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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 07:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 10:20 am (UTC)1. What is "outrageous" about "The American Look"? How is it any different from a product advertisement or a national pavilion's film at a World's Fair? If the film had been from say, the 1940 MoMA "Organic Design" exhibition or the 1950 "Good Design" show, and had used the same nationalist hyperbole, would you still be "outraged"?
2. The US was ahead of the USSR in every significant way, in the space race. The US was not suffering from insecurity or inadequacy in space. This is a fact. True, some in the media and the government tried to stir up public fears, so as to keep the money flowing to the space program, but the fears were unfounded.
Wikipedia states that in 1955, "when the Soviets read that the American Project Vanguard had two satellite designs, a small one which was just to see if they could get something into orbit, the Soviets decided to have what translates as the 'Simplest Satellite' too, one which was one centimeter larger in diameter, and much heavier, than Vanguard's 'real' satellite."
3. You claim that the Modernist designs shown in that film are more German or Scandinavian. Are you aware of the many significant American Modernist designers of that era? Do you think that Charles Eames, George Nelson, Florence Knoll, Russel Wright, Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, Paul McCobb, Henry Dreyfuss and dozens of other American Modernist designers of that time -- are somehow less significant to Modernism than their German and Scandinavian counterparts? And what do you make of the fact that so many of those foreign counterparts chose to emigrate to the US?
This whole issue has gone on far longer than it should've. I don't like being combative about these things, but I really wish you'd give the "outraged by America" think a rest. It's so overdone in the media, and it doesn't inform or even surprise anyone anymore. Be angry at the Bush Administration, be indignant at American corporations (I won't disagree on either count). But please -- enough with saying that America and Americans "are" this or that thing, as if such finite classifications were possible. You might as well criticize randomly generated numbers.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 01:13 pm (UTC)Alas, Fargo was just a slightly more quirky version of your stereotypical US movie. Not just in the colour of the lighting, the decor, the editing and so on, but in the concentration on policemen and women, the conception of human nature, the emphasis on murder and money, the scenes of sickening violence (which had Hisae moaning in discomfort) and so on. This, alas, happens so often when one turns to "exceptional" American filmmakers. They tend to be expressing the same themes, filming the same habitus from a slightly different angle. It's cultural, and it's because Americans "are" this or that thing. And I do believe that guilt is a factor in changing what Americans are, and what Americanized people are. There needs to be guilt.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 07:32 pm (UTC)*sigh*
If you're going to use the mediocrity and violence of movies as the standard, you might honestly admit that a higher percentage of Japanese films than American involve rather perverse examples of violence. Have you seen "Ichi the Killer"? According to Variety, it's done more than $50 million in box office; that's about twice what "Fargo" made. And to put it in further perspective, "An Inconvenient Truth" has been seen by more people (and made more box office) than "Fargo". And "Fahrenheit 9/11" did five times</u< the box office of "Fargo"; indeed, it was the highest-grossing documentary of all time, and one of the highest-grossing films -- period -- of 2004. An American documentary that spent over two hours savaging Bush? What do you make of that? Too bad your video rental place didn't have "Crash" or "Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room" or "Gunner Palace" or "Super-size Me" or "Syriana" or "Good-night and Good Luck" or "Fast Food Generation" or "The Corporation" -- all of which are recent, important and unflattering inquiries into American socio-politics, and all of which were made by Americans. My Japanese video rental place has little but horror films, samurai films, anime and hentai. Maybe that says something about the inaccuracy of video rental stores as a reflection of a culture.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 07:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 11:30 pm (UTC)As I've pointed out above, Americans are doing a fine job of being self-critical, nor is there a shortage of criticism from abroad; your contributions are merely predictable and superfluous.
And what does there need to be guilt for, and to whom should it apply? Your assignment of guilt seems rather didactic to me. I think that "guilt" is for the criminal justice system to determine and mete out, not for pundits.
I'll ask again: where is America's Hitler? Where is America's Tojo? Its Stalin or Pol Pot? As much as I despise George W. Bush, he's nowhere near the tyrant of those leaders, and yet I don't hear you (or many other people) spending much time criticizing them or guilting the people and nations they ruled.
If you're looking for leaders and nations today who deserve approbation, how about the Congo and Sierra Leone, where they've killed more than a million of their own civilians in the past decade? How about Saudi Arabia and other totalitarian Islamist states where women get stoned to death for having sex (or even being raped)? No, you're too infatuated with Islam to be critical.
If you're looking for nations to criticize, it's remarkable that you never seem to talk about China -- a nation of thought-crimes and brutal oppression, where merely being a dissident can get you imprisoned for life. Where they're destroying Tibetan culture and murdering any Tibetans who try to escape. How often do you criticize China on these pages? No, you have your agenda, and you're sticking to it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 07:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 10:49 pm (UTC)If I were alive in the 1930s, I don't believe I'd be saying "Germans are bad, Germans are guilty". The majority of Germans were good people, they just happened to have been used by some very clever, charismatic and bad people in positions of power. And Germans today are more or less the same as the Germans during the Hitler Administration -- good, decent people. (Most Germans over 70 today were de facto Nazis; should we still be guilting them merely for having been alive in that milieu?) Nor would I have said "Japan is bad; Japan is guilty". Japan has been around for millennia, and during most of that time, it wasn't being an expansionist aggressor. Japan and Germany were "good" before, and they're "good" now (or rather, they've always been neutral envelopes). The Japanese and Germans have always been predominantly good or neutral people. I find it astonishing that some people can have such a black-and-white view as to say that America -- a nation that has done much good and relatively little bad (especially compared to China, the USSR, et al) over the past century -- deserves to be vilified by otherwise intelligent people, and that its 300 million diverse citizens -- some of which are themselves refugees from Iraq, Vietnam and elsewhere -- are guilty by citizenship. And never mind the fact that only 16% of Americans voted for Bush in the first place, nor that the criticism of his administration has been resounding from inside America for the past six years.
Your claim that Americans (in whatever way you're trying to collectivize us) are guilty of an "aesthetic and ethical wrongness of a certain habitus", which I find equally simplistic. For every example you might give of such a fault, there exists a very different example to offset it. For the 1959 Impala with its garish styling, there's the 1956 Kaiser Darrin (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1954_Kaiser_Darrin_104-b1.jpg), or the 1961 Lincoln () or the 1963 Studebaker () -- all of which were aesthetically the equal of the best cars coming out of Britain at the time. The "American look" was distasteful to you? Well, the "British look" at the same time was dowdy (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1957TriumphTR3photo0006.jpg), fusty (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/N101.jpg) and no less garish (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/gr_daim-sp250.jpg). But I'm not going to try to claim that a "look" or the national industries which promote it, reflects anything more than the taste of some automakers; it doesn't impugn the British or Britain, no matter how much jingoism might've been trotted out in their service at the auto shows, the Festival of Britain, or anywhere else. Equally, for every Iraq or Vietnam, there's the fact that America entered WWI and WWII, even though the US had not been attacked, and without American assistance, the other Allies would surely have lost. (Were you aware that more American soldiers died in WWII than British soldiers?)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 11:03 pm (UTC)For the 1959 Impala with its garish styling, there's the 1956 Kaiser Darrin (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1954_Kaiser_Darrin_104-b1.jpg), or the 1961 Lincoln (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1961_lincoln_continental.jpg) or the 1963 Studebaker (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/avanti63rf.jpg) -- all of which were aesthetically the equal of the best cars coming out of Britain at the time.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 10:50 pm (UTC)You appear to choose your targets of criticism strategically, with the comfort of knowing that you're preaching to the converted. Do you really think that any English-speaking audience you might reach doesn't recognize the entire panoply of faults that have come out of America, from commercial hubris to military aggression? That you're telling us anything we don't already know? That the web needs one more Lefty pundit? And more salient -- that you're going to be a tool of positive change in America through your words? There's nothing inherently "bad" abouut America or Americans as a group. The faults and lie with a minority of humans and corporations, and they're not reading your blog, nor are they accessible or controllable by those Americans who do read it. You want to express your indignation about things? Go right ahead, but please -- in the future choose your targets more appropriately.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-13 07:03 pm (UTC)It is American culture and as such it depends upon Americans. You might find more appropriate ways to respond to this state of affairs as an American than the following bag of arse:
For the 1959 Impala with its garish styling, there's the 1956 Kaiser Darrin, or the 1961 Lincoln or the 1963 Studebaker -- all of which were aesthetically the equal of the best cars coming out of Britain at the time. The "American look" was distasteful to you? Well, the "British look" at the same time was dowdy, fusty and no less garish. But I'm not going to try to claim that a "look" or the national industries which promote it, reflects anything more than the taste of some automakers; it doesn't impugn the British or Britain, no matter how much jingoism might've been trotted out in their service at the auto shows, the Festival of Britain, or anywhere else. Equally, for every Iraq or Vietnam, there's the fact that America entered WWI and WWII, even though the US had not been attacked, and without American assistance, the other Allies would surely have lost. (Were you aware that more American soldiers died in WWII than British soldiers?)
You betray yourself.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-13 09:44 pm (UTC)I'm sorry, but that's a load of twaddle. You're making the all too common mistake of conflating the most visible American commercial exports with "America". It's a typical outsider's narrow perspective, and utterly superficial. It's no different than if Americans had an image of Britain based upon...say, what British products are successful exports today? That Simon guy from "American Idol"? Stephen Hawking? "Harry Potter"? Burberry plaid? Ergo, Britain must be a nation of wizardly children, men in wheelchairs with robotic voices, smarmy TV show hosts and strident clothing patterns. What an evil and miserable place it must be!
It's a shame that British and German video rental shops don't have a wide selection of great American films, but the blame for that rests upon the proprietors and (to a lesser degree) their customers, not "America", "Americans" or me. You're conveniently forgetting that America is also the nation of "Fahrenheit 9/11", the highest-grossing documentary film in history, seen in the theater by more than 20 million Americans. And "An Inconvenient Truth", the third-highest-grossing. And "Syriana" and "Good Night and Good Luck" and a slew of other very good American-made films of the past 2 or 3 years which are introspectively critical and critically acclaimed. But you can just keep seeing the surface, if you're determined to.
The shallowest perspective is the stereotype, like the way that Sasha Cohen has stereotyped Kazakhstan. The next-shallowest perspective isn't far removed from the stereotype: to claim that the universal must represent the particular. That can sometimes hold true for averages, and in some contexts, but if the group contains enough diversity, it cannot be accurate. That's the level on which you and Nick are operating on in this subject, albeit with a politically-correct twist. The formula goes like this: generalization + power = bad thing. America is the approved target for criticism; fire away. Of course, your criticism is particularly ironic, given that 150 years ago, everything you're claiming reflects "America" would've been even more likely to be applied to the British Empire, who seemed to have making the world over in its image as its goal. But did it? Only to those operating on level 2, where the universal supposedly represents the specific.
"To give an example of the kind of effect this might have; many children in England use the syntactical peculiarities, intonation and phrases of a character from Friends. It's even more worrying than it is annoying, which is saying something."
Yeah, well I'm not thrilled with the influence of rap/hip-hop on the syntactical peculiarities, intonation and phrases of American children, but what do you propose we do about it? Children will choose to emulate the worst examples; it's the way they distinguish themselves from their parent's generation, and seem more worldly than their peers.
"...the following bag of arse:...You betray yourself."
As what? A person who happens to introduce some balance instead of seeing only one side of things? Feel free to try to point out anything non-factual in the paragraph I posted. Can you? I doubt it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-14 04:12 pm (UTC)Cordially yours,
EP
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-15 07:32 pm (UTC)Just once I'd like to see you seriously combat your essentialist proclivities...
Date: 2006-12-15 08:25 pm (UTC)