The Theming Of America, Second Edition

American Dreams, Media Fantasies, And Themed Environments

Mark Gottdiener

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000306286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book, an analysis of American society, explores the nature of social change since the 1960s as reflected in the "theming" of America from Graceland to Dollywood, from Las Vegas to Disneyworld, from the Mall of America to local mall.

1
LOOKING AT THEMED ENVIRONMENTS

During the summer month of July 2000, a French sheep farmer, José Bové, descended to the site of the McDonald's fast-food outlet in his hometown of Millau and, with the help of some friends, demolished the building. He was sentenced to three months in jail. According to one report (Bremner, 2000:4):

For ordinary people, Bové spoke for the France of petits villages, red wine, and honest paysans that inhabits the Gallic imagination. "We have remained a culture where the time spent at the table is not just for consuming food. It's a social and family moment. There is a frightening statistic from America that the average time a family sits at the table is six minutes. That hasn't happened here yet."

The report also mentioned that Bové's other targets are mad cow disease, genetically altered products, and the large multinational corporations that are gaining control over all aspects of business and agriculture. To Bové and many others, McDonald's is a symbol of a general threat to their traditional way of life—a threat that they believe emanates from the global forces of the world economy.

During that same year, in Florida, famous country and western star Jimmy Buffett, who previously had opened a themed restaurant named Margaritaville (after his well-known hit song), announced plans for Cheeseburger in Paradise, an "island themed restaurant" named after one of his other hits. And in Los Angeles, a limited partnership between the Hard Rock Café Corporation and several National Basketball Association (NBA) players announced the projected opening of "NBA City"—a new, themed restaurant chain that was expected to gross $15 million a year from one million patrons (Schneider, 2000).

Later that year, in September, the Krispy Kreme national doughnut franchise opened stores for the first time in Buffalo, New York, and in Los Angeles, California, causing traffic jams in both cities. Buffalo, the home of wings and beer, and Los Angeles, best known for health food fads, witnessed the same doughnut-eating frenzy with the unveiling of the new stores.

This book focuses on the cultural trend that unites all of these events. Since the 1950s our culture has been increasingly characterized by the use of themes and signs to sell merchandise. At times, the symbolic milieus that have been created, like the Planet Hollywood chain, overshadow the quality of the products they sell. The frenzy over Krispy Kreme doughnuts in one part of the world is offset by the organized objections to franchises like McDonald's in another. As people in other countries are exposed to themed restaurants, theme parks, and themed tourist attractions, they feel the same conflicting dynamics of curiosity, celebrity, and caution that we experience. Both national cultures and local environments seem to be increasingly altered by the growing influence of franchising and theming.

People eat lunches and dinners in restaurants that compete with each other for the most attractive motifs. These include the signature logos of McDonald's, Burger King, and the like, in the franchised world of fast foods; small-scale theme restaurants that cater to particular tastes, such as Chi-Chi's for Mexican style food, the Olive Garden for Italian-style franchise cooking, and the Red Lobster for seafood; or more elaborately themed environments, such as the Hard Rock Café and Planet Hollywood. Even individually owned restaurants tout their personal themes as they struggle for business in the competitive world of dining out, by adding to the density or variety of symbolic decor.

Motifs increasingly define recreational activities both in central cities and in suburbs. Professional sports, with their aggressive merchandising and team boosterism, offer themed experiences that focus almost as much on abstract symbols worn as clothing or sold as poster images as on the spectacular players of the game. The motifs of teams and of sports figures are found on shoes, jackets, hats, and even men's suits.

Symbols also structure other experiences, such as family vacations, which increasingly involve visits to theme parks or commercialized leisure locations. Disneyland in California and Disneyworld in Florida are perhaps the most famous destinations. However, popular theme parks are scattered throughout the country. Dolly Parton, the country and western singer, has her own theme park, Dollyland, as does the dead Elvis, Graceland—both in Tennessee. Las Vegas, once a mecca for alcohol, sex, and gambling, has become the theme park capital of the United States as casinos switch over to family-oriented entertainment; but even before this change, Las Vegas was the themed environment par excellence. Nature has been similarly transformed by motifs. Government regulators and construction designers and engineers have worked over natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, to heighten the theme of mother nature in an idealized sense.

The forms of a symbol-ridden environment pervade everyday life as well. Shopping increasingly occurs in large suburban malls or special central city districts that use defined themes purposefully to entice consumers. Architecture and decor artfully play out distinctive symbolic appeals that connect the mall shopping experience with the media world of television and popular culture. Finally, the idea of overarching, organizing themes has recently been incorporated into the construction of museums and historical monuments. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., for example, orchestrates the visitor's experience entirely around the theme of Germany's failed destruction of European Jewry during World War II. The government also recently converted its abandoned absorption center on Ellis Island, located in New York City harbor, to a popular tourist attraction using a themed milieu that documents the immigration experience. This motif is painstakingly developed and highlighted in the restored buildings of the former immigrant absorption center. Similar themed historical renovations that are specifically designed for tourists characterize new public projects across the country. Engineered to attract outsiders rather than to commemorate local sentiments, these themed environments indicate the active competition among different places around the country for tourist dollars.

In sum, the themed milieu, with its pervasive use of overarching symbolic motifs that define an entire built space, increasingly characterizes not only cities but also suburban areas, shopping places, airports, and recreational spaces such as baseball stadia, museums, restaurants, and amusement parks. Progressively, then, our daily life occurs within a material environment that is dependent on and organized around overarching motifs. This book explores the nature of this themed environment as it has developed since the 1960s, the reasons for its emergence, its connections to the economy, and its development as a new cultural form of varied thematic appeals.

The Increasing Use of Themes in Everyday Life

Since the end of World War II, our everyday environment has been altered in profound ways. Before the 1960s there was a clear distinction between the city and the country (Williams, 1973). Cities grew as compact, dense industrial environments usually laid out along right-angled grid lines. They possessed a central sector of office towers and an adjacent area of factories tied to rail spurs and roads. Residential areas exemplified the classic contrast of the "gold coast and slum." Wealthy, privileged areas of housing were juxtaposed and in close proximity with more modest, sometimes squalid, neighborhoods of industrial workers. Lying outside the limits of the city was another contrasting space—the countryside of farm fields, wooded acres, and occasional houses separated by open space. Cultural styles of life that were either urban (urbane) or rural reflected this dichotomy of different land uses, as did depictions of city and country dwellers in novels and films (see Redfield, 1947).

Before the 1960s, fundamental class differences between capitalists and workers organized the land use of the industrial city. Neighborhoods, for example, were working class and the local community reflected ethnic, racial, and religious solidarity dedicated to the task of raising families. The center of the city, in contrast, belonged to business. During this period the symbols that provided meaning to daily life were manifested more cognitively than materially. Buildings reflected their functions with a minimum of symbolic trappings. People in neighborhoods signified their culture through the sometimes subtle markings of churches and store signs using foreign languages. Symbolic marking was muted, and inhabitants had to be perceptive to pick out denotations of place that signified particular ethnic solidarities or preferred places of business.

Since the 1960s a new trend of symbolic differentiation within the built environment has appeared that contrasts graphically with the earlier period. The use of symbols and motifs more and more frequently characterizes the space of everyday life in both the city and the suburb. Signification involves not only a proliferation of signs and themes but also a constant reworking of built facades and interior spaces to incorporate overarching motifs in such a way that we increasingly are exposed to new environmental experiences when we consume. Now these new consumer spaces with their new modes of thematic representation organize daily life in an increasing variety of ways. Social activities have moved beyond the symbolic work of designating ethnic, religious, or economic status to an expanding repertoire of meaningful motifs. Whereas symbolic elements were muted in the settlement spaces of the early twentieth century, the trend is reversed in the new consumer spaces of today.

Understanding Themed Environments

When I refer to a themed environment, I explicitly mean the material product of two social processes. First, I am talking about socially constructed, built environments—about large material forms that are designed to serve as containers for commodified human interaction (for example, malls). Second, I have in mind themed material forms that are products of a cultural process aimed at investing constructed spaces with symbolic meaning and at conveying that meaning to inhabitants and users through symbolic motifs. These motifs may take on a range of meanings according to the interpretations of the individuals who are exposed to them. The range of responses can include everything from no response at all—that is, a failure of the symbolic content to stimulate—to a negative response, or displeasure. Themed environments do not automatically provoke desire and pleasure in their users. Such spaces also can be sources of great irritation, as can be seen in the strong negative reactions of some Europeans to McDonald's franchises in their countries.

Another important distinction concerns the way I use the concepts of "production" and "consumption." The former refers to a social process of creation that often involves a group of individuals brought together within an organized, institutional context, such as real estate development. Consumption involves the way individuals or groups use or interpret the constructed space by imputing some meaning or meanings to it. These people may be customers, inhabitants, visitors, or clients, but they are all users of the space in some fashion. Consumption of a themed environment refers to the experience of individuals within a themed milieu, including the assumption of a particular orientation to space, based on the personal or group interpretation of its symbolic content. Built forms have the power to alter human behavior through meaning, and this response is also part of what I mean by the process of consumption in space.

Visitors to a themed park consume the environment itself as well as the rides and attractions. They adjust their behavior according to the stimuli they receive from the signals embedded in built forms. Motifs and symbols developed through the medium of the park's material forms may be highly stimulating, or conversely, hardly noticed. Always, however, the physical presence of individuals within a space involves their use or "consumption" of the material environment.

In the following chapters I discuss both the production and the consumption of themed milieus. Most commentaries—for example, those about places like Disneyland—ignore the production process of the park and focus exclusively on impressionistic accounts of a visit there. I seek to correct this one-sided view by also emphasizing the process of production, and the role of that process in the larger economic organization of our society. I am especially interested in the intermixing of creation and use, as consumer experiences increasingly are packaged within themed milieus.

Production in Consumption

Despite the dichotomization of the interrelated concepts of production and consumption, I must caution the reader against making sharp distinctions between these two social processes. To begin with, as our society progressively shifts from an economy dependent on manufacturing to one in which service industries predominate, the jobs held by the bulk of the population are increasingly associated with thematic experiences. Museum exhibits, for example, more frequently concern the elaboration of themes than in the past; service labor in restaurants or recreational areas requires employee conformity to the symbolic decor through the wearing of costumes and the like; and retailing activity increasingly locates in motifed milieus such as malls. Thus, the world of work, or production, penetrates and merges with the world of consumption.

Second, it has become harder to isolate shopping and other leisure pursuits as activities defined by consumption alone. In the past, observers of mass cultural participation often did just that by painting the users or the audience as a group of passive consumers, conditioned by advertising to behave in the way producers wished. More recently, analysts of culture have recognized that the gross manipulation of people by advertising is an exaggeration. We must acknowledge the relative autonomy of individuals in the act of consumption, as they blend personal history, the self-actualization of their identities, group pressures of various kinds, and the powerful compulsions of the consumer society that pressure people to make certain choices in the marketplace. As individual identities become wrapped up in modes of self-expression and the fashioning of particular lifestyles in response to the great variety of market choices, there is a blurred line between production and consumption. More and more we view the pursuit of particular styles of life and the development of contemporary subjectivities through the use of material objects as a form of production itself (de Certeau, 1984; Gergen, 1991). There is always an element of production in the act of consumption, just as there is also a corresponding aspect of use-value exploited by the production process. These intersecting, liminal activities of the economy are increasingly organized by overarching symbolic motifs within consumer milieus.

Michel de Certeau (1984), the author of an influential book on the subject, argues that consumers are always employing a creative strategy or series of strategies in their buying activities that bear a resemblance to the production process. They try to juggle desires, prices, stores, and modes of purchasing. They create uses for objects to fill specific needs. They modify commodities to suit their own lifestyle. These and other responses are common strategies of consumption deployed by average household or family groups as they cope with economic adversity (see Roberts, 1993). In short, people are not the passive, media-manipulated masses often depicted by analysts of advertising. They are very often proactive in their attitudes toward commodities and shopping. Through the daily use of strategies, they "produce" an attitude and a form of coping behavior in their social role as consumer.

Another way of viewing the links between the processes of production and consumption focuses on the development of subjectivity and the emergence of the self within a consumer-oriented society (see Langman, 1992; Gergen, 1991). To be sure, images and desires produced by the advertising industry constantly prime people to consume. When individuals enter commercial realms, such as in a visit to a mall, the themed, retailing environment actualizes their consumer self. This process, however, is not a passive one, with individuals acting like marionettes, pulled back and forth by powerful consumer conditioning. Instead, people self-actualize within the commercial milieu, seeking ways of satisfying their desires and pursuing personal fulfillment through the market that express deeply held images of themselves. Granted, mass advertising conditions much of this actualization of a consumer identity, especially aided by the group force of conformity to fashion. Equally valid is the observation that self-actualization is destined to be disappointed in the alienated world of mass marketing. However, as observers interested in the innovative (production) aspects of buying argue, the fashioning of consumer identities is much less controlled by advertising manipulation than is often supposed, and the incredibly prolific abundance of commercial products does promise the satisfaction of many of our desires, whether these are manufactured for us or not.

As an example of these aspects of production in consumption, consider the activity of dressing in contemporary society. Group norms highly regulate socially acceptable dress, and this has always been so (Gottdiener, 1995). The large fashion industry that orchestrates modes of appearance in modern society lately has targeted men as well as women both for periodic changes in style and for the production of desire. Despite the power of fashion, most individuals hold a very personalized conception of their dress patterns. They often seek self-actualization and pursue certain distinct lifestyles through the medium of appearance (see Stone, 1962; Simmel, 1957; Konig, 1973). People in our society spend a great deal of money on clothing—more than they could possibly need for purely protective purposes. They use these material objects symbolically in many ways to exploit social situations for their own advantage. Individuals may "dress for success" or to impress; they may seek approval of others—women, men, prospective in-laws, a possible employer; and they often seek identification with particular groups by dressing like them. Finally, people often mix and match objects of clothing and accessories on a daily basis in a creative effort to fashion a personal look or image. When considering the social process of dress as distinct from fashion dictated by the clothing industry, it becomes difficult to separate aspects of production and consumption because the two are so interrelated in the daily behavior of dressing (see Barthes, 1983).

A Brief Note on Signs and Symbols

In the opening section of this chapter we have already begun to use concepts associated with the analysis of symbols in specific ways. This is necessary to disc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 Looking At Themed Environments
• 2 From a Themed to an Anti-Themed Environment, and Back
• 3 The Mirror of Production: The Realization Problem of Capital
• 4 Themed Culture and Themed Environments
• 5 The Las Vegas Casino, Theme Parks, and the General Trend of Theming
• 6 Experiencing Themed Environments and Organized Protests Against Them
• 7 Themes, Societal Fantasies, and Daily Life
• Bibliography