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THE LAST FOUR CHAPTERS WERE about how Americans suddenly ramped up their beliefs that all sorts of iffy and unreal things were actually, factually real and true. This chapter is about what happened in the realms that are supposed to be fictional—movies, novels, Disney World, Dungeons and Dragons, war reenactments, pop culture. And how in the 1960s and ’70s we also began massively expanding the zone that combined fantasy with everyday reality—by making downtowns and suburbs more like Disneyland, theming restaurants, normalizing cosmetic surgery and gambling and pornography and so much more, turning American life into an exceptional hybrid of the authentic and make-believe. Nothing is real, the Beatles first psychedelic song instructed a generation in 1967. My point is that when the very definitions of reality were suddenly up for grabs on so many fronts—in science and social science, religion and politics—that extreme flux operated in synergy with all the unrealities being created and sold by the booming fantasy-industrial complex.
During the 1960s, we continued our great migration to the suburbs and the nostalgic, pastoral dream they fulfilled. For the first time, a plurality of Americans were suburbanites, on their way to becoming the majority. By 1970, 95 percent of households had television(s), most of them color, making the worlds inside the box still more entrancingly realistic. And we gorged, each of us spending more and more time watching TV, for many more hours than people in most developed countries (as we still do).
As the decade began, tellingly, American TV invented a curious new form of fiction-passing-as-reality: comedies were now mostly filmed without audiences, but recordings of laughing crowds were layered into almost every sitcom soundtrack. And what we watched suddenly changed as well. For its first dozen years, prime-time network TV was more or less committed to realism—Topper, a sitcom about ghosts, was the memorable exception. But that unwritten law was repealed at the beginning of the 1960s—The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Flintstones, The Jetsons—followed by an immediate glut of the supernatural and otherwise fantastic. In the course of just three seasons, the three networks premiered Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, My Mother the Car, Dark Shadows, The Flying Nun, Gilligan’s Island, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, My Favorite Martian, My Living Doll, The Time Tunnel, and Batman. As well as The Monkees, a show about a fictional band that then turned into a real and hugely successful band.
Fantasy fiction was suddenly percolating all through pop culture. When I started sixth grade, in 1965, I remember very clearly how all at once half the teenagers I knew, including both my older sisters, felt obliged to buy and read and adore four newly reissued novels by some old English writer named Tolkien. Why did these obscure books, first published decades earlier, suddenly become enormous bestsellers among young Americans? Because we were young, and it was the 1960s. American baby boomers were hearing the dog whistle alerting them to alternate realities, and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were supernatural stories with a benevolent magical bearded wise man; we had only just stopped believing in Santa and reading about Winnie-the-Pooh. Like Hermann Hesse’s Asian-mystic stories, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings provided a means for the not-so-religious to feel a frisson of the spiritual and have a place in the 1960s national carnival of reenchantment.
A little over a decade later, I remember very clearly the moment when I realized fantasy would now rule pop culture. The first Star Wars, which a majority of Americans paid to see, was an epochal success for many reasons. But one of those reasons was that it wasn’t just science fiction but had a spiritual fantasy at its core—the Force, the energy field that turned physics into metaphysics and vice versa, giving Jedis their telepathic and telekinetic powers. A mélange of affiliated New Age notions had just been mainstreamed, making 1977 the perfect moment to introduce an ecumenical new mysticism to the most religious rich country on Earth. The Force is very American, a spiritual discipline but also highly practical, a religion that lets you win battles, makes you successful. I remember walking out of the theater thinking the Force was the first faith with which I felt simpatico.
Because Star Wars and Tolkien’s world were set, respectively, in the distant future and the apparently distant past, neither one connected directly to Americans’ growing propensity to believe fantasies about real life right now. Then Close Encounters of the Third Kind appeared, very realistically depicting the extraterrestrials’ twentieth-century arrival as an event as profound and glorious as Christ’s Second Coming. The preceding decade of profligate belief—not just in UFOs but in government cover-ups and messianic prophecy—had primed us to love and believe in Close Encounters. (Spielberg would soon make another gigantically popular film about an extraterrestrial being, this one rescued from the malevolent U.S. government.) “The strange thing is,” Philip K. Dick wrote right after Close Encounters came out, that “in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title ‘science fiction’ is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star system….The producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?” It was one of the most lucrative movies ever, pop culture reflecting and energizing fantastical beliefs about our contemporary world.
In the past, Hollywood hadn’t given Jesus Christ a lot of screen time. But as superliteralist Christianity revived, more Jesus-focused than ever, the fantasy-industrial complex enthusiastically waded in as never before. There were productions starring Him, full-on biopics like The Greatest Story Ever Told and the NBC miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. Between 1969 and 1974, two big musicals all about the Messiah (Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell) and one about Genesis (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) opened on Broadway, then became movies. All those, of course, were happy fantasies and period pieces. But there was also a market, heretofore untapped, for frightened Christian fantasies set in present-day America: Satan-among-us was a new Hollywood genre, either in the form of possession (The Exorcist) or his sons born to human women (Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen). Outlandish supernatural belief was normalized.
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DISNEYLAND BECAME A paradigmatic place, American culture perfectly distilled into a quarter square mile of southern California. Fantasies were rendered impossibly real, historical and mundane realities improved and glamorized, the two merged seamlessly, overseen by the strict but avuncular supreme being who’d created it all. By 1970, something like 40 percent of Americans had spent time there. In 1967 the Disney Corporation began building Disney World—in America’s other confabulated paradise state, on a sunny emptiness a hundred times as big as Disneyland.
The Disney effect was at first just a matter of copycat tourist businesses chasing after the successful first mover. After Americans got a taste for Main Street USA and Frontierland, “living history” museums appeared everywhere, scores of them, so many that in 1970 at Old Sturbridge Village, they formed their own association. (There are now almost a thousand such places in America.) National Park Service rangers began dressing in period costumes to explain history, and by the 1970s they’d gone all the way, speaking with visitors as if they were historical figures—“doing first person.”
Dedicated to blurring the lines between the fictional and the real, people in the living history world became focused on what they called the authenticity of their simulations. Living history boomed and acquired academic legitimacy, no longer just tourist traps but centers for “experimental archaeology” and “imitative experiments.” In 1967 one of the foremost archaeologists of the American colonial era became assistant director of Plimoth Plantation, the built-from-scratch re-creation of the Pilgrims’ village. Soon all the “interpreters” at Plimoth playing the parts of Pilgrims started doing full first person, speaking seventeenth-century English in the historically correct regional dialects of England and never stepping out of character. As the professor-in-charge said, they “actually build houses and outbuildings….They cook food, and even eat it in period fashion” and “get dirty and tousled in their work in the fields.” They are P. T. Barnum’s descendants with advanced degrees and none of his winks about humbug.
Everywhere the living history fiction became more and more realistic, the blend of fake and actual more complete. The imperatives of show business often prevailed. When the new Pope John Paul II visited America in the 1970s, he touched down in the middle of Iowa. There he told the hundreds of thousands gathered for an outdoor mass that his “pastoral journey through the United States would have seemed incomplete without a visit…to a rural community like this.” That rural community was, in fact, a living history theme park—a make-believe eighteenth-century Indian farm, a make-believe nineteenth-century farm and town, and a make-believe early twentieth-century farm. It was a remarkable Fantasyland moment, as if the High Septon of the Faith of the Seven had come from Westeros to visit Middle Earth.
As everything started morphing into entertainment, more of America became DIY mini-Disneylands. The centennial of the Civil War was the perfect pretext at a perfect time for the emergence of a remarkable new hobby. On a summer weekend in 1961 in Virginia, an hour east of Washington, D.C., where one hundred years earlier several thousand men had been killed and wounded and hundreds more taken prisoner at the Battle of Bull Run, several thousand men in Civil War costumes in ninety-degree heat pretended to kill and wound and capture each other. Among the make-believe 1860s soldiers were 2,200 real 1960s soldiers, National Guardsmen on loan. At the battle reenactment in Manassas, not coincidentally, it was the victorious whooping yells of the pretend Confederate forces that got the big cheers from the crowd of fifty thousand spectators. More Civil War reenactments followed. The century-old fantasies around the South’s Lost Cause had been incarnated by this new mode of populist living theater.
Before long tens of thousands of Americans, almost all white American men, had enlisted in faux Confederate cavalry companies and Union artillery regiments, regularly going outdoors, fully kitted, to pretend to kill and die. It was playing dress-up but manly dress-up. The most devoted, unlike the dilettante farbs, became known as hardcore authentics, stitch counters, and thread Nazis who insisted on cannons and fabrics and buttons and boots and eyeglasses and hairstyles and pencils and food like the ones in the 1860s, in order to perform perfect impressions in total immersion events. For those moments during the sham battles when a sham soldier most acutely feels it’s the real thing, reenactors call it a period rush—the phrase itself a 1960s period piece.
Soon period rushes came from simulations of other kinds of events from other periods, eventually any period. The big bohemian variants emerged in California, created by young women. The first Renaissance fair—that is, faire—took place in 1963 in Los Angeles, staged as a fundraiser for the local Pacifica public radio station by a thirty-one-year-old and her artist husband. Thousands of people came one weekend to their Laurel Canyon backyard to pretend it was an English seaside town in the 1500s. “The Faire reminds us,” the founder said, “of simpler times, more in touch with nature and the Earth.” It adopted the motto “Where Fantasies Rule.” It then moved an hour west to the Paramount Movie Ranch, where high-production-value pseudohistorical stage sets made the fantasies seem more real. (Hallucinogens no doubt helped too.) During the 1970s a dozen other impresarios started Renaissance fairs all over the country. The founder of the original became a consultant to places in the blue-chip not-for-profit fantasy-industrial complex, such as Colonial Williamsburg.
Up north in Berkeley, a UC senior celebrated her 1966 graduation with an elaborate medieval-Europe-themed costume party and “tournament” attended by a couple of dozen of other sci-fi-fantasy geeks.*1 In their homemade tunics and tabards and jerkins, carrying broadswords and shields and longbows and spears, they “fought,” then marched up Telegraph Avenue “protesting the 20th century.” They decided to repeat it every year and formed the Society for Creative Anachronism—which went national, with multiple “kingdoms” and thousands of members.
Starting in the early 1970s, millions more young Americans who were jonesing to fight and quest in a magical version of the late Middle Ages—but all the time, indoors, dressed normally—had Dungeons and Dragons. You play—role-play—a specific character (druid, barbarian, paladin, sorcerer). Role-playing had been a technique used by psychotherapists and educators for a while, but it was in the 1960s that role-play became a verb. The inventors of D&D were young war-gamers. With RAND and the Pentagon reviving and refining war games, war-gaming among ordinary Americans surged as well. The guys around a table in a Minneapolis living room felt their own military fantasies were a thrilling bit more like the real thing—even before they were using computers like actual generals.
American motorcycle gangs, suddenly a big deal in the 1960s as Americans wildly self-fictionalized, were all-in reenactors of a kind: Wild West outlaws instead of Civil War soldiers, with motorcycles for horses, colorful dime-novel names (Hells Angels, Bandidos), special bad-guy wardrobe and grooming, and deadly barroom brawls. When the Angels became branded celebrities, they naturally hung out with the Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, celebrity performers who also played the parts of drug-taking outlaws. The Angels weren’t the only American criminals at the time whose lives imitated art: only after a novelist and screenwriter invented a Mafia term in 1969—“the godfather”—did actual mafiosi start calling bosses “godfather” and discussing offers that people couldn’t refuse.
Self-conscious fan fiction was another 1960s invention that permitted consumers of fiction to enter fictions. It started with Star Trek. During the show’s first season in 1966, young Americans began publishing homemade magazines that included their stories about the Enterprise and the Federation. Four years later, after the original show was canceled, there were dozens of such ’zines, and soon many more. Chekov and McCoy and Scotty and Spock actually corresponded with the ’zines—only the actors, but still—and appeared in costume at fan conventions. And in their stories, the young amateurs often included heroic and beloved and very young new characters—that is, fictional versions of themselves having adventures (and sometimes sex) in the twenty-third century with the Star Trek characters. Which became a trope in all fan-fiction genres as they emerged.
Before that moment, there had not been hordes of people living in their own private Disneylands or inserting themselves into familiar fiction and sharing their stories with the world. There were no Comic-Cons, the first of which took place in 1970 in southern California, when a few hundred people in love with comics and sci-fi met in the basement of a 1910 San Diego hotel that reeked of nostalgia—but that had also reeked of nostalgic make-believe when it opened, because it was built in a faux-old classical style popularized by the Chicago world’s fair.
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IN 1967 YOUNG Tom Stoppard had his breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a brilliant play about actors playing characters playing actors playing characters, and the amusing, confusing jumble of fiction and reality. Stoppard knew he was onto something new and important. “I have a feeling,” he said at the time, “that almost everybody today is more trying to match himself up with an external image he has of himself, almost as if he’s seen himself on a screen.”
Exactly. That was the heart of what I’m calling the big bang in entertainment, when it rippled out into normal life and individuals’ sense of reality. When you’re consuming a particular cultural product, a piece of entertainment, the movie ends, you finish the book, you walk out of the theme park, you toggle back to reality, and everyday life resumes. But starting in the 1960s and ’70s, lots more of everyday life was replaced by pieces of everyday fiction—fun, sexed-up confections that everyone agreed to consider real and normal, hardly any suspension of disbelief required. “In what was an entirely new concept, celebrities were self-contained entertainment,” Gabler writes in Life: The Movie. “Every celebrity was a member of a class of people who functioned to capture and hold the public’s attention no matter what they did or if they did nothing at all.” The celebrity-focused news media ghetto that started in the early 1900s had remained mostly seedy and disreputable. After American teenagers were recognized as a distinct cohort in the 1950s, fantasy-prone and celebrity-mad, new magazines like 16 and Tiger Beat were created to let the kids feel an intimacy with the famous—girls could enter contests to win dates with singers and actors. And then the respectable media’s resistance to celebrity obsession dissolved. After the circulation of the National Enquirer tripled in just a few years to several million, in 1974 Time Inc. created its final phenomenal success, the newsmagazine People, and The New York Times—the Times!—launched the celebrity magazine Us. All the big media companies recalibrated their self-respect compasses and plunged into the bog, making it entirely acceptable for all Americans to know too much and care too deeply about the lives of glittering strangers.
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DISNEY’S GENIUS WITH Main Street USA had been to conceive and build a big public space like a movie or stage set, but with no backstage in sight, an all-encompassing indoor-outdoor mise-en-scène that anybody could inhabit for twelve hours a day, every day. What happened in Disneyland did not stay in Disneyland, didn’t even stay in museums and theme parks. Main Street USA’s imitation of old-time small-town America was followed in 1966 by the three-acre simulation of a sexier, more cosmopolitan nineteenth-century urban downtown, New Orleans Square. They become the de facto models for large-scale builders and designers of shopping malls and much of the rest of real-life America. The Rouse Company, founded in Baltimore months after Disneyland opened, was a real estate development firm, but that’s like calling Walt Disney an amusement park operator. Apart from Disney, no American had a more important role in refashioning America physically—that is, in Disneyfying it—than James Rouse. He more or less invented shopping malls (and coined the term) and definitely invented food courts (and coined that term). Before Rouse (and Disneyland), American shopping centers as we know them—big public spaces with single designers and owners, town squares in a can—barely existed.
Walt Disney was Rouse’s visionary hero and friend. “I hold a view that may be somewhat shocking to an audience as sophisticated as this,” Rouse said in a speech at Harvard’s annual Urban Design Conference in 1963, “that the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland. If you think about Disneyland and think of its performance in relationship to its purpose, its meaning to people—more than that, its meaning to the process of development—you will find it the outstanding piece of urban design in the United States….It really has become a brand new thing.”
By then Rouse had built a new town, Cross Keys, on the grounds of a defunct country club on the edge of Baltimore, because he wanted to “feed into the city some of the atmosphere and pace of the small town and village”—a century later reinventing the wheel of Olmsted and Vaux’s prototypical suburb, their make-believe New England village outside Chicago. Just as Main Street USA was a nostalgic simulation of the Missouri town where Walt Disney had been a boy, Rouse was inspired to re-create a version of the old-fashioned little Eastern Shore town where he’d grown up. And then more: in 1967 in the countryside between Baltimore and Washington, Rouse’s company opened the first of the old-fashioned “villages” that would constitute the new city of Columbia, then built seven more during the 1970s.
Simultaneously some of the most serious up-and-coming architects were rediscovering history, creating the first “postmodern” buildings, with classical columns and pitched roofs and pediments and colorful finishes, sometimes cartoonish and sometimes convincing reproductions—like Disneyland and Disney World. So why not nostalgically revise existing big-city downtowns, too? Why not, they decided in the 1970s, sprinkle this amazing new pixie dust of nostalgia on an abandoned two-hundred-year-old hulk in Boston and turn Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall into a colonial-themed shopping mall? And then the South Street Seaport in Manhattan? Both were Rouse projects. Thus the “festival marketplace” became the new middle-class mode of instant American urban renewal—dying or atrophied urban organs and limbs revivified as imaginary versions of themselves. Themed was becoming the standard MO for the creation of any and all new American places and spaces.
When I was born, restaurants were neither national businesses nor themed. That changed as suburbs fulfilled the old-timey small-town American dream and as Disney cracked the code for themed commerce. We got theming that indulged geographic nostalgia—Old West steakhouses, first Bonanza and Ponderosa (from Bonanza, the number-one TV show), then LongHorn and Outback, and Old South iterations like Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores. And then any and every fantasy source—a children’s novel (Long John Silver), Playboy (Hooters), cartoon worlds populated by animatronic talking animals (Chuck E. Cheese, inspired by the founder’s visit to Disneyland), or a clown (Ronald McDonald in McDonaldland). During the 1960s, the McDonald’s founder said repeatedly his company was “not in the hamburger business, it’s in show business.”*2
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UNLIKE FAST FOOD, gambling and sex are not uniquely American pursuits. But both are obviously fantasy-fueled, and both were considered naughty for most of our history. And then the availability and cultural presentations of both changed radically.
In most places for most of U.S. history, gambling businesses had been outlawed. But after the anything-goes national ratification of fantasy in the 1960s, state government after state government decided to join the fantasy-industrial complex by operating lotteries—first New Hampshire in 1964, then New York, New Jersey, and ten more by 1975, eventually nearly every state. By the way, lotteries are gambling’s most fantastical form, with worse odds than any casino game. The lottery business is all about selling ridiculous long shots to magical thinkers. What’s more, government-run lotteries were specifically tweaked to exploit the psychology of fantasy. Scratch-card tickets—Four correct, I almost won!—essentially tricked bettors to keep buying, and computer-generated ticket sales gave the illusion of control over random chance.
Sex has probably been a fiction-reality blend for most of human history, but in America that all at once started becoming radically overt. The most common and incurable potentially negative consequence of heterosexual sex, producing children, had always inhibited the full flowering of make-believe. (If a random fraction of war reenactors used live ammunition in mock battles, for instance, “living history” would be less popular.) But once a contraceptive method of unprecedented effectiveness came along—the Pill, available everywhere by 1965—heterosexuality dramatically changed. People were freer to have sex more often and therefore more imaginatively, without the antifantasy buzzkill of possible pregnancy. Reliable contraception also meant they could do it with more people they found fleetingly attractive, and have sex unseriously, the way they might daydream about ravishing a character in a novel or a movie. When sex became far less consequential, it could become less “real” and more like exciting fiction.
At the same time, as guilty pleasure started becoming an oxymoron, the sexual practice that was always completely fantasy-based, solitary masturbation, began losing its stigma. Cosmopolitan, after Helen Gurley Brown took it over in 1965, regularly ran articles about it. The slang term stroke book appeared. In 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint, with a compulsive masturbator as its hero, spent three months as the bestselling novel in America. Portnoy was frank about how his sexual desire had been branded by show business: “I too want to be the boyfriend of Debbie Reynolds—it’s the Eddie Fisher in me coming out,” and what was more, he realized, “for every Eddie yearning for a Debbie, there is a Debbie yearning for an Eddie—a Marilyn Monroe yearning for her Arthur Miller.” Philip Roth, thirty-five when he published Portnoy, understood that his popular breakthrough was a function of the zeitgeist shift at the heart of this history: “By the final year of the 1960s, the national education in the irrational and the extreme had been so brilliantly conducted,” he wrote right afterward, “that for all its tasteless revelations about everyday sexual obsession…something like Portnoy’s Complaint was suddenly within the range of the tolerable.”
The first big business ever built on masturbation, Playboy Enterprises, had set the cornerstone in the 1950s for America’s mainstreaming of erotica, but it was during the late 1960s and early 1970s that the smut wing of the fantasy-industrial complex really grew. Pornographic films had been around from the beginning of cinema as a groundbreaking mutant cross of fiction and reality—(bad) actors playing roles in (stupid) fictional stories but also actually fucking and sucking. However, most people seldom if ever saw them. Porn movies were a special taste, like liqueurs or sardines. The sexually explicit movie that began making porn respectable was hardly porn at all but a sweet, arty, black and white Swedish film called I Am Curious (Yellow), extensively covered in the news media when it was released in America in 1969. By 1972, Playboy was selling seven million magazines a month, one copy for every ten men and teenage boys in America. For women, The Flame and the Flower (1972) sold more than two million copies, turning “romance fiction” into an explicitly sexual (“His other hand cupped a breast and played with it to his pleasure…she felt his manhood deep within her”) and hugely bestselling genre. The hardcore films Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones got enormous national media coverage when they opened in 1972 and 1973 and sold tens of millions of tickets. Last Tango in Paris, a serious drama released by a major studio starring Marlon Brando as an anal rapist, was the seventh-highest-grossing movie in the United States in 1973. Porn had been declared officially okay. Soon new technologies would make it ubiquitous, another American fictional realm that blurred with life and transformed it, providing a new model for sexuality.
Trying to appear younger and more sexually attractive wasn’t the only reason a majority of American women suddenly started coloring their hair, but it was the main one. Dyed hair is a small fiction, a fib rather than a lie. But the dramatic cultural change on this score is a striking metric of the acceptance of make-believe in real life. When I was a child, it was unusual to encounter a woman over fifty whose hair was not gray or white. By the time I graduated college, it was unusual to see a woman between fifty and seventy whose hair was not blond or brown or black or red. When Clairol sold its first home hair-coloring line in 1956, maybe one in fifteen American women colored her hair. By 1970, two-thirds did. Everyone agreed to pretend that women’s hair no longer turned gray. It was a cosmetological expression of the new paradigm that we quickly ceased to find odd.*3
Cosmetic surgery was extremely rare before the 1960s. From plastic surgery’s modern emergence during World War I through the 1950s, what plastic surgeons did was fix wounds from car crashes and fires and war and congenital problems like cleft lips. People who hadn’t suffered some terrible piece of bad luck didn’t ask surgeons to refashion their faces and bodies to make them prettier or sexier or younger-looking. And all but a few plastic surgeons would have refused. But then cosmetic surgery, heretofore disreputable, took off. Partly it was the result of new technologies—silicone breast implants appeared in 1962, that annus mutabilitatis—but it was mostly a matter of new thinking, often magical thinking. By the account of one pioneering New York practitioner, when he came along in the 1960s, there were only eight plastic surgeons in Manhattan. In 1967 the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) was founded, followed in 1969 by the American Association of Cosmetic Surgeons.
ASAPS presidents talk about the paradigm shift as if it were a civil rights revolution. “Up until that time,” says one, “face lifting was not considered a legitimate pursuit for any well-trained plastic surgeon and was done mostly behind closed doors.” “Back in the 1960s,” explains another former ASAPS president, who practices in Newport Beach, “when the major focus of plastic surgery was on reconstructive operations,…cosmetic surgery [was] ‘in the closet,’ ” but a few heroes “had the courage and foresight” to sell boob jobs and tighter faces and smaller noses to any citizen who could afford them.
A friend of mine, the plastic surgeon Jay Arthur Jensen, started his medical education in the 1970s at Yale and now teaches at UCLA and practices in Santa Monica. “Patients [do] develop a fantasy,” he told me. “I did a facelift on a woman who was not an attractive person. I think it was at least her second facelift. And when I was done, she screamed at me and said she did not ‘look as good as Sophia Loren.’ She was adamant that I could somehow change that. The patients are in a fantasy—they’re imagining that somehow they’ll become a different person or they’ll have a different life.”
Surgically renovated faces and bodies and artificially colored hair provided illusions of youth. They became widely available just as the first baby boomers entered adulthood—the generation, not coincidentally, that was the first to refuse to relinquish the perquisites of youth as they aged. Starting in the 1970s, adults were free and eager to behave and consume in ways previously the province only of teenagers and children.
A new national fantasy of permanent youthfulness kicked in.
No matter how old you got, you could continue dressing like a kid. You could continue riding your skateboard, continue listening to rock music and smoking pot, continue obsessing over ever-more-amazing ice cream and cookies, continue watching cartoons and comic book movies and reading comic books, continue going to Disneyland. In The Making of a Counter Culture in 1969, Ted Roszak noted and disparaged “the commercial world’s effort to elaborate a total culture of adolescence based on nothing but fun and games,” but he couldn’t yet see that the new countercultural paradigm would meld perfectly and powerfully and permanently into that total culture of adolescence.
It was in the 1960s that we first learned of our inner child, that we should each attend to his or her wishes and aspire to be more childlike as adults. That was one of the heartfelt, enduring takeaways of the era, part of nearly all the therapeutic and pop-psychology strands spun out of Esalen and its kin. If it feels good, do it: invented by Americans barely past childhood, that motto made the inner child idea actionable, and although the phrase faded quickly, the ethos lived on.
Instead of taking the correct lesson from Bob Dylan’s 1973 anthem “Forever Young”—to “grow up to be righteous” and “always be courageous”—way too many baby boomers chose to remain in Neverland, to keep believing they’d always have nothing but fun and never resemble mom and dad. The principle set forth in Peter Pan—“All children, except one, grow up”—was just another oppressive and unfair old-fashioned rule to be cast off.
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IN THE 1970S, not long before he died, the sci-fi writer Phil Dick moved into an apartment in Orange County a few miles from Disneyland, an irony not lost on him. There he wrote a perfect summary of his dread about the transformation of American society and culture as the real and unreal became indistinguishable. “We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.” I can’t do better, so I’ll quote him at length.
The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener….
And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes….
I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides….Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.
*1 The host, Diana Paxson, became a successful author of fantasy fiction—and fantasy nonfiction, such as Taking Up the Runes: A Complete Guide to Using Runes in Spells, Rituals, Divination, and Magic.
*2 In his youth, Ray Kroc had had noteworthy brushes with Fantasyland past and future. A phrenologist examined him at age four and purportedly divined that Raymond would work in the restaurant business. At fifteen, during World War I, he lied about his age in order to enlist and served as a driver in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps—the same job in the same outfit that sixteen-year-old Walt Disney, a year later, lied about his age to join.
*3 During the same period, we never stopped to register that our food was suddenly becoming preternaturally colorful too: during the 1960s and early ’70s, the food dyes consumed by the average American—tons of Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1—more than doubled, a bigger increase than any comparable period before or since.