Word: dreaming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dissatisfied by their lives--one is unemployed and the other spends her days "ripping out chicken guts and stuffing them into little plastic bags"--the two girls dream about the elusive "something better" which, as always but perhaps correctly, centers around some new romantic conquest...
What remains of the monarchist dream in Disney World is a benign dictatorship of style, a triumph of art over nature. The lightning bugs in the shrubbery by Cinderella's Castle are tiny synchronized bulbs. In a 3-D short called Magic Journeys (to be replaced this September with a Michael Jackson film, Captain Eo), a boy blows milkweed toward the audience, and 586 viewers shiver with delight. There is more magic that the customers never see. A Swedish pneumatic garbage system moves 50 tons of discarded glop a day. The costume room holds l.5 million items of clothing (eight...
...polyurethane, reflecting red, blue and yellow blinking lights. The machinery, tenderly adjusted and lubricated and looking like mobile sculpture, whirs and swivels competently behind transparent plastic enclosures. The employees are gung ho, and the most enthusiastic of all is their boss, John Rothwell, 41. "This is my life's dream," he says. "I love it." The atmosphere where they work is electric, suffused with a feeling that what is taking place here, in its boldness and sophistication, is happening nowhere else on earth...
Some intellectuals did not even put up a fight. The Popular Culture Association, founded in 1969, now has 3,000 members. At Bowling Green State University, apparently the one college with a department devoted to the subject, 22 students are currently pursuing degrees in pop. (An undergraduate's dream: degree credit for watching Gilligan's Island reruns and reading R. Crumb.) Unfortunately, the pop academy's insights often seem to have the depth and complexity of pop itself...
...quality. In Africa and Latin America, black American pop stars bring with them an implicit hopefulness; Thriller is thrilling partly as a totem of black achievement. Hollywood does not promote revolution but rather a flashy kind of Yankee individualism--spontaneous, self-reliant and acquisitive. "American film exports the American dream," says Charlton Heston, "which is achievable, not a fantasy. What film has done to the developing world is to change its sense of possibility." Yet a car and a comfy suburban split-level are not reasonably achievable by a Pakistani farmer; thus pop's glossy portrayals of the good life...