Design commentary as propaganda
Dec. 9th, 2006 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt may well be because I came to it immediately after listening to a podcast on socialism by Tony Benn and reading an article by the author of Why Do People Hate America?, but the fascinating 1958 design film "The American Look" struck me as outrageous peacetime propaganda -- a highly selective arrangement of the tools of a culture in order to show that culture in the best possible light. (Click the picture to watch the whole 28 minute film.)
"The American Look (A Tribute to the Men and Women who Design)" was financed by Chevrolet, and a chunk of it showcases the design of their 1959 Impala model at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. But it could just as well have been financed by the government, so relentlessly does it harp on the themes of freedom and individualism. "By the way things look as well as the way they perform," crows the narrator over a relentlessly triumphalist orchestral score, "our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accomodations expressing not only the American love of beauty but also the basic freedom of the American people which is the freedom of individual choice."
Oddly enough, though, the film calls to mind nothing so much as the North Korean propaganda movies that were showing at Christian Kracht's booklaunch. And, just as insecurity lay behind the confident, Utopian tone of those films, so it underpins this American film too. Certainly the late 1950s was a time of optimism, affluence and consumerist expansion in the US, a time still bathed in the glow of the military victories of World War II. But there's something uneasy in the film's harping on the essential Americanness of Modernist design, when so much of the architecture and furniture design on display here looks more Scandinavian or German. Only the grotesque, elongated, decorative and gothic Impala looks like a truly American design, and it strikes a very different note to the restrained, sparse and spare Modernist designs. (Better suited, in fact, to Postmodernism -- which raises the question of whether pomo came along simply because Modernism wasn't essentially American enough.)
The Impala's Space Age streamlining points to another insecurity, one I outlined in my AIGA Voice article Creativity and the Sputnik Shock. The central thesis of this film -- the idea that good design goes hand-in-hand with American "freedom of individual choice" -- was at that very moment being disproved by the success of the Soviet space program. On October 4, 1957 the communists had successfully launched the first satellite into Earth orbit. America reeled, throughout the late 50s, with a keen sense of its own educational, technical and creative inadequacy. As a result, money was poured into creativity research -- and into design and lifestyle propaganda like this film.
All propaganda, no matter how Utopian, optimistic, and triumphalist, raises fears; all that's left unsaid seems to gather just outside the frame, a threatening black cloud. In my case, when I watch "The American Look", I don't just worry about the people excluded from the ideal scenarios depicted. I also wonder whether all design writing -- and I've done my share -- isn't just a more subtle version of this kind of propaganda. Just like the film, we design writers like to point to the "ever-improving good taste" of the public. We like to select only the most advanced and beautiful designs and suggest that, soon, they'll predominate. And we like to evoke futuristic scenarios like the ones in the final shots of this film, in which rocket cars and dome houses dominate the landscape. Yet fifty years after this film was made, mock-Colonial and faux-rustic farmhouse styles are more likely to define the American design landscape than bubble jets and space craft. Put it down to "the freedom of individual choice", perhaps.
"The American Look (A Tribute to the Men and Women who Design)" was financed by Chevrolet, and a chunk of it showcases the design of their 1959 Impala model at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. But it could just as well have been financed by the government, so relentlessly does it harp on the themes of freedom and individualism. "By the way things look as well as the way they perform," crows the narrator over a relentlessly triumphalist orchestral score, "our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accomodations expressing not only the American love of beauty but also the basic freedom of the American people which is the freedom of individual choice."
Oddly enough, though, the film calls to mind nothing so much as the North Korean propaganda movies that were showing at Christian Kracht's booklaunch. And, just as insecurity lay behind the confident, Utopian tone of those films, so it underpins this American film too. Certainly the late 1950s was a time of optimism, affluence and consumerist expansion in the US, a time still bathed in the glow of the military victories of World War II. But there's something uneasy in the film's harping on the essential Americanness of Modernist design, when so much of the architecture and furniture design on display here looks more Scandinavian or German. Only the grotesque, elongated, decorative and gothic Impala looks like a truly American design, and it strikes a very different note to the restrained, sparse and spare Modernist designs. (Better suited, in fact, to Postmodernism -- which raises the question of whether pomo came along simply because Modernism wasn't essentially American enough.)
The Impala's Space Age streamlining points to another insecurity, one I outlined in my AIGA Voice article Creativity and the Sputnik Shock. The central thesis of this film -- the idea that good design goes hand-in-hand with American "freedom of individual choice" -- was at that very moment being disproved by the success of the Soviet space program. On October 4, 1957 the communists had successfully launched the first satellite into Earth orbit. America reeled, throughout the late 50s, with a keen sense of its own educational, technical and creative inadequacy. As a result, money was poured into creativity research -- and into design and lifestyle propaganda like this film.All propaganda, no matter how Utopian, optimistic, and triumphalist, raises fears; all that's left unsaid seems to gather just outside the frame, a threatening black cloud. In my case, when I watch "The American Look", I don't just worry about the people excluded from the ideal scenarios depicted. I also wonder whether all design writing -- and I've done my share -- isn't just a more subtle version of this kind of propaganda. Just like the film, we design writers like to point to the "ever-improving good taste" of the public. We like to select only the most advanced and beautiful designs and suggest that, soon, they'll predominate. And we like to evoke futuristic scenarios like the ones in the final shots of this film, in which rocket cars and dome houses dominate the landscape. Yet fifty years after this film was made, mock-Colonial and faux-rustic farmhouse styles are more likely to define the American design landscape than bubble jets and space craft. Put it down to "the freedom of individual choice", perhaps.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 01:36 am (UTC)I read the essay to which you posted a link. I have to say that I don't agree with a lot of it, but it would take too long for me to go through it point by point. One thing it does highlight is how nebulous the whole issue is, although I'm not sure if it was the author's intention to highlight this. I agree that anti-Americanism can be extreme, irrational and reflex, and I don't actually consider myself anti-American. I'm not. To be 'anti-American' even seems non-sensical to me. I suppose I feel ambivalent towards America, but my desire, for instance, to move to America earlier this year was partly out of a simple attraction to the country similar to that expressed by the author's daughter. This doesn't stop me recoiling from certain behaviours, actions and attitudes and commenting on them.
I don't expect all I say to go unchallenged, and you're right to pick me up on my comments if you feel the need to, but I don't think your response is the only response that can be made. I think that I am, broadly speaking, something of a misanthrope, and this is how I tend to achieve an egalitarian view of humans. One people is more or less as bad as another, but in different ways. And for the most part what we can do is talk about those different ways in which we are bad. It's not that I never see the good in anything, but somehow the good always seems more nebulous, or perhaps makes less impression when I do talk about it. On this occasion I happened to be talking about the negative side of America, which is, I believe, very real. On other occasions I have expressed more positive ideas. And, for what it's worth, I do think America makes a better superpower than, for instance, China, as it currently exists, ever would. But I don't feel the need, every time I write about something, to carefully balance the bad with the good. I might feel a need to be more balanced - certainly more balanced than the author of that article - if I was writing an essay or something like that, but not making a quick comment on a blog post.
To give an example of a different response to negative generalisations, my own tendency is not to take them to heart. As an example, I am friends with a Japanese girl here, and once she told me that British people seem nice at first, but underneath they're all monsters. I didn't feel she'd said something terrible or that there was a need to persuade her otherwise. That was simply something she wished to express at that moment. I believe I asked her why she thought that, and said that maybe she was right. I know that she wasn't referring to me. It seemed too bland and obvious to say, "But some British people are nice." It even seemed pointless to do so. I had no desire to pitch against her remark all the things I had disliked about Japan. Besides which, she lives in Britain and has said a number of times that she prefers it here to Japan. Life is not simple, and though such remarks can never come near to encapsulating some great overarching truth, I don't personally feel the need to whitewash them on that account. Also, my own remarks, while perhaps a little crude, were at least more specific than the example I've just given.
Well, I'm sure that I haven't covered everything, and that I probably can't, but if you feel the need to pick me up on anything else, feel free.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 09:51 am (UTC)The reason that I took Nick to task for his comments is due to a pattern or America-bashing that he's displayed over the course of many different entries. It's pretty much the same every time -- to play "find anything that can be construed as negative about the US, and play it up as if it were symptomatic of America and Americans". His rhetoric is too revealing, with choices of words like "outrageous" and "inadequacy" -- very loaded terms.