remained alert after Paris, where he saw the devastation, the wounded, and the pointless and cruel anarchy of combat. This bred a kind of madcap, existential freedom, tinged with not a little anger, that would inform his later work, beginning in 1957 with the surprise hit The Cat in the Hat (under the pen name, of course, of Dr. Seuss). The titular Cat does what he wants despite the almost incessant protestations of a panic-stricken fish belonging to a pair of children he visits one “cold and rainy day.”
The Cat wears a tall red-and-white chapeau that would, four decades on, be adopted by Ecstasy- and speed-fueled ravers as a sort of tribute to the anarchic feline’s madcap stance. He is also probably a sociopath, and certainly an exhibitionist. “I know some new tricks!” he promises the children, and refuses to vacate when asked. The cat is, in a sense, chaos itself, made palatable for children. It’s as if Seuss is saying, “Get to know this cat, because you will see him again . . . and again. Be cool when this cat comes around.” As with Disney, darkness, angst, and a kind of implicit but not overstated realism that children instinctively appreciated were never too far from Seuss’s enchantment through subsequent
books like The Lorax and his holiday tale How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
The Seuss stories, as a series of wildly successful animated films and television specials attest, translated seamlessly to the then-new media. They were at once throwbacks to the fables and incredibly modern and fearless, almost Punk. The first of which, the live action The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, is downright anarchic. It’s a surrealist waking dream about a piano lesson gone prepsychedelic. Cowritten by Seuss, the 1953 film is little more than a colorful set piece that warns against being too strict with the hard-practicing piano student. The evil Dr. Terwilliker exists in a dream world where he tends a mad vision of louder, faster concertos. Seuss’s fatherless hero Bart Collins seems to ask, “Why bother?” A key to the author’s appeal is that he has insight into this bit of childhood philosophy. The things adults prize often pale in comparison with pure fun. To have fun is to be alive.
This is not to say Seuss is a hedonist. From Seuss’s early children’s books, like Horton Hears a Who! (1954) to his The Butter Battle Book, four decades later, we find surface-simple stories that are deeply pregnant with morality (in the first case, a plea for tolerance and faith; in the latter, a Cold War parable about the dangers of hawkish fervor and the absurdity of mutually assured destruction).
Horton the elephant, like Ferdinand, is a gentle giant in the “Jungle of Nool” who communicates with a microscopic citizen of Who-ville. None of the other wild animals (monkeys, kangaroos) can hear the Whos shout at Horton, and they dismiss him as crazy. “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” goes the moral. It’s a plea for faith and tolerance by someone who has seen, firsthand, the testing of one and the absence of another. And it’s aimed at children because Seuss posits that they are instinctively moral. The world corrupts. Nobody is born hateful.
In The Butter Battle Book, the absurdity of prejudice is highlighted just in case. Seuss’s Yooks nearly destroy their rival Zooks for eating their toast butter-side down instead of up. Separated by a Berlin-like Wall, each side concocts more and more elaborate weaponry to prepare for a growing conflict; moving dubiously from slingshots to the “Eight-Nozzled, Elephant-Toted Boom-Blitz,” Butter Battle ends on a vague note, a stalemate, with bomb shelters dug and both sides pointing intricate (but Seussian-ridiculous) weapons at each other. “We’ll see,” says an elder, when asked about what happens next, “We will see.” One could be heavy, Seuss proved, even dour, without frightening off children or losing that crucial sense of whimsy. It was a rare and useful trick; and a must for any protest artist worth a damn.
In 1950 there were about 6 million TV sets in American homes. A decade later, there were upward of 60 million. Network programmers, with a huge demand to meet, turned to children’s stories to fill the airwaves and provide a proto-version of what is now called “content.” The 1939 filmed version of L. Frank Baum’s fantastic The Wizard of Oz, for example, made its television debut in 1956 and has remained an annual event ever since. Like Walt Disney, Baum saw the world as it was—black-and-white, dour, dusty Kansas, with its horrible Ms. Gulch—and then as it should be: a Technicolor fantasy world run by the Lollipop Guild and the Butterfly League . . . and, of course, a few witches, two of them really bad people. “There’s no place like home” is the takeaway from Oz, but the real wallop was and continues to be Judy Garland’s rendition of Howard Arlen’s dazzling ballad “Over the Rainbow” while still in Kansas, pre-twister. The film became a perennial because people continued to dream of that place as they recovered from the war—and, later, from the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam and even Iraq and Afghanistan. Wherever there is bloodshed, there will be the counterideal of “happy little bluebirds.”
Oz, of course, was a phony, and Jerome David Salinger, strong jawed, dark, and handsome, was already becoming world famous for creating a character who reveled in pointing those kind of people out. Salinger, unlike Disney, came from a well-to-do family, but he stands alongside Mickey’s inventor as perhaps the second great body of water that feeds all Twee streams, rivers, estuaries, and ponds. His influence on the aesthetic is equally vast, his body of work virtual Twee scripture. Salinger attended the highly regarded Valley Forge military school and before the war cavorted among society types at the Stork Club and other upscale watering holes. During the war, Salinger left that lifestyle behind and served in the 12th Infantry. He was among the soldiers storming Normandy Beach on D-day, June 6, 1944. His division fought its way through the snipers in Hürtgen Forest, where thousands of American soldiers lost their lives. As the war wound down, Salinger’s regiment was among those who liberated an offshoot of the Dachau concentration camp. He saw firsthand the dead, naked bodies stacked like cordwood or buried in mass graves after the guards had fled. Later, as part of the ISI, he hunted and interrogated Nazis. Then he almost obligatorily lost his mind, briefly married, quickly divorced, and by the late 1940s became the celebrated author he had aspired to be since his prep-school years.
J. D. Salinger was broken by the world as it truly was, but he saved himself from destruction by inventing a seventeen-year-old boy. Unbeknown to most, Salinger took this boy overseas with him, in his head. The boy wore a crew cut, like a soldier, and adopted the same chain-smoking, foul-mouthed persona at times (masking, of course, a pained sweetness). He had drink and girls on his mind, this companion-creation. Holden Caulfield was conceived in New York City, during the aforementioned reverie, which was marred only by frequent rejection letters from the New Yorker. Holden came of age and entered into the Twee canon not only as a product of the war and its chilly aftermath but as a balm for it all. Holden knew the game was rigged. He was familiar with loneliness. Every date would end in tears. In “I’m Crazy,” published in the Christmas 1945 issue of Collier’s magazine, Salinger, using the first-person narrative device that would soon be the universally familiar, lets us in on his heroes’ inner voices: “I kept saying goodby to myself. ‘Goodby, Caulfield. Goodby, you slob.’” And suddenly, self-deprecation is sexy and tough and sad, a decade before Woody Allen became a popular stand-up comic and four before the Smiths’ debut.
Holden is a mess. He flunks classes. He talks back. He loses his fencing equipment on the subway. (How does one lose fencing equipment?) But he’s wiser than everyone else around him at once and sees through them with ease.
It’s reductive—and, given Salinger’s eventual disappearance into New England and his refusal to publicly analyze his stories and novels during much of his later years, nearly impossible—to say that Caulfield would not exist without the war. But Holden’s undeniable, irresistible, unrejectable voice was burnished during combat, and he surely came to life by roadsides and in foxholes and tents in Europe. Holden the idea—and the ideal—required battle, horror, and recovery. His voice is resilient, wise, and wiseass. He will go on because he’s young but also because he sees beauty among the terror.
“Life is a game, boy,” Holden is told in The Catcher in the Rye, the novel Salinger had been planning and piecing together as he served. “Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”
“Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it,” he replies to his elder. But in his head, which we’ve already been allowed into, he says, “Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.”
Seymour Glass, hero of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the short story that made Salinger famous before The Catcher in the Rye made him immortal, puts a bullet through his temple in a Florida motel room as his troubled girlfriend sleeps next to him. Shell-shocked, he’s lost all hope. Holden Caulfield has some left, even if he finds the very concept sappy. His persistence makes him not only endearing but also a sort of beacon.
It should be said that there’s also a practical appeal to Salinger’s literary universe and its population, one not lost on modern storytellers like Woody Allen,
Whit Stillman, or Wes Anderson. Salinger offers the real-life miserable misfit wretch something glamorous. His heroes are all beauties, first of all. They sip martinis. They smoke. They quip. They fence, or attempt to. They live in a Manhattan where it always seems to be cold and Christmas-aired. When we see them, through his words, we really see our ideal selves as physically attractive and troubled; our pain given a kind of train-station shoe shine. They are pop savvy as well, all versed in magazines, jazz, and movies even as they remain haunted. The Glass family alone is marked by suicide and combat death, but who would not want to join it?
Salinger himself, wandering Central Park dreaming of a life akin to that of his literary hero F. Scott Fitzgerald and rereading his rejection slips, knew this particularly perverse strain of urban envy well. Writers were lousy with it. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were drunk and doomed, but the young, prefame Salinger would have given an arm to be either of them. The Catcher in the Rye was published in the summer of 1951 and was an instant hit. For two years Holden Caulfield stood, virtually alone, as the voice of postwar reason, truth, and youthful power.
By 1953 the fictional Holden Caulfield had competition: a young girl who had been dead for nearly a decade, her life snuffed out by hate and pestilence and the very hypocrisy and cruelty and general cruddiness that Salinger’s narrator assails. Unlike Holden, she had actually existed. She was real. She lived, briefly, and then she perished of typhus, naked, bald, and covered with lice, in the Auschwitz death camps in Poland, convinced (incorrectly) that her entire family was also doomed. Anne Frank does not exist in our minds this way, of course. In books and plays and on concept albums she is a voice of honesty, reason, hope, wit, and sanity in a world that seems broken and insane. She goes on until she can no longer, but, even in the concentration camp, she persists.
It seems unfair and probably unwise to continue to compare the real Anne Frank to any fictional character, even though Holden seems so real and Anne has been so effectively dramatized over the years onstage and in film that she seems beyond flesh and blood and commands that seamless permanence of a great fictional character. I only mean to say that the idea and example of Anne is similar to that of Holden. Both ask, “Why can’t things be different?” Her appearance (in the scant photos and one bit of film footage available) before the camps supports these thoughts of her. She is a darkly beautiful and precocious, very young woman with a mischievous, humorous gleam in her eye and a smile on her face. She is neatly, almost crisply attired, like the fastidious writer she aspired to be.