“[T]ourists see a Potemkin Village or theme park, a San-Francisco-in-quotation-marks.” James Brook
"Corporate monoculture has wiped out any unique sense of place, turning the island-city into an artistic theme-park." Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“Whoever controls […] the images, controls the culture.” Allen Ginsberg
Throughout the quarter we have encountered various images of San Francisco: Mistress/Queen of the Pacific (Brechin), Wall Street of the West (Brook), the end of the trail (Garrison), the Last Frontier, and many others. I am interested in the imagery of San Francisco as a theme-park, and how this functions in relation to the themes we’ve been dealing with.
There are some postmodernist theories that designate theme-parks as a site of consumption. What are we consuming? In a way, we consume the artificial images or landscapes presented to us, and the contexts we are meant to view them in. Let’s take Disneyland’s “Frontierland” as an example. This is a landscape that “celebrates the trailblazers, settlers and other heroes of the Old West” (Disney website). Here, Frontierland is a constructed experience embedded within a specific context. People come and feel they are experiencing an authentic part of history, but fail to recognize the myths attached to place and past. In a way, this allows for a recycling of myths to ensure the historical narrative remains intact.
How does this translate to the image of S.F. as a theme-park? How do the texts we've read support, complicate, or resist this designation?
The aim of the essay “You Are Here (So You Think)" is to examine the ways tourism “unconsciously shape[s] our ways of experiencing cities” (137). The essay claims cities like S. F. are filled with a “mixed nostalgia for the not-yet and never-was” (139). This is important to our discussion of S. F. as a mythical site. It seems to me that the overall project in Reclaiming San Francisco is an attempt to challenge, thwart, or re-write (a worlding project, so to speak) the myths that shape and sustain the ‘postcard image’ of San Francisco.
Other texts we have read also seek an alternative, less mythical view of San Francisco. One could argue this is the ambition of Grey Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco. Brechin, however, takes it a step further by arguing that S.F. myths serve the contado and, more specifically, those who stand to benefit most from the contado. This text is significant in that it deliberately and unabashedly removes the myths and constructed landscapes from the consumer. I’m not sure about you, but – as a Bay Area native – San Francisco will not (cannot) ever be the same for me after reading Brechin’s work. The S.F. image as a theme-park full of myths is no longer a possibility; that S.F. is an illusion.
Can we widen the scope of the theme-park imagery to American society?
Ferlinghetti’s poem “A Coney Island of the Mind” opens with a reference to the artwork of Francisco de Goya, most likely the “Disasters of War” series. In the poem, Ferlinghetti writes of the “suffering humanity” in the artwork. Goya’s images are “so bloody real / It is as if they really existed / And they do / Only the landscape has changed” (9). Here, the landscape is no longer war-ravaged Spain, but, rather, it has shifted to 1950’s America. The poem goes on to describe the “concrete continent,” “bland billboards,” and the “freeways fifty lanes wide” (9). This imagery suggests America has fallen to the brute powers of materialism, mechanization, and modernity. In short, there is a different, but equally devastating, kind of war taking shape in America. It is no wonder, then, that this disorienting image of America has the power to force one into "a Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.”
In the end, the imagery of a space or site as a theme-park raises many concerns on how we absorb culture, myths, and American consumerism. If San Francisco (or America) is a theme-park, what price do we pay for admission? If we take Ginsberg’s quote from above, it seems to be a severe one; we lose the power to see beyond the constructed images, experiences, and contexts that are surreptitiously placed before us.
Links:
Here is a link to a slideshow of Goya's images of war. While a little long, the images are really powerful, especially when thinking of Ferlinghetti's image of America in this poem.
Great work Ryann, looking forward to your final product.
ReplyDeleteTrey