Disney’s House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war. But the HoF wasn’t marred by starkness. The spare white form had been warmed with curves. Each quadrant was a streamlined seamed pod, a crossbreed: half jet fuselage, half legume. And, as with an airplane or a beanstalk, the structure rose aloft, flying on a plinth above its house lot.
This was not the domicile’s most practical feature when it came to helping Mom unload the groceries from the DeSoto Fireflite station wagon. (Chrysler Corporation’s advertising slogan in 1957: “Suddenly it’s 1960!”) But levitation sure would have enlarged my weenie subdivision yard. There’d be room for a bit of Tomorrowland for my own family, or, anyway, a trampoline. I remember wondering what our “colonial” (which didn’t even merit the prefix pseudo- ) would look like jacked up eight feet and plopped on a shaft. Better, definitely.
The House of the Future was sponsored by the Monsanto Company and designed by Marvin Goody and Richard Hamilton from the MIT architecture department. They were prescient in various unimportant ways: the residence contained cordless phones, a flat-screen, wall-size TV; and a somewhat sinister-sounding device called a “microwave oven.” Otherwise the only relationship between the futurism and the future was that today, in Los Angeles and New York, every bit of the place would be worth tens of thousands of dollars as a precious “Mid-Century Modern” antique.
The most nostalgically futuristic aspect of the House of the Future was that it was made almost entirely of plastic. In 1957 plastic still enjoyed the benefit of its definition (2a) in Merriam-Webster’s: “capable of being molded and shaped”—into anything you wanted! Plastic was the stuff that didn’t rust or rot or break when you dropped it. Thanks to plastic and a little glue, even the clumsiest kid (me) could build splendidly detailed models of PanAm Mars Passenger Rockets and atomic-powered automobiles and all the other things that wouldn’t happen. We were a decade away from the scene in The Graduate that made the word an epithet. I, for one, think Dustin Hoffman’s character should have taken the career advice, and the stupid movie should have ended then and there. Instead, in 1967, it was Disney’s House of the Future that came to an abrupt finish. Or not-so-abrupt. Reports have it that a wrecking ball merely bounced on the sturdy polymer seed cases, and the prematurely postmodernist structure had to be sawed apart by hand. (As many a timorous would-be suicide has discovered—with vise-like grip on a bridge railing—the future is harder to get rid of than you’d think.)
Tomorrowland survived being homeless. But it lost its zest. Walt had died in 1966, and Disney Inc. was deprived of his instinct for America’s flights of fancy. For example, Tomorrowland’s Hall of Chemistry closed that same year, just as an entire generation of me and my friends got very interested in chemicals.
Nothing speaks of living in the present like getting a complete makeover, which Tomorrowland endured in 1998. Disney, displaying one of the greatest absences of irony on record, gave Tomorrowland a “retro” theme.
Disney’s press release called the new Tomorrowland “a classic future environment.” This explains the Astro Orbiter ride, built in a style that might be called “Jules Vernacular,” with lots of exposed rivet heads, ogee-shaped pieces of wrought iron containing circular holes, and rockets with nose cones like the Eiffel Tower. “Classic future” also excuses the Chevron-sponsored Autopia, a holdover from the Tomorrow-land of yore where tourists can drive on a “superhighway”—with divided lanes!—in quarter-scale fiberglass imitations of the dream cars at auto shows when Ike was in office.
My family and I arrived at Disneyland on a hot June day. We had spent the preceding two hours stuck in traffic on an un-super Interstate 5, idling away $4.35 gasoline in a rental car that was no one’s idea of a dream. Autopia did not appeal.
But there was a part of moldy old Tomorrowland that wasn’t past its sell-by date. A fresh-minted House of the Future had had its ribbon-cutting—with laser scissors?—earlier that month. These digs were completely original and all brand (specifically: Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Life|ware brand) new.
Mrs. O. took our younger children, Poppet and Buster, “to infinity and beyond” (Buzz Lightyear being integral to the classic future’s canon). And I led ten-year-old Muffin to utopia’s latest abode.
Muffin, like her dad as a kid, is a midget aesthete, though with an interest more in interior than edifice. She has a good eye (if somewhat too great a fondness for cute kittens). My wife and I actually consult her about paint colors and where pictures should be hung. I didn’t tell Muffin what I was up to, or Disney’s press office, either. We eschewed friendly hovering. I wanted my daughter’s gut reaction. And if that gut reaction was as strong and as positive as mine had been in 1957, if Muffin uttered the 2008 kidspeak translation of “It’s neat”—“Omigod, awesome”—then we, as a civilization, are doomed.
I say this because I’d read a February 13 Associated Press story by Gillian Flaccus, “Disney Rebuilds ‘House of the Future’ with Tech Giants’ Help.” Various passages caught my attention and piqued my blood pressure: “Lights and thermostats will automatically adjust when people walk into a room.” My wife, for example. All winter long—with heating oil costing more per gallon than the brand of vodka we’ve been reduced to buying—my wife walks into a room, and the thermostat is adjusted to eighty degrees. First that sentence from the AP started a fight in my mind with my wife. Then the next sentence turned my wife on me, tooth and nail: “Closets will help pick out the right dress for a party.” The article went on to explain, “Mirrors and closets could identify clothes and suggest matching outfits.” Imagine having a full-length looking glass and a husband tell you, “That makes your butt look big.”
Following upon the stifling bedroom with its closet full of body image insecurities and bitchy fashion comments came, “Countertops will be able to identify groceries set on them and make menu suggestions.” You’ve just come back from a family trip to the Shop-N-Pay. (And, I gather, in the new House of the Future, you don’t have to beam up the canned goods from the sub-household carport.) The tantrums over checkout lane candy and gum and the attempts to avert children’s eyes from the cover of Us are over. Sticker shock has worn off. Everybody’s in a pretty good mood. And suddenly the strip of Formica between the sink and the stove pipes up in a computer-generated snivel: “I hate asparagus.” “Muffin took all the Skittles.” “Meat loaf again?” Probably the fridge chimes in, “Well, if you don’t like meat loaf make your own damn dinner.” And this is assuming that the kitchen doesn’t have IT problems or an e-mail virus or an inputting error that causes the countertop to go, “macaroniandcheesemacaroniandcheesemacaroniand . . .” We already have a four-year-old who does that.
“Much of the project,” Flaccus wrote, “will showcase a network that makes the house ‘smart’ and follows family members from room to room—even adjusting artwork—to preset personal preferences.”
So I enter the “great room.” (HoF II is described as having 5,000 square feet and only two bedrooms, so I assume we’ve got a McMansion here.) I encounter bracing fresh air, Remington bronzes, and Buddy Holly on the sound system. My wife is greeted with cozy warmth, abstract expressionism, and Bach. Muffin receives kitten portraits and the High School Musical score. Her younger siblings, Poppet and Buster, get plush toys, Tonka trucks, and Raffitunes.
But what happens when we all walk in together? Just how smart is this house? Does it launch into a pathetic attempt to make everybody happy? Norman Rockwell limned some kittens and a cowboy or two and even an illustration of a museum guard puzzling over a Jackson Pollock. Maybe the Boston Pops does “Baby Beluga” to a rockabilly beat. There could be a blazing fire on one side and a freezing draft on the other. Or does the smart house, like many brainy types, get angry when it’s conflicted? Our living space turns into a sauna hung with hellish works of Francis Bacon while Philip Glass blares and all the plaything
s come from China slathered in lead paint. I showed the AP article to my wife. She said, “You don’t sell a house like this; you divorce it.”
Muffin and I trudged across Tomorrowland, following intermittent and unenthusiastic signage, toward the House of the Future. The way in was at the top of a spiral ramp that should have been an Archimedes’ screw of a people mover, or something, especially since it ascended a building that once held the “General Electric Carousel of Progress.” (This merry-go-round of human improvement broke down in 1973.) Muffin asked where we were going. I told her and she said, “So it’s really, really, modern?” It was more modern than that. HoF II has a subprime mortgage, or so it appeared. The joint was closed up.
“Technical difficulties,” said a Disney “cast member.”
I listened at the roped-off entrance for a telltale sound of “macaroniandcheesemacaroniandcheesemacaroniandcheese,” but I heard nothing. So one had to wonder.
I invoked what media privileges I have and called Disney public relations. John McClintock, a senior publicist, could not have been more polite and understanding. He did what he could to get my daughter and me just a walk-through and a look-around. That was all you got with the old House of the Future anyway, although HoF II comes with performers portraying a future family (which still has one mom and one dad, amazingly enough). I understand you’ll get to visit with them while they play-act packing for a trip to China—posters of Chairman Mao on the “adjusting art”; tunes from Flower Drum Song playing in the background; closets scolding, “That will get so wrinkled in the suitcase”; and countertop warning, “Don’t order snake.”
McClintock called back. “Technical difficulties,” he said, plus a firm no-go from his higher-ups.
Muffin and I could look over a railing into the ceiling-free household one floor below us. It has a single-story open plan with a circular shape, though the circularity seems to have more to do with the roundness of the old Carousel of Progress and crowd control than with futurism. Not that there were any crowds trying to get in. As far as I could tell nobody but Muffin and I noticed that HoF II wasn’t open.
I boosted Muffin so she could get a better view. Her preteen snarkiness blended with childish disappointment. “It looks like our hotel,” she said.
Not even. And where we were staying was best described as “Schlitz-Carlton.”
According to Disney, the shape of things to come takes shape at Pottery Barn, with a quick stop in Restoration Hardware for “classic future” touches and a trip to Target to get throw rugs and cheap Japanese paper lanterns. HoF II was designed by the Taylor Morrison company, a home builder specializing in anodyne subdevelopmental housing in the Southwest. The company’s president and CEO told the Associated Press, “The 1950s home didn’t look like anything, anywhere. It was space-age and kind of cold. We didn’t want the home to intimidate the visitors.”
Muffin wasn’t scared. To my profound relief she wasn’t interested at all. Though, in fairness, only a few of the HoF II innovations were discernible from our perch. The art on the walls, set in fussy gilt frames, did keep changing. I couldn’t see quite what the changes were, but I’m guessing Manet to Monet and back.
The variegating artwork summoned memories of my Great-Aunt Lillian’s annual visits. She was a very amateur painter. On the day before her arrival my mother would make a frantic rush to the attic to dig out her wealthy, childless relative’s oeuvre. (Many depictions of kittens, as I recall.) Unfaded spaces on our wallpaper did not match the shapes of Aunt Lil’s paintings, and she left us nothing in her will.
A coffee table in HoF II displayed, via Power Point–type projection, the text and original John Tenniel illustrations of Alice in Wonderland. “Daddy, read me a coffee table.” Family photos were scattered around, cased in conventional silver plate. But there was something lap-toppy about the backs of the pictures that suggested they were video capable. Uncle Mike on the mantel, forever recounting his Iwo Jima exploits.
HoF II’s kitchen table had plasma screen place mats showing water rippling over rocks—just the sort of thing a drinking man wants waving away under his eggs in the morning.
I asked Muffin, “Well, what do you think of the House of the Future?”
“It’s beige,” she said. Beige it is, literally—upholstered, carpeted, and painted in brownish, grayish, yellowish hues. And beige it is metaphorically. Any random dull normal person (we have one in our house) could come up with snappier ideas for the future than HoF II seems to contain. How about self-washing windows? Automobiles have had them since the 1930s. And have you watched the clever manner by which modern convertible car tops operate? What keeps that technology from being applied to self-making beds? If a house must be smart (and, as a man who is continually outwitted by his wife, children, and dogs, the house can dummy up and mind its own beeswax as far as I’m concerned), then why can’t it be as smart as a Toyota? Toyotas start their wipers at the first drop of rain. I wouldn’t mind a house that could close its own windows, although I’m sure my thumb will be there when they slam shut.
Such ideas are too simply reasonable for Tomorrowland. In HoF II, according to the AP, “When a resident clicks a TV remote . . . lights will dim, music will shut off and the shades will draw. . . .” What if it’s a beautiful day outside, I’m reading the paper and humming along to “Hello Peggy Sue,” and I just want to check the NASDAQ?
I saw no mention of the Disney house having one of those robot vacuum cleaners that trundles around hoovering on its own agenda. I hope HoF II at least has that. I want to see it face off against my Boston bull terrier. I’m giving two-to-one odds against the vacuum. Even better would be a helium balloon with a propeller and a mop of feathers that flew around dusting things. It might not do a very good job dusting, but at our house, neither do we.
I polled the family, to get their ideas of how a domicile could be inventive. My wife suggested that the “smart” closet cut the wisecracks about her knockoff Jimmy Choos and close its doors and do the dry cleaning (with ecologically friendly solvents, of course). She also proposed a “face bidet” for chocolate-smeared kiddies and an iPod “nag chip” that periodically interrupts to tell children to do their homework, clean their rooms, etc.
Muffin wants to install hot air dryers in our shower “to save the earth’s towels.” She also has an idea for a spiral slide from her bedroom to the garage. The chute would be rigged with her clothes so that she could slide right into them. Homework and packed lunch would be pressed into her hands and milk, juice, and cereal piped into her mouth as she descended to the backseat of the car. Thus Muffin figures she could go from bed to being on the way to school in one minute flat.
Poppet, our eight-year-old, envisions a system of pneumatic tubes that would deliver the stuffed animal of her choosing to the place of her choice, worldwide.
Buster, who’s four, said, “Dogs on the potty.” A serious challenge to the plumbing industry, not to mention the dogs, but it’s a worthy goal.
Even if Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Life|ware have no ideas whatsoever you’d think they could tap Disney’s proven reserves of whimsy. Where’s Mrs. Teapot, her son Chip, the officious candlestick, and the chairs that walk around in Beauty and the Beast? Where is the plastic inventiveness of Mickey and Donald cartoons? Where is Gyro Gearloose when we need him?
Denigrating the future has been a main prop of the intellectual edifice for the past forty years. Looking forward went out of fashion about the time that Buckminster Fuller’s audacious geodesic domes, meant to cover entire cities, wound up as hippie-height wobbling commune structures cobbled together out of barn boards. Bruce Handy, writing in Time about Disney’s 1998 reopening of a deliberately outof-date Tomorrowland, began his essay with the sentence, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” He stated, “It’s not a novel observation to point out that our culture has become increasingly backward looking.” And he asked, “Hasn’t life become messier as it’s become easier?”
Don’t bl
ame the future. For one thing, it doesn’t exist yet. And, for another thing, we do. We’re always creating our future whether we mean to or think so or don’t. Global creativity, like global climate, seems to have its cycles—natural, man-made, or whatever. Sometimes human beings just aren’t very imaginative. There was our first million years of existence as a species, for starters. We came down from the trees, made some stone choppers, and that was it.
The last 1,000 years of the Roman Empire, until the fall of Constantinople, were no great shakes. The Romans had all the engineering knowledge needed to start an industrial revolution. But they preferred to have toga parties and let slaves do all the work.
The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn’t occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn’t go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.
And here we are now. Name a cherished contemporary avant-garde painter or novelist. Name a great living composer. Say “Andrew Lloyd Webber” and I’ll throttle you. Theater is revivals and revivals of revivals and stuff like making a musical out of old Kellogg’s Rice Krispies commercials with Nathan Lane as “Snap.” Movies are famously not any good anymore. More modern poetry is written than read. Modern architecture leaks and the builders left their plumb bobs at home. The most prominent contemporary art form is one that is completely unimaginative (or is supposed to be), the memoir. To top it all, we have just experienced perhaps the greatest technological advance in the history of mankind. And what are we using the Internet for? To sell each other eight-track tapes on eBay, tell complete strangers the location of all our tattoos on Facebook, and, if Tomorrowland is anything to go by, turn our houses into nattering, shrieking, dysfunctional reality TV shows even when nobody’s home.
I took a last look into the homestead of the hereafter and said to Muffin, “Let’s get out of here.”
Holidays in Heck Page 18