Somewhere in an alternate universe, Philip K. Dick is alive and well. He is also still on the alert for those collective psychic traps we euphemistically refer to as "reality."
Recently, after viewing the much-praised film Pleasantville, I suddenly found myself channeling PKD. What follows are his own words:
Back in the early '70s, when I wrote the dystopian novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, I was literally beside myself. The author of that book was another me, from another place and time, someone who may have seemed stressed out and paranoid but who was, in retrospect, quite comfortable in his post-'60s countercultural assessments of Good and Evil. I was content, back then, to envision America as a police state where student dissidents are shipped to slave labor camps and Richard Nixon is a national hero. To me, Nixon represented everything that was reactionary and bourgeois about America; he was a reminder of what seemed an even more iniquitous chapter in our history: the Eisenhower Era. Like Eisenhower, Nixon was the military industrial complex, the suburbs, and consumer materialism. In my novels, as I'm now able to see, I polluted a well-meaning aversion to tyranny with a less noble, knee-jerk hatred of the Perry Como '50s—a decade whose orderly wholesomeness seemed sinister and repressive to me.
The reason I bring up Flow My Tears, and parallel worlds in general, is because the themes of time travel and counter-utopias inform Pleasantville, a recent film in which two dysfunctional '90s teenagers accidentally wind up stuck in the marshmallow splendor of their favorite black-and-white '50s television sitcom. The film presents the universe of mown lawns and spotless living rooms so common to shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver as the embodiment of all that was baleful and conformist about '50s America. Amid Pleasantville's immaculate living rooms, malt shops, and sanguine codes of conduct, the teleported ingrates proceed to convince the residents of Pleasantville that life is much richer and more "real" when it includes extramarital desire, existential doubt, abstract art, and the rhythms of bebop.
Even this simplified plot summary shows how the Pleasantville premise could easily have been something concocted by my bad old self. In truth, the film seems like the detritus of a bad trip. It is a parody of my own fevered, post-hippie certainty that we are all inmates of a "black iron prison" lurking just beneath the placid surface of daily life. Like a thought virus, my dystopian vision of the '50s is everywhere today: A couple of years ago, for example, I caught an episode of the sci-fi television series Sliders that depicted an alternate universe in which J. Edgar Hoover rules America and militantly sober teenagers dance to the lull of easy-listening instrumentals: scary vanilla people charmed by what has been called "soulless" vanilla music.
But why, one wonders, would anyone even bother making this kind of point today? Sure, a film like Pleasantville might have had some impact twenty or thirty years ago, when the white picket fences were still in place, but now, when hip-hop and death metal have replaced Muzak in shopping malls, and when portrayals of the shrink-wrapped and sparkling '50s are more likely to evoke an enchanted curiosity than contempt, Pleasantville can only come off as dated and irrelevant. Its message about being "genuine" seems much more treacly and paternalistic than that which it attempts to lampoon.
This was no clearer to me than when I walked out of the cineplex after seeing the film. Here I was surrounded by all of the vibrancy, cacophony, and prima-donna passions that the film celebrates. The black iron prison I once wrote about suddenly resembled something much different and in some ways more insidious than the Jell-O mold of middle America I once so smugly despised. A new kind of social nightmare was apparent. Instead of being controlled by an environment that is supposedly "bland" and "homogenized," people are controlled by one that is brash, loud, and designed to be forbidding. This bedlam passing for "real" seemed to me a sick-making nihilistic illusion, an Un-Pleasantville that had the added disadvantage of being hostile. I perceived another form of repression, a psychic and physical incarceration so full of sound and fury that I longed for June Cleaver to feed me tapioca pudding on a shiny Melmac plate before rocking me to sleep.
The prison that is daily life is no longer quiet, orderly, and spotless but rather an overflow of noise, dirt, and crime. The once valorized "melting pot" has turned into a clumping pot, with mounting tensions among balkanized ethnicities and tribes, all vying to forge their territorial soundmark. While capitalism thrives in its most aggressive forms, companies and mainstream media moguls have replaced the left in condemning so-called suburban mores in the service of "diversity." Worse, the wardens of this prison cannot easily be pinpointed as being on one particular side of the political fence. Today they are more like a corporate-government patchwork that entices its "citizens" to buy and owe at an unprecedented pace. They intimidate people into purchasing security systems to ward off the street thugs who essentially operate as the new order's watchdogs. Daily reports about hostile militant fundamentalist factions snapping at our borders induce more disorientation. No wonder, then, that people flock to places like Disneyland for an experience that is safe, controlled, and homogenized. The simple days of Flow My Tears, when someone as embarrassingly banal and mortal as Nixon could assume, for so many of us, the mantle of Antichrist, are long gone.
All this considered, Pleasantville has incited me to confirm mounting suspicions that the statute of limitations against the middle-class '50s has run out. Pleasantville—predictable, sanitized, and unabashedly artificial though it may appear, now seems the better way. The Pleasantville utopia was, and still is, a logical dream for a society reacting to a world changing at an unprecedented pace. Don't we still face oblivion from weapons of mass destruction? Aren't we still both amazed and terrified by a marvelous technological boom? Don't we, then, have the same right today that middle-class Americans of the '50s had—to entertain the hope that entropy can be neutralized with sugar-dust, soap, and slipcovers?
In our battle against the "saccharine" values of our parents, the beatniks and hippies I helped to inspire went too far—particularly, I now believe, when it came to music. Was it really necessary to champion hard-boiled sexual libertinism and rock'n'roll against the fluffy sentimentalism and wistful romance celebrated in, for example, the movies and music of Doris Day? Some of the boldest cultural battlelines of this century have been drawn in the arena of popular culture. Pleasantville, for example, draws the musical line in the sand during a key moment when some townsfolk draft up civic guidelines, among them the specification that only "temperate" music by the likes of Perry Como and Johnny Mathis (their names mentioned specifically) be allowed. In keeping with today's version of a politically acceptable Hollywood scenario, of course, the reactionaries lose the battle, and Pat Boone's "Mr. Blue" cedes to Miles Davis's "So What." I know that I'm remembered today for being a huge fan of Linda Ronstadt, but I'd like to spend the rest of our time together defending the kind of music put up for ridicule in Pleasantville—that glorious music often off-handedly referred to as "whitebread."
Unfortunately, the term whitebread has been deployed, since at least the early '60s, to undermine rather than ennoble. With its combined connotations of white folks and refined flour, "whitebread" evokes concepts that are politically and gastronomically verboten for those hopped up on multiculturalism and whole grains. But like white bread itself, whitebread music has the distinction of being refined of all rawness; processed and presented as a consistent and assuaging commodity that pleases the palate without an overwhelming flavor—except, of course, for the refined-sugar sweetness of such related treats as angel food cake.
In whitebread music, the chunks of attitude which add so much bulk to jazz, country, blues, bebop, and rock are carefully sifted out. Using postwar studio innovations, the musical science of whitebread engineered songs for those weaned on a softer, less rancorous musical diet. Long before antigravity was applied to market the Nike sneaker or the Wonderbra, it was applied with an ingenious fervor to the pop standard, in order to buttress the needs of listeners who wanted to stay motivated and optimistic. The echo chamber made voices and instruments sound ethereal. When the song was not a dreamy melody infused with layers of reverberating strings, there were underplayed march rhythms that rarely if ever degenerated into syncopation. The arrangements tended to be a creamy mixture of full-stringed orchestras accented by guitar, piano, bass, and a chorus that stuck firmly to a simple melody. Most importantly, the vocal delivery was crisp and did not linger on or distort the notes.
Even the rougher genres of music succumbed gracefully to the whitebread treatment. Pat Boone reworked Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" into a less-lascivious swain's-song. Tony Bennett (in his far less jazzy days) ironed out Hank Williams' country kinks with a lush and contoured version of "Cold Cold Heart." And then there was Perry Como. With his cardigan sweaters and soothing voice, Como offered America shelter from emotional storms during one of its most prosperous and technologically savvy periods. His velveteen phrasings and lush melody lines made him the antidote to the scowling Rat Packer holding a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other. Como's forte was the kind of sandman serenade that mixed cozy romance with evocations of a simultaneously archaic and futuristic netherworld. This sf scenario is best rendered on his 1956 recording "Dream Along With Me (I'm on My Way to a Star)." Though it was not one of his big chart hits, it had the distinction of being the opening theme to his long-popular television variety show. It starts with a flutter of violins and some bells, and then introduces a gorgeous chorus from the Ray Charles Singers, an occasional harp, and lyrics about drifting "on a cloud of love." Como delivers the strong straight: His voice is restrained; there is no excessive emoting; the whole effect is almost mystical.
In the case of Johnny Mathis, the whitebread appeal has a special intrigue, precisely because he had started out with ambitions to be a jazz singer. Thanks to the persuasion of Columbia producer (and whitebread music maven) Mitch Miller, Mathis changed his tune into something infinitely sweeter. On songs like "Chances Are" and "Wonderful, Wonderful," his reassuring and echoing tenor conform without flaw to Ray Conniff's skip-along arrangements. Easy-listening instrumental artists like Conniff and Percy Faith were key players in establishing the Mathis mystique—thanks to which the singer garnered many Top 40 hits and became an icon of turtleneck sweaters and genteel smiles.
As both a movie star and top-selling recording artist, Doris Day was manufactured to bring viewers and listeners instant cheer. Her effervescence, angel food hairdo, and bouncy voice seem today an anomaly, a popping-fresh challenge to the ululating pyrotechnics of rock singers. The lyrics to her signature song, "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)"—which appeared as an incongruous addition to Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much—may suggest an unknown future, but the assuring waltz beat and Day's lustrous delivery set the tone for an era that looked with zeal toward Tomorrowland.
Then there were The Doodletown Pipers—a young, perky vocal ensemble from the '60s that took whitebread singing as far as it could go. They used to appear on programs like The Ed Sullivan Show, interpreting the latest hits in their own paler-than-pale fashion. Alas, in recent years their surviving members have been used as fodder on the smirky Christmas specials of David Letterman.
When hearing the Doodletown Pipers, I know that I shall always celebrate a plurality of worlds, places arranged along a right-angle time axis passing laterally to our accustomed linear time. It is into one of these worlds, one in which David Letterman was never born—an alternate spatial vector where the noise of contemporary life morphs into something soothing and refreshing—that I have learned to escape, at will. Like that melancholy man in the famous Twilight Zone episode who takes the train to an imaginary town called Willoughby, I am transported to the ideal world of Doodletown—a viable place that exists in a here and now adjacent to our quotidian reality. Here, freed from the gravity in whose grip the rest of us suffer, people move about with equipoise, and terms like diaphanous, light, and sanitized are high praise, not censure. In Doodletown, diaphanous music plays everywhere, at medium volume; and many of the tunes that once lined Memory Lane reappear here, sounding even more aerated and filtered.
As you can see, I am attempting to subvert my own earlier subversions by cultivating a genuine affection for many of the sounds and images that reflect what a professional anti-bourgeois figure like Henry Miller once referred to as "the air-conditioned nightmare"; what Pete Seeger ridiculed as "little boxes" of immaculate tract housing; and what other equally uncharitable cranks simply and inaccurately write off as "kitsch." Whitebread's detractors have called up an interdiction that is as cramped and as ripe for rebellion as was the one against raunchy rock'n'roll in the days of Ozzie and Harriet, and I for one am ready to rebel. Instead of dumping a Rocky Road malaise over the plain vanilla world of Pleasantville, I want to reclaim the sugar-dust integrity of Doodletown—a land once commonplace, but now more exotic than Polynesia. It waits for us in the sunlight zone, on the other side of cynicism.
