PJ O'Rourke on Disney's Future Schlock
In the new issue of The Atlantic, the inimitable PJ O'Rourke tours Disneyland's revived House Of The Future attraction. According to O'Rourke, it's a boring beige abode lacking the imagination that makes futurism fun in the first place. From O'Rourke's piece, titled "Future Schlock":
According to Disney, the shape of things to come can be found at Pottery Barn, with a quick stop in Restoration Hardware for “classic future” touches and a trip to Target to get throw rugs and cheap Japanese paper lanterns. HoF II was designed by the Taylor Morrison company, a home builder specializing in anodyne subdevelopmental housing in the Southwest. The company’s president and CEO told the Associated Press, “The 1950s home didn’t look like anything, anywhere. It was space-age and kind of cold. We didn’t want the home to intimidate the visitors...""Future Schlock" (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)
Denigration of the future has become an intellectual prop over the past 40 years. Looking forward went out of fashion about the time that Buckminster Fuller’s audacious geodesic domes, meant to cover entire cities, wound up as hippie-height, wobbling, tent-sized structures on Mendocino County pot communes.
Bruce Handy, writing in Time about Disney’s reopening of a deliberately out-of-date Tomorrowland in 1998, began his essay with the sentence, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” He went on, “It’s not a novel observation to point out that our culture has become increasingly backward looking.”
Well, given the future envisioned in Disney’s House of the Future, who can blame us for looking the other way?
Disney’s Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative. This isn’t the fault of the “Disney culture”; it is the fault of our culture. We seem to have entered a deeply unimaginative era.
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You really should run a contest to *design* what the House of the Future should look like.
"O'Roruke"? Is that PJ's cousin from Japan?
(sorry, couldn't resist... it's a typo in the heading of the post)
"We seem to have entered a deeply unimaginative era."
Wow. Talk about a guy who lives in a fundamentally differant world than I do, if he thinks this era is particularly unimaginative.
let us not forget PJ's time as the good doctor Thompson's protege,
I some may think this generation is stylish and creative and imaginative, and it is, on a small, individual scale.
but on the large corporate scale, we only do what is safe, sanitary, and risk-free.
where's my rocket belt?
Yeah, what #4 said. The future, once you get beyond the "Golly, look at the new all-aluminum appliances in out Alcoa Future Kitchen" / flying car level, the future can com across as pretty gonzo, scary, and weird to Mr. and Mrs. Levittown.
I'll keep trotting this out because it remains relevant:
"Modern science has imposed upon humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the future will disclose dangers. It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon the placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge. The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security. In the immediate future there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages."
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925
I've been lamenting about this very thing of late. One of my hobbies is spacecraft; I prefer the speculative and real hardware stuff over science fiction, and some of those 1950's designs were not only fantastic but they were somewhat realistic (if not horribly expensive in reality). Even in science fiction, there is this weird trend to go backwards and forwards simultaneously. Example - the trailer for the next "Star Trek". It starts off with a boy Kirk driving a classic Corvette. Wouldn't you think by that time that there would be many more generations of classic cars? How would a 2020 Corvette look? Why not a flying car? And the Enterprise being built on the surface of the Earth instead of orbit? Which looks better? For me, the orbital drydock from "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" looks more futuristic, not the slipways of an Earthly shipyard. This is a starship, folks, not a container ship.
We embrace that retrofuture look for various odd reasons, I know I do. For me, it was always about what should have been. Perhaps, in some way, it is actually about what could still be.
The future can still be cool.
Greetings
We quit dreaming the day we walked away from the moon
we have not had an imagination or goal since
sad we've become a anal claustrophobic little society of flip flops and bike helmets
too sad
Institutional futurism is never really about the future anyway. One level of Disney's 1960-style House Of The Future was really about what was supposedly stable - Dad still read the paper in his chair, and Mom ruled the (shiny new) kitchen, never having looked back once at the job she got tossed out of once the boys came back from Europe. Junior certainly wasn't listening to strange new music in that future world.
Maybe whomever designed the new HOF was being pretty optimistic - that Pottery Barns and Plasma Screens were going to be available in the new future. Clearly nobody in that world has to worry about declining real income, vanishing retirement funds, or the rise of two billion more people who want a seat at the grownup table. Tomorrow being recognizably like today might not be a terrible outcome from that perspective.
Whatever house of the future we build is pointless, as our present view of the future, will look as quaint and naïve to the our descendants fifty years from now as our ancestors' view of the future looks to us now.
I'm with Hubertus Bigend on this, that "things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on"
I am assuming that this "House of Tomorrow" being discussed is the Innovention thing that now occupies the old rotating building in Tomorrowland. After seeing it for the first time last October I too went off on a rant about how the future looked suspiciously like 3 years ago, and was primarily running on Microsoft software and hardware (really? Th future is a bunch of Xbox 360s? Not even a single Xbox 720?)
It was amusing, thought that nearly everything was running a form of Windows and nearly everything had an error message of some sort displayed on it.
Sad...really, really sad.
I did like the non-functional microwave-looking box labeled "3d Printer" with no explanation at all. If you didn't already know what it was supposed to be you would never find out.
Maybe it is because all the "futuristic" fantasies we are working on now just aren't that "spectacular" in the theme-park way that fins on cars and sputnik-shaped lamps were. The fantasy of living longer doesn't *look* very exciting, someone just doesn't age...that's hard to show on a ride or even over a weekend at Disneyland. So is providing drinking water for a doubling population. It's hard to see nanotechnology at work. If the robots look like us and act like us and have sex like us, that's exciting, but it doesn't make for visual drama in a theme-park. Vaccinations against all known diseases -- what does *that* look like? Or not getting cancer. Technology that let us talk to each other remotely as if telepathic is a real snore from both the visual and audio perspective. Finally getting rid of pollution and landfills leaves behind something that looks like...Earth. Going to other planets is something that has been shown to us time and time again in films, always a version of Earth to be interesting. I don't like GMO foods, but they look like...foods.
It is hard to even think of what the future *might* look like that isn't a dream of health and safety and purity and sustenance and connectivity and wider bandwidth. And I guess it wouldn't be a terrible future if these things were available to everyone on the (sustainably managed) planet outside of some Capitalist economic structure that makes hierarchies of having and not-having necessary.
Sadly, if we follow the money today, the future looks like something out of Terminator.
Disneyland is the most boring topic in the world to me and I started writing some software to filter it out of my BoingBoing feed but stopped reading BoingBoing for months instead.
However, I think the misinterpretation here is very interesting, the idea that we've entered into a very unimaginative phase in our culture. This guy says this at a time when sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and comic book movies are all hugely popular - in my mind it's pretty obvious imaginative culture wins out over every other kind. I think he's conflating cultural imaginings about the future with cultural imaginings in general.
I'm being quite critical, apologies, but I think the line of reasoning is worth following. Here's why: there've been other posts on BoingBoing about a weird kind of stasis/stagnation in sci-fi, and I think these posts highlight something real. Consider how William Gibson moved his novels sooner and sooner in the future until now. His new books all happen in the present.
I'm leaving out the Difference Engine though. Seminal steampunk work. And steampunk is a BoingBoing obsession. Interesting to find the idea that the world has lost its imagination on a blog which celebrates re-imagining the past.
I think it just means our culture is looking backward for a while, the same way a person does after changing a lot, and for the same reasons.
The Carousel of Progress already had a great, practical, and imaginative, future version, it was at EPCOT and was called Horizons (they tore it down to put in "Mission Space".
I remember it being full of all the things you could want from a future. You can see some of the thing in the Starship Earth ride, like the translating videophone/game console. But it was what I considered to be a realistic, and optimistic view of what technology would create for the future.
I don't think our society has gotten unimaginative, I think the people building the Home of tomorrow just got lazy. Frankly I expect more from Disney.
Imagination about the future ended in 2000. Why? One reason is that for generations we were raised to believe 2000 represented the future. We had a future to think about and look forward to.
Once 2000 rolled around, we stopped having a commonly agreed future date to look forward to. So we stopped talking about the future. If you want to test this for yourself, ask yourself what year you thought was the future growing up. If you're old enough, you'll say 2000 (or thereabouts). Now ask yourself and others what year is "the future". We no longer have a horizon, so we no longer try to see what's over it.
Often when companies like Disney attempt to guess the make of the WORLD OF TOMORROW, they fail with hilarious results. Disney is just playing it safe.
creative thought left the House of Mouse decades ago.
@12 Giles: "I think it just means our culture is looking backward for a while..."
Xlnt point. Matthew Arnold said as much in Culture and Anarchy - that when we have no new ideas we revisit a more productive piece of the past and re-imagine it. Works like a creative jump-start. He said it better, of course.
Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966. I take that to be the exact date creative thought left the House of Mouse. It's Big Corp in general and Disney in particular that's unimaginative, not the times. Imagination abounds. The times are in such a flurry of motion right now, we know the future will be here in under three months.
I got partway through Future Schlock and came across this:
"The most prominent contemporary art form is one that is completely unimaginative (or is supposed to be): the memoir."
I think PJ here is wrong, wrong, and wrong again.
The most prominent contemporary art form is games (I tried to fix the grammar on that sentence but can't).
I could go on about art, the future, futurism, and marketing. I could go on and on and on, but I won't. I will just add that I would like to see Disney create a House of the Future that incorporated mechanical and electronic features as well as lab grown biological tissue. Now that would be rad! Oh, and Skynet. The house of the future should include Skynet too!
#19 How about
The most prominent contemporary art form is game design.
Anonymous @19, you're right. Games are one of the brilliant, thriving art forms of the early 21st century. Not just computer games, but boardgames too.
Comic books have been getting steadily better and more inventive for the past 25 years or so, too. Not superhero comics, which have still not recovered from the success of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, but indie comics from smaller publishers, and webcomics.
And television! Not only is modern fiction TV much more intelligent and demanding than its equivalent from forty years ago, but modern game shows (reality shows like Survivor) demand a much wider range of skills and strategic thinking from their contestants than old game shows which just tested trivial knowledge.