by David Rakoff
Does the Elias Family Saga turn this trade show into an immersive experience? One is certainly deposited into a sea of people. They let in groups of seventy visitors at a time, but guests can stay as long as they like and the space fills up in very short order. Another impediment is that the Elias characters never interact with one another—kind of a basic requirement for a dramatic entertainment—so the carefully constructed back-stories and relationships might as well never have been written in the first place. Moreover, they’re all wearing the same yellow Astro Blasters jersey, which makes them seem like less dramatis personae than employees at a Best Buy. And no one, neither guest nor Elias, is sticking around long enough to have anything but the most glancing contact. They appear, greet us, say something breathless and generic about their upcoming trip to China while directing our attention to some gadget, and then beat a hasty retreat with a cheerful “See you at the party out back. Have fun!” To cut them some slack, there is almost no way to inject emotional urgency into the phrase “See, my iPac phone connects with the Life/ware system that connects through Microsoft Windows …”—but why even try? The narrative hook of the Elias family and their “story” is about as effective as decorating bullets. Who’s going to appreciate the flowers that have been lovingly painted on as they whiz by?
Actually, a bullet—decorated or unadorned—starts to look mighty attractive after a while once the crowds come in. The Dream Home is a place of ceaseless activity and cacophony. The Life/ware consoles compete with one another from room to room. The light levels cycle rapidly. The window shades—printed in an attractive Alphonse Mucha–style swirl—rise and fall like carousel horses. The crowds want to try things out, pitting Dad’s Barry White against Mom’s ABBA not twenty feet away. At one point I park myself near one of the control panels and unilaterally select Grandpa’s Andrews Sisters playlist, not giving anyone who approaches even the slimmest of chances of changing the music for a few blessed minutes. This is just one of the many dispiriting aspects of 360 Tomorrowland Way: it would be just as jangling even without visitors, if it was only the family here. Rooms reassemble themselves upon the arrival of a new Elias, responding to RFID tags sewn into their soccer jerseys (although if two people enter the room at the same time, Mom’s preferences prevail, the Peace of the Hearth being of paramount importance). Things chez Elias are both adversarial and negligent, as though a family with shared interests who might agree upon what to hang on the walls of the dining room was somewhat laughable, as though we have all of us, up until now, been living lives of quiet desperation, muffling our desires and personal preferences in ambient music, lighting, cuisine, and artwork. The Life/ware system is predicated on the notion that the personal preferences of each family member are inimically different. And such environment-shifting software seems a questionable power to bestow upon a child, if only because of its potential narrowing of horizons. The notion of guiding a juvenile mind away from a constant diet of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody might seem heretical here at Disney, but surely shaping the tastes of the young is a fundamental part of taking care of them, a more benign aspect of the moral attentiveness that makes us inoculate them against disease and teach them not to steal. Is the fear of a tantrum so great that a Brueghel painting, say, must perforce morph into a large photo of a gumball machine just because an eight-year-old has walked into the room?
Passing the Parrish-style mural on the courtyard wall—beside the very ordinary laundry room that still filled this apartment dweller with envious wonder—I head to the much talked-about party out back, in the AstroTurfed “yard.” With an expected eight thousand visitors marching through the space every day, any natural grass would be trampled into oblivion just as surely as if it had been napalmed. It resembles a car commercial set in a dealership where there is a balloon-festooned shindig in progress. Will we all kiss at midnight? Unlikely, since there isn’t a scrap of sustenance or drop of inhibition-lowering liquid in sight. With a cocktail or two, this could become the scene in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments where the Israelites, doubting the existence of their god, smelt a golden calf to worship—and for some nubile contract players to writhe upon—the bacchanal reaching its acme just as Moses returns with the tablets of the Law in hand, and you know the rest of that story …
A major aspect of the party that is preventing the kind of unenlightened behavior that goeth before a fall is the fact that no one is looking at anyone else. There is a deafening chaos of competing Zunes (Microsoft’s MP3 players), a Taylor Morrison Homes design-it-yourself monitor, a race-car simulation game complete with juddering driver’s seat (what garden would be complete without one?), and a barbecue with a flat-screen monitor that can dispense cooking instructions, but no food. And there, a vanquished Apollo, now reduced to serving as nothing but a decorative pedestal for another noise-dispensing screen, is a small-scale model of the original House of the Future.
It is a dog pile of consumption, overhung with colored Chinese lanterns. It all makes one yearn for the monastic serenity of the Times Square subway at rush hour. The cherry on this sundae of despair is the helium squeak of two little girls karaoke-ing their way through the main anthem from High School Musical, the musica sacra of the tween canon, “Start of Something New.” Frankly, it all feels anything but.
At five thousand square feet, the Dream Home is plush and commodious. In the entire place, the only thing that might qualify as a space-saving Innovention is that kitchen faucet. Otherwise, nothing is dual-purpose; nothing folds down into anything else. Nowhere is there even a tip of the hat to a world of dwindling resources or our dependence on fossil fuels, foreign or domestic. Far more than the atomic-age louvers and aerodynamic icing of the fifty-year-old versions of the future, this house seems mired in yesterday. Your grandfather’s tomorrow was more ingenious. Atkins doesn’t really understand my reservations, thinking that my problems with the Dream Home are aesthetic. “We’re in Southern California. We think this way,” spreading his hands wide apart, “not this way,” he says, spacing them vertically. Precisely.
Art director Tom Zofrea gets it. He acknowledges and applauds the current trends toward mixed-use, human-scale homes and neighborhoods, with the lost art of walking enjoying a locomotive renaissance. “If you read the architectural literature and what architects are looking at for the future, they are looking at reinventing the mixed-use, New York flats above the retail space. I actually think that’s a great way to go, it sends the right message, absolutely positive.” Why then does this have no place in the Dream Home? The reasons are both practical and philosophical. With Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility requirements and fire-code compliances, there would be almost no way to make it much more compact. True enough, but the conspicuous absence of even a mention of alternative fuel sources, of solar or wind power, smacks of marching orders from on high. “What we’re trying to do is to keep a very optimistic and open view of the future, and the optimistic view of the future is ‘we’ll solve these problems and we’ll learn to design around them,’ ” he says. The Dream Home, therefore, exists in an unspecified time and space when the challenges of oil and sprawl have been vanquished, although how exactly is never mentioned. Disney may have said it first but they seem to have forgotten that it really is a small world, after all.
In an odd coincidence, the very week that the Dream Home opened, at the other end of the Disney corporation’s spectrum, Pixar releases Wall-E, its thoroughly dystopian masterpiece, a film premised on a world choked by garbage and waste, a planet no longer habitable and made so, at least in part, by—let’s not mince words—the fat fucks who build gargantuan homes that make little or no concession to the limited resources out there.
The Monsanto House of the Future actually began as a research project between the chemical company and MIT as a means of exploring the ways in which plastics and man-made materials could be harnessed in ways they never had been previously. The original promotional film begins by speaking rapturously of the many wondro
us innovations (see how lovely a word that is, all on its own?) that had already vastly improved lives: waterproof roofing materials; shockproof vinyl coverings for electrical cords; materials that could be produced industrially and cheaply. “This is indeed a revolution,” says the voice-over.
The current revolution—one that Disney has ignored here—is sustainability. We should be walking through a five-hundred-square-foot home where you cook with, drink, urinate, heat, cool, and drink once more the same four gallons of water. The overwhelming feeling here is of a home from 2004, already ancient history in the public consciousness, pre–subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the world economy. The paint is barely dry and this is already out-of-date; a timid, delusional, exurban mausoleum that can only be accessed by a decreasingly affordable car (the Monsanto House didn’t even have a garage). More than the waste, the equating of acknowledging reality with bumming people out is what seems most glaringly old school. By the time I visit in late 2008, we are already shuddering on the brink of a cultural moment where, after suffering through years of falsely elevated and baseless hopes, it feels downright animated-woodland-creature-chirpy to face up to facts. A young fellow waiting to get into the Dream Home wears a T-shirt whose sentiments presage the necessary tough times ahead which still hold the promise of the rosiest of new dawns: 1-20-09. BUSH’S LAST DAY.
It’s not a total bust. The Dream Home does provide one moment of absolutely authentic wish fulfillment: a father in the family room, in front of the vast, gorgeous, pool-table-sized sheet of glass that is the Elias family television set. He is on the sofa, asleep.
II.
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Superman has taken the morning off. Although appearing among us in mufti, he is immediately identifiable by his square jaw and the comma of dark hair upon his forehead. With an affable hello he greets the other Hollywood Boulevard regulars who have gathered along with a small crowd of tourists standing outside the classical façade of the old Masonic Temple, now the theater where Jimmy Kimmel does his evening talk show. The USC Trojans marching band, or at least a skeleton crew thereof, goes through its paces, a casually synchronized, loose-limbed routine in which they instrumentally exhort us to do a little dance, make a little love, and above all, get down tonight. Superman bops his head, enjoying his moments of freedom. In a while he will have to put on his blue tights and red Speedo and go in to work, posing for pictures with the tourists in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Maybe he’ll stop on the way at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at the corner of Hollywood and North Orange. Batman and the Cat in the Hat go there sometimes.
Suddenly, from the doors of the theater, just behind the Trojans, emerges a cheerful chubby fellow. Completely unconnected to the proceedings on the street, he is dressed in a cheap red-satin Satan costume. Dancing in time to the music, he beckons to us, crowing delightedly, “Worship me! Worship me!”
But we are here for neither the Man of Steel nor the Prince of Darkness. We have come this morning to witness the consecration of the newest star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. The “star” in question on this dull April morning is local radio personality Dan Avey, who will join the two thousand–plus others—from the greats to the somewhat less-than-greats to the downright obscure—in that characteristic luncheon-meat-pink-against-lustrous-black-terrazzo-and-brass immortality. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, the organization that administers the Walk, has set up a steel barrier to separate those with a personal stake in the ceremony from the gawkers and hoi polloi. It is a hopeful gesture.
“It’s almost like going to your own funeral,” says Avey, after the brief tributes from fellow radio announcers. The star is unveiled. Avey’s friends and family applaud. A local crazy snaps pictures; his straw fedora is banded with a braid of blue-and-white balloons, the kind birthday-party clowns twist into animal and flower shapes, and his ears sport very large fake diamonds. He is trying to get a knot of puzzled German tourists to move, but he squeaks out a high-pitched gibberish that only seems to increase his frustration, as the Germans just look at him. Perplexed Northern Europeans—hereafter PNEs—turn out to be just one of the mainstays of the area, along with leafleting evangelicals, sex workers, harmless ambulant schizophrenics, and beat cops.
There are some places where an intrinsic melancholy might be reason enough to stay away, I suppose, although I can’t think of any. Hollywood Boulevard recently underwent a major urban renewal, a charge led by the building of the Kodak Theatre complex, current home of the Oscars and American Idol telecasts. But the neighborhood’s dilapidated, honky-tonk charms, and they are legion, lie in the vestiges of its storied past that endure obstinately: Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, currently home of the American Cinematheque, with its sandstone forecourt and hieroglyphics, looking like something straight out of the Valley of the Kings; the polychrome-plaster opulence of the El Capitan Theatre, restored and now owned by Disney; the affronted but intact dignity of Marlene Dietrich’s star as it sits for eternity in front of Greco’s New York Pizzeria; similarly the star of June Havoc, baby sister to Gypsy Rose Lee, which welcomes shoppers to the rubber and fetish extravaganza of Pleasure’s Treasures. Only a heartless ogre would fail to be touched by a protective affection for Hollywood Boulevard. It is trying its best. Hollywood Boulevard makes you want to take care of it.
It was ever thus, it seems. Gleaming new theme restaurants and chain stores fail to get at what has always been the essence of the neighborhood. Like other cultural institutions whose heyday is perpetually a thing of the past—reports of the death of the Broadway musical that have been around as long as the musicals themselves come to mind—Hollywood Boulevard was born a little bit sad. The Walk of Fame, for example, was conceived as a means of sprucing up the neighborhood as far back as 1960 when they, ahem, laid Joanne Woodward. Even farther back the writer Nathaneal West lived in a hotel on the boulevard and set his 1939 novel, The Day of the Locust, in and around its environs. West’s dark tale of Hollywood concludes gruesomely with two senseless murders and a frenzied crowd out of control, whipped into a fervor of lawlessness by the sweeping klieg lights and bottlenecking barricades of a movie premiere at Kahn’s Persian Palace Theatre, a thinly veiled reference to Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
Things are a good deal tamer on the day I visit, as tourists mill about the theater’s courtyard, posing with costumed characters—for the most part fictional superheroes, with the exception of a late-Vegas-vintage Elvis—and looking over the hand- and footprints of Hollywood immortals. The tradition was supposedly begun when silent-film star Norma Talmadge was walking in front of the theater and inadvertently stepped into some wet cement. The most popular square remains the joint one of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, a title presumably conferred by the number of people posing in front of it. No one is standing by the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes co-stars this morning, although a young African American woman has her picture taken with her hands nestled into the prints of Denzel Washington. Elsewhere, a five-year-old Scandinavian boy (cf. earlier reference to PNEs) dutifully places his tiny mitts into the depressions made by Depression-era cutie-pie Joan Blondell. You know how Swedish kindergartners go mad for Gold Diggers of 1933.
Grauman’s Chinese is one of the loveliest and most impressive buildings it has ever been my privilege to enter, with beautifully marked fire exits, to boot. If you go to Los Angeles and do not see it, then you are a dope, as I was the first dozen times I visited that town. It must be an oversight most people make, because there are only four of us on the tour. Where most opulent movie palaces are great, neo-Versailles meringues, Grauman’s Chinese is a lavish exercise in Orientalist escape. The murals that adorn the walls and ceilings of the place, skillful and beautiful traditional Chinese ornamental scenes, were done by Guangzhou-born actor Keye Luke, most famous as Number One Son of non-Chinese actor Warner Oland in the Charlie Chan films.
More movie premieres are held in Grauman’s than in any other theater, ever since 1927, when it h
osted its first, Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings. The prime seats in the theater are rows seven, eight, and nine, reserved for whosoever is starring in that night’s film. Indicating a seat in this hallowed section, our tour guide says, “Ray Romano sat here for Ice Age.” Then, so as to assure us that all the seats are good ones, he points to the front of the house and says, “For the premiere of Along Came Polly, John Travolta and his lovely wife, Kelly Preston, sat down there.”
Our guide. Sigh. In his cheap tuxedo at midday, with his mild manner, weak chin, and a face scarified by the ravages of adolescence, he is the embodiment of a doomed and guileless purity, the hapless pawn set upon by the townspeople in a misguided riot of mob mentality. Or perhaps I’ve got Nathaneal West on the brain. But our docent does seem like the classic victim. Even his evident love for the theater is given short shrift by the powers that be, because throughout the tour, the Grauman’s sound system vomits out a meaningless and distractingly loud montage of partial commercials, snippets of songs, and bits of movie trailers.
We are led outside and up the outdoor escalator of the theater complex/mini-mall, to the adjoining Mann Chinese 6 Theatre. We are being given a tour of a multiplex built in 2001. My underpants are older than the Mann 6. A greasy usher opens the door for us on the second floor. “Welcome to the VIP area,” he leers. (Okay, he’s not that greasy and not really leering, but there is such a sideshow shadiness to the “value added” aspect of this leg of the tour and, let me reiterate, we don’t need to be here! Grauman’s by itself is sublime and sufficient!) The VIP area is neither all that “V” nor “I.” It is just a loungy part of the theater where, for an extra twenty dollars, you can sit and order concessions and they’ll be delivered to your seat. Or you can play chess or checkers or read a book, our guide tells us, pointing to a wall where there isn’t a book in sight. “Go ahead and sit in one of the chairs so you can feel what it’s like,” says our guide. We all remain standing.