Shelton Waldrep - The Dissolution of Place - Architecture, Identity, and The Body-Ashgate Pub Co (2013) PDF

The Dissolution of Place
Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series

series editor: eamonn canniffe, manchester school of architecture,
manchester metropolitan university, uk
The discipline of Architecture is undergoing subtle transformation as design

awareness permeates our visually dominated culture. Technological change,
the search for sustainability and debates around the value of place and meaning
of the architectural gesture are aspects which will affect the cities we inhabit. This
series seeks to address such topics, both theoretically and in practice, through
the publication of high quality original research, written and visual.
Other titles in this series
Architect Knows Best

Environmental Determinism in Architecture Culture from 1956 to the Present
Simon Richards
ISBN 978 1 4094 3922 6
Nationalism and Architecture

Edited by Raymond Quek and Darren Deane, with Sarah Butler
ISBN 978 1 4094 3385 9
The Political Unconscious of Architecture

Re-opening Jameson’s Narrative
Nadir Lahiji
ISBN 978 1 4094 2639 4
Forthcoming titles in this series
A Life in Education and Architecture

Mary Beaumont Medd
Catherine Burke
ISBN 978 0 7546 7959 2
On Frank Lloyd Wright’s Concrete Adobe

Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler and the American Southwest
Donald Leslie Johnson
ISBN 978 1 4094 2817 6
The Dissolution of Place
Architecture, Identity, and the Body
Shelton Waldrep
University of Southern Maine, USA
© Shelton Waldrep 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Shelton Waldrep has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce
the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright
holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher
apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified
of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Waldrep, Shelton.
The dissolution of place : architecture, identity, and the
body. -- (Ashgate studies in architecture)
1. Architecture, Postmodern. 2. Identity (Psychology) in
architecture. 3. Place (Philosophy) in architecture.
4. Decoration and ornament, Architectural--Psychological
aspects. 5. Themed environments. 6. Ethnic architecture.
7. Homosexuality and architecture. 8. Architecture in
motion pictures.
I. Title II. Series
720.1’03-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waldrep, Shelton.
The dissolution of place : architecture, identity, and the body / by Shelton Waldrep.
pages cm -- (Ashgate studies in architecture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-1768-2 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-1769-9 (ebk) 1. Architecture,
Modern--21st century. 2. Place (Philosophy) in architecture. 3. Architecture--
Psychological aspects. I. Title.
NA687.W35 2012
724’.6--dc23
2012026362
ISBN 9781409417682 (hbk)

ISBN 9781409417699 (ebk – PDF)
V – ePUB)
ISBN 9781472404329 (ebk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the

MPG Books Group, UK.
Contents
List of Figures vii

Preface: Letter from Portland, Maine xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1 The Architectonics of Post/modernist Space 9
2 The Global Theme Park: Disney in the World 37
3 The Architecture of Time: Postmodern Casinos in Las Vegas 69
4 In Her Majesty’s Secret Closet: Bond’s Body 93
5 Reverse Empire: Architecture in Native American Casinos 109
6 Philip Johnson and the Architecture of the Body 129
7 Bodies in Space: Architecture and the Films of Stanley Kubrick 165
Coda: Virtual Communities 207
Bibliography 213
Index 223
For Lily
List of Figures
0.1 Waterfront x
0.2 Statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow xi
1.1 Centre Pompidou 14
1.2 Villa Savoye 20
1.3 Maison de la Roche 22
1.4 La Grande Arche 27
1.5 Le Grand Louvre 28
1.6 Bibliothèque François Mitterand 28
1.7 Opéra Bastille 29
1.8 Parc de la Villette 30
1.9 Folly 30
1.10 Folly detail 31
2.1 Cinderella’s Castle 43
2.2 Tomorrowland today 49
2.3 The Tree of Life 50
2.4 Animal Kingdom fantasy architecture 52
2.5 Animal Kingdom realistic architecture 52
2.6 Disneyland Paris fantasy architecture 54
2.7 Disneyland Paris ironwork 54
2.8 Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant 55
2.9 Detail of Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant 56
2.10 Les Mystères du Nautilus 56
2.11 Phantom Manor 57
3.1 Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans 72
3.2 The Mirage 76
3.3 Excalibur 76
3.4 Interior of Excalibur 77
3.5 Sphinx at the Luxor Casino 78
3.6 Luxor Casino 79
viii The Dissolution of Place
3.7 New York, New York 80

3.8 Detail of New York, New York 81
3.9 Petroglyph 82
3.10 Circus Circus 86
3.11 The Wynn 87
3.12 Interior of Encore 87
3.13 Mandalay Bay 89
3.14 Paris 90
4.1 Ken Adam’s set design for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964)99
5.1 Foxwoods 110
5.2 Interior of Foxwoods 110
5.3 Rainmaker statue 112
5.4 Themed shopping area 113
5.5 Store sign 114
5.6 Pequot Museum 116
5.7 Pequot Museum tower 117
5.8 Interior of museum 117
5.9 Gathering Place exhibit overview 118
5.10 Gathering Place exhibit 119
5.11 Gathering Place exhibit detail 119
5.12 Mohegan Sun 122
6.1 Glass House 130
6.2 Interior of Glass House 131
6.3 Guest House 132
6.4 Art Gallery 133
6.5 Sculpture Gallery 133
6.6 Interior of Sculpture Gallery 134
6.7 Library/Study 134
6.8 Entrance Gate 135
6.9 Gate House 136
6.10 Interior of the Gate House 136
6.11 Carpenter Center, Cambridge 137
6.12 Lake Pavilion 138
6.13 Interior of Art Gallery 139
6.14 Seagram Building 142
6.15 Seagram Building detail 143
6.16 Boston Public Library addition 143
6.17 AT&T Building (Sony Plaza) 147
6.18 Five Hundred Boylston Street, Boston 148
6.19 Lipstick Building 148
6.20 One International Place, Boston 149
7.1 “The Day of the Fight” 167
7.2 Barry defends himself 168
7.3 Running toward the mannequin factory 169
7.4 Interior of mannequin factory 169
List of Figures ix
7.5 Bowman holding Poole’s body 171

7.6 The Cartier brothers 173
7.7 Poole sunbathing 173
7.8 Forgotten helmet 174
7.9 Exterior of Wandsworth Prison 182
7.10 Exercise in the prison courtyard 182
7.11 Thamesmead 185
7.12 Barry in bed 189
7.13 Mandy 190
7.14 Body in the morgue 191
7.15 Barry with Bryan 197
7.16 Inside Barry’s club 198
All photographs, unless otherwise stated, are copyright of the author.

This page has been left blank intentionally
Preface:
Letter from Portland, Maine
“To All Maine Points” is what the sign reads when you finally break away from the
gravitational pull of the Boston area and head north on the interstate highway
system. And indeed it feels like you are driving into the wilderness—quiet, cool,
often a bit gray, and in sharp contrast to I-95’s corridor of too many people and
cars. Indeed, Northern New England is a spatial zone all to itself. To go to “All Points
North” is to realize the way in which historical versions of space are still preserved
in the states of the original colonies. In New England, this preservation seems in
part due to the large number of buildings—especially homes—that date back to
prior centuries. Though this phenomenon can also be seen in the American South
in a city like Charleston, in Portland, Maine, especially, it is rare for someone to live
in a home that does not have a nineteenth-century sense of space. For someone
coming to live in this environment for the first time, the spatial vocabulary can be
more than a bit disconcerting. Though it might seem counterintuitive, urban New
England architecture is more than a sort of living time capsule; it has a distinctly un-
American feel. Like the architecture of Europe’s older cities, the built environment of
New England is marked by complexity and layered historical precedent. The typical
New England lot, for example, is neither the grid of the Midwestern city nor of the
suburban development; rather, it maintains the integrity of the township divisions,
but with lots further sub-divided into a myriad of rectilinear patterns whose
maze-like lines do not fit any easily-discernible design. Likewise, the interiority of
the New England Victorian house consists of not only additions, but also paths,
internal byways and small spaces that orient the dweller toward the inside and
away from the harsh climate of the outside, but also to the very temporal nature
of the dwelling—its building up, like a text, in such a way as to remind one of its
internal complexity.
Getting lost, therefore, is part of the New England spatial experience. One need
only drive around rural Massachusetts to encounter such uniquely New England
spaces as the rotary: combining the worst aspects of a traffic circle and what is
elsewhere called an intersection, this form is ready-made to create confusion.
xii The Dissolution of Place
0.1 Waterfront Just as streets in Maine and Vermont have lanes that appear and disappear (the
turn lane is apparently too nouveau—or impractical—for these ancient streets),
so too, the roads lack street signs and the general regularity of traffic laws and
informational markers that I have to expect in my native South. Indeed, the spatial
disorientation that I feel in New England is part of a cultural one that I encounter
whenever I ask a question—always in my flattest accent—and receive a distinctly
Midlands-accented answer back. New England is closer to England, perhaps, than
it is to the US. Certainly, this spatial difference, as a metaphor for cultural ones,
seems to provide some of its distinction, but it is also a sign of a resistance to
integration. Faulkner said that New England and the American South were like
two older countries within a newer one, and he was right. One main difference
between these two old countries is that New England spatializes time just as the
South temporalizes space. That is, in New England, space has remained the same
even as the supposed timeline of progress has gone forward. In the South, time
is always set in the past, while space, which was unable to remain fixed after the
Civil War and Reconstruction, has rarely been kept intact. Southerners always tear
down their past. To take one example, the city of Atlanta is a very 1970s city, yet it
can’t even hold on to its 1970s architecture. The Omni coliseum, built in the early
1970s, was imploded in 1997, as was the Atlanta Braves baseball team’s 1960s-era
stadium, to make room for ever-newer digs. In the towns of West Alabama, I can’t
Preface: Letter from Portland, Maine xiii
count the number of antebellum mansions that I know have been torn down to
make way for gleaming new service stations.
New England space, in contrast, is distinctly not that of the exurban sprawl of the
New South, of California and the West, of the rural areas of most of the continent.
Though, again, I talk here mostly of those parts of New England that are somewhat
urban, one need only walk out of a building in Portland to feel out of kilter, out of
balance, in a way that is quite different from the calm, harmonizing lines of Colonial
Williamsburg or the melodramatic grandness of a Southern plantation. In Portland,
I become keenly aware of the unevenness of the streets, the closeness and fragile
verticality of the buildings, the nearness of the ocean and the way the horizon
seems too close. New England space is pitched, uneven, uncanny in its quietness,
and seemingly accessible mainly by foot or by boat. The steep and narrow stairs
echo the relationship of the buildings to their surroundings—the visitor has, in
other words, an almost constant sense of falling.
This is not space to play in, but to live in. Yet, Americans love a theme, and
New England tries, like everywhere in America where space has some kind of
distinctiveness, to theme itself for tourists. In Portland, this effort takes the shape
of the Old Port Exchange, a 20-block area of shops, restaurants, and bars that is
the gentrified ancestor of a maritime trading area. Bordering a continuously active
seaport, the Old Port’s mystique is somewhat mitigated—like the lived-in quality of
0.2 Statue of
New Orleans’s Vieux Carré. However, it is really not here that one can see what old Henry Wadsworth
New England—that complex tautology—is really like. Rather, one need only visit Longfellow
xiv The Dissolution of Place
the older houses on Munjoy Hill—structures that have escaped the two fires that
have devastated the chic West End—to see the way that New Englanders do not
so much reenact their lives—à la Plymouth Plantation—as live them as a history in
the present. Or, at least, as an encrusted space, on top of which is a present that is
ever changing and seemingly new.
To travel to the edge of the American North, therefore, is to move toward a
preserved spatial past, a place of little building, long winters, and vivid architecture.
As a Southerner, it is also, for me, a movement away from the intense languidness
of the South: a Mediterranean sense of unease and expectation where architecture,
however bold, rarely really competes with nature—and the nature of people
as well. The rationality of New England architecture could never hold up to the
conscience of the South; likewise, to be a Southerner in this New England grittiness
is to be more than a fish out of water, but a lowlander caught between the hills and
the ocean, in a landscape that has long belonged to no one.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the University of Southern Maine for the generous support of
this project over the last several years. Some of this support has been in the form
of equipment and leave time, but other as direct monetary support for travel and
books, which were essential to the project’s completion. Thank you, especially, to
the College of Arts and Sciences (now, the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social
Sciences), the Office of the Provost, and the Faculty Senate. I would also like to
thank the staff at the Glickman Family Library at the University of Southern Maine;
The Philip Johnson Glass House (a National Trust Historic Site); and the Canadian
Centre for Architecture for their help with materials involved with this project.
Jenna Noray compiled the index with speed and proficiency, for which I am very
grateful.
Portions of this book have been presented at a number of venues, and I
appreciate the comments from people there as well as from friends and colleagues
who have taken an interest in my work over the years and have provided material
support in a variety of ways. Students at the University of Southern Maine tested
many of the ideas in the book, especially in those sections concerning film, which
they helped literally to make possible. Chapters 4 and 5 appeared in slightly
different form as “Postmodern Casinos” in Productive Postmodernism: Consuming
Histories and Cultural Studies, edited by John Duvall (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2002), and “Bond’s Body: Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Casino
Royale (2006), and the Future Anterior” in World Cinema and the Visual Arts, edited
by David Gallagher (London: Anthem, 2012), respectively.
I appreciate the expansive approach to architecture that Ashgate takes and, in
particular, the helpfulness of the reader of the manuscript. It was with great relief
that I have been able to work with the gracious staff at Ashgate, who have been
the best organized and most professional I have ever encountered. Valerie Rose
has allowed the process of publishing to retain its joy for the writer—an experience
that I am profoundly grateful to have had.
As with my last book, this one has been marked by extreme sadness and
happiness: the death of my father, Floyd Shelton Waldrep, Sr., who taught me much
xvi The Dissolution of Place
about the joy of intellectual eclecticism, and the birth of my lovely daughter, Lily
Catherine Waldrep. The book would not be possible without her existence, along
with that of the rest of my family, Jane Kuenz and Chloe Waldrep, who together
form a place for me.
Introduction
Architecture exists, for me, primarily through photographs—often expensively

printed in books that cost a great deal more than those devoted merely to text.
The surface of the architectural photograph is its own erotics—a view into
a perfected world that is, by being tied to a specific place and taste, also made
real—an embodied fantasy as opposed to a merely imagined one. Modernist,
postmodernist, and post-postmodernist architecture then, is tied intimately to the
technology of reproduction and to my own personal associations with built spaces
from the past century. For better or worse these associations are concretely tied to
their visual image—whether as photographs or, by extension, in films that feature
architecture in some thematic way.
My work on the postmodern meaning of space has expanded from an initial
interest in casino architecture and its relationship to Disney theming to involve
broader concerns about the function of postmodernist architecture more
generally. My contention is that the concept of postmodernism, as it has been
structured within debates with modernist architecture, does not fully explain
newer architectural phenomena. That is, I am interested in how postmodernism
limits the definition of architecture as a built environment. I explore this question
by investigating the ways that theming uses narrative devices to call into question
the discrete nature of structure and fosters the rise of virtual architecture—
architecture that exists not as actual buildings in space but as computer design
models or as metaphors for on-line community.
This book examines the transformation of physical space that has occurred in
Europe and North America from the 1950s to the present—during the transition
from late modernism to full-fledged postmodernism and after. Postmodern
architecture—with its return to ornamentality, historical quotation, and low-
culture kitsch—has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst
aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many
interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs. In the following pages
I hope to extend this debate beyond the modernist/postmodernist rivalry to
2 The Dissolution of Place
situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended

by deconstructionist and virtual architecture, as well as the continued turn toward
the use of theming (that is, the Disneyfication) in much new public and corporate
space. I instead investigate architecture on the margins of postmodernism—those
places where both architecture and postmodernism begin to break down and to
reveal new forms and new relationships. This book examines, in detail, not only a
wide range of architectural phenomena—theme parks, casinos, specific modernist
and postmodernist buildings—but also interrogates architecture in relation
to identity—specifically Native American and gay male identities—as they are
reflected in new notions of the built environment.
*****
Postmodernist architecture rejected the universalism of modernism in order to
replace it with the particularity of the vernacular, the new rule of “context.” The
answer to modernism’s supposed woes was to do the opposite—ornament was
now good, historicism was okay, and paying attention to your context, or at least
referencing it, even better. As Robert Venturi notes:
Postmodern ideas on context cause many design review boards to insist that
new buildings look like the old buildings beside them, yet the Piazza San Marco
is highly harmonious as a whole, although Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance
buildings sit on it side by side.1
Continuity is placed above invention, conventionality before everything else.

In most urban environments, neo-classicism is the dominant architectural style
and thus becomes the dominant form.2 While postmodern architects—or those
architects practicing after postmodernism but inflected by it—can enlarge the
language of the vernacular or dominate style of the environment by inserting a new
part, they cannot isolate themselves from it or change the vocabulary of forms in a
profound way. It matters little whether this system is urban, suburban (in the case
of planned communities), or completely private as in the case of one of the Disney
parks, for example. The buildings built by major architects at the Disney World
complex in Florida all have to reference the work of Disney filmmakers and ride
designers, albeit in often whimsical or even indirect ways.3 Postmodern architects
essentially agree in advance to work within the given strictures of a style or genre
rather than question the essential elements out of which it is based—even less
so, architecture in general. Far from making cities livable, what sets postmodern
architecture apart is what Ian Buchanan calls “its intractability to habitation,
or better yet dwelling (in Heidegger’s sense).”4 Postmodern environments are
“too familiar, their lack of difference disconcerting ….”5 With postmodernism,
space becomes generic and thematized, a corporate version of modernism that
attempts to turn the aesthetics of modernism against itself using the tools that
modernism invented in the first place. Yet, when we talk about place, we are often
talking about something much more than mere physicality, memory, or desire—
and certainly not some kind of originary moment. Space, likewise, encompasses
much more than mere anti-place. As Kathleen M. Kirby notes:
Introduction 3
Space has the capacity to figure many of the different aspects of identity—the
psyche as volume, the body as container, discourse as spatial network, groups as
closed circles, and the aloof expanses of geography and nation.6
“Place,” as Kirby goes on to say,
seems to assume set boundaries that one fills to achieve a solid identity. Place
settles space into objects, working to reinscribe the Cartesian monad and the
autonomous ego. It perpetuates the fixed parameters of ontological categories,
making them coherent containers of essences, in relation to which one must be
‘inside’ or ‘out,’ ‘native’ or ‘foreign,’ in the same way one can be, in the Euclidean
universe, at least, be in only one place at one time. If place is organic and stable,
space is malleable, a fabric of continually shifting sites and boundaries.7
The link between space, place, and identity is key to the pieces in this collection,
which attempt to explore the different negotiations that come about from
definitions of space and place as inside and out, public and private, alien and
native, self and other.8
Architecture here is especially important because the relationship between
architecture and society is always concretely present. The question of the
hermetically sealed modern artist is balanced against the necessary outside
pressures of the patron/client/user, even when the architect, as Le Corbusier did,
conceives of himself as an Ayn Randian “heroic” figure. For these reasons, I have
often come back to architecture as a useful barometer of trends and problems
in aesthetics, and also as an exceedingly suggestive system of metaphorics and
intertexts. That is, I want to emphasize not only architecture in the way that
architectural historians and critics often speak of it—that is, as form—but also
bring to my analysis the social aspects as well. I discuss the influence of those critics
who have seen the built environment as a practice or an experience that people
negotiate in complex and highly mediated ways. My comments are informed by
theoretical positions usually associated with the Birmingham School in addition
to theories of postmodernism, mass culture study, gender/sexuality theory, and
(neo) colonial theory. My overall approach weaves together the work of a variety
of theorists, some of whom have seen space as a trope or metaphor for a large
number of complex phenomena. In choosing this configuration of thinkers, I hope
to make clear that the approach to space I am advocating is one that overlaps
several disciplines and erodes the boundaries between art-historical and textual
analyses. While architectural theory is central, I hope to show that the question of
space is also geographic, holographic, and cinematic.
*****
This book is organized in such a way that sections on architecture alternate with
those on other media—literature, film, and virtual environments—in an attempt
to show parallels and connections between architecture and other forms of
representation that may mimic or contain its effects and interests. Chapter 1
outlines the architectural theories that have come closest to offering what I think
is a genuinely useful explanation of the way that one’s sense and use of space has
changed during the period that we call the contemporary. Specifically, architecture
and (sub)urban development are increasingly experienced as procession rather
than form. That is, as an aesthetic experience, among other kinds, architecture
exists in time rather than space. Although this thesis is meant to reference Sigfried
Giedion’s concept of “space-time” in his monumental Space, Time and Architecture,
my primary referent is the collection of writing and speeches by Philip Johnson
in the 1950s and 1960s and collected by Robert A.M. Stern in 1979. In essays such
as “Whence and Whither: The Processional Element in Architecture,” Johnson lays
out the possibility for conceiving of an architecture that exists in time, not space.
Johnson credits his own inspiration to Le Corbusier, and, indeed, the origins of this
concept can be found at least as far back as Le Corbusier’s notion of the promenade
architecturale. In fact, I argue that, in various ways, this transformation of space
begins even earlier and emanates from the establishment of the mass-produced
commodity form and the shift from production to consumption within market
economies. The historical origins of my theoretical point of departure is perhaps
most significantly prefigured in Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Passagen-Werk, in
which he prophecies the necessary methodological approaches for examining
what has become, in our own age, a pervasive aspect of our everyday environment
of shopping malls, food stores, or cinemas rather than merely the isolated effect
of the display of the commodity in arcades. Benjamin is, in many respects, the
major figure for this work as his approach to the Parisian shopping experience
about which he wishes to write is a project that involves a discussion of memory,
mythology, allegory, architecture, mass culture, economic analysis, aesthetics,
and mysticism—all of which I find important for any analysis of postmodern
architectural forms and events. As key words for the project, I will attempt to offer
definitional boundaries and a theoretical discussion of the importance of the
following frequently dichotomized terms: city-suburb-exurb, space-time, inscape-
landscape-horizon, architecture-building, space-location-place, procession-narrative-
theme.
In addition to establishing my own theoretical approach to architecture, the first
chapter presents a revisionary version of the debate within architectural theory
over space vs. time, or to some extent, building vs. theory. The section ends with a
discussion of deconstructive architecture and its parallel movements, which have
placed the very idea of a unified sense of space, place, or time into question. I deal
not only with architects such as Peter Eisenman, Steven Holl, and Rem Koolhaas,
but also with theorists of space and spatiality—from Lefebvre and Certeau to Soja,
Virilio, and Deleuze.
The second chapter examines the effects that globalization and multiculturalism
have had on Disney’s attempt to theme third-world environments at their newest,
and largest, Orlando theme park, Animal Kingdom, and in the Disney company’s
attempt to update the Orlando facility generally in the face of new challenges to
the 1950s ethos of Disney identity. The signal importance of Walt Disney to popular
culture in this country and abroad warrants acknowledging the centrality of Disney
to the way that we use space in all its vicissitudes. I see Walt Disney’s theming as
the ultimate example of the use of time in a spatial setting to create a form that is
Introduction 5
arguably unique to the twentieth century: a kinetic architecture whose aspects are
reflected in and borrow from film, television, theatre, transportation, and reading,
and whose very existence is emblematic of debates over realism, surrealism, utopic
models, and modernism. I would like to look at the theme park not just as a new
form, but as a place where changes in architecture, space, and time get concentrated
and refracted—especially as the theme park becomes more open to and melds
with other pre-existing and new forms of architecture and entertainment. In
writing on theme parks, I make comparisons between Disney’s creations and those
regional parks that inevitably imitate the Disney ones and provide fresh ideas for
Disney expansion. One of my overriding goals is to place the discussion of the
Disney resorts within a debate—at once philosophical and practical—over the
relationship between space and time within the built world. I also hope, however,
to show how the Disney parks embody contradictions—narratives that break
down, postmodern effects that undermine each other, traces of modernism at war
with realist effects, and so on—in an attempt to see the Disney construction as
synecdoche for past, present, and future developments in the hyper-themitization
that has overcome our present sense of space. The history of WED Enterprises with
its anti-modernist origins and rapidly developing postmodern future may in fact
change our concept of architecture, entertainment, and public space in ways as
profound as those wrought in 1955. By looking at both architectural and spatial
theory and Walt Disney World in detail this chapter as a whole offers an explanation
for the implications of these changes for theming generally and the Disney empire
in particular.
In the chapters that follow, I treat the postmodern casino as a case study for the
kind of analysis one can make of the differing types of spaces that were developed
or opened up in the latter half of the twentieth century as the result of this debate.
The establishment of theming, as both anti-architecture and the logical conclusion
of the tension between temporal and spatial tropes, formal and social definitions,
links the postmodern theories of architecture and space to concrete examples.
The third chapter discusses the use of narrative and story-telling in prototypical
Vegas casinos (Luxor, for example) that are part of the transformation of the “Strip”
into post-1950s themed architecture. The fourth chapter shows how this transition
was signaled by the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever (1971). This chapter includes
a discussion of the Bond franchise, the monumentality of the male body, and the
anxieties that surrounded it in the immediate post-Stonewall atmosphere of the
early 1970s. The chapter concludes with a new consideration of the male body
brought about in the series’s most recent major rethinking of it in Casino Royale
(2006), especially in regard to the attempt by the franchise to recreate its own
origin story and find a new way to mix the past with the present.
The fifth chapter contrasts this narrative effect to its potential subversion in
the representation of regional architecture on display at the Foxwoods casino
in Ledyard, Connecticut. I hope to show how this casino acts to undo the typical
theme of a Vegas casino by offering representations of both the “white” culture of
coastal Connecticut and of a retroactive mythos about the origin of the tribe—a
particularly small one whose extraordinary wealth has caused much consternation
within Native American populations. That is, I explore what is being said about the
phenomenon of Native American gaming from within the Native American national
communities and how disputes about self-representation have complicated the
thematics of this casino.
The sixth chapter continues the discussion of representation and identity by
analyzing in detail the architectural corpus of Philip Johnson. Johnson’s work
may be best understood if we can figure out how it reflects the materiality of the
body—not just in terms of procession, but specifically in terms of Johnson’s own
body as a gay dandy figure whose tastes, both modernist and postmodernist,
frequently involved creating an architecture that bespoke a sense of danger. That
is, the design of Johnson’s Glass House compound creates a sense of the body’s
dislocation in space, an uncertainty about where one is or what the relations are
between one spatial structure and another. Built up over the course of his entire
architectural career, his estate in Connecticut also reflects temporal drift, a series of
buildings added roughly every ten years and that represented his thinking about
past and future architectural forms and theories. This chapter discuses especially
the domestic living space that is the Glass House, which I connect to current
debates about queer futurity (Halberstam, Edelman, and the rest) and the notion of
an alternative “queer time and space.” Johnson’s life and work bring together many
of the themes of the book: group identity as it is reflected in architectural structures
and in space; eroticism and the environment; the Glass House compound as theme
park and ever-changing laboratory; the New England landscape as the site of a
regional identity that is, nevertheless, impacted by postmodern forms and the
creation of a new myth of self-identity.
The last chapter and the coda examine architecture that goes beyond the
bounds of the built environment itself to exist in virtual rather than built spaces as
“cities” or “worlds” on the Internet or on CD-ROM, where architectural metaphors
are frequently invoked as symbols of community. This section ends with a
speculative examination of identity as it comes into play in these virtual versions
of architecture—whether in the form of game-based “avatars” or their more literal
representations in other media. One potent example of this new use of spatial
identity is pornography, which makes literal the idea that the mechanical body
can express a new, better post-human identity that is still connected to the actual
human body in terms of a cerebral version of physical eroticization. The chapter
includes a discussion of the representation of the body in architectural space in the
films of Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick’s later films, after 2001 (1968), spatialize time by
creating an architectonics that submerge the viewer in a parallel universe in which
the subtleties of watching and looking—the visual experience—are paramount to
understanding the extent to which time is contained within space.
This book comes at the problem of space from several different angles, but in
my thinking they are connected and not mutually exclusive. Johnson’s work and
theme parks are connected via the artificial sense of danger and the creation of
border zones between different “lands” or historical times (at the Disney theme
parks, the movement from Fantasyland, say, to Adventureland) and in the use
of false perspective to create a sense of child-like memory with a concomitant
Introduction 7
dislocation in space and time. Johnson picks up on these themes throughout

his Connecticut estate where procession and accessibility are built into the
experience of the buildings and false scale is used in some of the designs. This
thematic approach to time, space, and postmodernism can also be found in Las
Vegas, which is arguably a later adult remake of Disney-like ideas. Theming is also
prevalent in Native American casinos, which use the narrative aspects of theming
to tell counter-narratives to the dominant ones about American Indian culture. All
of these ideas interlace with concepts of time, space, and the virtual (or cinematic).
Likewise, all of these traces extend from a modernist origin, if only in an
attempt to disrupt it. New England, whether in the form of Johnson’s estate in
Connecticut or the Foxwoods Casino located nearby, represents an area that one
might say remains original in a way that the sunbelt cities of the United States
do not (Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte), though one might just as well say that New
England simply themed itself earlier (lighthouses, old barns, maple trees, and so
forth). Questions of gender and sexuality are central to Johnson, I would argue, and
more important to his postmodernist work than has been adequately theorized.
The sense of false danger in his work, in addition to borrowing from Disney, is also
a clue to the danger he felt as a closeted architect much of his career. Identity,
which is an integral part of the arguments around the social role of modernist and
postmodernist architecture (Kenneth Frampton, for example), is central not only
to Johnson and to Native American cultural identity, but to Disney’s attempt to
“theme” Africa at Disney World or “France” in Disneyland Paris. The major theoretical
work that I hope to do is around the notion of the temporal and how it erodes the
concept of space that has itself replaced the pre-modernist sense of place.
Notes
1 Rem Koolhaas and Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Content (Köln: Taschen, 2004),
156.
2 Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late
Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 154.
3 For more on this topic, please see “Monuments to Walt” in The Project on Disney, Inside
the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995),
199–229.
4 Ian Buchanan, “Space in the Age of Non-Place,” Deleuze and Space, (ed.) Ian Buchanan
and Gregg Lambert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 21.
5 Buchanan, 22.
6 Kathleen M. Kirby, “Thinking through the Boundary: The Politics of Location, Subjects,
and Space,” boundary 2, 20(2) (Summer 1993): 174.
7 Kirby, 176.
8 Kirby also notes: “The movement to eradicate essentialism, particularly in feminist
theory, has made it an error to align the edges of socially constructed subject positions
with the margins of the body, to assume that the positions mapped out by physical
space coincide with those created within discursive systems” (176).
1
The Architectonics of Post/modernist Space
Modernism and Postmodernism
The historicizing of modernist and postmodernist architecture has been ongoing

at least since both movements began, and the debate between them has clouded
much of what we think of as the central tension within contemporary aesthetic
theory. Modernist architecture contained within it at least the possibility of serious
social commitment and a desire for radical change in society while postmodernism
ultimately gave way to language games and meta theories that were themselves
ultimately flashy and self-contained. In a sense, modernism and postmodernism
were both the opposite of what they seemed to proclaim. That is, visual modernism,
in all of its abstraction and conceptualizing, maintained connections to the
outside world, to actual social issues, however naïve the belief might seem that
architecture or painting could solve the world’s problems by aesthecizing them.
Postmodernism, at least in its glossy 1980s version, seemed ultimately a corporate
style that debased itself and finally turned its back on any social responsibility
at all beyond self-consciousness and an opening up of the playfulness of formal
design.1 Postmodernism was a reaction to the formalist doctrines of modernism,
but those doctrines, however ultimately rigid when adopted by less-talented
advocates of figures like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, were based upon
principles of social change (at least for Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and others)
and not mere form.2 Postmodernism seemed instead to embrace private culture
and to be dependent upon the wealth of the 1980s and 1990s for its existence.
While both movements may be said to have gone through their respective phases,
it is also possible to say that they are both still extant. The language and vocabulary
of modernist architecture can certainly be said to resurface in the work of many
artists practicing today, while postmodernism continues in the work of theming
and in the general emphasis on allowing architecture to draw inspiration from any
moment in the architectural timeline. In fact, one might argue that postmodernism
allowed for the return of modernism by doing away with the necessity to follow
any particular style. In that sense, postmodernism has never ended.
There has been much debate about the legacy of modernism and its history
after CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). While different
interpretations of the origins don’t necessarily agree—Johnson and Henry Russell
Hitchcock’s The International Style, S. Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture,
for example—generally, three competing schools have arisen with different
versions of what to do with modernism: the Italian Rationalism school, of which
Manfredo Tafuri is an example, calls for more sensitive sociological awareness; the
postmodern school, of which Charles Jencks was a championer and Charles Moore
and Michael Graves its builders, has become popular with both the public and
big business with an eclectic “historicist” style; and the late-modernist architects,
Kenneth Frampton as nominal historian, are essentially all those architects who
have continued to be modernists and have wanted to recoup its glory without
recreating its obvious problems. Coming after the social awareness brought
about after the late 1960s and 1970s, all three schools call for more attention
to be paid to architecture’s audience: the people who have to live in or with the
buildings. However, although each group claimed a best way to accommodate
the environment, site, or community, their aesthetic goals were far apart. In his
The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (now in its 6th edition), Charles Jencks
attacked early modernist architecture (CIAM) and the Rationalist school as being
elitist, cerebral, and unpractical. Jencks was successful at spreading the popularity
of the style he called “Post-Modern.” While Jencks was brave in his attempt to run
headlong against institutionalized modernism, his tone now seems reactionary—
very close to Tom Wolfe’s execrable From Bauhaus to Our House—and his hypocritical
attack on the “corporate glass boxes” was to prove ironic considering how quickly
postmodern architecture become not only the darling of downtown finance but
also soon developed a sameness and blandness of style nearly as insipid as the
worst corporate modernism (like the World Trade Center before nostalgia for its
passing made it beloved in hindsight) without ever having as great a phase as
modernism did at its height with Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. By the time
Jencks wrote Architecture Today, he had divided the postmodern into more discreet
units (making distinctions between the various proliferations of postmodernisms).
Perhaps acknowledging that there was an opposition, he called it “late modern,” as
opposed to just “modernism.”
Thinking of architecture as a matter of conflicting schools of thought obviously
has its limitations and occludes the many other ways to conceptualize the cultural
production of architecture—smaller self-conscious sub-units (Archigram, for
example); individual buildings and designers who work against the grain of
predominate styles or outside of them (Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Kahn); and
architecture that exists outside of the notion of built form—as performance, site,
landscape, event, place, or disruption. To some extent, architecture has always
contained these individually destabilizing aspects within itself. A figure like
Corbusier is as linked to cinematic procession and landscape design (in his rooftop
patios, for example) as he is to the making of new sculptural or architectural forms.
We need to pay more attention to the many ways that architecture contains within
it more effects than we can presuppose by focusing attention only on architecture
The Architectonics of Post/modernist Space 11
as form. Likewise, we need to explore more fully architecture as an influence on

the non-built environment: cinema, television, literature, music, and any places
where architecture intersects with these media either literally (a theme park, a set
design or location for a film) or figuratively.3 Architecture does not exist separately
from its environment, however much its designer may wish it did. The context
for architecture, however, may not be within proximity of the building or site but
somewhere in the wider world. Architecture is, in this sense, global. Linked by their
creators and styles, buildings converse not only with their immediate environs,
but with other buildings like them elsewhere. Analyzing individual buildings thus
requires placing them within this wider system of references. Reading them as
texts allows us to see the multiple ways buildings intersect with meaning outside
of what is tied directly or solely to built form.
Individual buildings may exist as part of an architect’s personal style, like so
many expressions of authorial intention, but works of art individuate a great deal
according to the activities for which they were built—worshiping, gathering,
shopping, entertaining, and so forth—as well as by the uses to which they are actually
put by the people who frequent the spaces. Architecture is in a continual process
of being written, rewritten, and revised according to the multiple meanings that
overlap in any one particular architectural site. Similarly, just as there are multiple
meanings for each building, there is no one monolithic version of modernism (or
postmodernism).4 It may be possible to say, however, that at least since modernism
architecture has slowly moved from a modernist sense of time grounded in a
specific place, toward a sense of space, not just a postmodern space outside of
time, but space reimagined entirely as virtual and cinematic environments. That
is, space seems now embedded in time and architecture itself and to exist less and
less as actual built form and more and more as a structural metaphor embedded
within visual forms that use architecture as a type of representation.
Space and Place
Definitions of space are numerous and have become a fundamental part of any
examination of the built environment since the advent of modernism and its
counterpart, postmodernism. What is meant by space, however, is never completely
clear as it can be placed against the older idea of place to mean the more unstriated
notion of modernist space as a sort of generic anti-place, or it can be seen as the
philosophical concept that is always paired with time or the temporal.5 In either
usage, space can be thought of as always existing in some sort of dialectical
relationship with the notion of the erasure of something distinct yet on whose
definition it seems to depend for meaning. In the modernist era, space is about
the erasure of the Victorian dominance of time and place: a baroque, encrusted,
multifarious, and even eccentric concept of objects, buildings, and places as a
wealth of patterns, surfaces, textures, and shapes is replaced with an aesthetic of
“less is more,” where the forms and their relationships to their environments or
contexts have been re-ordered in a classical definition that emphasizes some type
of truth to the expression of forms, materials, and settings. The erasure of detailing
and the advent of new forms of signification that came with modernism can be said
to continue into the post-World War II contemporary era and to define the notion
of the intermediate “non-place” of Marc Augé: airline terminals, the highway, the
Internet, all of which in one way or another clearly disrupt the notion of place as it is
usually thought of as a part of the contiguous spatial environment that we loosely
define as real.
This notion of contemporary space as the debased continuation of modernist
space arguably undergoes another transformation in the context of postmodernism
when the pre-modernist figurative returns with a vengeance. Once again, the
return of space as anti-modernist postmodernist place is a return of the repressed
or the apparent return to human scale and proportion, decoration and detail.
Though certainly postmodernism can be seen, depending upon the critic, as either
subversive and ironic or reactionary and conservative, history has shown that
postmodernism, whether it still exists or not, has, at least as a world-wide aesthetic
system, shown itself to be fragmented and ultimately resistant to the notion of social
progress that modernism, however naively, tried to enact through form. Seeing
postmodernism as merely the obverse of modernism is not accurate, however, as it
can be argued that postmodernism is not actually a return to the temporal outside
of or in contrast to the spatial. In fact, what Jameson calls “the postmodern world
system,” “resorts to new techniques of distortion by way of a suppression of history
and even … of time and temporality itself.” The seeming move back toward the
figurative or toward the realism or naturalism of the Victorian era
is not really figurative in any meaningful realist sense or at least that it is now
a realism of the image rather than of the object and has more to do with the
transformation of the figure into a logo than with the conquest of new ‘realistic’
and representational languages. It is thus a realism of images or spectacle society
… and a symptom of the very system it represents in the first place.6
To Jameson, the figure represented is Guy Debord’s spectacle as postmodernism

represents the elision of the real or the superstructure of a changed economic
system of global capital of which the cultural effects of postmodernism are what
are read via aesthetic theory.
In his work on the production of space, Henri Lefebvre notes that
[t]he Bauhaus group, as artists associated in order to advance the total project of
a total art, discovered … that an observer could move around any object in social
space—including such objects as houses, public buildings and palaces—and in
so doing go beyond scrutinizing or studying it under a single or special aspect.
Space opened up to perception, to conceptualization, as it did to practical action.
And the artist passed from objects in space to the concept of space itself. Avant-
garde painters of the same period reached very similar conclusions: all aspects
of an object could be considered simultaneously, and this simultaneity preserved
and summarized a temporal sequence.7
As he notes earlier, artists such as Paul Klee or architects such as Le Corbusier

understood that things could not be created independently of each other in

space, whether movable (furniture) or fixed (buildings), without taking into
account their interrelationships and their relationship to the whole.8
Place became space, in other words, which existed in time. With this invention of
space “a new consciousness” emerged; the “façade” “disappeared” (only to return
with postmodernism as a new facialized surface); and “global space,” now waiting
to be “colonized,” was “filled by commercial images, signs and objects” as capitalism
displaced any possible gaps in the world spatial order.9 What Lefebvre also refers to
as “capitalist space” is the space of fragmentation.10 Only the state can hold space
together and contain the correct macrocosmic perspective to keep fragmentation
organized and grounded, the social functioning and harmonious.11
Lefebvre claims that space is social and economic and he emphasizes its
corporeal and erotic dimensions. Space changes, and more importantly, as Andy
Merrifield notes:
Lefebvre knows too well … that the social space of lived experience gets crushed
and vanquished by an abstract conceived space. In our society, in other words,
what is lived and perceived is of secondary importance compared to what
is conceived. And what is conceived is usually an objective abstraction, an
oppressive object abstraction, which renders less significant both conscious and
unconscious levels of lived experience.12
Abstract space is linked to Marx’s notion of abstract labor, which, as Merrified argues,
is carried further by Lefebvre: “Marx held that qualitatively different (concrete)
labour activities under the bourgeois system got reduced to our quantitative
measure: money.” But for Lefebvre:
Just as abstract labour denies true concrete labour, abstract space likewise denies
true concrete qualitative space: it denies the generalization of what Lefebvre
calls differential space …. It’s different because it celebrates particularity—both
bodily and experiential. Hence abstract space isn’t just the repressive economic
and political space of the bourgeoisie, it’s also … a repressive male space which
finds its representation in the … towers and skyscrapers, symbols of force … and
of masculine violence.13
The process that Lefebvre identifies, and that we could call modernism, is intricately
related with architecture’s history in the twentieth century. By Lefebvre’s definition,
architecture is both subsumed by space—becomes a part of it in the sense of
design or total control by the artist—and a metaphor for it. In this former sense,
architecture becomes postmodernism; in the latter sense it becomes modernism.
To some extent, Lefebvre defines what one might think of as postmodern space
created and designed in response to modernism. Certainly in what we might refer
to as its most hyperbolic form—the huge glass-clad skyscrapers of Philip Johnson
and John Burgee, for example—postmodern architecture exists as an extension
of corporate power. Arising primarily in the late 1970s and the 1980s, this type of
postmodernism is the opposite of Lefebvre’s particular version of utopian Marxism
and functions in contrast to something like the Pompidou Centre in Paris built as
1.1 Centre a response to the May 1968 riots and the influence of the Situationists. Designed
Pompidou to be completely open to the public, literally and figuratively, the Pompidou’s
transparency strove to make not only its functionality apparent but to democratize
art—or at least access to art—by using glass (in the escalators, for example, and
in the building as a whole) as a metaphor for a new approach to the design and
function of museums. As Annette Fierro argues:
As the building becomes progressively more exterior, it might be regarded either

as having no void space at all or as a replete void—replete surface—a building
composed entirely of event.14
The building disappears, but, more importantly, it disappears to be replaced by

people themselves. The popularity of the Pompidou with Parisians (not just tourists)
creates a community that, to some extent, fulfils Lefebvre’s desire for architecture
as a balm for commercial dislocation and the social isolation of individuals.
In many ways the spatial and temporal mapping of modernism that Lefebvre
describes is present in the architectonic approach to painting that Piet Mondrian
took, especially in regard to seeing the plane of the painting as extending beyond
the limits of the frame out into space itself, organizing it, aestheticizing it, and finally
balancing it in a type of universal harmony of elemental oppositions.15 As Mondrian
wrote, this new vision “does not proceed from one fixed point of view; it takes its
viewpoint everywhere and is nowhere limited. It is not bound by space or time (in
agreement with the theory of relativity).”16 Or, as Theo van Doesburg elaborates,
[i]n the new architecture, building is understood as a part, the sum of all the arts,
in their most elementary manifestation, as their essence. It offers the possibility of
thinking in four dimensions, i.e., the plastic architect, under which heading I also
include the painter, has to construct in the new field, time-space.17
Not all notions of space are, of course, as utopian as Lefebvre’s, especially his ideas
of the potential for modernist space. Augé, for example, calls contemporary space
“supermodernity” in which
[e]verything proceeds as if space has been trapped by time, as if there were no

history other than the last 48 hours of news, as if each individual history were
drawing its motives, its words and images, from the inexhaustible stock of an
unending history in the present.18
Time, arguably, comes into play with postmodernism to re-narrativize the spatial
dislocation of modernism. Or, the linking of space-time that was the hallmark of
modernism gets reduced, in postmodernism, to an emphasis on linear narrative—
on a return to the pre-modernist Victorian notion of time, but without the
context or depth that it previously had. Realism becomes a reality effect and time
dominates, but is changed in significant ways. Postmodernist notions of space and
the built environment are distinct, but only in the sense that they undo the work of
modernism. As Reinhold Martin notes:
In architecture, as elsewhere, the active ‘unthinking’ of Utopia is among those

practices that distinguish postmodernism from modernism. This activity cannot
be explained merely as a reaction to earlier modernist excesses. Instead, under
postmodernism, cultural production has been repositioned as a laboratory
for auto-regulation, wherein power is redefined as control, and especially,
self-control. […] Thus appears another hallmark of postmodernism: the
sullen withdrawal from engagement or (what amounts to the same thing) the
preemptive, exuberant embrace of the status quo.19
For Augé, space and place mix, while time controls space to construct what Gilles
Deleuze terms a baroque fold:
… the fold of the Event, the unity that creates being, a multiplicity that makes for
inclusion, a collectivity having become consistent.20
The tension between modernist and postmodernist definitions of space to

some extent comes down to the notion of surface, or symbol, as the function of
time in modernist architecture is non-diegetic and, in some sense, diegetic in
postmodernism in that that architecture supposedly returns us to narrative, context,
and linearity. The definition of history that we get in postmodernism, however, is
not necessarily real, but a mere effect of history. Still, as postmodernism’s main
theorizer, Fredric Jameson argues:
To demarcate the postmodernist aesthetic from this one [high modernism],

two familiar themes may serve as points of reference: the dialectic of inside and
outside and the question of ornament or decoration. For Le Corbusier … ‘the plan
proceeds from within to without’ in such a way that the outside of the building
expresses its interior; stylistic homogeneity is thus here achieved by unifying these
two opposites, or, better still, by assimilating one of them—the exterior—to the
other. […] What may now briefly be observed is that Robert Venturi’s conception
of the ‘decorated shed’ seeks, on the contrary, to reinforce these oppositions and
thereby to valorize contradiction itself ….21
For Jameson, postmodernism, perhaps especially in its architectural form, offers

a separate aesthetic—one that is parasitical on modernism, but is distinct—or
perhaps opposite—nevertheless. The key, for him, is in the difference between
interiority and exteriority, or inside and outside, hidden and exposed. The temporal
dominance of postmodern architecture comes about not only in the form of
realism and linearity but also in the many ways that time erodes space itself.
While one might be able to claim that modernism and postmodernism continue
to exist in building design today, a third major influence has come more to the
fore—either as a further extension of postmodernism or as another direction
for architecture altogether—in the form of an architecture increasingly affected
by temporal erosion. One could plot the trajectory for this development at least
as far back as the opening of the Disneyland park in California in 1955, a singular
cultural paradigm shift in which a theme park and a television show were created
simultaneously. Walt Disney not only perfected the notion of the “dark ride” such
as Pirates of the Caribbean, which carried theming and narration to new levels
of sophistication, but created an entire themed three-dimensional structure that
recreated cinematic effects in built form. Disneyland’s seamless promotion of new
films and other products in the theme park, itself a repository for old films, and
in the television show that doubled as an advertisement for the park, was not
only a major new paradigm for marketing but for cultural production as well. The
cinematic and the televisual interpenetrated the spatial and geographic definition
of the park to create a new synergistic definition of both architecture and the
experience of popular culture itself.
The effects of Disneyesque theming can be seen everywhere in the built
environment as the reinvention of entire towns and cities as themed environments
has become the de facto style of most urban design in the United States. This
essentially postmodern effect—a pastiche, to use Jameson’s term, of local
characteristics held together by a tissue of generic references—has turned more
and more architecture into a narrative about place, a narrative that displaces
place, however, with the simulacrum of space. One might argue that identity itself
is made up, in part, by the successful narritivising of that identity and that some
places are famous precisely because they have been able to create intriguing
stories about themselves that create mystique—merry old England, romantic
Paris, picturesque New England—and that the extent to which theming of the
Disney kind is preceded by the success of town or regions at theming their own
history begs the question of what exactly theming is. One element that is perhaps
new, however, is the emphasis in Disney theming on capitalism and branding—
the removal of the social democratic aspect of space and its replacement with
the privatized corporate one of the department store, shopping mall, or theme
park. Contemporary postmodern space exists for a profit and theming and other
temporal aspects of this space differ from their earlier counterparts by turning
space into a zone of advertising and profit. As Anna Klingman notes:
By addressing topics such a drama and ambience as vital ingredients of theming,

the scripted spaces of Disney express at once the enormous potential of social
inclusion and the staging of diverse activities but also, to an equal extent,
the danger of exclusivity and homogenization. Another danger of privately
financed scripted spaces lies clearly in the distorted representation of place, as
local, production-based connotations are deliberately replaced by universally
recognized consumption-based meanings that appeal to a broad customer base.
Such controlled environments are safe, familiar, and comfortable, entertaining
yet homogenized to accommodate a commonly accepted standard. Local
symbolism is used only to flavor the otherwise universal product.22
Lefebvre’s fear of the scripted social space is realized perfectly in a Disney park
where the “guest” is allowed nothing but scripted play. As Klingman notes:
If architecture becomes a catalyst for events, performances, spectacles, and

rituals, it also, just by sheer necessity, becomes a barometer for social control. The
difference, then, between dominant and resistive practices of postmodernism
stems from the extent to which events are preprogrammed or self-directed.23
Disney shuts down these opportunities and redirects the notion of time itself toward
scripted ends. People give up freedom in order to enjoy its opposite: the possibility
of danger, chance, spontaneity, and even individuality. The branding and control of
postmodern space—or post-postmodern space—is so dominated by the scripting
of space that time is allowed to transform the spatial into something else entirely.
Beginning at least as early as Disneyland, the cinematic and the nominally spatial
blurred together to form a precursor to virtual space, which is perhaps now the
only real way to describe the almost total temporality of contemporary space. Just
as film spatializes time, space now seems more and more to be an extension of
film. Life itself interconnects with time-shifting virtual environments—computers,
smart phones, the Internet, social media, DVRs, ad infinitum—to create a seamless
environment in which time is the marker of all things.
Architecture in the twenty-first century is one in which space itself has all but
disappeared and been replaced with a spatial effect that is constantly impacted
by visual representations of it. Space is as much metaphor as it is reality—
kept as a definition of community and an organizing structural principle, but
increasingly unreal. The transformation of space may be seen in the increasing
mixing of film and architecture such as large video screens attached to buildings
(the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, for example); the persistent use of architectural
interiors in video games and on Internet sites; the merging of video and museum
space in artists’ exhibits; and in Rem Koolhaas’s notion of the datascape. Buildings
and landscapes seem to have their instability increasingly called attention to with
the fact of their falseness or their de-creation highlighted. Yet, architecture persists
and, if anything, seems to have become more rather than less prevalent as it has
become less likely to be built, permanent, or functional. Architecture as structure
has become less important while at the same time its link to the body—as shelter
and protection—has ironically intensified. The embodiment of architecture is one
of the defining features of the transformation of architecture from volume and
form (space) toward perspective and movement within space (time). Beginning
at least as far back as Charles Baudelaire, the notion of the flâneur creates the
possibility of an alternative approach to the experience of architecture—one
that is further elaborated by Walter Benjamin, who understood that architecture
collapses with shopping by the nineteenth century. Benjamin’s theories are further
elaborated upon by Michel de Certeau who saw architecture not only as cinematic
montage but as a strategy. Architectural space existed to be used, made personal,
its boundaries transgressed, reordered, and redeployed.
Linking all three figures is the idea of corporeal embodiment and the notion that
architecture is about movement, specifically the movement of the body through
space, which creates the effect of time. The notion of architectural procession is key,
but it cannot exist without a preexisting body. Thinking of architecture as existing in
time, not space, places particular attention on the body and its movement through
space and experience of it. The viewer experiences space as perspective, pictorially
in the form of innumerable single shots that interlace into a single experience or
memory. While the physiology and anatomy of the process by which the brain and
the eyes create the visual effect that we think of as sight (and perception of it),
the conceptual or aesthetic process is central to architecture since the modernist
period and is prefigured in architecture at least since the eighteenth century. As
David Willis argues, the creation of the chateau in the Marquis de Sade’s The 120
Days of Sodom develops
a formalist architecture of the recess, for extrapolating, within the chateau itself
the structures of retreat that had to be traversed and endured for one to arrive
there. These spatial structures of recess and retreat mean that Sadean theatrics
involve a play of light and dark and thus constitute a type of cinematcs.24
Architecture itself constitutes not just space, but light, as Le Corbusier famously
observed, and in its montage-like creation of multiple images that pass by, creates
the blending of space and time that is suggested by cinema itself, especially early
cinema that attempted to suggest spectacle and to do something to the body—
shots of trains entering a station; of women undressing; and so on.25 This type of
cinematic experience can still be seen today in films made for theme parks or in
certain genres, like horror, where people pay not so much for the rewards of narrative
but to have something done to their bodies—mainly, to be frightened—and judge
whether or not the film was successful based upon the effect it had upon their body.
Architecture, too, must have a visceral haptic effect on the body of the one who
experiences architecture, but that effect is not usually generically inscribed nor is
the design that architecture has on one merely that of time—form and volume
are key as well. The notion that architecture is static, however, is as incomplete
as the notion that a painting is. Just as an oil painting of a bowl of fruit contains
compositional movement and the play of colors and light, so, too, do buildings,
which exist in a constant movement of the viewer through space. The reduction of
architecture to that of the beautiful object takes up only a small part of the meaning
conveyed by the architecture to the viewer. As Mark B.N. Hansen observes:
The spacing that comprises the body’s self-intuition as absolute volume

encompasses both time and space (and also space-time of relativity physics).
What is at stake in bodily self-intuition … is an unprecedented conception of
space as spacing, a conception that is not only compatible with the flux of time
(duration), but in fact constitutive of this flux.26
Cinema, though a corollary, finally is unable to be much more than a two-

dimensional copy of the essentially bodily experience that is space:
the indispensible distance between image and perception, which ensures that the
cinematic object be apprehended in the secondary mode of abstract knowledge,
and not as the direct experience of (absolute) sensation. Viewed in this context,
Deleuze’s recourse to the time-image can be understood to be symptomatic
of cinema’s fundamental insufficiency as a mode of experience: it is precisely
because cinema cannot account for the primacy of the subjective dimension
of the body-brain (its status as absolute survey or volume) that Deleuze finds
himself compelled to introduce a source of creativity (time or the virtual) that is
external to the body brain and its constitutive equipotentiality.27
Yet, if the body is the source of the time/space experience, what defines the body is
neither simple nor monolithic. As Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke argue:
… a ‘body’ is a composition and articulation of relations, social as well as object

relations: of speeds and slownesses, and of the power to affect and to be affected
by other bodies.28
While this argument suggests the notion of the body as a social being à la Lefebvre,
it also suggests the body as the basis of architecture itself. For Corbusier, analogies
between buildings and bodies were common and the details in his buildings were
always expressive of or built upon the body itself: “Le Corbusier was always keen
to emphasize the fact that his architecture was built around a series of unfolding
views, encompassing and celebrating the movements of the body.”29 The unfolding
series of events was expressive of the body in space and of architecture itself. While
the connection between the body and the building could be seen as an analogy,
buildings were also designed as anthropomorphic extensions of the body.30 The
modular man or pilotis were the measure of the body and were the details and
parts that expressed the existence of the body. The emphasis on light, nature, and
greenery was an attempt to think about the health of the body and the function of
the machine that was the house was to aid the body.
Of the many haptic aspects of Corbusier’s architecture, perhaps the most
important is the promenade architectural. While horizontal windows in Corbusier’s
Villa Savoye, for example, bring in light from outside, they also suggest a movie
screen, so the path organizing the space of the building and the movement
through it.31 The solid or voluminic nature of the building is broken up by Corbusier
by ramps, walkways, and paths that punctuate his buildings and create a narrative
1.2 Villa Savoye usually leading from bottom to top. Time itself is made spatial and the building’s
own sculptural qualities are, arguably, made secondary to the notion of movement
in and through the building.
As Giuliana Bruno notes, “[Sergie] Eisenstein envisioned a genealogical relation
between the architectural ensemble and film, and he designed a moving spectator
for both.”32 For Bruno, film comes from the experience of museum-going:
The movie house signals the mobilization of public space with its architectonics
of display and architectural promenade, experientially implanted in the binding
of imaging to spectatorial life.33
Eisenstein takes this one step further:
The filmic path is the modern version of the architectural itinerary, with its
own montage of cultural space. Film follows a historical course—that is, a
museographic way to collect together various fragments of cultural phenomena
from diverse geohistorical moments open for spectatorial recollection in space.34
The opposite is also true: that architecture is not a trope of cinema (or its precursors),
but rather an effect that cannot be tied to one medium, material, or approach. If
architecture as conceived by Corbusier and others derives its effects from other
media (or shares them), then it is also true that those media are themselves
architectural. As Michael Speaks asks:
Is it not the case, for example, that Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and J.G. Ballard’s
near future novels have created some of the most powerful architectural affect
in recent memory, so strong that architects find inspiration in these ostensibly

cinematic or literary forms of urban life? In other words, what if architecture were
not defined by some essential core … but was instead the name for a practice
that does certain things, that creates certain affects. As opposed to an identity
which necessarily limits architecture’s affective range, we can call this dynamic
yet coherent form of practice architecture’s singularity.35
*****
The body is not important to Jameson as an organizing principle as he sees a
definition of materialism that is based upon the usual or contemporary sense of
the body at odds with class analysis. As he argues:
But a materialism based on the individual body … is to be identified as a

mechanical materialism descended from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment
rather than a historical and social materialism of the type that emerged from
Marx and from a properly historical (nineteenth-century) world view.36
For Jameson:
The problem with the body as a positive slogan is that the body itself, as a unified
entity, is an Imaginary concept (in Lacan’s sense); it is what Deleuze calls a ‘body
without organs,’ an empty totality that organizes the world without participating
in it.37
“It is hard to see,” he concludes, “how theories of gender could support such a one
body reference.” But what he calls “ideologies of the body” are hardly monolithic
and much that is lost from the de-particularization of the body is precisely what
is at stake in re-gendering or re-sexualizing the body both historically and in
terms of the present (which is always immediately historical anyway).38 The body
as a mechanistic figure in space is important precisely because it is an example
of the forces that act upon it—social and technological—and its representations
in the form of architecture, films, theme parks, and the rest, which de-codes vital
information about forces that act upon individuals. As Michel Foucault notes in
the lectures that later provided the basis for his last great project on sexuality,
technology acts upon the body in two different ways: the technology of the body
which disciplines the body and individualizes it and the technology of “life” which
attempts “to control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass,
a technology which tries to predict the probability of those events … or at least
to compensate for their effects.”39 These two technologies of power overlap and
come to fruition, in one example, in the very grid system of suburbia, in the utopian
dimension of nineteenth-century town planning that gives us the attempt to create
the regulation of health and hygiene in the “working-class housing estates.”40 One
is both individuated—one unit per family—and protected from disease, poverty,
and anything that might affect one’s longevity. For the sake of society, one is made
an object as “a whole series of … regulatory mechanisms” are employed to protect
the body.41 Sexuality, as Foucault goes on famously to argue, becomes a privileged
site as it represents a point of impact for both the individual and for the societal
good. The one individual activity or aspect of identity that becomes public is
sexuality as its regulation, in the case of masturbation, is seen as part of the public
good. Sexuality, therefore, becomes part of the “permanent surveillance” from the
eighteenth century on as a part of “regularization.”42
Landscape
As noted by Beatriz Colomina, any consideration of Corbusier’s career needs to take

into account the fact that he was “perhaps the first architect fully to understand the
nature of the media ….”43 In this sense, Corbusier shares with Johnson a savviness
at self-promotion that was, for Corbusier, expressed in his voluminous publications
and his ability to communicate his ideas to the public as a spokesperson for
modernist architecture in general. In his work in the 1920s, Corbusier emphasized
the function of horizontal ribbon windows in such masterpieces as the Villa Savoye
and the Maison de la Roche. The windows that he constructed became a part of
the procession through the house—not just a source of light (always an essential
element of architecture for him for both aesthetic and health reasons) but as a way
to dissolve walls and provide for views from the outside of the inside and a free
(though controlled) interpenetration of outside and inside that is a hallmark of
his classical period. What Corbusier also seemed to understand was the cinematic
nature of these windows, which functioned, in their role as elements of a moving
composition, to wrap around the house, divide it, and appear, at times, both
1.3 Maison transparent and opaque, weightless and solid. Windows in Corbusier’s work can be
de la Roche both screens and frames—for nature, people, other architectural elements. As one
moves up and down the ramps of one of Corbusier’s homes or buildings one passes
by glass windows while moving or, conversely, the windows themselves seem to
move—even the slit of glass that divides one whole side of the Villa Savoye as seen
from the outside draws one’s eyes around the side of the building. Though much
has been made of the transparency of glass, Corbusier seemed to understand its
two-fold nature and to see it as one discrete unit that should not overwhelm any
other (sold walls, ramps, volume, and so on). In other words, Corbusier seemed
already to make his architecture a function of space, to see ahead to the idea that
architecture was itself about much more than structure and protection. The radical
apartness of the Villa from its environment—especially in 1929—suggests the
radical break that modernism had with the past and with the definitions of the
past, especially as concerned the possibilities for transforming art in the future via
technology. Corbusier’s Villa re-imagines architecture as space, not building, and
calls into question traditional ideas about how we define place.
As Colomina notes:
Viewing a landscape through a window implies a separation. A window, any

window, breaks the connection between being a landscape and seeing it.
Landscape becomes visual, and we depend on memory to know it as a tangible
experience. Le Corbusier’s horizontal window works to put this condition, this
caesura, in evidence.44
The pictorial elements that can be at the center of glass windows can in fact be a
complex phenomenon that either elides landscape or frames it and emphasizes
its tableau-like quality.45 Landscape as an aid to memory literally showcases the
tension between space and place—that which is by definition specific but anti-
temporal, and that which defines itself through the accretion of time. What we
mean by landscape, of course, is culturally and temporally specific and can be
defined in a myriad of ways—from the Greek notion of solid objects in space, to
the Medieval idea of a plane on which objects exist, to the notion of Renaissance
one-point perspective, to multiple points that finally give way to the notion of
space-time and the virtual version of the spatialization of time that exists now. As
Yi-Fu Tuan argues, time used to be conceived as a circular or repetitive process and
only since the Renaissance has taken on the more arrow-like notion of forward
process, modernization, and linearity.46 The advent of photograph-like perspective
has emphasized the “subjectivity” of space and time and brought them closer to
“the surface of consciousness.”47 As Karatani Kōjin describes:
Recent discoveries of the structure of subatomic particles … have been

immediately absorbed into theories of the origins of the universe. Not only that,
but the evidence for the existence of these subatomic particles is in such historical
data as cosmic rays. What sustains contemporary natural science … appears to
be a kind of horizon that makes the conversion of space to time possible or, more
precisely, a certain perspectival configuration.48
Knowledge itself is based on how one sees reality, the progressive drift toward ever
more depth in space reaches a certain endpoint with the idea of time, into which
space must ultimately be converted. Kartani uses the example of Linnaeus, whose
elaborate spatial system of taxonomy had to be converted to a temporal one by
Darwin.49
The many different ways that perspective (or the lack thereof ) can be interpreted
includes going beyond the spatial/temporal dichotomy into the theories of Freud,
Marx, and others. In terms of the first, for example, one might argue that Freud
dissolves “the ‘boundary’ between reason and madness ….”50 As Karatani points
out, Foucault argues that in order for the insane to be spatially separated from
the sane, space itself had to be perceived as “homogeneous,” something possible
only with the advent of “one-point perspective.”51 Madness is conceived by Freud
(and Hegel before him) as a lower state, but one that can ultimately be integrated
or brought up to par with reason itself. The psyche, in other words, is spatial and
linear and can be made to progress from its arrested state.52 Freud’s most famous
discovery (and most profound, according to Lacan) of the unconscious mind was
also one of depth and substratum in that the unconscious mind is the surface
realm of all that has been expelled by the conscious mind—that is, that which is
integrative and linear.53 “By contrast,” as Karatani phrases it, Marx offers a different
concept of the body “to conceptions of history produced by the perspectival
configuration of vertical depth ….”54 Rather, Marx “dissolve[ed] the oppositions
between upper and lower, near and far, depth and surface which were effects
of perspective,” which “he envisioned as a kind of rhizomorphous structure
undergoing transformations in the process of natural extension.”55 Like Hegel and
Nietzsche, Marx understood that neither God nor man dies, but is merely an effect
of a vanishing point, a system that is always replaced by a new context in the
natural process that is called history.
History itself, however, as Paul Carter argues in his work on the centrality of
landscape and history to Australia, is never a simple narrative. And just as landscape
is connected to the pictorial aspects of perspective, landscape as perceived in
painting, travelogues, poems, parks, gardens, and in other forms of fiction (whether
visual, literary, or topographical) presents nature on a stage. This particular version
of history, which emphasizes “events unfolding in time alone” gives “the impression
that events unfold according to a logic of their own. They refer neither to the
place, nor to the people.”56 For Carter, “Imperial History” is a theatrical one in which
actors are divorced from any context other than time. History becomes chronology
and heroic or mythological events seem to unfold by themselves in some sort of
universal realm of cause-and-effect inevitability. Put against this type of history is
what he calls “spatial history” such as place-naming, calligraphy, diaries—meaning
that is attached to exploration and the tactile signs of human touch.57 In other
words, signs that do not link to time but to place and provide an alternative cultural
meaning to the master narrative imposed on space by time as history.
To some extent the picturesque allows for some sort of escape from these
alternative definitions of history since the picturesque landscape allows for the
mixing of culture and nature, the viewer and that which is viewed, and even space
and time. Especially as it was understood in the eighteenth century, landscape
organized space into a grid but one that appeared to “telescope time.”58 The viewer
is not a disinterested party but one who actively seeks out the variety within
landscape in a “visibility that implicates the viewer.”59 Consumers of landscapes
are, finally, “experimental psychologists” asking questions about what and why
certain aspects of “visual perception” are or are not pleasing.60 The movement in
landscape studies from the sublime to the beautiful is a movement from nature
to culture, but also an understanding of the complex interplay between actual
nature and our constant recreations of it for reasons that are as much internal
as external. This malleability of space is reflected in the use of landscape and
architecture as analogy for psychological states in literature, theatre, painting,
and film in later centuries. By the nineteenth century, dioramas introduced “the
novelty of motion in pictorial reproduction, a motion adding temporality, and thus
narrativity, to the representational scene.”61 Whether in the mechanization of the
libido via the architecture of the villa or the bedroom in Sade or Anthony Vidler’s
argument that Bernard Tschumi’s follies at La Parc de la Villette are sterile machines
of purposelessness meaning, architecture and setting become linked to inside and
outside, madness and reason, and to the vicissitudes of reading space and time.
Event
It is difficult to underestimate the significance of Corbusier’s ramps that cut their

way through buildings and turn them effectively into cinematic experiences. Of the
many ways in which one might argue that Corbusier reinserted the human body
into the architectural equation, the ramps that Corbusier used literally place the
human body—and the human observer—into the middle of the architecture and
emphasize the corporeal nature of space. Many prominent architects working after
Corbusier, like Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman, have made time an important
element of their architecture, and have, along with other architects, such as Tadao
Ando and Steven Holl, emphasized the corporeal nature of architecture as well. For
Tschumi, space does not exist without the human body:
[A]rchitecture doesn’t exist without bodies in it. In other words, space and people
are what make architecture. Space doesn’t exist in itself.62
His and Eisenman’s interests in grids and plans, overlays and strata with which
to organize their work and ideas in the 1980s can be traced to the grids and
nodes created by Corbusier’s concept of the various levels of the architectural
site and their interconnection with the ramp or promenade. Corbusier’s villas
and homes, especially, seemed to be created to be moved through or lived in as
an isometric plan with one always aware of one’s place in the building and the
relationship of the different forms to each other that one passes through.63 This
combination of formality and movement seems to give rise to Tschumi’s notion
that architecture
finds itself in a unique situation: it is the only discipline that by definition

combines concept and experience, image and use, image and structure ….
[A]rchitects are the only ones who are the prisoners of that hybrid art, where the
image hardly ever exists without a combined activity.64
Architecture is not, in other words, pure, nor is it something that exists without other
elements—movement, bodies, the social, that which grounds it and completes its
negative definition.
For Tschumi, this interaction is what he referred to at the time of The Manhattan
Transcripts as “space”: “Even though architecture can be made of static spaces, the
interaction between the static and the dynamic is what really constitutes it.”65 In
that sense:
‘space’ could embrace both an empirical and sensual definition as well as a

social and political one. [… ] The word … had the great advantage of opening a
territory that was much larger. It could extend a bridge to other disciplines ….66
For Tschumi, this extension was toward film and dance (choreography) especially,
both of which came to play prominent roles in his design, which was eventually
formulated with such key words as “use,” “program,” “function,” and, most singularly,
“event.” Space replaces architecture itself to constitute a range of interactions
between the building, the site, and the observer, creating a dynamic relationship
that allows for the possibility of architectural space to include elements from
a variety of other art forms or lived experience. For Tschumi, this approach to
space made possible a new definition of contemporary architecture—something
that went beyond the post-historicism of postmodernist architecture.67 If
Eisenman’s paper architecture seemed to reference archeological sites and time,
Tschumi’s projects referenced montage and jump cuts in film and emphasized
the spatialization of time that film attempts to create in its materiality, if not in its
illusion.68 For Anthony Vidler, Tschumi’s architectural projects at this point “[held]
no … symbolic connotations. They are, as he has himself insisted, signifiers without
signifieds, pure traces without meaning.”69 The body in Tschumi’s theoretical and
built work, such as La Villette, represents “a body in a state of self-acknowledged
dispersion, without a center and unable to respond to any prosthetic center
fabricated artificially from architecture.”70 But for Tschumi, the architectonic space
he created and with which, especially, he experimented was not devoid of the
body but was explicitly an attempt to return to it, since architecture failed to have
meaning unless it was embodied. The element to which Tschumi turned was time.
In the Parc de la Villette project, especially, the grid and follies upon which the park
is based do not represent a dispersion of the body via a decentering of modernist
form so much as an attempt to create events in space:
At a conceptual level, randomness can be better applied to events, actions, and

programs than to physical form itself. So at La Villette the system of physical
forms is there to allow the random—the event—to take place.71
Tuschmi’s notion of architecture as “space, event, and movement” is an extension

of Johnson’s claim that architecture exists in time, not space. Based in part upon
the deconstructive concepts of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, La Viellete is
arguably the site that best expresses in concrete form the interrelation of film, bodies,
and architecture in Tschumi’s work and illustrates his notion of the “space-machine,”
in which aspects of architecture are taken apart and space is opposed to building.
Made up of an elaborate series of walkways punctuated with semi-abstract
architectural sites (“folies”), Tschumi’s park plays with the notion of architecture’s
relationship to site (the slaughterhouses that once occupied the space), film
editing (shifting perspectives of the pedestrian), and the abstract grid upon
which the work is based in part. Tschumi’s work interconnects with those of his
contemporaries such as Peter Eisenman and Steven Holl, but builds upon the work
especially of Le Corbusier. Tschumi’s work also links to the postmodern buildings
constructed in France at the proximate time of Villette and frequently termed the
“Grands Projets.” As Sylvia Lavin has noted:
No new public building in France can be thought of outside the context of

the Grands Projets, where the impact of a strong, centralized government on
architecture is evident.72
Begun in part under the leadership of French President François Mitterand, they
include La Grande Arche, Le Grand Louvre (I.M. Pei), and the Bibliothèque François
Mitterand (Dominique Perrault), among others, designed in the 1980s and 1990s.
These buildings carry on, challenge, and amplify not only the context for Tschumi’s
work but that of the modernist and postmodernist architecture in general.
Laid out as a series of 26 “folies” covering the area that was once a cattle butchery,
the Park is bisected by three primary axes: a wave-like walkway that suggests the 1.4 La Grande
water of the canal on whose banks the park partially sits; a pathway by the canal Arche
1.5 Le Grand Louvre
1.6 Bibliothèque François Mitterand

itself; and cinematic pathways that are supposed to lead to areas where events can 1.7 Opéra Bastille
take place (such as gardens that are used as camps for children). The many follies
suggest the notion of eighteenth-century follies (such as one has at Parc Monceau
in Paris)—places upon which one might chance and onto which one might, in a
child-like way, map one’s own fantasies and uses. While somewhat whimsical, the
follies are built to adult scale and provide a number of uses, some of which seem
particularly tied to the notion of event or spectacle, such as providing a stage for
an outdoor concert. The wave of the primary walkway also suggests a filmstrip and
one of the motifs built into the design of many of the follies is the open frame:
as though the folly frames the landscape or some sort of event transpiring in the
park in an attempt by the architecture to arrest time—or at least frame it so that
it becomes itself a static event. The park embodies paradox as it pushes to the
forefront the twin desire of post-postmodern architecture to be both time and
space simultaneously. Like film, the reigning analogy in the park, the two states of
being are constantly tipped at a careful balance with each other.
The follies themselves emphasize looking—places from which (once elevated)
you can see great vistas (the canal or wonderful views of Paris). Much of the
architecture also includes grids that suggest not just the grid of the layout but
frames as well—especially picture frames or screens. This suggestion is balanced
by the notion of folies or the “paysages” as places of action—children’s playgrounds,
open-air theaters, garden clubs, and so on. The points on the grid are places where
time and space come together to suggest how they interact. Several places in the
park are especially child-friendly and suggest the definition of a park in the sense of
something not just to be seen (French eighteenth century), but to be used (twentieth
century) and that features the tactile and the kinesthetic, not just the visual.
1.8 Parc de la Villette
1.9 Folly
The pun on the word folie, as Tschumi has noted, is a reference both to the 1.10 Folly detail
architectural miniatures such as one might see in a painting by Fragonard and to
the French word for “madness,” such as one finds in the title to Foucault’s Folie et
déraison (1961). As Tschumi has said:
Madness wasn’t an accident; I was interested in the relationship between

architecture and institutions and certain issues (including … schizophrenia ….
[…] I had assumed the overambitious task of trying to make a direct parallel
between architecture and psychoanalysis.73
Tschumi’s follies, in other words, bring the inside outside, or vice versa, to create
an alternative definition of architecture itself. Tschumi attempts to bring into
architecture not only the body in space such as one might find in Bauhaus school
dance such as Oskar Schlemmer, but performance itself—the voyeuristic aspects
of cinema, but also the way in which film interacts and changes our way of living
life as well.74 By not remaining completely static, by seeming to be deconstructively
incomplete, Tschumi’s architecture forces the viewer to put the parts together
either into a sense of narrative or into a sense of closure—literally or figuratively—
that gives the viewer some kind of psychological rest.75 It is important to note that
in French “les folies” refers to “camp or drag queens,”“those non-totalisable practices
which fall through the system,” the gap between art and life, “delinquency.”76 As with
his insertion of De Sade into architecture, Tschumi focuses on the performance of
desire in architecture and sees it as a form of performance, movement, or program
that, as Hays notes, interacts with form, but is not form alone: “Advertisements for
Architecture throws into difficulty the sorting through of the relays between author,
object, performance, audience, and so forth.”77 Tschumi speaks of architecture as

wearing “masks” and in other ways functioning psychologically and aesthetically
to communicate with the viewer and to absorb the functions of various media.78
While Tschumi extended his interests in the cinematic and psychological
possibilities of architecture in other projects stretching over several decades such as
the Fresnoy project in the late 1990s, his work has changed and reoriented toward
other priorities as can be seen in his discussion of the Downsview Park project in
Canada from 2000 in which he lists the characteristics of the La Villette project from
1982 and how they have been replaced by others for a new urban park in a new
century.79 “Discontinuous” becomes “continuous,” “points, lines, surfaces” become
“flows, ebbs, fields, zones,” “follies and galleries” become “spools and digits,” “solids”
become “liquids,” and “difference” becomes “self-similarity.”80 In some ways, Tschumi
seems to be anticipating the work of Zaha Hadid and the “cinegraphic design” that
she develops for the modern city. Specifically, her work brings the core out to the
surface of the work creating an expression of pure structure. Her architecture aims
to be completely liquid, flowing, and adaptable, doing away with the modernist
notion of an object on its base or an object placed within an environment of which
it is separate. Her buildings, resembling spider webs, attempt to morph into each
other and their environment creating a topographical architecture that is infinitely
expandable, infinitely adaptable to any and all social, economic, and practical
problems. The final attempt to remove any remaining romantic notions from
architecture, Hadid’s work seems to take Tschumi’s and Koolhaas’s work to a logical
conclusion to become architecture of pure mathematics, pure data, anonymous
and polymorphous: an architecture of pure abstract praxis.
Notes
1 The aestheticization of culture that the postmodern era has brought about is
dehumanizing in its ability to reduce all serious debate to games and co-opt all
attempts at finding a position from which to make a valid social (and, indeed, aesthetic)
critique. See, for example, Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA:
Basil Blackwell, 1990); Stuart Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview
with Stuart Hall,” (ed.) Lawrence Grossberg, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10 (1986):
45–60; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell,
1989); Fredric Jameson, Foreword, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
by Jean-François Lyotard, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), vii–xxi; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
2 As Tafuri notes, “For this reason it is useless to propose purely architectural alternatives.
The search for an alternative within the structures that condition the very character
of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction of terms.” Manfredo Tafuri,
Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La
Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 181.
3 One could argue that ever since Tinguely, Happenings, earthworks (Smithson),
Schwitters—and even more recent developments such as Paik’s installations and Coop
Himmelblau’s projects—architecture has been in danger of dissolving.
4 As noted before, postmodernism in the UK encounters the stiff opposition of

Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, and also Christopher Norris. In France,
however, the opposite camp is established but may be facing a new opposition. In
Australia, Japan, Italy, and the “Southern Cone,” postmodernism manifests itself in
different debates and different art forms—feminism, economics, design, and fiction,
respectively. Perhaps in having the ultimate postmodern book named after it (Jean
Baudrillard’s America), the US is the postmodern empire. Though some, like Linda
Hutcheon, might argue for a Canadian postmodernism—or that postmodernism is
more likely to flourish on the margins of empire.
5 As Paul Virilio notes: “Modern war has already moved from space into time. It’s
already a war of time. Of course it will still happen somewhere, but in this place time
is much more important than space. Military space is first and foremost technical
space, a space of time, a space of the rapidity of attack and reaction. The nineteenth
century didn’t take time into account, the twentieth is forced to. And the limits are
not in space. The time-limit allowed us is Draconian; it’s time to realize this. We are
not at liberty to travel in time.” Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark
Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 72.
6 Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (New York: Verso, 2008), 641.
7 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge,
MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 125.
8 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 124.
9 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 125.
10 Cf. Soja: “We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide
consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the
apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled
with politics and ideology.” Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of
Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), 6.
11 Henri Lefebvre, “Space and the State,” State, Space, World: Selected Essays, (ed.) Neil
Brenner and Stuart Elden, trans. Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 238. It is important to remember
the centrality of social progress to Corbusier and CIAM’s Charter of Athens (1941). Not
only does this document set out specific guidelines about the health and sanitation of
housing, but emphasizes the importance of parks, recreation, and green spaces as well.
The document covers everything from density to transportation and is adamant about
the negative effects of the privatization of housing—or the city in general—and the
central role that the architect has not only in coordinating the various elements that go
into a viable and healthy domestic zone, but in resisting the effects that corporations
might have on the structure and function of the city or the town. The charter begins and
ends with exortions about the importance of the social and the centrality of collectivity.
Le Corbusier, La Charte d’Athènes (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1957).
12 Andy Merrifield, “Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space,” Thinking Space, (ed.) Mike Crang
and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 2000), 175.
13 Merrifield, 176.
14 Annette Fierro, The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle, Paris, 1981–1998
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 86.
15 As David P. Brown notes, “As one looks upon the surface, the intent is not to
perspectivally experience pictorial depth. Instead, while standing before the neo-
plastic plane, and viewing forces in equilibrium upon its surface and with its edges,
a viewer’s vision collapses into an inner seeing that enables the viewer to intuit or
perceive … the unity of objects and the environment as different states, densities, and
intensities of matter.” David P. Brown, Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 14.
16 Hans L.C. Jaffé, De Stijl, trans. R.R Symonds and Mary Whitall (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1970), 169.
17 Jaffé, 187.
18 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John
Howe (New York: Verso, 1995), 104–5.
19 Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv.
20 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 31.
21 Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986, vol. 2 (Minneapolis, MN:
22 Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007), 80.
23 Klingmann, 114.
24 David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis, MN:
25 “In their attempt to produce deceptively lifelike changes in represented nature, the
panoramas prepare the way not only for photography but for [silent] film and sound
film.” Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Selected Writings,
(ed.) Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al., vol. 3
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 35.
26 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004),
190–91. Further: “What this means, finally, is that time can be intuited only through
direct experience, or alternatively, through the spacing of the body itself” (191).
27 Hansen, 193.
28 Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke, “Virtual Worlds: Simulation, Suppletion, S(ed)uction
and Simulacra,” Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space, and Relations, (ed.) Mike Crang, Phil
Crang, and Jon May (New York: Routledge, 1999), 280.
29 Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier in Detail (Boston, MA: Elsevier, 2007), 127.
30 As Corbusier argues, “Architecture is interior circulation more particularly for emotional
reasons: the various aspects of the work … are comprehensible in proportion to the
steps which place us here, then take us there, permitting our eyes to feast on the walls
or the perspectives beyond them, offering up the anticipation or surprise of doors
which reveal unexpected space; or a chiaroscuro pattern of shadows designed by
the sun as it streams through windows or bays; or the views of distant prospects …
The quality of the interior circulation is the biological discipline of the work, for the
organization of the building is bound up with the building’s essential purpose.” Le
Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, trans. Pierre Chase (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 46–7.
31 For an interesting take on how Tadao Ando extends Corbusier’s concept of the
architectural promenade, see Kenneth Frampton, “Corporeal Experience in the
Architecture of Tadao Ando,” Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relations of
Body and Architecture, (ed.) George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002), 304–18.
32 Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007), 18.
33 Bruno, 18.
34 Bruno, 19.
35 Michael Speaks, “Alessandro Mendini’s Love Letter from Holland,” Mart Stam’s Trousers,
(ed.) Crimson [Wouter Vanstiphout and Cassandra Wilkins], Michael Speaks and Gerard
Hadders (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999), 233–4.
36 Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, 651.
39 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76,
(ed.) Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador,
2003), 249.
40 Foucault, 251.
41 Foucault, 251.
42 Foucault, 251, 252.
43 Beatriz Colomina, “L’Esprit Nouveau: Architecture and Publicité,”
Architecturereproduction, (ed.) Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 82.
44 Colomina, 97.
45 As Benjamin notes, “At the same time, the range of architectural applications for
glass expands, although the social prerequisites for its widened application as
building material will come to the fore only a hundred years later. In Scheerbart’s
Glasarchitektur (1914), it still appears in the context of utopia” (33).
46 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1977), 123.
47 Yi-Fu, 123.
48 Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1993), 142.
49 Karatani, 142.
50 Karatani, 143.
51 Karatani, 143.
52 Karatani, 144.
53 Karatani, 145.
54 Karatani, 145.
55 Karatani, 145.
56 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York:
Knopf, 1988), xvi, xvii.
57 Carter, xxiv.
58 Carter, 244.
59 Carter, 240.
60 Carter, 231.
61 Allen S. Weiss, Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 94.
62 Enrique Walker, Tschumi on Architecture: Conversations with Enrique Walker (New York:
Monacelli Press, 2006), 100.
63 “Le Corbusier considered film the best medium to represent his architecture.” Beatriz
Colomina, “1949,” Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, (ed.)
R.E. Somol (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 323.
64 Bernard Tscuhmi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 257.
65 Walker, 27.
66 Walker, 21.
67 “… the hegemony of historicist postmodernism …” (Walker, 40).
68 Deconstructionist architects such as Peter Eisenman and others have spawned not so
much a new spate of building as they have books on architecture. With his interest in
Derrida and linguistics, Eisenman has created such works as Moving Arrows, Eros and
Other Errors: An Architecture of Absence, which consists of a clear plastic box with sides
of equal length containing transparent plastic leaves of text that form a design when
seen three-dimensionally, but which can also be held up to the light (or projected on
an overhead) and read as text or studied as diagrams.
69 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992), 111.
70 Vidler, 111.
71 Walker, 59.
72 Sylvia Lavin, “Inter-Objective Criticism: Bernard Tschumi and Le Fresnoy,” Le Fresnoy:
Architecture In/Between (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999), 178.
73 Walker, 59.
74 Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture (London: Architectural
Association, 1990), 21.
75 As K. Michael Hays argues, “Tschumi recognizes that architectural autonomy itself
must be volatilized, that the internal and intimate must be externalized. How, in
other words, could architecture face its death in a way adequate to its desire?” K.
Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 140. “For Tschumi, event was a highly charged
term: it represented a reversal of the object-subject hierarchy of contemporaneous
architecture, and it was related both to the situationists’ énévement … and to Georges
Bataille’s expérience intérieure …” (141).
76 Bill Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 12.
77 Hays, 141, 144.
78 Tschumi, Questions of Space, 55.
79 See, for example, Holl’s Competition for the Palazzo del Cinema, Venice, 1990.
80 Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities 3: Concept vs. Context vs. Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2004), 543.
2
The Global Theme Park: Disney in the World
The establishment of the theme park, and theming itself, as both anti-architecture
and as the logical conclusion of the tension between temporal and spatial tropes,
formal and social definitions, links postmodern theories of architecture and space
to a concrete example. In my previous work on Disney World, I turned to Walter
Benjamin—in his posthumous fragments and their distillation in Susan Buck-
Morss’s Dialectics of Seeing—mapping his analysis of the arcades onto the Disney
parks in order to show the complex relationship of mythology, narrative, and
memory at work for both children and adults in all of Walt Disney’s major theme
parks and, indeed, in much of theming itself. Similarly, the buildings in the resort
that are supposedly extraneous to the theme parks themselves—office buildings,
hotels, and so forth—nevertheless represent not only much new design, but also
a new relationship between the Disney corporation and designers outside of
the Disney logo. My previous analysis ended with a speculative examination of
Disney’s plans for Celebration, its first complete suburban town, the recently built
Seaside, Florida, and the globalization of Disney resort building, including Tokyo
Disneyland, EuroDisney (now Disneyland Paris), and the new All-Star Village to be
built at Walt Disney World. As an epilogue to that project, I included a short section
as an overview of the changes wrought in the Disney resort empire before and
after the death of Walt Disney himself as the parks have become a global reality
from the 1980s onward.1
Since the mid-1990s scholarship on the Disney theme parks has explored not
only new approaches to studying Disney that have come out of cultural/gender/
postcolonial studies, but also the increased globalization of the parks. Disney studies
has taken a distinct turn toward the fragmentary and specific with the proliferation
of books that deal exclusively with one particular aspect of the parks—working
conditions, marriage, architecture, gay and lesbian culture, and so on. These works
comprise a new type of Disney studies and suggests that the approach to Disney
must now be many-headed as the Disney Company’s built environment changes
to include not only massive new building at the Orlando property, but also large
additions to the properties in Anaheim, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and the Paris suburbs.
The expansion of Disney property has meant the necessity for new paradigms for
discussing theme park growth as well as Disney’s increasingly globalized power
over popular culture. The question of globalization in particular is pertinent to the
theme park as Disney is forced to confront the world outside of the 1950s-style
Magic Kingdom and conduct commerce with an increasingly diverse society.
Disney Studies
For several decades after the opening of Disneyland in California there were few
books published on the subject of Disney world that were not, in fact, sponsored
by the Disney company itself. Some of the best books, such as Ariel Dorfman’s How
to Read Donald Duck and Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version, were not strictly
about the theme parks themselves. One needed to look to individual essays for that
analysis and much of it came from scholars working either in the social sciences
or in community colleges and universities geographically close to Orlando. While
there was the obscure gem here and there—Umberto Eco discussing Disney World
soon after it opened in the early 1970s or a translation of Sergei Eisenstein singing
the praises of Mickey Mouse—the scholarship that had been done on the cultural
production of Walt Disney was fairly sparse. It was possible, in other words, to read
nearly everything of a critical nature that had ever been written on Disney in an
academic context before writing about it. What is striking about Disney scholarship
now is that beginning around the time of Eric Smoodin’s edited volume, Producing
the Magic Kingdom, and Inside the Mouse there has been an explosion in Disney
scholarship that I don’t think anyone could have quite predicted. While a number
of non-scholarly factors could be pointed to as the possible origins of this trend—
Michael Eisner’s rapid expansion of the theme parks, or the tremendous growth of
the Disney media empire generally in the acquisition of ABC television—none of
the possible reasons explains why Disney has become a bigger topic now than it
used to be. After all, there has been a consolidation in the entertainment field since
the 1990s—AOL Time Warner is an even better example of this—and Eisner himself
endured his own ups and downs before finally being forced out. Disney studies
may or may not be connected to the popularity of the company itself, though
surely its overall size now as opposed to its pre-1990s expansion—however newly
problematical in a post-9/11 age—has made Disney more ubiquitous than ever.
The very popularity of the Disney Company—its films and theme parks,
especially—has meant that books on the subject—even academic ones—could,
relatively speaking, mean big business. The first wave of books to capitalize on the
pressure exerted by the popularity of Disney was surely the theme park exposé.
Taking off from Jane Kuenz’s chapter in Inside the Mouse entitled “Working at the
Rat,” this sub-genre reaches its pinnacle in the much-publicized Team Rodent by
Carl Hiaasen. Written from a journalist’s point of view, the book’s popular success
is due at least in part to a desire to see Disney unmasked—to find a chink in the
armor of a seemingly impenetrable corporate empire. Disney is posited as a sort of
secret society in which the extreme control exercised on the unsuspecting visitor is
also visited upon the underpaid employee whose only opiate is the idea that they
The Global Theme Park: Disney in the World 39
are part of something bigger than themselves. They exist as insiders who must
either swear their allegiance to the company’s ideology or, in the new version of
Disney scholarship, become whistleblowers helping to invent a history alternative
to the official one authored by the Disney corporation itself. While the theme
parks—especially the megalithic Walt Disney World—are usually the objects of
this scrutiny, studies have also appeared that take on the films and the business
practices of the company as well. A few recent titles tell it all: Deconstructing
Disney by Eleanor Byrne, Mouse under Glass by David Koenig, Disney: The Mouse
Betrayed by Peter Schweizer. I don’t mean to suggest that the point of this era of
Disney study was merely to bash Disney, but certainly a critical approach to the
company—including work on its more insidious practices—got the attention
of the public—and the press—even if it was often represented as the symbolic
equivalent of giving Disney a black eye.2
More recent Disney scholarship has focused on new aspects of the Disney
enterprise such as Disneyland Paris and the planned community of Celebration,
Florida, as well as devoted entire book-length studies to topics that had really
only been touched on before such as the gay subculture that has been essential
to the success of both the parks and the films and the relationship of Disney to
the changing identity of Orlando, Florida. If anything, the work on Disney has
become steadily more specialized and mirrors—in rapid form—the development
of an entire field of knowledge. One may now take seriously the idea that there
exists something we might call theme park studies. The work that we see on
Disney has been used as a model for any number of essays and books on non-
Disney themed environments—from Sea World to Bible Lands, from Sim City to
roller coaster rides in the UK. As any veteran of Disney scholarship will tell you,
one of the most common assumptions among your friends is that now that you
have done Disney you will want to apply a similar analysis to other popular themed
experiences. The idea behind these assumptions—both real and ironic—is that the
same methodology that has been applied to the Disney paradigm can be applied
to other pop culture as well. In the broadest possible outlines, what I think this
assumption suggests is that the approach to Disney that has been instituted via
the criticism is one that privileges ethnographic approaches—that is, that uses
field work as a basis of analysis. What the suggestions fail to understand, however,
is that the Disneyfication of the global landscape needs not to be furthered by a
similar approach in the criticism of it. That is, I would hope that an approach to
Disney World would not be applicable to an understanding of an historical park
in Massachusetts or Virginia or a themed mall in Minnesota. The Disney paradigm
replicates itself enough in small town redevelopment projects or corporate office
parks without needing further help from academics. To do Disney should not mean
to approach all themed environments as though they were, at best, replicating the
Disney formula.3 Indeed, if anything, it is the resistance to that phenomenon that
criticism should wish to mount.
In an overview of Disney criticism written by Greil Marcus in 1997, he claims that
almost all of the major criticism of the Disney theme parks—from Eco to Baudrillard,
from Charles Moore to Reyner Banham—has consisted of “overstatement.” “So
far” he writes, “The real literature remains to be written; the parks have a 40-year
head start.”4 What is unfortunate about Marcus’s writing here is not only the lack of
attention he gives to Disney scholarship as it marks a change in the field of popular
culture studies but also that his own critique seems little more than bad armchair
criticism. Purporting to summarize all that has been written so far, Marcus chooses
nothing—all is bad, all inadequate to explain Disney to him. Richard Schickel’s work
is termed “prissy,” while critics that come after him are described as “suspicious,
afraid, envious, chilled.”5 The most frequently damning description of recent Disney
critics is, apparently, “Postmodernists.”6 Marcus instead ends his fusillade on a
mark of nostalgia—a scene from journalist Tom Carson in which a teary-eyed park
worker notes, while passing through Fantasyland, “’This is everything we dreamed
of … We thought all Californy would be like this.’”7 Marcus argues that successful
Disney criticism would try to get at something this “deep”—a term for which we
might well substitute “real” or “felt” or “authentic.” That is, something that might not
be criticism at all. But this sort of critique misses the point and itself illustrates just
the kind of approach that Disney studies has, in the main, most often tried to resist.
That is, whatever else may be said about the academic work on Disney, it is most
certainly not written by people who fail to struggle with the ways the park invests
itself in pleasure, leisure, fun, enjoyment, boredom, and pain. Disney is not about
the annulment of pleasure, but the reprogramming of it by a corporation that sees
it as a commodity. Marcus’s own recourse to the mythos of California, no matter
how self-conscious, is merely a sign that he himself is only able to recover emotion
outside of Disney. With the opening of California Adventure, the first major addition
to Disneyland in California since the section entitled New Orleans Square in 1966,
even the dreams and associations of the Golden State have become a part of the
expanding Disney recreation of reality. To practice Disney studies is to resist the
kinds of questions that find pat answers—as Marcus would, I think, agree—but
surely not all of the questions scholars have been asking have been wrong, not all
of their own experiences of Disney cultural production invalid.
Living with Disney
Hal Foster’s articulation of the contradictions in the approach to history inherent in

“neoconservative postmodernism” could find no better material example than the
development of the Disney resorts over the last forty years.8 The mingling of public
history with Walt Disney’s own obsessions created an amusement space that lends
itself both to a reading as an autonomous work of art—though one created, like
old Hollywood films, by what amounted to a guild of artisans—and as a public
monument that houses versions of history and myth that are part of the popular
psyche. In one way or another, this complex gestalt is the object of most analysis of
the Disney phenomenon. What is missing in these analyses, however, is a dialectical
approach to the aspects of the various Disney enterprises themselves that might
allow one to perceive the unthought hidden in the official narrative as presented
by Disney—an organization that spends a great deal of energy telling its own story.
By analyzing this, one can begin, perhaps, to uncover the historical precursors to
Disney’s methods of manipulation in its use of narration, memory, utopian models,
and fantasies of material consumption. This approach may also make it easier to
read Disney’s current history for a forecast of imminent changes within culture in
general, the postmodern in particular.
It is central to any discussion of Disney World to acknowledge that it is an import
to the State of Florida.9 Although the actual infrastructure was built at or near the
site in Orlando, the planning, coordinating, conceptualizing, and some of the smaller
construction was completed in California and, indeed, an entire ethos was imported
from the West.10 The existing Florida landscape was completely transformed into a
variety of park-like settings. The original geography seems never really to have been
considered as a model for anything; it was simply assumed that the Florida landscape
would be destroyed and then remade. Nature’s one act of rebellion occurred on
Discovery Island, an area themed for Stevenson’s Treasure Island and originally
designed to house audio-animatronic figures. Against Disney’s wishes, the island
was occupied instead by indigenous Florida birds and animals. Disney reluctantly
decided to reconceive Discovery Island as a nature preserve—though some animals
were kept in cages—and during the attraction’s last few years attempted to use
this decision to score points with environmentalists—a strategy which is illustrated
literally by the “hand-made” look of the brochure prepared for the attraction.11 The
buildings in the Magic Kingdom, in contrast, have always been populated by the
inhabitants originally intended for them—audio-anamatronic figures. Interestingly,
they were completely constructed in California, shipped to Florida, and installed as
is.12 Like the natural fauna, these transplanted Californians have stayed.
Orlando became Disney’s land, and though many critics have noted that
Orlando now copies Disney World in an attempt to remake itself in Disney’s
image, it is inaccurate to elide Orlando and Disney World completely. Somnolent
adjectives are usually used to describe Orlando’s pre-Disney existence, yet one
rarely hears about the other connotations or histories of the area that are lost: the
large military base; Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville; the not-so-distant history of
the Seminoles. Since the postmodern parts of Orlando—the gleaming glass office
buildings and hotels—are all that are noted by the press, the cultural complexity of
the city is very rarely commented. As a part of central Florida—that is, non-coastal
Florida—Orlando is both more authentically Floridian—that is, Southern—than
any other part of the state other than the panhandle. By invoking the imprimatur of
Southern I mean especially to suggest the conservative—and here I am not talking
about electoral politics—aspects of Southern culture such as a tendency to have
several generations living in the same region, a belief in a rootedness in a certain
landscape, and a sense of separateness from the areas surrounding one’s own
region.13 One could claim these traits for central Florida in relation to the southern
and central coastal areas of the state. Orlando, therefore, had an identity prior to
Disney, and indeed still does. Martin Marietta, for instance, is more likely to be the
main point of temporal reference for a discussion about Orlando among regulars.
Though currently suffering from Defense Department downsizing, the Martin
Marietta company is similar to the huge aerospace firms on the West Coast—from
Seattle’s Boeing to San Diego’s General Dynamics—that seem attracted to the same
types of geography as Disney, but which actually create a very different employee
base and concomitant culture. Among other things, the employees live in the
city. Disney employees never seem to leave the park. Much of the control that the
Disney Company exerts over its staff is to colonize them from the inside—to get
them obsessively involved with the products and supposedly unique standards of
quality that Disney sets for itself. They are, in other words, lured into consuming the
ethos of their own jobs as commodities.
It is in the businesses on or near Orange Blossom Trail that traces of other
cultures continue to exist outside of the sphere of Disney influence and which,
more importantly, suggest another history: Hubcap World, Quick Shots: Family
Entertainment Shooting Gallery, The Doll House, the ubiquitous self-service
centers catering to an indigenous culture of lower-to-middle class Floridians.
Although probably waning, this alternative cultural past in some ways parallels
the initial French response to EuroDisney. For several years after its opening in
1992, EuroDisney was a cultural and economic failure. Because of their enormous
popularity, the Disney parks have always been beyond criticism, or so the Company
thought. But now Disney was trying to expand into cold climates—an idea
considered but rejected by Walt after the opening of Disneyland—and to respond
to the criticism that it doesn’t deal with diversity or controversy; hence, the plans
for a new park in Haymarket, Virginia, that was supposedly to present the rougher
edges of US history. The announcement for this project brought an outcry from
environmentalists, landowners, and anyone else who thinks that a Disney version
of the past built in the middle of—actually on top of—one of the most historically
rich areas of the country is something to decry. What Disney was doing in Virginia
was the same as it had done in Florida: a classic example of colonization. With
Disney’s abandonment of the project, perhaps for the first time since Walt Disney’s
death, the success of Disney’s future theme parks may be up for grabs.
*****
Not a land but a world, Walt Disney World demands to be revisited and reexperienced
as it contains the insinuation in its very name that it is too much for one lifetime.
This challenge was perhaps as powerful when it opened and was much smaller (a
mere 35 “attractions”) than it is today. For Floridians, especially children growing up
in the area near Disney World, the park is not an occasional experience but a semi-
quotidian one. One’s relationship to it is not that of the bedazzled first-time “guest,”
but as either a tour guide for family and friends, or as one who attempts to create
any kind of subcultural resistance one can muster as a visitor at the park. It is within
this kind of relationship to Disney World that the park becomes something in
which one notices changes, and in which one can’t help but speculate about one’s
relationship to them vis-a-vis changes in one’s own subject position, and, of course,
in terms of ascribing significance to the on-going changes in the resort itself.14 To
write about Disney is in many ways to feel like Michael J. Fox, who becomes by the
end of the Back to the Future trilogy confused about the relationship between past,
future, and present. Disney’s lands create this temporal slippage in order to effect
the emotions of different age groups and different generations simultaneously. The
only way, finally, to approach a critical survey of the parks is to admit a relationship
to them, and that this response is not the same as that of everyone else who has
been there before. In an attempt to historicize one’s subject position, one must
acknowledge that one’s approach is uniquely one’s own—with some suspected

parallels with others born at about the same time.
In tracing the way that history maps onto that of the Florida experience of the
Walt Disney Company, from the death of Walt Disney in 1966 until the present, it is
important to keep in mind the extent to which that might mean something that is
representative of a generational or demi-generational experience. The experience
of the parks, for example, has everything to do with television, with the theming
in the toys advertised on Saturday morning, with the electronic revolution’s effect
on everyday life. The Disney effect was not one of realism, but instead a descriptive
one about how we process or order our perceptions. The mixture of media
employed at the parks and the manipulation by them of effects found in painting,
literature, animation, film, television, pre-recorded music, architecture—and the
resulting synaesthesic blur—pretty much accurately reflects the commodity-
formed capitalist culture of growing up in America.15 Disney was, then, simply
the furthest instance of this experience. Disney World is self-contained and,
finally, self-referencing. The park’s operative concept has always been fantasy in
general—rather than Mickey Mouse’s films—and the primary instance of this was
Fantasyland and the ability to disappear into a simulated world.
The opening of EPCOT Center in October of 1982—ten years after the Magic 2.1 Cinderella’s
Kingdom—did not live up to the expectations of theming set by the Magic Castle
Kingdom, which always seems a relief in comparison to the huge quasi-futuristic

behemoth. It’s difficult not to notice that EPCOT is aimed at adults as it is designed
more for buying and consuming.16 The care taken to distinguish among several
lands and psychic experiences in the Magic Kingdom is here erased just as the
employees in Future World are all dressed in homogeneous “futuristic” costumes.17
At EPCOT music is ever-present along with new technological attempts to create
olfactory and tactile sensations to match the aural and visual effects of a new
generation of audio-animatronic figures. Technology as a theme, however, seems
generally to fail Disney here. Rather than presenting a complex interweaving of
theming and stories, EPCOT instead has only two themes that are suggested by
its two sections: Future World and World Showcase—a world’s fair and a shopping
emporium, respectively. The one exception may be “Captain EO” where dramatic
action, special effects, and an original sound track combine with Michael Jackson’s
usual fetishistic costumes and make-up to create a decadent mixture of Star Wars
and Disney’s wicked witch.18 Since moved to Disneyland Paris, this fusion of sci-fi
and fantasy is regretfully missing from the rest of the park.
By 1988, with the opening of the Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park, the Florida
resort complex finally began to change and offer options other than EPCOT. With
the arrival of CEO Michael Eisner, the Disney flagship property became as much
involved in real estate as in attractions and rides. As with Jurassic Park, however,
the resort began to suffer the results of chaos theory as Disney World became
inordinately complex: thousands of new hotel rooms were added in the form of
self-contained mini-resorts each of which has its own unique theme; Pleasure
Island, a Vegas-like nightclub island, was built as well as Typhoon Lagoon water
park, an expanded outdoor shopping center, themed corporate office buildings,
and so on. Eisner has said that the 1990s will be the “Disney Decade,” but actually
the 1980s already were.
The explosion of growth at the 28,000-acre Florida complex means that it is no
longer totalizable. For anyone who is interested in its future has to be increasingly
convinced that whatever new resort paradigms might be introduced in Orlando,
the possibility of Disney’s recreating anything like the critical success of the
Anaheim park seems unlikely given the history of the Florida resort. The choices
made in the design of the parks built since Walt Disney’s death represent the strains
placed upon his original aesthetic theory as his ideas from the 1950s are simply
repeated or blown up to gargantuan proportions. The most pressing concern,
however, that critics of the Disney resort may now have is not the construction and
changes taking place within the Disney property lines—although there is plenty to
say about this—but rather the effect of Disney on the surrounding Orlando area.
Namely, the enormous changes taking place in the general region of central Florida
that are directly related to the influence of Disney. The history of the instillation of
Walt Disney World in Florida followed a classic narrative of colonization. This history,
along with the analysis of the parks from within, is at least as important to pursue.
The science fiction writer William Gibson has written about the effects of
growing up in California with Disneyland nearby. In fact, Disneyland has become
so connected to a certain strain in Southern California culture that Disneyland
functions as both a metaphor and a simulacrum for a certain brand of Southern
California surrealism. Certainly, one can find further back than the park’s opening
in 1955 the origins of self-conscious postmodernism. Perhaps, however, with the
change in the cultural landscape since then, the spatiality of Disneyland—as noted
by Louis Marin, for example—suggests a more suitable simulacrum of originary
meaning. Or perhaps people simply acknowledge Disneyland’s profound influence
as affecting primarily the area outside of the always already artificial landscape
of Los Angeles. At any rate, Walt Disney World does not suggest Orlando, or vice
versa, in the way that Disneyland might suggest LA–or LA suggest Disneyland. Walt
Disney World cannot, therefore, become a measure of the psychic landscape of
Florida in the same way that Disneyland does for Gibson.
*****
Although cartoons, unlike live-action films, don’t seem to age, what Disney is now
doing is creating a complex relationship between adult and child, parent and child,
present and past—a past lived by us but, in part, scripted by Disney. Disney is popular
for the same reason that the Chili’s restaurant in Monterray is so amazingly popular,
because its service and quality of food are high and because its Tex-Mex packaging
is like Disneyland—that is, exotic to those not used to it.19 This is the essence of US
postmodern culture in terms of its popularity across borders, and in general. What
is odder is that US popular culture and popular culture traditions such as Disney
are liked for the exact opposite reasons that something like blues music is. That is,
what is liked about Disney culture is its very lack of distinctiveness or tradition, local
color or aesthetic subtleness, its consistent, dependable homogenization. In its
progressive sense of easy accessibility and technological success, Disneyfication acts
as a synecdoche for life as it is lived in North America and Western Europe. Disney
co-ops this effect or consumer marketing ploy and pushes it to an extreme. Its more
recent tack of offering haute-bourgeois luxuries to its baby-boomers—more golf
courses, expensive hotels—is simply a desire to harness an apparent market niche.
Just as it sells the “essence” of Mexican culture to Mexicans in a defamilarized form
that is itself the true exoticism, so Disney World sells the latest demographic desires
to each new generation or group that comes along.
Nowhere is Disney’s own ability to sanitize the world made more extreme
than the way in which children are “protected” from some aspects of the adult’s
world. As Richard Schickel and David Kunzle note, the only kind of eroticism
allowed by Disney is of a distinctly anal kind: Dumbo’s big behind sailing through
the air; Tinker Bell’s filling the TV screen at the opening of The Wonderful World of
Disney; the many kicks and spankings received by characters in the comic books.20
In general, it is almost impossible to find even a hint of “normal” heterosexual
eroticism: Mickey and Minnie are never shown embracing and, in the comic books
and cartoons, all of the Disney characters are related to each other as aunts, uncles,
or widowed grandparents.21 As in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest,
adults are represented as inhabiting a child-like state of polymorphous sexuality,
perhaps “stuck” at Freud’s anal stage prior to the passing on to a “fully developed”
stage of genital heterosexuality. Like so many Pee-wee Hermans, the characters in
Wilde’s play have food fights and exist in a realm without parental authority. Just as
in gay culture one has adoptive gay parents—an “Auntie,” for instance—so Wilde is
portraying Victorian types as, actually, doubles for types in a gay cultural underworld
where one can practice “Bunberrying,” that is, lead a double life.22 Donald and
friends, therefore, are hardly as innocent as they might seem. Their representation
as sexless animals might prevent some from seeing them as symbolic of human
social types since the use of animal forms—of nature in general—allows one
some distance, especially when combined with the Disney aesthetic of extreme
anthropomorphism. However, the vicissitudes of sexuality are not so easily erased
from children or adults. From the fetish-like costumes with buttons up the back of
the pants that the male hosts were required to wear at 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea to the book on Samurai warriors’ homosexual bonding sold in Japan to the
David Hockney prints adorning the walls of the Dolphin Hotel’s lobby, one can find
“coy anality [as the] substitute for sexuality” throughout the resort.23 Or, perhaps,
the suppression of the representation of “adult” drives surfaces as a matrix of anal
erotic desire between men.24 As Schickel recounts, Walt Disney’s feelings about
sexuality were often contradictory. Fond of bathroom jokes and the representation
of cartoon asses on film, he was manic about the cleanliness of his parks and studio
offices. His apparent enjoyment of the macho world of his male subordinates and
purported lack of interest in romance might be reflected in his attempt to create
a filmic world so devoid of (hetero) sex as to become the standard definition of
“family” art itself.25 It is not surprising, therefore, that his own urges and phobias
have formed the architectonics of childhood desire at the parks by masquerading
as the values of the bourgeoisie.
As a public space, the Magic Kingdom theme park within the Walt Disney World
Resort manages to represent a simulacrum of “reality” that is both self-contained
and superior to the actual (as it existed in the past and exists in the present)
world while simultaneously destroying any sense of privacy or, in fact, private
ownership or possession. The ethos and ideology of the “World” is one in which
the “guests” are forced to play out a role as tightly regulated as that of the “hosts”
who ferry, feed, and clean up after the consumers who experience the park. The
choreographed role one is forced to adopt is that of a sanitized, heterosexual,
acquisitive citizen-consumer who has no other emotions, needs, or wants than
those created via Disney robotics, entertainers, and corporate planners. Various
methods are employed to keep one’s “perverse,” “deviant,” or even intellectual and
mildly subversive desires in check via the manipulation of architectural space,
“gentle” policing by the employees, and other controls placed on the millions of
crowds who frequent the park each year. The regulation of visitors is mirrored in
other aspects of the resort as well, including, but not limited to, the inordinate
requirements placed upon the workers. The use of behavior control has been
discussed at some length by other essays on the park, but my emphasis is on how
people in familial groups relate to each other, how subcultures are evoked in style
and contribute to gender definition, and how all social relationships are influenced
by the Disney environment.26 The erasure of any kind of subcultural influences from
Walt Disney World—and the attempts to contain the eroticism of 20,000 mostly
college-age employees—is brought about through an effective—and chilling—
combination of image, manipulation, and strategy performed on a gigantic scale.27
Theming Utopia
Walt Disney’s original desire for the Disney parks was that they avoid what he saw as
the excesses of the state fair—the barkers, trash, smell of food, people, animals, and
all of those things that have always been a part of the carnivalesque. Walt wanted
control, in other words, over people’s sensory experiences and their memories. His
solution was the creation of Disneyland as a safe fantasy that substituted robotics,
crowd control, cleanliness, and the efficiency of a monolithic corporation for those
aspects of outside entertainment that he found too earthy.28 Perhaps nowhere is
this contrast made clearer than in the comparison one might make between the
gateway to Disneyland (or the Magic Kingdom in Florida), the idealized Main Street
USA, to the real main street of Marceline, Missouri, Walt’s childhood home. The dirt
streets, gray skies, and dingy buildings during Walt’s childhood contrast sharply
with the bright colors, blue skies, and forced perspective facades of the California
and Florida recreations of this world. Disney World is a utopian rewriting of his own
personal history as well as an expression of a new formula for utopia generally—
perhaps a design that has been best understood and described by Louis Marin
in Utopiques, especially when he notes that Main Street is the locus of “semantic
polyvalence,” a place of actual exchange—the exchange of money for goods—and
also of symbolic exchange of “the past and the present—that is, an ideal past for a
real present.”29
The utopian aspects of Disneyland, however, were eventually augmented by
EPCOT Center’s strange example. Meant originally by Walt to be an even grander
utopian gesture than the original Disneyland, EPCOT was supposed to be a model
for world cooperation with a Soviet section and a functioning city surrounding
the whole park. EPCOT instead became a giant ad for corporate futurism—that is,
Future World—and major US allies or trading partners—that is, World Showcase.
The mall-like simulacrum of world cooperation that is EPCOT is a sort of dystopia in
relief—or a sardonic comment on the future as Don DeLillo might imagine it rather
than a genuine vision. But the Disney Imagineers—as the design wing is called—
have always had trouble with the future. Tomorrowland was never able to express
much more than a 1950s-era, Jetsons-like version of the future as a streamlined
space in which technology solves humankind’s problems. EPCOT contains the
same sort of trust in the vision of a corporate future—no matter how oddly
retrograde it might seem. Only at EPCOT can you find yourself on a ride in which
Exxon proclaims as a vision of the future that technology will help us to extract
more oil from the ground. The future is always an expression of the present—or at
least of one version of it—and EPCOT ultimately seems to dislink from the utopian
vision that should per definition be at the heart of its very undertaking. If the Magic
Kingdom/Disneyland represents an expression of utopia as a never-never land—
of utopia as fantasy—EPCOT is supposed to be the blueprint for how some sort
of actual utopia might be reached. Instead, in the 1990s the Imagineers began to
refashion the Tomorrowland section and replace key rides. Thus, Mission to Mars
(originally Flight to the Moon) becomes The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter.
Science fiction, in other words, is replaced with science fantasy in what looks like an
admission on Disney’s part that the future as Disney would project it is something
of a failure. Disney seems to retreat into the safety of Walt’s original impulse toward
fantasy and away from the ugliness of actual reality. As Mark C. Taylor notes, the
Magic Kingdom is a “postmodern utopia” and as such “is an unwitting—and not
even particularly witty—parody of the utopias of modernism. In Disney World,
utopia becomes kitsch and kitsch becomes utopia.”30
By the time that the Walt Disney World Tomorrowland opened in 1971 it was
already an archaic feature of the park: a distinctly twentieth-century vision of
the twenty-first century that never came about. In essence, the section is a self-
contained futuristic vision that replays, in a movie-esque way, the tropes of
modernist architecture (white, concrete, glass) without seeming to understand
it. Within Disney World’s overall design, Tomorrowland transitions uneasily from
Fantasyland and seems to act like a seemingly adult version of it. Less boldly
imaginative than Adventureland, Tomorrowland seems wedged into the park—
perhaps at Walt’s insistence that there was a serious side to his overall vision. It now
certainly seems a precursor to the horror that is EPCOT (formerly EPCOT Center):
the future as boring US corporate shopping mall. Tomorrowland shares with
EPCOT, however, the desire to project a future from the present—one rooted in a
kind of reality.31 In an attempt to make this section of the part seem more relevant,
the Disney planners have partially revamped the land into an alien world—a sort of
jumble of science fiction and science fact. Whatever else one might say about the
old Tomorrowland, it at least had the integrity of its concept and all of the pieces
more or less fit together under the rubrics either of futurity (Mission to Mars) or
contemporaneity (Indy Racetrack). The old WED People Mover now pretends to be
an arrival station for “people, robots, and intergalactic beings.” Disney went from
trying to update Tomorrowland into science fantasy to more recently abandoning
even this concept for pure trademark interest: Buzz Lightyear, and the rest. Disney
has even tried to hide part of Tomorrowland behind fake rocks—disrupting the
1950s-era futuristic sheen, the pure streamline effect of its Star Trek minimalism. The
new architectural additions introduce curly-cues and multiple colors—seemingly
retro, but without references to a definite style or backstory. Disney Hollywood
Studios (formerly Disney-MGM Studios before a break between Disney and MGM)
effectively evokes nostalgia through a recreation of a Deco-era Los Angeles that is
rooted more in actual So Cal geography than in filmic representations of the city.
But the new Tomorrowland is pure simulacrum of what Baudrillard would call the
fourth order. One senses that there is some sort of backstory there, but it doesn’t
come through in any of the clues given by the architecture, rides, or any other
semiotic system. The attempt to revamp this (US) city of the future into an arrival
port for space aliens fails utterly as the Disney company seems embarrassed by
its own optimism and, once again, determined to seem hip—to change with the
times even if that means altering or destroying the monuments of its own past.
To alter Tomorrowland in this way seems to emphasize the point that WED
Enterprises doesn’t know how to transition to the twenty-first century. Indeed,
though Tomorrowland was always the weakest “land,” to gut it in an attempt to
update it does it a disservice, though one perhaps forecast in the additions to EPCOT
and Animal Kingdom—neither of which have any reason to exist. Disney Studios,
which can at least claim brilliant design, has boring rides that see filmmaking as an 2.2 Tomorrowland
exercise in either technical education (this is how waves are produced in a film!) or today
silly nostalgia (audio-animatronic renderings of Gene Kelly dancing in the rain). It
is, in that sense, a failure at everything that Universal Studios does well (and vice
versa).
The fourth park to open at the Orlando property, Animal Kingdom is by far the
largest of all the Disney theme parks. It epitomizes a move on the part of the Disney
Company under the leadership of Michael Eisner toward both the high concept—
in this case the general theme of animals—and the Disnifying of any generic
attraction that has yet to be done by Disney—in this case the zoo. However, it is not
only its size that makes Animal Kingdom significant, but also the Disney company’s
attempt to suggest a new direction for theme park design. Opening in 1998, Animal
Kingdom is a millennial project—a glimpse of what the Disney Company might be
thinking is appropriate for the twenty-first century. In its concept and design, the
park seems to reflect some of what the Disney company has learned from the shifts
in culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, including the public’s reactions
to its other parks. If so, Animal Kingdom also suggests what has been lost by Disney
since the opening of the original theme park in 1955 in that it most lacks the theme
or story that gives Disney parks their reason for existence. The minimal theme here
is sensitivity to the environment, though the actual instances of this idea seem
2.3 The Tree somewhat half-hearted or even dumbed down when compared to, say, the San
of Life Diego Zoo. Disney’s Animal Kingdom is stuck between animals as fantasy—one
goal of the park is to pay homage to animals that are extinct or mythological—
and real animals that are impacted by real-life scenarios. In the park’s signature
ride, Kilimanjaro Safaris, guests motor through an African savannah while listening
to a drama unfold on their on-board short-wave radio. The narrative involves evil
poachers and their attempts to secure ivory. At one point we, the guests on the
ride, supposedly rush to the scene to stop them only to find that we are too late,
their plane is wrecked, and the crisis is averted. This sort of narrative is the closest
that Disney has ever come in one of its parks to being “politically correct,” yet the
narrative tension on this ride is minimal and the politics overly simplistic. Poaching
is not a good thing, but the economic realities of Africa are obviously complex and
peoples’ reasons for poaching can include, among other things, the need to survive
in a post-colonial environment that has made some animals tremendously more
valuable than others.
In general, Disney should be applauded for their restraint at Animal Kingdom,
for concocting a theme that is not too overbearing. There are fewer corporate
tie-ins than at other Disney parks (or at least the obvious outward signs of them)
and fewer examples of toeing conservative lines. However, there is also a sense
that by lacking a firm identity the park’s design too often resorts to the forced
pedagogy of EPCOT whenever there is a need to reference the overarching

thematic. This is, in other words, Disney’s first direct-to-video theme park. Outdoor
shows substitute for rides and the careful blending of fantasy and reality, past
and future in the Magic Kingdom here gives way to an odd assortment of lands:
“Discovery Island” is at the middle (not to be confused with “Oasis,” which is in
the beginning) and branches trail to “Africa” and “Asia,” but also to “Camp Minnie-
Mickey,” a vacation “at an Adirondack mountain retreat,” and “DinoLand USA”—
the latter an attempt to theme dinosaurs both real and imagined. The camp and
DinoLand take up places at the entrance and seem to reflect the light-hearted,
human-centered approaches to animals as they are imagined by children. The
deeper the visitor goes into the heart of the park the closer they get to Asia
and Africa and what Marin calls the Disney theme park’s presentation of “the
difference of the world, the ‘other’ of the world”: in other words, utopia.32 At the
opposite end of the familiar is difference, only here the “other” is supposed to be
darkness, though Africa and Asia become rides themselves. Animal Kingdom, in
stark contrast to the Magic Kingdom, is a claustrophobic experience. The amount
of acreage that the park includes might be the largest in Disney history, but the
paths that people walk along are narrow and crowded and the rides often lack
anything other than a sense of benign seriality. The “Wildlife Express Train,” for
example, takes you from one land, “Africa,” to another, “Planet Watch,” and then
back again. The guest can’t actually exit at the other station. You have to ride
back in order to go anywhere else. The entire park mirrors the circularity of the
ironically named “Discovery Island”: there is nothing to find, nothing to know,
nothing to suggest a real experience that has not already been painstakingly
thought through. Since animals cannot serve as the performers that the Disney
designers would like for them to be, the guests take on that role instead. For
anyone who has ever visited a Disney park before, this role will be a familiar one,
but the Animal Kingdom is most notable for the extent to which it makes crowd
control ever-present and obvious in ways that previous Disney parks have tried
to make subtle and unobtrusive.
The distance that Animal Kingdom has come from other Disney parks is perhaps
best summed up by the embarrassingly titled “DinoLand USA.” Sharing, as it does, a
patriotic suffix with Main Street USA, one can only imagine, as Marin did with Main
Street, that the suffix seems to suggest that “through America’s self-contained
potential the reconciliation of opposites is performed, but within representation
….”33 The utopian function of the park, in other words, is performed by this section,
but only as a representation “on a stage.”The critical function is undone and the park
exposes itself as ideology. As Marin concludes, “The ideology that holds it restricts
its play so that it no longer represents the true conflicts men and women imagine
themselves having.”34 A similar process is at work in DinoLand where games based
on archeological digs are set next to rides that are based on the midway of county
fairs. In other words, animals are reducible to two essences: either bones or fantasy.
Either representation will do, and neither is the real thing. As you enter this section
of the park the first sensory experience you might have is to notice the distinctive
smell of McDonald’s French fries wafting from a stand located conveniently at the
2.4 Animal Kingdom fantasy architecture
2.5 Animal Kingdom realistic architecture

entrance. The only part of Animal Kingdom to have its own corporate sponsor,
DinoLand is everything that Walt hoped his theme parks would avoid: the smell of
fried food and the reduction of a theme to carnival rides. Animal Kingdom contains
within its own borders its own degenerate utopia, its own negative version of its
primary theme of preservation. Animal Kingdom presents the future as unknown,
the past as binary, and the present as a place with no way out.
Returning to Disney
In addition to Animal Kingdom, Disneyland Paris may also be looked at to see

how Disney deals with the question of cultural difference in an increasingly global
marketplace. The problem of differences in taste and cultural expectation are
dealt with by creating a park that, while built roughly at the same time as Animal
Kingdom, likewise seems to be sensitive to its native inhabitants: that is, the French
and other European tourists that at first rejected and then accepted the Disney park
to make it the number one tourist destination in France. If Animal Kingdom seems
to stage the question of post-colonialism as coterminous with ecology and attempt
to theme “Africa,” “Asia,” and “South America” as regions whose natural products are
their wild animals and colorfully “exotic” citizens, then Disneyland Paris recreates a
fanciful French history that is based as much upon French literature and film as it is
the reality of everyday French life. Real history, in other words, is usurped or simply
altered to re-create Disneyland in California with a French twist.
In terms of park design, what is most striking about the Paris version of
Disneyland in comparison to its American counterparts is the elaborate detailing
that has gone into the design of the park’s structure, which is denser and more
refined than the American versions. The themepark definitely has its own look
unto itself, with French elements worked into the park’s overall design. As perhaps
the first theme park by Disney to be completely rethought since the Florida park,
Disneyland Paris almost seems like an opportunity for Disney designers to show off.
The park is dominated by Fantasyland as the look of that section of the park seems
to dominate all the others and to combine with and morph into the Jules-Verne-
esque “Discoveryland” that replaces Tomorrowland. Rather than reimagining that
now problematical section as an alien space station (Florida), the Disney designers
turn it into the past—or really a simulacrum of a literary past. Both Fantasyland and
Discoveryland seem to echo the architectural history of Paris (the Belle Époque
especially), with elaborate street lamps, curving ironwork, and cake-like theming
in which everything is turned up a notch via brighter colors and more biomorphic
designs that suggest that buildings and objects seem to grow into or out of each
other. The tone seems to be lodged carefully somewhere between whimsy and
nostalgia.
American culture is fed back to Americans, especially in Frontierland and
Adventureland, whose theming is the least elaborate and most generic (and
seemingly more full-scaled).35 Real French taste seems reflected in the density
of restaurants, which seem to dominate the park—sometimes seeming even to
2.6 Disneyland Paris fantasy architecture
2.7 Disneyland Paris ironwork

replace rides (which are fewer than in other parks).36 Several attractions are designed
solely for walking: Alice’s Curious Labyrinth; Les Mystères du Nautilus; Adventure
Isle (with a kind of Skull Rock). Maybe these attractions also reflect nods to French
taste as well as saving money. The huge pirate-themed area seems to build on the
popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise and seems rather sterile—
lots of fake rock and dried-up water areas that don’t seem to exist for any function.
This isn’t a successfully themed area of the park and creates the opposite effect
that we see in Florida. At Disneyland Paris, Fantasyland and Discoveryland seem
more successful perhaps because they are tethered to the French past or context,
whereas in Florida, Adventureland works well for the reason that it seems to be
connected to the American past of the Wild West and the American Revolution,
contexts that contain seemingly realistic elements.
The actual rides show some interesting differences as well: in Pirates of the
Caribbean guests sail out into a tropical area that is the Blue Lagoon restaurant;
there is no Jack Sparrow. Phantom Manor, Disneyland Paris’s version of the
Haunted Mansion, features an elaborate Victorian staircase at the entrance; more
skeletons (which makes the ride seem, tonally, scarier than the American versions);
and a phantom of the opera motif in the dinner party scene. In general the rides
seem spiffier, longer, prettier. Inside and out the park seems more atmospheric and
visually arresting. What is perhaps lacking or different is the sense of realism—of
escaping into the fantasy since one is often reminded of its artificiality (whether
in the elaborate French landscaping or the intense use of bling in the dark rides).
2.8 Le Château
The scale is closer to Disneyland in California—much more compact (especially the de la Belle au
castle), though the sense that the park is do-able (as opposed to overwhelmingly Bois Dormant
2.9 Detail of Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant
2.10 Les Mystères du Nautilus

epic in scale, à la Florida) is in many ways pleasant. In Florida, it is difficult to control 2.11 Phantom
either time or space as it is a resort, finally, not a park. Manor
*****
While the Paris park shows an updating of Disney for European tastes, the original
parks in California and Florida are also in a state of constant flux. The parks are
caught in a perpetual temporal paradox: on the one hand, they are not supposed
to change, to age, but to always seem as fresh and new as they day they were
opened. On the other hand, the practical reality of remaining open and attracting
repeat guests means that every few years some part of the park must shed its old
skin and change.37 While new parks within the Disney World complex can invest
in completely new types of rides, Disneyland in California and its twin, the Magic
Kingdom in Florida, have to reinvent selectively, replacing only those rides that
don’t seem to work anymore for fear, presumably, of alienating as many older
guests as younger guests these rides might bore. When new rides are introduced,
however, into Tomorrowland, for example, they often suggest new directions that
Disney’s theme park design is headed. Wholly new rides often create the feel of
movement—Body Wars, for example—without any actual movement: like a
highway or watching a TV, while changes to older rides introduce new thematic
elements or refurbish older ones. Most strikingly, at Walt Disney World in Florida
the Pirates of the Caribbean’s original narrative was replaced with the narrative
plot of the film franchise that was created from it and which now hangs like an
exoskeleton on the original narrative of the ride. Jack Sparrow appears three
times—even getting the last word at the end of the ride. Generic storytelling—
pirates as a theme—is replaced with the specific plot of the film. A technologically
impressive waterfall projection at the beginning of the ride in which guests
penetrate Davy Jones’s face would have been enough. The revamped ride is now a
muddle of product placement and the original plot—neither really working.
At the Pirate ride there is gum on the floor and dark, dusty corners. One can
see rust at It’s a Small World and dry rot at Peter Pan’s, whose UV-bathed day-glow
paint is spotted with stains. Disney either has to replace rides with new ones and
get rid of beloved classics (Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, for example), or contend with the
deterioration of the originals. One never used to see attractions closed for repair
behind false fronts; one never used to see anything that suggested that Disney
World was an illusion—that it was false, or mutable. The disorientation of the new
rides, however, makes a parent not know what ride to go to—no Boomerang
Channel effect in which the young and the old enjoy Scooby-Doo or the Smurfs in
equal measure. New rides (and new parks) seem always to tend toward either shows
(with some sort of audience interaction) that never helps but seem like watching
TV or movie screens (with the interaction a twist), or versions of amusement park
rides—roller coasters, spinning cars, and the like. What seems decidedly out are the
Dark Rides—as though these former prestige rides were now considered too old-
fashioned—too much a part of prior technology. The technological innovations
that are put on display in the new “show” rides are impressive. The original
Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom are now essentially archeological strata of
technology—from the 1950s Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents to the newest rides
in Tomorrowland. Probably some legacy rides have been updated with newer
technologies as well (Haunted Mansion—which also adds the original part of the
story left out of the Florida park), but the choice of which rides to change or not and
how is a vexed one. Kids recognize the new branding—Monsters Inc., for example,
but not Jungle Cruise. In that sense Pirates comes full circle—now it is a movie, not
a ride, a franchise, not an idea. The Jungle Cruise remains, with much of its post-
colonialist banter in place, but this former scion of athletic male workers now is
home to women pilots, and the patter is delivered with complete irony; all jokes are
supposed to be bad ones, the tone completely retro. But some things don’t survive
their updating. When the original meaning is lost, meaning simply ceases. When all
is subtext and reference to a text that is gone, then the referent fades.
Narrative can’t just be applied. Disney may have invented the notion of the
ride as narrative, but it can’t seem to update narratives—to just override or reboot
the genomic master narrative of a ride. A case in point is The Enchanted Tiki Birds
under New Management. The original story is interpellated with the minor Aladdin
movie character Iago. The ride opens with not one audio-animatronic bird at the
water fall, as before, but two—“William” and “Morris”—who end up bickering at
the end. Though this act is mainly a hollow way to kill time while the audience is
in line to come into the theater, it’s striking how crude the language of the birds’
act has gotten in comparison to what it used to be—a fact carried over into the
main show where disco, hip hop, and other dance tunes are used with the original
four birds—stand-ins for British, French, German, and Spanish types—mention
the fact that as old birds they can’t do the new dance numbers. While an attempt
to update a ride that is ancient even by Disney standards, the show takes away
from the elegance of the original production in an attempt to inject humor (Iago
is voiced by Gilbert Godfry) into a production that used to be strangely naturalistic
by Disney standards—birds and flowers singing after a tropical thunderstorm. Now
the show is self-consciously about “entertainment.”
The one aspect of a recent trip to Disney that was heartening was the ability of
my four-year-old daughter to enjoy the un-scripted more than the artificial and
contrived technology on display when a recent late-Spring downpour created
pools of standing water, a family of ducks came out to play. In the ensuing melee
they produced in the excitement of my daughter and several other children took
in chasing the mother and her ten ducklings, one little duck got separated. As in
a book, the mother duck came back looking for the errant chick, but not before
a half-dozen adults got involved in a complex attempt to head off and shew the
duckling across the bridge connecting Adventureland to Mainstreet and reuniting
the family. The rescue attempt—ultimately successful with the mother duck’s
help—was touching, spontaneous, and the most fun I had at the park—and it had
nothing to do with Disney. As we left the park late that night and sailed across the
Seven Seas (manmade) Lagoon on one of the last ferry boats of the evening, my
daughter noted, not the fading, color-changing magical Cinderella Castle in the
deep distance of Disney-made perspective, but the beauty of the moon overhead.
Earlier that same day, we had hiked around Tom Sawyer Island—an attraction
that is refreshing in its lack of noise, lights, and in its possibility for some self-
controlled decision making. The self-contained island, reachable only by boat,
is covered with paths and caves. Though the paths are loosely scripted by the
narrative of the Tom Sawyer stories, there are multiple choices to be made and the
island is an oasis of quiet within the park. My oldest daughter, then seven, came
upon two older girls (“I’m almost twelve; I’m almost thirteen.”) who offered to help
them climb some rocks. The combination of flattery (that older girls would notice
her) and delight in climbing meant that she and my younger daughter immediately
allowed themselves to be hoisted up an artificial rock that in a short space led to
a cliff. Only in this ride—seemingly off limits from the prying eyes of Disney Cast
Members and some self-censoring guests—could my daughters have chanced
upon these real anti-princesses—real people doing real things generously. In their
own way, they were saving the ducks—finding a way out of the narrative, and we
were all only too ready to play along. Perhaps the answer to Disney’s attempt at
self-re-invention is to devolve.
Disney needs to devolve.
“American Environments”
In his novel White Noise, Don DeLillo accurately chronicles the blurring of space
and place coinciding with the advent of new technologies and the Disneyfication
of the landscape. The book now seems prescient in its ability to identify those areas
of our lives where our environments have or will change. Although many possible
events, places, or actions in the novel might be singled out as the novel’s central
metaphor of this change, many readers, I believe, would probably choose either
the supermarket or the TV as worthy of special attention. The two have much in
common. Both are connected with consumer culture and capitalist expansion;
both have been characterized by the novel, at least, as containing codes or systems
of aesthetics that can be tapped into; both are credited with providing an escape
or an anesthetizing effect—especially if you include shopping malls along with
supermarkets. Both contain, literally, white noise. It is to the supermarket that
Murray Jay Siskind, the hyper-theoretical visiting professor, comes to find out
what is most avant-garde in the world and finds it in the design of the packaging
of generic foods; likewise, he and Jack Gladney, the novel’s protagonist, sense a
profundity in what is broadcast on television. In terms of the novel’s structure,
TV takes a back seat to the cinematic, the medium that DeLillo has said greatly
influences his writing, and which he sees as containing a seriousness as an art form
that TV lacks.38 However, in the world of the novel, the supermarket/shopping
mall and the TV both act as sources of community and (ambivalent) spiritual
contentment for which the book’s characters seem to search.
The supermarket and the TV are also important as examples of the typical or
quotidian; that is, they provide the novel’s focus for examining the domestic in its
most ordinary form—that they are also both about surfaces—packaging and the
lure of the sharply-dressed commodity form, part of the almost religious devotion
that Americans accord the experience of both TV and malls—is not to be taken
lightly within the novel’s emphasis on the seduction of the senses. To someone
who had never seen either, both the brightly-lighted supermarket or the TV
could appear mystical, both wondrous and very frightening. This mixture of the
fascinating and the horrifying is a key to the type of “environment” that DeLillo
creates in his novel. In interviews DeLillo has said that he does not believe that
most characters in twentieth-century fiction are very developed—including his
own—but he does want to create a strong sense of place. The supermarket/mall is
one such place, and the home—ruled over by the TV—is another.
What he means by place, however, might not mean what it once did. While the
characters in the novel seem to feel most comfortable in a typical family kitchen—
the location in the house where most of the supermarket packages are kept—the
protagonist is in an academic department that studies “American environments.”
To a large extent, place seems to function in the novel not so much as location (a
specific town in a recognizable part of the country, say) as it does a new kind of
space: a physical environment so altered by technology that the technology trains
people to mimic the representations it offers them. This is why Jack often seems
to imagine parts of his life as a movie, that his daughter follows the directions of a
computer calling her over the phone to poll her opinion, that the dialogue among
the family members or between Murray and Jack often sounds like the stylized
exchanges one hears on TV sitcoms or melodramas, that the entire “airborne
toxic event” bonds the family together via the thrill of being in a cinematic
“spectacular”—or an improbable event like the tabloids that Jack’s wife, Babbett,
reads to the blind. The air they breathe, so to speak, changes them—in Jack’s case,
literally—and erodes the distinction between location and psychic space. DeLillo
has a lot of fun with this effect, of course, and provides a number of humorous
examples of it taking place. One of my favorite instances emerges in the following

exchange that occurs early in the novel, when Jack says to Babette:
’Bee wants to visit at Christmas. We can put her in with Steffie.’

‘Do they know each other?’
‘They met at Disney World. It’ll be all right.’
‘When were you in Los Angeles?’
‘You mean Anaheim.’
‘When were you in Anaheim?’
‘You mean Orlando. It’s almost three years now.’
‘Where was I?’ she said.39
Like many others in the book, this passage makes it difficult for the reader to know
which character is talking when because of the lack of dialogue markers; we have
only one here, “she said,” coming at the end. The question that Babette finally asks,
“Where was I?” is meant to be taken in two ways: literally, where was I when that
happened and, metaphorically or psychologically, where must my mind have been
then—or now—not to know this bit of information. Although like their precocious
children, Jack and his wife obsessively correct each other about the way to frame
this question geographically, they are not talking about a place in the usual sense,
but about a theme park. Technically, Disneyland is in Anaheim, but, technically,
Disney World is in Lake Buena Vista, not Orlando, Florida. The point, however,
is not who or what is correct but the fact that the place where Steffie and Bee
met was actually a theme park—a technologically drenched manmade themed
environment—a place that, like utopia, is no place—or, more aptly, a place that is
usually thought of as an experience or an event in one’s life where temporality and
spatiality are interwoven.
Other than the question of place, the Disney World passage and others like it
raise another trope important to understanding the novel’s unusual methodology:
the concept of the simulacrum used in its pure sense as “a copy without an original.”
DeLillo has Murray explain this idea to the reader in his theorizing about “the most
photographed barn in America” when he says that what he and Jack are seeing
when they get to it is that “’They [tourists] are taking pictures of taking pictures ….’”
As readers we don’t, in fact, ever get a description of the barn or even know that he
and Jack see anything, although the barn does exist on the postcards sold at the
nearby gift shop and on the film other tourists are exposing. “’What was the barn
like before it was photographed?’” muses Jack.40 In fact, there is no way to know.
If the actual barn ever existed before its endless number of copies, the copies
and their constant reproduction and reproducibility has rendered its originary
status impossible—much to the delight of Murray. The experience of returning
to something that may have once been an original artifact only to erode further
the possibility that it ever was prior to its reproduction as a sign is described by
Murray as “A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”41 Like Disney World, this
is tourist event as homage: the barn is where one comes to enact a rite important at
least in part because it is prescribed, preordained. As they pilgrimage to the barn,
Jack and Murray even find signs along the way that they are on the right trail in the
form of actual advertisements for it. The tourists at the site—like shoppers in malls
or visitors to Disneyland—act the way they are supposed to when confronted with
something that is a copy of an original. In Disney World, or in a supermarket, one
might have an area themed to look like, say, Germany or France in order to sell
beer or wine. What you are experiencing, of course, is not the actual place, but a
representation of an idea about the place—an idea that is not, in fact, necessarily
part of the place’s actual existence, now or in the past. Similarly, just as Cinderella’s
Castle is a fantasy of what a castle should be, what Jack and Murray see at the barn
is not an actual barn as it may have once existed, but an Ur-barn or a perfected
image projecting a popular idea of what a barn should be with all the traits,
details, and characteristics that a most-photographed barn should. Copies without
originals proliferate throughout the novel, dominating the characters’ perceptual
world and culminating in Jack’s orgy of shopping at the Mid-Village Mall, itself a
simulacrum of an actual community complete with a town square (here, “a center
court of waterfalls, promenades and gardens”) where “a band plays live Muzak.” In
other words, the live band reproduced music that is itself a flattened-out copy of
original music—a “real” simulacrum, in other words. This is, of course, impossible,
and this paradoxical joke is at the heart of the novel.
Like the architecture of suburbia, simulacra are usually composed of what we
can call reality effects. DeLillo’s novel is made up in large part of data—facts, place
names, technical jargon, slang, academic-ese, advertising jingles, tabloid headlines,
disembodied sentences from TV and radio announcers, and even words just floating
through the novel. At times, these phrases are connected to a consciousness, but
usually they seem to belong to another narrative—or at least to another narrator.42
In order to exist, simulacra depend upon the repetition of the same kind of effect
from reality—a robot in Disney World “performing” the same skit hundreds of times
a day, for example. In DeLillo’s world we have people bombarded by these effects
both when they are waking and dreaming. Words, as a part of this effect, not only
break down, but also begin to become something other than denotative. At times
we are asked to think of them as music, at other times, as a chant, and at all times, as
a type of code sometimes available to us (or to the characters), and sometimes not.
Names have certain connotations: Is Jack really “glad”? Is there a Mr. “gray”? Is the
word “Babette” a mixture of the word “babel” (as in Tower of ) and the diminutive
suffix “ette” or simply supposed to signify pre-speech sounds like “baba”?43
Similarly, Jack’s attempts to master German are foiled because he can never get the
sounds right, and the SIMUVAC computer technician’s speech seems to be made
up of a new kind of language that is a combination of technical vocabulary and
syntax borrowed from scientific, governmental, military, and bureaucratic jargons.
Instead of writing prose that creates the sense of a realistic, believable place,
time, and people, DeLillo has instead raised questions about whether or not the
world that we actually live in can be represented by stable language capable of
reality or verisimilitude. This point is made most forcefully at the end of the book
when a side effect of Dylar leaves Willie Mink susceptible to perceiving words as
the actual sensory things or events that they describe. Jack has merely to utter
“Hail of bullets” to send Mink scampering along the floor. Likewise, the floating
chant “MasterCard, Visa, American Express” triggers a programmed response in the

reader in much the same way: we may not go out and start charging on our credit
card, but at least we feel a twinge that tells us our reality is composed of language’s
disembodiment from any message and attachment to the medium through which
it is either delivered or associated. For DeLillo, therefore, no such thing as realistic
writing exists in the traditional sense. Rather, a realistic novel of and for the 1980s
would have to emulate or create the effects of language mediated by mass culture.
Any twenty-first century Flauberts will have to write in a language that reflects a
shared cultural knowledge with their readers.44 The language in White Noise is one
example of what one would come up with. Just as the characters often seem to act
as though they are performing (for each other, for a camera, or for themselves?),
their conversation similarly feels rehearsed as if taken from a script or, in Murray’s
case, a lecture: all having been repeated before—just as the reader knows she has
heard “Toyota Celica” a thousand times before. Most of the language, in other words,
comes from TV, film, magazines, and the PA system at the mall or supermarket.
To call DeLillo’s novel postmodernist means we think at least in part that it reacts
in some way to the modernist novel. In fact his book is un-modernist precisely
because it seems to be striving for a type of realism, although the society he mirrors
has become postmodern. If this is the case, then DeLillo has taken a very different
tack from those novelists who wrote non-fiction novels (Capote, Mailer, and the
rest) as a contemporary reaction to the modernist novel.45 With all of its bizarre
postmodern effects, DeLillo’s type of realism may be more properly termed post-
postmodern in that it returns to a type of realist or naturalist fiction during the
age of the hyperreal. Certainly, his novel revitalizes the celebratory mixing of the
sublime and the abject one finds in the tradition of American literature—including
the modernism of William Carlos Williams’“To Elsie,” which presents a bleak portrait
of American history relieved somewhat only by the image of fields of goldenrod
at the end.46 DeLillo’s ambiguous presentation of American culture and cultural
products as both horrifying and transcendent becomes a central theme in the
book and is perhaps summed up best by Murray’s class on car-wrecks.47 What is
purposefully missing from the novel is any real answer to why this paradox exists in
America. This conundrum may in fact be the “mystery” that “deepens” as time and
the plot progress. It may be that what Williams calls “the pure products of America”
don’t go crazy, but, as he asserts, simply settle in suburbia along with everyone
else to practice medicine or teach on college campuses. The character of Vernon
is a parody of the pure American, the allegorical figure who is falling apart and
communicative only in his breaking down. Like Williams’s poem, the satire and
irony of the book set up an endless loop between these bipolar extremes, never
allowing an escape from the reactions of disgust and bliss, never giving the answer
to the question “Who will die first?” or “Who will drive the car?”
Notes
1 See The Project on Disney, Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
2 As Disney studies grow and become more popular two dangers seem to exist: one,
that the criticism will become chiefly one that attempts to utilize the familiarity
of Disney—the reassurance it offers—to make the consumer feel good about the
criticism itself. That is, criticizing Disney always contains within it the problem of
discussing something that many people hold dear. If you go to Amazon.com, the
two least popular books with readers are, arguably, the two that are the most critical
and academic at the same time—Andrew Ross’s The Celebration Chronicles and
Inside the Mouse—though only the latter has a review that actually begins, “Burn this
book!”
3 If the Magic Kingdom is a hologram—a model replicating itself in California, Florida,
the world—then EPCOT Center is a fractal.
4 Greil Marcus, “Forty Years of Overstatement: Criticism and the Disney Theme Parks,”
Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, (ed.) Karal Ann Marling
and Centre canadien d’architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture (Paris and New
York: Flammarion, 1997), 207.
5 Marcus, 204, 205.
6 See, for example, Marcus, 204.
7 Quoted in Marcus, 207.
8 “So: on one side, a delight in the contemporary cityscape of capital (e.g., Las Vegas
Venturi); on another, a nostalgia for the imageability—even the typology—of the
historical city (e.g., Paris Leon Krier) … Here, the contradictions of neoconservative
postmodernism begin to cry out, and in relation to history they fully erupt. We have
noted that this postmodernism privileges style—in the sense both of the signature
style of the artist/architect and of the ‘spirit’ of an age. This style … further proclaims a
return to history. Thus, the postmodern zeitgeist.” Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle,
Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985), 127.
9 According to David Forgacs, Mickey Mouse appeared in his last film in 1953. See his
“Disney Animation and the Business of Childhood,” Screen, 33(4) (Winter 1992): 361–74.
10 Edward L. Prizer, “The Disney Era in Florida,” Orlando-Land (October 1981): 43–4, as
quoted in Stephen M. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 1993), 123. It should be noted that the State’s own potential was tapped
to some extent. The submarines for 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, for example, were
constructed in the Tampa Bay area.
11 It should be noted that Disney never had to control nature at Disneyland. This is a
phenomenon of Disney World, where nature is treated as a commodity.
12 Fjellman, 123.
13 Under the putative idea that the “Confederacy” was one section of the park, Six Flags
over Georgia used to sell Confederate flags emblazoned on car tags and even on
bumper stickers you could purchase in the park that read, “Pride Not Prejudice.” On my
last visit I saw kids walking around with glow-in-the-dark crosses hanging from their
necks. The Confederate section has since been renamed the “Cotton States section” in
what is apparently a weak gesture towards political and cultural awareness.
14 Tampa’s Busch Gardens is by far the most important precursor to Disney World.
Begun as a Florida version of a beer garden, it is essentially an actual park built
around a factory—in this case, a brewery rather than a hydroelectric or nuclear
power plant. After the arrival of Disney only 90 miles away, the gardens were
supplemented by an African-themed section that has provided the main identity for
the park ever since.
15 Making literal, perhaps, Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote: “We look at the present
through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future. Suburbia lives
imaginatively in Bonanza-land.” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is
the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), n. pag.
16 Fjellman, 123.
17 If the Magic Kingdom isn’t Corbusian, then EPCOT really is, at least in its plan.
Revisionist modernisms have shown how Corbusier did wish to have a relationship
with the past in the utopian modernist cities that he planned, like the Voison.
Stanislaus von Moos, “Le Corbusier: The Monument and the Metropolis,” Newsline
(January/February 1993): 5. Similarly, Fjellman notes that in EPCOT “[v]istas at Future
World are severely edited. From any vantage point one can see, through and around
the landscaping, only a small number of pavilions other than Spaceship Earth. […] At
any point a first-time visitor is presented with just two possible directions to take. One
moves along barely conscious of making decisions. At pavilion exits, especially those
in the CommuniCores, views of other pavilions are framed by trees that block out
alternative views and point the visitor in a particular direction” (231). At least Corbusier
wanted for his residents and visitors to see the monuments, but at EPCOT one isn’t
allowed to see the pavilions across the lagoon, the shrines to an Americanized view
of the world. EPCOT’s planning, hence, can be said to be more modernist than the
modernists’.
18 Cf. Arthur Krocker: “Probably because he takes so seriously Franz Fanon’s analysis of
race as a purely accidental quality, Michael Jackson’s image construct has gone for
a complete make-over: bleached skin, retooled eyes, oxygen pumped organs, and a
sculpted nose as cute and pert as the young Diana Ross’s. The earth-bound body of
the smallest member of the Jackson 5 has disappeared and what has taken its place
is a random image museum culled from Disney’s Peter Pan.” Arthur Krocker, “The
Architecture of Sound,” Semiotext(e)/architecture, (ed.) Hraztan Zeitlian (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1992), 49.
19 All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 19 October 1993.
20 David Kunzle, Introduction, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the
Disney Comic, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, trans. David Kunzle (New York:
International Generation, 1984), 20–21.
21 Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in
the Disney Comic, trans. and introd. David Kunzle (New York: International Generation,
1984), 34.
22 I am indebted in these observations to comments made by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in
a class at Duke University in the Fall of 1989 entitled “Literature and the ‘Invention of
Homosexuality.’”
23 Kunzle, 21.
24 Alcohol, the other great adult sin, is treated almost as severely, but with less
interesting results. Although drinking has never been allowed within the Magic
Kingdom, one can drink in designated areas in EPCOT and the MGM Studios. In World
Showcase, however, hosts in each country watch guests to make sure that they do
not walk through the park with a drink in their hand. I was stopped leaving “France”
with a glass of middling Paul Bocuse vin blanc by a French student cum host and later
observed the same happening to someone with a beer in “Mexico.” The aura associated
with drinking is, apparently, supposed to be kept cordoned off, hence, the existence
of Pleasure Island, Disney’s equivalent of an adult nightclub area. Located outside of
the parks, it is near one of Disney’s convention areas and easily accessible to the other
areas of Orlando. Of course, the name “Pleasure Island” comes from Pinocchio where it
designates the place from which the boy-like puppet must escape before he is turned
into an ass.
25 “One animator, working on Fantasia, decided to take piano lessons—at his own
expense—in an attempt to gain a better understanding of musical structure and thus
improve his work on this difficult project. When Disney found out about it, he snarled,
‘What are you, some kind of fag?’” Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times,
Art and Commerce of Walt Disney, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 250.
26 Popular culture critics have pointed out the way in which various aspect of the theme
park evoke film, TV, or book illustrations in which the participants—the customers—
are able to imagine themselves acting out some kind of adventure in a fantasy world.
Sociologists and urban planners have seriously examined the pragmatic solutions
the Disney company has developed for dealing with many of the basic needs of huge
crowds of people. And on a more conceptual level Louis Marin writes that “in fact,
without being aware of it, the visitor is forced to spell the vocabulary in the right order.
In other words, this structure which belongs to the map [of Disneyland] is a concealed
rule of behavior for the visitor.” Louis Marin, “Disneyland, a Degenerate Utopia,” Glyph, 1
(1977): 56.
27 Edward Ball notes: “What is unique in the Disney version, however, what both
repels and attracts, are (1) its ethnic homogeneity, and (2) its paternalism. Disney
environments both evoke and erase the differences between historical moments,
promoting the invidious idea that we are all one people. This is accomplished in a
patrician manner by infantilizing the users of buildings. The ultimate goal might be
summarized this way: The more authority is invoked by paternalistic design, the less
the need for authority as such.” Edward Ball, “Theme Player: Disneyland Is Our Land,”
Village Voice, 6 (August 1991): 81.
28 According to Diane Ghirardo, Disney spied on his dinner guests at his apartments on
the second floor of Mainstreet in Disneyland with “hidden microphones.” “By contrast
with Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the control on Disney’s Main Street is far more
subtle, guided by sophisticated marketing and crowd control techniques, but the
surveillance is just as pervasive—and just as particular.” Diane Ghirardo, Architecture
after Modernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 48.
29 Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1984), 248.
30 Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 223.
31 “[E]ven Walt Disney himself was known to refer to Disneyland’s Tomorrowland as
‘Todayland.’” Beth Dunlop, Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture (New York:
H.N. Abrams, 1996), 131.
32 Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, 244.
35 In some places in the Paris park American culture is made literal: cowboys suddenly
appear in Phantom Manor to have a gun battle and in It’s a Small World audio-
animatronic figures of an American boy dressed as a football player and an American girl
as a cheerleader offer American junk food to the guests as they ride by in their boats.
36 The food is very French—“gelatti,” “prix fixe” menus with “l’eau minerale, un plat, et un
dessert,” and so on (even for children).
37 As Morse notes, “Similarly, within the mall (as in Disneyland, McDonald’s, and other
realms of privately owned mass culture), decay or the fact of time itself has been
banished from cycles of destruction and regeneration via a scrupulous cleanliness
and constant renewal of worn parts.” Margaret Morse, “An Ontology of Everyday
Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television,” Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural
Criticism, (ed.) Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990),
202. And “the temporal world is also lifted out of history in favor of cyclic repetitions
…” (202). Characters don’t age on TV; they go through a journey that ultimately takes
part in a static situation (214).
38 It is not surprising, therefore, that Murray says that his students only want to discuss
film, not television.
39 Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986), 15–16.
40 DeLillo, 13.
41 DeLillo, 12.
42 In his “Tales of the Electronic Tribe” Frank Lentricchia sees these floating strings of
words as necessarily tied to Jack’s consciousness because he also argues that the
novel is a first-person narrative; hence, everything in the novel has to come from
Jack. I’m not sure that this explanation is the only one to believe, especially since the
boundaries between words and thought—not to mention words and actions—is
called into question so many times throughout the novel. Frank Lentricchia, “Tales
of the Electronic Tribe,” New Essays on White Noise, (ed.) Frank Lentricchia (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 102.
43 It might be interesting to note that DeLillo’s wife’s name is Barbara Bennett, for which
Babette is an anagram.
44 Lentricchia refers to the novel as an example of Naturalist fiction, which seems
accurate but for the fact that my sense of the novel is that DeLillo feels very much a
part of the world that he describes and doesn’t look at it from a scientistic distance.
I see the novel, therefore, more as an experiment in a new kind of realism.
45 Libra may be an exception, of course, as it does seem to owe much to the non-fiction
novel form.
46 For this observation I am indebted to David Case’s chapter on White Noise in “American
Abject, American Sublime,” diss. University of California at Los Angeles, 1992.
47 Cf. David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996).
3
The Architecture of Time: Postmodern Casinos in Las Vegas
Gaming, as the gambling industry prefers to call gambling, is rapidly becoming

a popular cultural phenomenon that not only increasingly influences trends in
family leisure, but also represents one strand of postmodern cultural production
that has thus far remained undertheorized. This situation is especially odd when
one considers that our understanding of postmodernist architecture took a
major step forward in the work of Venturi, Brown, and Izenour when they first
began to theorize the landscape of Las Vegas as an American vernacular style
that existed outside of Europeanized modernist systems of architecture.1 Though
they tended to focus more on Vegas’s non-casino buildings and features than the
casinos themselves, they were able to make a convincing argument that Vegas
was structured as a system based specifically on the sign—both literally and in a
structuralist sense—that announced the function and meaning of buildings from
the vantage point of the road—specifically, the multi-lane roads of Vegas’s famed
Strip. That this conception of Vegas architecture has expanded to form a major
tenant of what we call postmodern architecture is now a given. Postmodernist
architects genuflect to this concept of architecture as a counterpoint not only
to a modernist high art approach to architecture, but also to a subtle reading of
the way in which mass-produced vernacular architecture has already changed
the way that US cities look and feel via the use of theming. That Vegas is already,
then, a postmodern playground for architecture need not be disputed. That we
need a theoretical approach to understand how to explain the changes in the
morphologies of this postmodernism is another problem altogether. The current
challenge posed by Vegas is twofold: on the one hand, it may well have morphed
into an island of new postmodern architectural experimentation that has, at least
for the moment, outstripped the prevailing theories that we have for analyzing
postmodern architecture; it has also, in its post-1970s emphasis on family theming,
posed an alternative to the Disney paradigm that is, finally, simply another kind
of architectural form completely. The actual existence of the newer postmodern
casinos, in other words, resist both the theories of “contradiction” upon which
postmodern architectural theory is largely based, and the analysis of themed
environments coming out of cultural studies. Perhaps Vegas architecture has, to

some extent, always been its own model. Certainly, its latest incarnations, like the
casino owner’s designs in general, are a disorienting experience.
Constructing a Postmodern Architecture
With their competing theories of “parody” and “pastiche,” Linda Hutcheon and
Fredric Jameson have, respectively, provided the primary concepts for making sense
of the postmodern strain of architectural production. In A Poetics of Postmodernism,
Hutcheon reacts to Jameson’s famous formulation of the postmodern effect in his
detailed analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Hutcheon points out,
accurately, that the building that Jameson refers to as postmodernist is, more
properly, late modernist. More to her point, Hutcheon wants to counter Jameson’s
negative critique of postmodern architecture generally by making claims for
the movement as a whole—mainly, by pointing to the wide range in the use of
tone that is employed by various postmodernist architects, most especially when
referencing history. Where Jameson sees a deracination of the past in contemporary
postmodern architecture, Hutcheon claims an ironic play that attempts to connect
the past to the present via references that self-consciously recontextualize history
for the present.
Early on in his discussion of postmodern architecture, Jameson dismisses
parody—a key term for Hutcheon—in favor of pastiche:
In this situation [late capitalism] parody finds itself without a vocation; it has
lived, and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place.
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style,
the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral
practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of
the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction …. Parody is thus
blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs ….2
It is to this concept of parody that Hutcheon takes exception—especially the idea

that parody might lack agency, in the hands of the architect or artist, to reflect,
among other things, political conviction. Hutcheon claims that this effect can be
best seen in a “study of the actual aesthetic practice of postmodernism” as opposed
to a “reaction against its implication in the mass culture of late capitalism.”3 In other
words, Hutcheon feels that postmodern architecture is being used as a metaphor
for a (now dated) debate about the ideology of postmodern aesthetics without an
inductive analysis of the actual artifacts of postmodernism. Further, she stakes a
claim for an approach to postmodern cultural production that always posits a close
reading of the products over a theorizing about postmodernism generally. Though
she makes an effort to be sensitive to the variety of modernist architecture, she
does downplay the ideological goals expressed in much modernist architecture—
namely, the desire to better the lives of everyone. Indeed, in the desire of modernist
architects to reject history—or the immediate past—can be seen a desire to break
with the past horrors of European history especially, to forge a new consciousness
The Architecture of Time: Postmodern Casinos in Las Vegas 71
that is not so much an erasure of the memory of history as an attempt to avoid the
social and cultural disparities that the weight of history placed on the European
context. Of course, this idea might now seem naive, but it is still an important
distinction to keep in mind as one ponders the irony of the reduction of modernism
to a cooperate style that has no utopian impulse whatsoever. Hutcheon prefers
to view modernist architecture as essentially elitist and to posit postmodernist
architecture as sharing characteristics that make it distinct—differences that she
lauds, and which are now quite familiar: “a … return to … the vernacular (that
is, to local needs and local architectural traditions) to decoration and a certain
individualism in design, and, most importantly, to the past, to history.”4 History,
as she later explains, is the equivalent of parody, a concept that she thinks
Jameson misunderstands, or simply reduces, to “the ridiculing imitation of the
standard theories and definitions that are rooted in eighteenth-century theories
of wit.”5 That Jameson misdiagnoses the use of parody by postmodernist architects
becomes the primary basis for Hutcheon’s own claim to the productive use to
which postmodernism is put in the hands of some of its most famous architectural
practitioners.
Citing Portoghesi in response to Frampton, Eagleton, and Jameson, she sees
postmodern parody as a playful use of irony that does not refuse modernism
so much as rearrange the viewer’s approach to architecture—one that puts the
user on the inside of the conceit or the joke, rather than on the outside, as she
claims the modernist architects did.6 Indeed, what she terms the “double coding”
of postmodern architecture is also supposed to allow the creator—especially
marginalized ones of the Commonwealth countries or of Western society in
general—to speak from within the dominant structure while simultaneously
critiquing it. That is, parody implies a humorous, almost camp-like awareness of
not only contradiction, but also of the slipperiness of one’s own subject position.
Postmodern architecture should, according to Hutcheon’s formulation, allow for a
return of history in a form that is also self-conscious about its difference—how it
plays within the radically different context of the present. Irony is what saves the
architect from merely seeming to dredge up the past as superior to the present—
to invoke nostalgia—as irony “critically confronts the past with the present, and
vice versa.”7
The problem with this claim is that the very principle upon which Hutcheon bases
her defense—the actual postmodernist structures themselves—have not survived
the passage of time in much better shape than their modernist predecessors. Her
detailed critique of Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, for example, fits
uneasily with the abandoned site that that architectural space has become. The
ironic use of references to classical architecture and Sicilian culture has become
lost under the decrepitude of this monument to ethnic assimilation. Hutcheon’s
claims that postmodern architecture has—in the hands of Moore, Michael Graves,
and Robert A.M. Stern—taken on a sophisticated sense of narrative deconstruction
assumes not only that this story is there for the masses—in a form that they can
and do interpret—but is recognized by them as a counter-measure to the suffering
they have experienced at the hands of corporate modernism and its wholesale
destruction of public space. The real story, however, is more complicated, and
Hutcheon seems to replace a wholesale defense of modernism—or at least its

purported goals—with a blanket defense of postmodernism’s ability to bring
back the past as an ideological critique of the anemic vocabulary of forms that
modernism seems to represent. While Hutcheon is certainly correct that the
discourse of postmodernism as it existed in its original form in the 1980s and early
1990s often underestimated postmodernism’s ability to create interesting works,
she is also too optimistic about both the political work that is being done by the
architecture she champions, and the way in which her analysis actually displaces
these very buildings from the flow of history to make them seem like hermetically
sealed texts created by auteurist architects for the purposes of countering
modernism. For all that one might say in criticism of Jameson, his discussion of
postmodernism does attempt to place the phenomenon within a larger field of
historical forces for which it might be a symptom. Hutcheon ties postmodernist
production too closely to a reaction to modernism and ignores its effects on the
present as well as its relationship to the distinct ethos of the period in which it was
first conceived: the time of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney.
In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson’s other close
reading of a particular work of postmodernist architecture is of Frank Gehry’s house
3.1 Piazza d’Italia,
in Los Angeles. As Jameson acknowledges, Gehry’s house is an unusual example of
New Orleans postmodern architecture for the simple reason that it does not, pace Moore and
Graves, attempt to tell a story.8 The postmodernism that Hutcheon enjoys is that
which constructs narratives—stories that the buildings tell to anyone who can
“read” them. Yet, one might argue that what is essential to an understanding of
postmodernist architectural production is whether or not one likes the stories that
are being put forth—and, quite possibly, whether one is comfortable with a style
of architecture that attempts to privilege the temporal and verbal over the spatial
and visual aspects of modernism. If the narratives that a postmodern architect tells
are not themselves “blank parody,” then they must mean something. Who authors
these stories, and towards what ends, become important questions to ask. If Graves
or Stern are creating works for the Disney corporation in Orlando or Paris—or for
a corporate giant in another location—the story may well be authored by the
client—even if it appears in an ironic form. Likewise, the narrative-as-building
that Hutcheon praises can appear to even an informed viewer like a mere Barthian
exercise in metanarrative: fictions about fictions that ultimately comment only
on themselves, and not on the stories from history that have been occluded by
modernist architects and writers.
As Jameson notes, the importance of irony to postmodern architecture is already
in the formula presented by Venturi in Learning from Las Vegas, which
proposes that the new, architect-designed building stand out ever so slightly from
the vernacular surrounding it by way of a barely perceptible ironic distance ….9
The problem with this idea, as Jameson concludes, is that
it does not quite seem to work, particularly since irony itself was traditionally a
sign fully as much as a weapon of just those condescending upper classes from
which we were supposed to escape.
Whether or not Jameson is furthering the idea of irony or parody in what Hutcheon
terms its old “eighteenth-century” definition, the mistrust of irony that he evidences
clearly reads for him as a failed project whose very play with tone makes it suspect
politically. Jameson does analyze the actual buildings of postmodernism—
his analysis of Graves’s work, for example, is accurate. As he says, in the newer
incarnations of Venturi’s idea:
The question of the part … seems dominant, well beyond the merely ‘superficial’
matter of ‘ornamentation’ as such, insofar as … it is somehow the empty or
paradoxical relationship of the various parts to each other that often seems to
constitute the building as such.10
In other words, not all postmodern architecture functions equally well, and
Graves’s buildings, rather than fitting to the schema of postmodern ideology,
seem to function like so many collections of systems of signs that do not even hold
together as a narrative or ironic critique so much is the fetish for the part and the
detail able to overwhelm any one aspect of the building’s announced theme. Irony
alone, in other words, does not a postmodern building make. One has to look at the
specific types of postmodern building to distinguish the differing effects.
Though Jameson is incorrect in calling the Bonaventure a postmodernist hotel,

he does identify some aspects of it that could now be said to apply to a new class
of hotel-casinos in Vegas. Jameson says that the Portman-designed hotels that
dot the US landscape “seek to speak … [the] lexicon and syntax as that has been
emblematically ‘learned from Las Vegas.’”11 Portman’s buildings, however, do not
speak this way. The newer versions of Vegas mega-hotels do. Just as Jameson
laments the loss of the old-fashioned hotel, including “the monumental porte
cochere with which the sumptuous buildings of yesteryear were wont to stage
your passage from city street to the interior,” the Vegas hotel brings this theatrical
concept back with a vengeance.12 Indeed, the hotels try so hard to make an
immediate impression that they often succeed in displacing the viewer in much
the same way as described by Jameson’s definition of “postmodern hyperspace,”
which:
has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human

body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and
cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.13
Casino architecture, in general, is a perfect fit for postmodern effects, and could
be said, as Venturi and company realized, to constitute postmodernism avant la
lettre. When Jameson notes that “postmodern buildings … seem to have been
designed for photography, where alone they flash into brilliant existence …,” he
is not only explaining Disney World, but what it means to take in a themed Vegas
casino: a monumental stage-set whose visual coding is best understood when
studied in a photographed or video-recorded form.14 As a mere human, standing
before the MGM lion or the Luxor pyramid and sphinx, one is overwhelmed by the
immense size and monumental scale of an architecture designed to stun as many
senses as possible—not just at one time, but as one moves through it, or from
one huge building to the next. Postmodern casinos challenge our notions of what
architecture is or might be while they also reinforce both Hutcheon and Jameson’s
sense that the advent of postmodernist architecture meant a paradigm shift in the
use of building as signification.
Theming the Family
It is fair to say that gambling as entertainment or leisure activity is on the rise and
will, in the next century, emerge as a major player in vacation and architecture
design. As the theming of adult utopian desires, gambling has transformed itself
from a shady activity into a much more ubiquitous pop cultural phenomenon that
will ultimately shape not only the imaginations of the middle-class vacationer—
but also the lives of many into a new middle class itself. The casinos that were lining
the Strip in late 1990s Las Vegas came to represent a fantastic utopia in the form
of Disney-like built environments. Holding the same relationship to gambling that
Walt Disney World in Orlando does to theme parks, Vegas—with the help of new
complexes like the MGM Grand—represented the cutting edge of technological
entertainment. With volcanoes erupting every half hour and pirate frigates dueling
on cue, Vegas was in a position to challenge the Disney empire’s lock on advanced
uses of the themed environment and fashion itself as an alternative to the theme
park vacation. The existence of theming at Vegas was supposed to bring more
people there—especially the families that the corporate owners of the casinos
(hotel chains, mainly) seemed to want to court—as Martin Scorsese’s film Casino
(1995) suggests. The problem, if there is one, is that Vegas as a cultural phenomenon
hasn’t actually changed. Theming is simply what the Rat Pack or Elvis were before:
another lure, another attempt to get you to put one more quarter into the slot
machine. At the World Gaming Congress and Expo held in Vegas in 1991, Paul
Rubeli asked of theming, “What business are we in?”15 If the answer is “theming,”
then what does that mean—particularly for Vegas? As Mark C. Taylor notes:
None of the nostalgia that pervades Disney World haunts Las Vegas. In the
simulated environment of Vegas, the real becomes blatantly hyperreal. The
primary motivation for thematizing Las Vegas is economic. As we have seen, to
attract people who never considered gambling, illegitimate vice had to be turned
into legitimate entertainment.16
For Taylor, there is no mystery to the use of theming in Vegas because the casinos
proudly display every aspect of their theming as an obvious attempt to make
money. Taylor also argues, however, that the mega-hotels of the new Strip created
a “mallscape” of
facades, which dissolved the boundary between inside and outside. Most of the
casinos that are still set back from the street are framed by simulated movie sets
depicting everything from erupting volcanoes … to Italian lakes ….17
Although Taylor is mainly interested in the idea that the Strip functions as much as a
pedestrian space as the space for automobiles (of Venturi’s 1960s era), his argument
suggests that Vegas themes moved in the direction of increased attention to the
idea of theming as narrative as opposed to theming simply as general opulence
or privilege. We can see this movement at work in the changes that have occurred
in theming from the 1950s to the 1990s. The Sands, for example, which was torn
down in the summer of 1996, at one time represented the hangout for the Rat Pack.
The general air of Orientalism and quasi-tropical adventure (desert sands) helped
to mask the bastion of male privilege that the Vegas “show” seemed to represent.
Post-1960s theming has followed two paradigms: the Mirage (tropical elegance;
perhaps an update of the older theme), and Circus Circus, which was built in
1968, and which began the vogue of pirate ships (Treasure Island) and medieval
castles (Excalibur) that obviously pull on the Disneyfication of the North American
suburban landscape.
Many of these resorts did create a Disney-like feel: the midway theme of the
casino at Circus Circus undercuts the usual associations with gambling to present
a child’s-eye-view of what is going on there. Likewise, the heightened security
and cleanliness of Vegas are certainly parallel to Disney standards—especially
interesting since the Vegas casinos are, of course, not all owned by the same
3.2 The Mirage
3.3 Excalibur
company. Indeed, there were attempts at Disney-level theming here that are 3.4 Interior
probably often misunderstood or even overlooked. The creation of Excalibur, for of Excalibur
instance, involved a great deal of research into actual Medieval castles—even if the
resulting structure seems much more fanciful and over the top than anything that
would be built by Disney. The point is that though theming has always been a part
of Vegas, it is only since the 1980s that Vegas designers have lavished so much care
on the themes that they choose and the elaborateness with which they carry them
out. One case in point is the elaborate story told by the Luxor Hotel—a theme that
goes way beyond the high-concept themes of most Strip hotels—the Wizard of Oz
for the MGM Grand, King Arthur for Excalibur, and so forth—to present a “crypto-
Egypto” narrative about a pre-Egyptian civilization that has conquered gravity.18
With everything from 30 football fields of carpeting to a model of the sphinx that
is 50 percent larger than the original, the designers of Luxor downplayed gaming
and focused instead on architecture and high-tech special effects to create a
complicated theme that begs to be read as a story.
“The strange mystery beneath the Las Vegas desert” was how Luxor was
described in one of three films that visitors could once pay to see in the new Luxor
casino. Though most guests probably associated Luxor with an attempt at theming
ancient Egypt, the design for the resort was developed by Douglas Trumbull, a
special effects expert who cut his teeth on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) and later
oversaw special effects in such films at Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). His
idea for the theme of Luxor—surely the most elaborate in Vegas—was a strange
amalgam of postcolonialism and sci-fi, based on a plot much like the film (then
television series) Stargate. As the first of three films informs us, the Luxor pyramid
is supposed to be built on top of a 100,000-year-old temple. “It was discovered in
a vision during an eclipse …” a young female archaeologist tells us and then goes
on to explain that she was suddenly able to decipher hieroglyphics (as in Mormon
beliefs), which then allowed her to decipher a map, which led her to someone’s back
yard, to a shaft, and finally to the temple. Once at the temple site, the archaeologist
and her fellow adventurers find a “monoled”: a “magnetically levitating flying
vehicle.” If one were interested, one could experience the rest of their “adventure”
as it unfolded in the other two films. The overall plot involves a military type who is
trying to take control of the discovery from the archaeologist who is trying to save
it for the future. The “hero,” of the tale, not surprisingly, is the developer: he has the
legal rights to the land the shaft was found on, so he is able to control the future of
the new discovery.
Of course, it would not have been unusual for the average visitor to Luxor to
miss the point of the resort’s strange design. With its odd mixture of the fantastic
and the historical, Luxor was simply the latest—and perhaps most conceptual—
installment in Vegas’s strange pastiche approach to architecture and theming.
Like the other large hotels that anchor the corner of Tropicana and Las Vegas
Boulevard, Luxor presents an immensely imposing facade. After the appearance of
Luxor, perhaps grandness was necessary just as a way to keep up. Indeed, it’s not
an exaggeration to say that the mega-hotels have their own skylines—something
3.5 Sphinx at made literal after the opening of New York, New York, located on the strip next
the Luxor Casino to Excalibur. Even with these elaborate external dressings, however, in the main,
all the casino complexes feel the same: each has a lavish pool area; a huge casino 3.6 Luxor Casino
or two; a hotel tower—towers being important to pack in as many guests as
possible; a buffet area; a couple of theatres; and, finally, some theming in order
to distinguish the products. Yet, despite the hype that each new themed Vegas
hotel generated—the Stratosphere; New York, New York; Monte Carlo; Bellagio;
Paris—the fact is that Vegas is about gambling, not about the interactive cultural
synergy that Walt Disney created in the 1950s when he unveiled a new concept
for a theme park and linked it to a television show based upon the same idea. This
was a conceptual breakthrough that changed the landscape of popular culture—
and how we think about space and the built environment—forever. Vegas may be
attempting to learn from Disney, as we’ve all learned from Las Vegas, but for the
purposes of sucking in more guests to gamble, not for them to enjoy theme parks.
Luxor was later topped by the new MGM Grand Hotel, a rebuilt casino that more
than dwarfs the original MGM Grand that was destroyed by fire. The new MGM
even had its own theme park. That is, though the resort is themed for the Wizard
of Oz, there was also on the premises a separate theme park—a mini Six Flags or
Busch Gardens. Interestingly, it doesn’t appear that many people went there and
it was closed as part of a major upgrade made to the resort in 2000. In fact, the
theme park seemed in every possible way like an afterthought—or certainly not
the primary reason that anyone would want to visit MGM. Once again, the question
gets begged: in the end, what is the product that the casinos are selling? And, of
course, what are we to make of a theme park that doesn’t theme very well? Would
one go into MGM’s theme park if it were less derivative and functioned in either
3.7 New York, of the two ways that most theme parks function: either as themed environments
New York
(Disneyland), or as a place with ever-increasingly larger or rougher roller coasters
(the Six Flags chain of amusement parks)? Or was MGM’s theme park just the
equivalent of the rather mediocre $3 prime rib dinner? What do you expect, after
all, if it’s more or less free? Unlike Disney World, in Vegas one is handed pornography
as one walks along the Strip. Though there is elaborate security, there is also the
feeling that—as one sees in the tragic death of rapper Tupac Shakur—there is
the possibility of violence. There is also the tawdriness of much of the downtown,
and the obvious knowledge that Vegas plays on the ideas of sophistication and
insiderness, rather than fantasy and/or nostalgia such as one has at a Disney park.
Indeed, Vegas is about getting ripped off, enjoying the grift. The disorientation of
light and sound that occurs at Vegas 24-hours a day is not planned to amuse, but
to distract—or attract—for the reasons of getting you to spend more money. The
carny atmosphere of the state fair—the very thing Walt Disney so wanted to erase
or suppress in his parks—is very much alive at Vegas. This atmosphere permeates
the place at all levels, sitting very much at odds with the idea of “family” or even
of “children.” Vegas is not for those who disdain overkill, but likewise, it isn’t for
those who don’t understand the enjoyment of gambling—and the often related
pleasures of scopophilia, drinking, and feeling that you are getting a lot of food and
a lot of high-class entertainment at rock bottom prices. You pay for Vegas, but only
indirectly, by feeding the slots rather than the waiter.
Though the Vegas resort hotels attempted to create the same kind of all-
encompassing isolation from the world that Disney does, unlike Disney, Vegas
corporate designers don’t make their amusements

accessible. If Disney creates “lands” or a “worlds” that
you are asked to explore and to get lost in, Vegas is a
semiotic system of signs that function in such a way
as to tell you only enough to catch you attention, but
not necessarily as much information as you might like
to have. To access the narrative of Luxor you had to
pay to see three separate movies. As Taylor observes,
the meaning behind Luxor was finally, like the space-
age hieroglyphs, “indecipherable” and “irreducibly
cryptic.”19 Themes must normally work as stories
that involve the viewer or participant in a narrative.
Vegas tells you nothing about itself other than what
you see—what was once transmitted via the signs
and that is now implicit in the architectural theming.
Disney attempts to “educate” its public by offering
mountains of information about how a particular
lake was dredged, or what the historical referent for
a particular ride’s architecture is, but Vegas, like the
“Mob” that created it, wants you to know as little as
possible. You aren’t allowed to take photographs of the slot machines at Caesar’s 3.8 Detail of New
Palace. To enter into Vegas is to enter into an entire city of muted communication. York, New York
There is no one to talk to; random interpersonal communication between guests
is extremely unlikely; there are no information packets about the casinos. Vegas
is a sign that consists of such a jumble of referents (extreme pastiche), that they
don’t relate to anything real, but then they don’t relate to anything simulated (or
representational) at all. To do either thing would be to communicate something to
the viewer. Vegas prefers to remain silent.
Vegas finally didn’t really try to offer the experience of theming that Disney does.
What Vegas provided for most visitors instead was a strange mix of the elite—the
myth of the underground world of the high roller—and the chance to wallow in
one’s own middle-classness: finding the cheapest buffet in town, for instance.
These two “cultures” manage to exist in a very comfortable relation to each other,
but this relationship also partly explains the schizoid aspects of Vegas’s theming.
Does “Las Vegas World” really know what it wants to be? Doesn’t there have to be
a meta-theme at work for the other themes to function? (For example, EPCOT as
the future, and the future as spatial.) Doesn’t there also have to be a sense of trust
between the person experiencing the place and the company—rather than one
built upon suspicion? If environment, as opposed to spectacle or show, are what
people want, then Vegas isn’t a threat to Disney—even with the mammoth hotels
like Luxor and MGM Grand. Lounge acts are still what Vegas does well. Originally
a combination of comedy, strip tease, and singing, the latest formulation seems
to be an unobjectionable performer such as a magician paired with a comic
who performs “adult” humor. The lounge act stresses the way in which Vegas is a
couple’s place, rather than a family place. Or, one might say, Vegas is the destination
for young, as yet childless couples: those who are not quite ready for the family
paradigm. These young people constitute one of many waves of visitors: busses
of West Coasters on the weekends; foreign tourists; older visitors on respirators,
seemingly here on, or for, their last breath.
At the OZ Buffet in MGM, people used to sit on the white picket fence because
there was no place to wait for the buffet to open. If one just wants to watch people
gamble, then one has to sit at a slot machine—with one’s back turned towards it.
Basic human needs are not acknowledged at Vegas, even though the traditions of
Vegas are to encourage human waste. One overeats, overgambles, overdrinks, in
the middle of a desert, in a postmodern environment that is literally a manmade
oasis that one flies into at night, so that one will forget about time, forget that one
is, indeed, any longer on the planet at all. The socialist idea that everyone should
eat well cheaply is used to serve a conservative capitalist ethos. Everyone can enjoy
Vegas, though there is a distinction between the big-spender and the three-night
guest. Someone else’s everyday existence becomes yours for a while: or at least
the simulation of it does. No auteuristic spirit need abide here. The casinos avoid
innovation because they can just borrow it. Disney does this, too, but it Disnifies
its sources. Vegas never tries to make something that is borrowed into something
new—tackier, bigger maybe—but that’s not the same thing.
What really works best in Vegas are structures or environments that are themed
3.9 Petroglyph in a restrained way—or perhaps inadvertently as nostalgia for Vegas’s traditional
glitz. Theming in Vegas is interactive and full-scaled, while the sort of fantasy world
of Disney’s Magic Kingdom section is not in evidence. Vegas is about monotony:
each casino replicates the same thing over and over again. All the casinos are
the same, separated only by their themes, which are clearly secondary. Disney, in
contrast, has one of everything (one camp ground, merry-go-round ride, haunted
house, and so on), but each is part of the integrated system of Disney thematics.
Vegas is a repeating island, or oasis, or mirage, but the repetition is serial. The
desert may be, finally, the ultimate paradigm here. The ancient paleographies that
encrust the rocks outside the city are also hieroglyphs, parts of a sign system that
stand out from the beauty of the natural surroundings. The desert reflects not
back onto Vegas, but echoes or structures its inability to seem inevitable, ancient,
or overwhelming, even as it presents the spectacle of its own always-recurring
discovery.
Gambling on the Future
Vegas as it exists on the Strip is gambling as a postmodern phenomenon: family

entertainment that completely avoids any acknowledgement that pleasure and
leisure consumption should come about in any form other than via the glitz of
Vegas-style simulacra. The total reliance on capitalist markers of excess sit in odd
contrast to the simultaneous reification of one’s position outside the hierarchy of
show business, say, as well as within the middle-class tourist paradigm. One is an
insider to one’s own stratification. Laying the odds on gambling as both financial
bonanza as well as a new paradigm for mass entertainment is to bet on the future
in which the nascent optimism of much consumer leisure production is exchanged
for a future where the odds are set by the house. One becomes, in a casino, a
betting machine: an anonymous part in an infinitely replicating orgy of self-
denial. Casinos go beyond the Disney paradigm to create worlds that are devoid
of not only spontaneity and play, but even of limited choice or everyday freedom.
Casinos and gaming generally offer a glimpse of the next wave of postmodernist
themed culture. Though the iconography of gambling is that of the frontier and
the nineteenth-century landscape of the US, the goals of casino designers and
the corporate avatars of gaming are ones firmly set on the continued growth of
popular culture. One need only look at the $70 million themed environment, Star
Trek: The Experience, that opened in the Vegas Hilton to understand the synergy
perceived to be at work between an entertainment conglomerate like Viacom, the
owner of the Star Trek franchise, and an international hotel chain like Hilton. Vegas
may become the place to go to for pop cultural experiences that cannot be had
anywhere else. What Vegas may eventually evolve into is as yet unknown, but that
it is to be a major player in postmodern cultural production now seems inevitable.
Taylor sees the new architecture of the strip as existing beyond the categories of
modernism and postmodernism:
If modernism has lessons to learn from Las Vegas, it is because Las Vegas has
always understood modernism better than modernists themselves. Like the
desires circulating through it, ornament never disappears even when it is denied.
The Strip strips bare the pretenses of modernism by exposing structure as
ornament and form as figure rather than ground. If ground is figure and figure
ground, foundations collapse.20
But if implosion does occur, as Taylor suggests, then Vegas isn’t the “ground zero” of
a war between Le Corbusier and Gehry but an evolution in the themed environment
that either freezes at the flashpoint because of the inevitable allegiance that
theming has to gambling, or suggests a form of themed architecture that takes the
lessons of Disney but applies them to corporate competitiveness to create a new
form of theming as spectacle—as a non-narrative hyperspace that questions or
extends the definition of architecture as a mere physical entity rather than as the
simulacrum of an event.
In the 7 June, 1958, issue of The Nation, Julian Halevy speculates on the relation
between Disneyland, then only three years old, and Las Vegas to conclude
that both of these institutions exist for the relief of tension and boredom, as
tranquilizers for social anxiety, and they both provide fantasy experiences
in which not-so-secret longings are pseudo-satisfied. Their huge profits and
mushrooming growth suggest that as conformity and adjustment become more
rigidly imposed on the American scene, the drift to fantasy release will become a
flight.21
He was, of course, correct in this prediction and in the idea that Vegas is not
about gambling so much as the illusion of gambling as the house always has the
advantage and gamblers play the house, not each other. Likewise, the atmosphere
of Vegas is distinct from Disney, though it is related in that one travels to Vegas to
enter—or reenter—a specific kind of place:
You live in a luxury world where the fact of money seems beneath notice; a world
of Olympic swimming pools, hanging gardens, waitresses beautiful as movie
stars, marble baths and bars a block long … royal buffets and obsequious waiters
offering free drinks. The illusion is created that we are all rich, that money means
nothing.22
The difference between Disney and Vegas is that, for the latter, money is the fantasy,
though money becomes illusory—it either disappears or it seems to magnify in its
power to buy. In either case, you feel tacky for holding on to it as though you thought
it had value. Money, in Vegas, becomes what you learn to forget. The fantasy, if you
buy it, is that money has no meaning in life—that it is either something we can live
without, or something that we can give up for the feeling that the distraction is
value enough. If Disney World offers escape as fantasy—as themed stories we can
enter via nostalgia or the pre-programmed sense of following the prescription of
the family vacation—Vegas offers the thrill of forming a habit, deciding that giving
your money away for free is fun to you. Constituting the excitement of the illusion
of chance, it is a choice you make.
Vegas, Phase III
The Las Vegas of the twenty-first century is in many ways a changed place. The
hoped for family dream of Vegas in the 1970s and 1980s has given way to a new
non-family vibe (“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”).23 Las Vegas Boulevard
and Tropicana Avenue are now eight lanes across. At the street level, Vegas has an
increasing sense of urbanization—that every square inch is taken up. The Vegas
built for the automobile seems to have changed into a more pedestrian-friendly
mock-urban space. The Vegas of Venturi and Reyner Banham has been replaced
with one that is no longer readable from the road.24 While Ian Buchanan might be
right that Vegas has become one version of a “non-place,” “movement” is not what
defines Vegas now.25 Though the road may have made Los Angeles, the argument
about whether or not the car creates a new kind of architecture or impedes it has
come full circle in Vegas, which seems once again to support the foot traffic and
flow that is defined by procession and the design of casinos as a series of ramps
that allows people to flow through them—like the moving sidewalks at airports.
The effects of Vegas that Mike Davis describes as “a hyperbolic Los Angeles”
may be true in terms of housing and, especially, the misuse of natural resources
and the end point of a certain kind of negative attitude toward sustainability as
private companies are allowed to control the urban center of Vegas politically,
geographically, architecturally, and sociologically, it’s not clear that Vegas is Los
Angeles in terms of cars.26 While Vegas’s periphery is of a piece with all sunbelt
sprawl, the Strip itself and Fremont Street are now almost more urban than
suburban, and the negative or failed future that is on display at Vegas is both a
separation from and intensification of the Southern California culture of which it
seems increasingly to be a part.
Circus Circus—one of the few casinos that still has an amusement park—is left
by itself at the wrong end of the Strip, next to the condos between Encore and the
original downtown. Despite the sense of economic trouble, the Strip, the original
outlaying area, is striking in its density. As Rem Koolhaas notes, the biggest change
in Vegas since the time it was analyzed by Venturi is that
Las Vegas is now a hypersubstantial condition, an accumulation of brutal mass,

where the scale of objects utterly overwhelms any message. Sign has become
hypertrophied, overwhelmed by substance ….27
Most tourists don’t seem to be here to gamble anymore. Whether Vegas has
changed or the economy has forced a change, Vegas seems to be about drinking,
eating, entertaining. It seems more a destination for the people who want glamour
and a sense of luxury that would cost more elsewhere. To some extent Vegas
probably has gone more upscale, catering to people’s wish that, even as middle-
class Americans, they can taste how the other side lives. Certainly that is true in
terms of hotels, but the sense of luxury is also, like everything in Vegas, delivered
with a certain generic quality.
The building boom continues more or less unabated and has provided Vegas
with yet another generation of casinos like New York, New York, which has been
3.10 Circus Circus very successful at elaborate theming and is the end result of the 1970s era of
family-oriented casinos begun by Circus Circus. More recently, Bellagio attempted
to re-define Vegas as “artsy” or “European.” An offshoot of Caesar’s, the Bellagio
perhaps really established Vegas casinos as a new formula: mammoth scale; one
“wiener,” as Walt Disney called the central attraction in a themed environment, in
this case, an art museum; one signature exterior defining image—in this case, the
wonderful fountains; and lots of opportunities for shopping. The Bellagio was soon
followed by the similarly themed Venetian, with its faux interior street scene (like
Caesar’s Palace) and inside/outside gondola rides, and Paris, with its ride to the
top of its own Eiffel Tower. All of this generation of casinos have their appropriate
shops (wine shops for Paris, delis for New York, and so forth) and restaurants. The
next style is represented by the Wynn/Encore combo: casinos with a much more
pleasant interior sense of space, which emphasize nature (butterflies in the Encore)
and abstract art (the great waterfall and sculptures at the Wynn). Together, the two
casinos emphasize sophistication with restraint: something that couldn’t stick out
more in the landscape of Vegas. Though delayed, the City Center complex seems to
take this new late-modernist style a step further.
Essentially, all of the various phases of Vegas exist simultaneously on the
Strip, though there is always the sense that there is something new in Vegas. It’s
a competition: Excalibur beats the original Sands, then loses to Bellagio, which
loses to the Wynn, itself in competition with the younger, hipper Cosmopolitan.
Yet only the oldest casinos get torn down (The Dunes, The Sands) to make way
for the newest version of theming. The MGM conveniently burned down. But the
3.11 The Wynn
3.12 Interior of Encore

new casinos continue to ignore reality. There are no eco-friendly casinos, no gay
casinos, not even any true non-white or non-US casinos. The illusion is ultimate
choice for adults, a fantasy playground. Yet nothing is easy to find. Signage is
poor. Destinations are placed as far away from the front entrance as possible (the
aquarium at Mandalay Bay, the art museum at Bellagio). You have to go past as may
shops or as many slot machines as possible to get there. Each casino is a theme park
or a country in miniature—a fiefdom that only grudgingly admits the existence of
other casinos (or other gaming or hotel companies, since most are a part of a family
of casinos: Paris/Rio, for example, are a part of Harrah’s). Yet each casino also offers
a number of options and allows adults to get lost on purpose. Indeed, the ideal of
Vegas designers seems to be to keep you in stasis, to keep you frozen in time where
you can spend and spend without going anywhere. While most visitors to Vegas
are probably not that into gambling (at least the younger or poorer visitors aren’t),
they do happily surrender their sense of time, staying up all night, crossing the
street in lemur-like droves, drinking and spending with abandon. Vegas condones
this behavior, whether it is the “club-like” atmosphere of the Wet Republic at the
MGM Grand or the Bare pool at the Mirage, Vegas attempts to play to the sexual
content of younger visitors. Vegas becomes an “only in Vegas zone”—a place for
doing the opposite of what you are supposed to do, that is, keep a schedule, stay
sober, and be responsible.
Vegas’s one nod to urban cooperation is its monorail system, the uselessness
of which is illustrated in a voiceover announcement that “mono means one.” The
stations are set as far away from the street as possible. Since tourists move about
on foot or in rental cars and casino service workers use the two-story bus that runs
up and down the Strip, the monorail becomes just another entertainment rather
than actual transportation, much like the children’s destinations that some of the
casinos have: obligatory and well done, but clearly extraneous. The Siegfried and
Roy Secret Garden of white tigers (with Dolphin exhibit) at the Mirage and the
Mandalay Bay aquarium are, like the contemporary art museum at the Bellagio,
necessary medicine—seemingly things that are good for you, but only popular
with children. That is, the dolphins, fish, and white lions are, like the other guests
of Las Vegas, well taken care of, but unlike them, they are not really native, they
are not the reason that adults are visiting sin city. No matter how much Vegas may
have once attempted to seem real and, dare we say, East Coast, it is clear that the
reason people come here is to have, not just a good time, but a decadently non-
mental one. The zoos and aquaria may exist as environmental habitats, but no one
really cares. The various features to get you in to the casinos depend upon a certain
lowest common denominator. The shark exhibit seems to assume that you know
absolutely nothing about fish or their international management; the art museum,
all two rooms of it, that you have never been to one or taken a serious look at a
painting; the dolphin habitat, that it is a shock to see animals as something other
than cuddly mammals meant solely for our pleasure. There is, arguably, nothing
about Vegas that requires anything of people. To be tourist-friendly, Vegas, like
Orlando or New Orleans, has to be its own version of the big easy.
In the main casinos, like MGM Grand, the slot machines and gaming tables
almost seem to have been squeezed out by the high-end restaurants and shops.
While the ratio of one to the other varies with the property, they both seem to have 3.13 Mandalay
slowly taken over and made Vegas both more high-end and also more generically Bay
suburban (like a high-end mall or an airport—Pittsburgh, Atlanta—that has
melded shops with semi-public spaces). Increasingly, gone are the cheap buffets
and constant emphasis on slot machines. The movement toward well-heeled non-
gambling spenders seems to suggest that a lot of money is still being spent in
Vegas, though one may now begin to question whether or not Vegas is overbuilt.
Though its size keeps increasingly dramatically, it has the highest number of
foreclosures in the country, has seen a 20 percent drop in the number of tourists
in recent years and a lot of layoffs in the casino industry.28 The Westgate Planet
Hollywood addition was left unfinished for a long time and other unfinished
projects are not hard to find. Near the Strip, behind the MGM property, for example,
there is another project that was left at ground level. “All of this, Dubai,” as one cab
driver told me. People seem to be in the casinos, but not playing. There are hordes
of tourists on the weekend—drunk young people from California carrying around
plastic cups. Vegas has become an extension of Los Angeles—an entertainment
capital that sells images and shows, food and wine, and is always willing to change
to fit the company it keeps.
In a recent interview the first theoreticians of Vegas architecture, Denise Scott
Brown and Robert Venturi, describe the attributes of old Vegas as “iconographic
sprawl” and “signage,” which they put in contrast to recent Vegas design that is
“scenographic like Disneyland.”29 Their interviewer, Rem Koolhaas, goes even
further to describe the changes in Vegas since their book in 1972:
the archetype of unreality … has, through sheer mass, become a real city. So Las
Vegas seems to be one of the few cities to become paradigmatic twice in 30 years
….30
Anna Klingmann explains that current Vegas architecture functions by “synthesis,

not analysis.” Designers
taking bits and pieces from the past quite eclectically and stitching them together
in a collage of equally important phenomena, largely divorced from geography
and material history, transported to the gambling halls of the casinos in a
more or less uninterrupted flow. […] Emotional involvement, associations, and
experience are assumed models of reception, carefully planned and executed in
an intense environment of time-space compression.31
The giant megaresorts are “seemingly arbitrary” but in fact form
a coherent narrative. This animated reading of architecture operates under the

assumption that structures are never experienced in their totality but rather as
a series of still pictures that are linked and completed in the imagination of the
visitor, similar to what occurs in a movie.32
While this description is perhaps too generous, as casinos are certainly made to
entrap customers and their narratives are clunky, at best, the construction of casino
architecture has clearly gone beyond the dictates of the sign on the country road
3.14 Paris to become a plastic mixing of sensory overload and deprivation.
Notes
1 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The
Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991), 17.
3 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York:
Routledge, 1988), 25.
4 Hutcheon, 26.
5 Hutcheon, 26.
6 Hutcheon, 30.
7 Hutcheon, 39.
8 Jameson, Postmodernism, 108.
9 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 143.
10 Jameson, Seeds, 185.
15 Paul Rubeli, Theming—The Casino Marketing Strategy of the 90s, sound cassette
(Brooklyn, NJ: Conference Copy, Inc., 1991).
16 Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 259.
17 Taylor, 261.
18 The Making of Luxor, dir. Scott Morris. Scott Morris Productions, Inc., 1994.
19 Taylor, 248.
20 Taylor, 250.
21 Julian Halevy, “Disneyland and Las Vegas,” The Nation, 7 June 1958: 513.
22 Halevy, 511.
23 A cousin of mine who grew up in Germany and lived and gambled in Vegas on and off
for many years claimed that families are not good for Vegas because they don’t spend
enough at casinos. The essence of Vegas, for her, was its constant stimulation. Vegas
doesn’t close down, even New York City does. Gisela Matthews, personal interview, 24
April 1997.
24 As Bernard Tschumi notes, “By order of experience, one speaks of time, of chronology,
of repetition. But some architects are suspicious of time and would wish their
buildings to be read at a glance, like billboards.” Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and
Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 161.
25 Ian Buchanan, “Space in the Age of Non-Place,” Deleuze and Space, (ed.) Ian Buchanan
and Gregg Lambert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 20.
26 Mike Davis, Dead Cites, and Other Tales (New York: The New Press, 2002), 91.
27 Rem Koolhaas, et al., Mutations (Barcelona: ACTAR; Bordeaux: Arc en rêve centre
d’architecture, 2000), 65.
28 “Vegas’s population doubles every 10 years; at this rate, in 2020, it will be one trillion
people”—monorail recording.
29 Rem Koolhaas and Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Content (Köln: Taschen, 2004),
150, 151.
30 Koolhaas and Office of Metropolitan Architecture, 151.
31 Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007), 195.
32 Klingmann, 207.
4
In Her Majesty’s Secret Closet: Bond’s Body
In his one book about Las Vegas, Diamonds Are Forever (1956), Ian Fleming includes
a paragraph on the vicissitudes of casino architecture, which he describes as “The
Gilded Mousetrap School”
since once you tried to reach your objective—buy a paper … at the news stand,
have a drink or a meal in one of the … restaurants … there was no way of
reaching your objective without passing between the banks of slot machines
and gambling tables. And when you were trapped in the vortex of the whirring
machines, amongst which there sounded always, from somewhere, the
intoxicating silvery cascade of coins into a metal cup … you were lost.
At first, Bond considers this disorientation pleasurable, something that can’t be

resisted, only then to conclude
it could be a trap only for peculiarly insensitive mice …. It was an inelegant trap,
obvious and vulgar, and the noise of the machines had a horrible mechanical
ugliness which beat at the brain.1
Fleming’s take on Vegas becomes, to some extent, one of his most sustained
statements on US culture in general, and its built environment in particular. For
Fleming, Vegas is “hood-ridden”; in Goldfinger, Auric Goldfinger hosts a “hoods’
congress” at his stud farm in Kentucky.2 The US, for Fleming, is defined by villains
who not only run Vegas but, seemingly, the country as a whole.3
A part of the formula of the Bond film franchise is that the hero has always
made his way in the world by romancing beautiful women and defeating corrupt
villains. Yet Bond’s nominal heterosexual identity must always function in relation
to the villain’s “perversity.” Bond depends upon the villain’s sexuality as a sort of
negative definition of his own.4 Indeed, Bond’s subjectivity is tainted both by his
intimacy with the villain and his frequent cruelty to the “Bond girl.” During the
Connery era (1962–1971), Bond is implicated in homosexual and sado-masochistic
scenarios that arguably reach their most complex form in Diamonds Are Forever
(1971). Connery’s last film with EON Productions, Diamonds is unique in the Bond
oeuvre by having as its villains a gay male couple. The film is the first in the Bond
franchise to deal directly with the threat to Bond’s sexuality brought about by the
Stonewall riots and the rise of a burgeoning gay-rights movement. While earlier
Bond films frequently dealt with the threat of women’s rights—most often in the
form of a lesbian character (From Russia with Love, 1963, for example)—Diamonds
Are Forever introduced the notion of gay male desire as a new reality for Bond and
his future dealings. It also marked a turning point in the franchise from cold-war
spy drama to spectacular melodrama, or from 1960s seriousness to 1970s comedy.
The film is a post-mortem on the franchise itself and a prescient examination of
the corporeality of film—specifically as a male body designed to be observed and
examined, but never touched. The film is symptomatic of various anxieties around
the male body that result, in part, from the insecurity that propels nation-states to
spy on each other: spying becomes its own excuse for men to look at each other,
watch, and ultimately ignore the realities of their own actions.
The strange mixture of comedy and nastiness that characterizes the film begins
in the opening teaser, the pre-credit sequence that is by this film a part of the
franchise formula. We hear Sean Connery’s voice, but don’t see his face, while he
beats up two men, one in Japan and one in Cairo, Connery emerging, finally, by the
pool to confront a woman named “Marie.” Connery, as Bond, grabs the top part of
the woman’s bikini and wraps it around her neck, choking her and threatening her
with death unless she tells him the location of Ernst Blofeld, his frequent enemy and
nemesis once again in this film. The sequence ends with Bond confronting Blofeld
in Mexico where he has apparently gone to oversee the construction of three
duplicates of himself—men changed through plastic surgery to resemble him.5
Bond dispenses with one man while he sits in a bed of molding plastic poured from
a sphincter-like vat and then apparently kills Blofeld after a knife fight by dumping
him into a Dantesque pit of sulfur.6 “Welcome to Hell, Blofeld,” quips Bond.7
This particular sequence sets up at least three themes that will function
throughout the movie:
1. The cruelty associated with Connery’s version of Bond, made famous later
in an interview with Barbara Walters in which Connery argued for the
necessity of hitting women in order to teach them a lesson, finally crosses
over into misogyny on the screen.
2. The use of the double (or of multiple versions of the same person) is
emphasized and will be picked up as a trope of the film connected
especially to the notion of male homosexuality in the form of the villain as a
split subject position, two gay men, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, who literally and
figuratively project a new instability within male sexuality.
3. The beginning of the image of refuse, of excrement and anal expulsion that
will become the film’s final metaphor.
The return of Connery in the role of Bond comes after the visible emergence
of women’s rights and the dawning realization that there would be a political
element to the visibility of gay and lesbian rights. The film seems to react to
In Her Majesty’s Secret Closet: Bond’s Body 95
both of these realities while at the same time looking backward to the era of the
Connery franchise. The film immediately preceding Diamonds was the only Bond
film not starring Connery, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Released in 1969, it was
the last Bond film of the 1960s—the decade still most associated with the Bond
phenomenon. It was not considered a success by the producers, Harry Saltzman and
Albert R. Broccoli, mainly because of Lazenby’s presumed limitations as an actor. In
hindsight, however, the film has grown in stature, often considered by many as a
superior film qua film, if not, perhaps, a great Bond film. Much of this judgment
is based upon the casting of Diana Rigg as the primary “Bond girl.” Rigg not only
brings to the role a great deal of subtlety and intelligence, but Lazenby, whether
consciously or not, gives Bond a certain amount of complementary vulnerability.
The film ends first with a climactic scene in which Rigg, as Tracy, gets to show off
her fighting abilities—à la the Avengers—and then dies in an attack by Blofeld
just after getting married to Bond. The film shows that this Bond girl has some
substance and is not, in other words, just another girl. At the same time, it allows
us to see that Bond has grown, has developed a weak spot precisely by allowing
someone into his life. By ending the film on a down note, the producers feared
that they had let down the public rather than assuming that their attempt to grow
the character had produced a superior artistic achievement. Diamonds was, then,
a reaction to this perceived misstep, an attempt to pretend that On Her Majesty’s
Secret Service had never happened. Nowhere in Diamonds does Bond ever mention
having once had a wife, though his search for Blofeld in the pre-credits sequence
is supposed to suggest his ruthless desire for revenge and, to some extent, link the
two films thematically, if not tonally.
In harking back to a moment before On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the creators
of the Bond franchise looked to what was considered by many critics and fans as
the high-water mark of the franchise, 1964’s Goldfinger. Here the different parts
of the Bond formula came most completely together: Gert Fröbe as the laser-
wielding Auric Goldfinger, Oddjob and his equally-castrating bowler hat, the nude
gold-laced Bond girl, the Aston Martin, and so forth. The franchise even began to
develop a sense of humor about itself in this film, a sense that it could relax and
perhaps didn’t have anything to prove since it had finally become a phenomenon in
its own right. What people perhaps fail to remember about this film is that it is also
uncomfortably misogynistic. From Bond’s dismissal of the soon-to-be gold plated
character with a pat on the rear when he is talking with his FBI friend Felix Leiter
(“Men’s work.”) to the conversion of Pussy Galore from Amazonian lesbian private
pilot and henchwoman to lover and loyal defender of the West after a roll in the hay
with Bond, the film treats the sexuality of women as not only childlike, but totally
malleable in the presence of Bond. While other films during the Connery years have
less objectionable, or at least somewhat neutral, portrayals of women, Goldfinger
stands out as not having aged well. Diamonds was originally supposed to retell
that film, which had been reconceived by Cubby Broccoli at some point after he
had the inspiration to meld the story with the myth of Howard Hughes. In the final
form of the film, however, the plot is muddled and the yoking of the Hughes idea to
the basic retelling of Goldfinger drags the film down—or, perhaps, makes the plot
somewhat beside the point. What remains of the Goldfinger idea seems to be in an
attitude toward women that harkens back to the early 1960s when the Bond films
were born. The connections to Goldfinger also show up in the soundtrack: not just
in the title song sung once again by Shirley Bassey, but also in the extensive use
of American settings.8 In Goldfinger, Kentucky figured prominently; in Diamonds, it
is Las Vegas that represents America’s interest in the sparkle of both real and fake
diamonds, of a sort of egalitarian spectacle of consumption, showmanship, and
technology. Interestingly, nothing seems to be real here: Bond crashes onto the
set of astronauts using a moon buggy; Bond’s hotel suite in the Whyte House is
clearly a movie set that looks about as real as a room in an Astaire-Rodgers picture;
and so on.9 All of the American locales are contrasted to the European ones—Bond
meeting with “M” in London; Bond killing Peter Franks in Amsterdam. The US seems
as fake as the neon billboards on Fremont Street. The few glimpses we have of
a real US, such as a scene set in a service station, emphasize its basic ugliness—
exposed power lines, cheap paving, fat and/or ugly inhabitants.
The basic reality of Vegas is that it is not what it claims to be, or what it seems.
Bond spends much of his screen time in elevators, tunnels, behind the scenes. The
sense of Las Vegas as a duplicitous place is further underlined by the two main gay
characters, who are related somehow to this same grotesquery. Wint and Kidd, as
played by Bruce Glover (father of Crispin Glover) and Putter Smith, are contrasted in
their physical attributes, but must function together as the villain. They are not just
lovers, but a team: we never see them apart; they complete each other’s sentences.
The physical malformation of the villain is replaced with the notion of homosexuality
as something missing that even doubling can’t replace. Homosexuality becomes
an endless signifier, much like the three copies of Blofeld (mirrored in the fact that
he has more than one fluffy white cat to stroke). Duplicating men is never the same
thing as creating one good man—that is, Bond, that is, Connery. Lazenby can’t take
his place, no one can; he is the origin and the only real thing in the desert.
The problem with this formulation, of course, is that it isn’t true. Connery made it
quite clear before he agreed to appear in the film that this was going to be his last
time out as Bond, a fact that proved true as far as EON Productions was concerned.
Connery received over $1.2 million to star in the film—the highest at the time—
and then donated it all to charity. The producers knew, in other words, that though
the film attempted to conjure the early 1960s, the death of the originary Bond was
imminent. The extent to which Connery and Bond were one and the same thing
created a problem for the film that resulted in anxiety about the very definition of
maleness, of what might be considered real. What is Bond? More specifically, what
is he to men? To the British or American males of a certain age Bond internalized
central aspects of male identity: Do you want to be like him, or to have him? To what
extent does the sameness of Bond—his chromosomal male sex—get confused
with his gender—his cultural re-definition of maleness as a mixture of British-ness,
toughness, consumption, coldness, professionalism, loyalty, and self-awareness?
The film’s answer, that Bond is Connery, clearly splits the film apart. Connery is a
copy of himself: coming back into the role, but he is changed, different. The gay
male couple is at most an attempt to split the difference. Similarity of sex does not
create similarity of gender. Bond feels pity for Wint and Kidd, but not sympathy.
Connery walks through the film comfortably, but also never works up a sweat,
never takes anything too seriously. The gay male presence in the film is displaced
onto the plot as the threat from the villain, while the actual threat to identity
appears everywhere else. For a film series that emphasizes sex, Bond’s relationship
with the one Bond girl on display, Miss Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) is particularly
lacking in sexual sparks. While their initial meeting in Amsterdam is hopefully full
of sexual innuendo (“That’s quite a nice little nothing you’re almost wearing”), by
the time Bond sleeps with her, he hangs up his dinner jacket before getting into
bed. The supposedly real villain of the film, Blofeld, is given a surprisingly strange
treatment by talented character actor Charles Gray, who portrays him as effeminate,
supposedly jealous of Bond’s relationship with Tiffany, but also appearing to her at
one point in a disguise that consists of a dress and wig.
While the gender markers are clearly confused they don’t just signal anxiety
about men. When Bond closes in on the prison in which the millionaire Willard
Whyte has been kept, the scene is filmed in architect John Lautner’s ultimate
bachelor pad, the Elrod House (1968), which fuses with the desert landscape and
even brings it inside. In this setting, the final threat that Bond must overcome
appears in the form of two lesbian bodyguards who come closer than anyone else
to keeping Bond from his appointed rounds. That Bond finally defeats them through
sheer brute force—and not one, but two—is part of the film’s intended mythos—
in the form of Connery, Bond is now larger than life. The twining throughout the
film—from the two sisters in Amsterdam who built a bridge so that they could visit
with each other to the scientist that Bond impersonates at the rocket facility—the
film positions Bond in two places at once—the past and the present, but not in
the future. Limited only by futurity, the franchise will go on, but no one knows
how. Things will change, but no one knows if it will be for the better. Given this
uncertainty, the franchise’s producers looked for a future in Bond’s pre-Lazenby
past where conservatism triumphs over women, gay men, change itself.
The film’s ultimately negative attitude toward the necessity of change is seen
throughout in the form of its final trope of analyity. Bond slips the cassette tape
that controls Blofeld’s satellite system into Tiffany’s bikini bottom; he ties the bomb
meant for him to Wint’s coattails. The pleasure of the anal and of putting it in its
place exists throughout the film in much the same way that women do—to be both
admired and feared, used and avoided. While the bottoms of Vegas chorus girls are
admired longingly in the film, the reduction of male-male desire to the same thing
ultimately takes over. Upon landing at LAX with the body of the drug smuggler
Peter Franks, Bond’s American friend Felix Leiter asks him where he has concealed
the diamonds on the body, to which Bond replies, “Alimentary, Dr. Leiter.” The
body is promptly burned so that the refuse it leaves behind will be precious. Bond
himself almost gets incinerated at the same funeral parlor. Death as waste lingers
everywhere. Bond is knocked unconscious only to wake up in a rat-infested metal
pipe far out in the desert.10 He breaks into Willard Whyte’s penthouse by way of
the bathroom—the room Whyte uses to monitor his gaming empire.11 Bond finds
himself everywhere confronted by the spectacle of shame, of an American way of
life that is, like Vegas itself, based on the needless multiplication of consumption,
on the idea of having too much and then needing to get rid of it.
Diamonds is unusual in filming most of its principal action in an American

setting—in and around the actual city of Las Vegas, Nevada. The American
landscape functions, at times, as a sort of anesthetized subject—a blank slate that
resists meaning or deflects it back onto the viewer.12 The desert is contrasted with
the urban Vegas dreamscape, which more properly generates meaning as a newly
“family” entertainment destination—a fact emphasized by placing a long scene in
the then new Circus Circus casino.13 True to the reality of Vegas and the mythos of
Bond, however, the film ultimately gives in to a series of adult desires—showgirls,
off-color comedians, gambling at craps. Vegas is made, in some American way,
parallel to the Bond universe. By placing Bond in an American setting in the early
1970s, Vegas becomes symptomatic of the anxieties percolating through the
body politic. Most early 1970s pop films set in contemporary American society
felt compelled to deal with the social upheavals of the time either literally (The
Andromeda Strain, 1971) or metaphorically (Westworld, 1973). While functioning
as a seemingly utopian space for its male spectators, Diamonds enacts revenge
literally and physically on the bodies of the two gay men as the feminine is replaced
by the supposed effeminacy of male homosexuality. The film as a complex reaction
to the new visibility of the queer body, which, in finally being shown, is like the
desert, presumed to be but never really understood.
If Ian Fleming created the original Bond as an answer to the anxieties of the
MI6 scandals involving gay figures like Kim Philby, then Bond represents by the
early 1970s how complex the attempt to stabilize Bond had become.14 If Bond is
a figure who could exist to counteract the lingering notion of Oscar Wilde, of the
British male as somehow an “other” of male sexuality, then Bond’s anodyne did not
last all that long.15 The one way out producers seemed almost to stumble upon
was to make recourse to humor. Bond’s way of dealing with difference, with the
coming of change, was not to take anything too seriously. The result of this was to
send the franchise into a period of popularity, the Roger Moore years, in which the
importance of Bond seemed to resonate precisely in how topical it could become.
Live and Let Die (1973), the first of the Moore films, referenced black-action films; The
Man with the Golden Gun (1974) was in part about martial arts films; in Moonraker
(1979), possibly the nadir of the entire franchise, Bond meets Star Wars (1977).
The more the Bond films avoided the real present by hiding in genre, the more
the franchise seemed to go away from those elements that made the franchise
significant in the first place—the seriousness with which it took its themes both of
death and redemption and of a new kind of twentieth-century identity. Only with
the recent Bond film, Casino Royale (2006), does the EON franchise seem to return
to the pre-Diamonds Are Forever era to reestablish what may have been important
about Bond in the beginning. This now classic reboot of the franchise once again
establishes Bond’s credibility by completely rewriting the formula and creating
one of the rarely successful prequels for a major movie series. In this version of
the Bond mythos, less is more and there is some hope that by not seeing the past
as a collision with the present the franchise will avoid repeating the mistake of
Diamonds Are Forever. Casino Royale takes Bond back to a time before Dr. No in 1962,
yet puts him spatially in the present, creating a logical paradox that still allows him
to fuse the best of both worlds. While hardly an answer to the problem of the body
and of sexuality presented in most Bond films, the approach in Casino Royale is at
least a potentially promising new beginning that complicates the divide between
normative and non-normative forms of gender and sexuality. Bond becomes Bond
again, by ignoring time and becoming only space itself. While it is too early to see
where this new start might lead, it is at least a promising possibility that Bond may
finally catch up with himself.
*****
The new version of the Bond film Casino Royale opens in Prague where the
cinematography treats the viewer to a careful black-and-white exterior of modernist
architecture redolent of post-World War II corporate manufacture, a veritable icon
of periodicity. The scene switches to the interior of a small office that sums up the
“total design” that famed set designer Ken Adam championed for the series from
the first film onwards: every wall, floor, staircase, lamp, object, and person seemed
to fit into an overall pattern of futurity, function, and knowingness—a marker for
the Bond films at their best and, subsequently, of the Connery years of the 1960s.
The visual style of the scene we are about to enter, in other words, suggests the
film series’s past, the sleek, black-and-silver world of the bachelor: masculine,
hard-edged, and hyper-modern. By opening the film in this way the director and
producers seem to signal that the look of the original Bond films now constitutes
not only a style but a retro-style, an era, an acknowledgement of a past. The very
surface of the film suggests a new type of self-consciousness for the Bond formula
about its structure, style, and function. And indeed, this film does seem on one level
to resist or even arrest its own history, to place it within a spatial construct much
like a Möbius strip in which the end twists slightly to become its own beginning.
Running counter to this spatial structure is the overall relationship that the film has
to the timeline of the series: its events take place before the events of the other
4.1 Ken Adam’s

set design for
Stanley Kubrick’s
Dr. Strangelove
(1964)
Source: Columbia
Pictures.
films, but after this brief pre-title sequence set in Prague, it takes on the look of a
contemporary movie, switching from black and white to color and to characters
that act, more or less, like they are coterminous with the present. Time, in other
words, enters the film only to be confused and undone by the spatial tropes that
the film attempts to establish as part of the deconstruction of the Bond franchise’s
elements.
The audience doesn’t realize the extent of the re-imagining taking place in the
film until it arrives at the final moments of this scene. It begins with Bond talking with
an MI6 agent gone bad, Dryden (Malcolm Sinclair), about his undercover contact,
Fisher. At one point, Dryden asks, “How did he die?” to which Bond responds, “Your
contact?” “Yes,” Dryden answers.16 “Not well,” says Bond. “Made you feel it, did he?”
asks Dryden, drily and somewhat wistfully. This exchange is significant in two ways.
First, Bond responds to his question with an interrogative, suggesting just a note
of insecurity or naiveté. Perhaps he is willing to have a real human conversation
or perhaps eager to talk to someone about his first kill. Bond, in other words, is
not fully formed and the rest of the film will be a treatise on his origins, on his
hardening into what he will become. Second, the question elicits an honest
response from Bond, “Not well.” We might think that Bond has the usual upper
hand here, as in, it was an ugly death, too bad for your compatriot, and hence, you
as well. Bond’s interlocutor, however, immediately turns the situation on its head,
“Made you feel it, did he?” The wiser older man—Bond in some number of years—
knows that death is a two-way street and that Bond is being schooled in the link
between the body and the soul. Intercut with this conversation is a flashback to the
job itself, Bond battling brutally with a villain in a black-and-white tiled bathroom:
chequered floors and white basin splattered with the dark water and blood of the
environment of public privacy. Bond gets roughed up, though not as badly as
his adversary, who refuses to die easily. The style of the photography assumes a
slightly grainy feel, the opposite of the sensual slickness of the Prague interior. The
images from the beating come in primitive bursts of memory, almost like images
Bond is already trying to suppress, but can’t quite—at least not yet. Dryden had
begun their conversation with the confident statement, “If M was so sure I was
bent, she’d have sent a Double-O.” With this flashback we now realize that Bond is
“James” but not yet “007.” The man in the bathroom was his first kill, but he needs
another. Dryden continues, “Well, no worries, the second is ….” “Yes. Considerably,”
says Bond, as he completes the thought and shoots Dryden dispassionately in the
head. A straight, simple, nearly silent kill—the sort of elegant murder we associate
with Bond and his professionalism. What we are witnessing is the birth of a Double-
O—a transition that occurs between Fisher and Dryden, the birth pangs of the first
kill and the hard-won knowledge immediately assimilated into the second. Bond
turns the tables back on the fellow spy and makes him his second victim, the badge
that earns him his identity. The Bond we thought we knew is gone. In his place is a
creature that embodies the Bond we know and also something else—a Bond we
have never known, cinematically or otherwise.
This pre-credits sequence ends with our moving back to the flashback where
Fisher, having seemingly faked his drowning in the bathroom, rises again. The last
image we see is of Bond grabbing his gun and shooting Fisher and, by extension,
the audience as the shot becomes the iconic image of Bond shooting into the
viewer of a gun that is aimed at him as the screen slowly bleeds red. Bond becomes
007, but the process has only just begun and the rest of the film will tease out
the elements that go into the other aspects of the transformation. By the time we
get to the end, Bond will have triumphed over not only his nemesis, Le Chiffre,
but also arrested the notorious Mr. White by knee-capping him and reducing him
to crawling at his feet. “Who is this?” Mr. White asks on the phone. Bond answers
by uttering his most famous line—“Bond, James, Bond”—as he steps out of the
shadows dressed in a blue version of the three-piece suit that Sean Connery wore
at the end of Goldfinger. Bond smirks noticeably before we cut to black and roll to
the credits and finally hear the iconic strains of the original Monty Norman surf
guitar theme song. The director, Martin Campbell, and the writer, Paul Haggis,
seem to suggest that the 1960s begin now, only after Bond has gone through the
events shown in the film we have just seen.
Those events are ones that take Bond on an odyssey that tests him physically
and emotionally. The clever conceit of the film is that we are getting to see Bond
again, for the first time, as though we didn’t know him, as indeed we don’t. The film
works against our sense that the character on the screen is one that we have grown
up with and that we think we know well. Just as we begin to fall into a scene or
situation that seems familiar, even traditional for the Bond genre, we are reminded
that we are, in a sense, seeing everything anew. This same conceit also allows for a
simultaneous updating of the Bond character so that he seems more like a Bond for
the present, mainly, a Bond with a body, the most physical Bond that we have had
since Connery, if not ever.17 Bond’s body gets to register everything for the first time,
and the film, rather than being merely another episode of the ongoing seriality of
the franchise, gets to pack together Bond’s life as an ingénue, as someone who is
vulnerable for the last time before he becomes the cold professional that we know.
The emphasis throughout the film on Bond’s body begins for many viewers
before they see the movie. The fact that actor Daniel Craig is blond and not in the
tall, dark, and handsome mold of Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan drove some fans
to set up sites that lambasted him even before the film appeared. His body, in other
words, was an object of extreme attention even prior to the narrative that contained
it. The creators of Casino Royale met the critics of the casting of Craig head on by
allowing him his own emergence from the waves to echo the arrival of the first
Bond girl, Ursula Andress, in Dr. No. While this trope had already been used in the
last Brosnan film, Die Another Day (2002), with Halle Berry playing the Andress role,
the switch of gendered view in Casino Royale also suggests the movement of Bond
from subject to object. While Bond’s emergence on the beach is, to some extent,
contained within the narrative of the film as he is spied for the first time both by
Solange (Caterina Murino), the first Bond “girl” of the film, as well as her husband
Demitrios (Simon Abkarian), we as viewers are asked to examine him as well.18 In a
sense, his subjectivity isn’t formed yet and his body, like his identity, is the object
of a certain amount of self-conscious scrutiny both on the screen and this scene
becomes one of many self-conscious winks to the audience.
The body of Bond is on display in a way that consciously activates what Tony
Bennett and Janet Woollacott call “a license to look,” or as they write, “the novelty
of the Bond tales, and that of mass-produced pornography generally, is it’s place
in the new organisation of sexuality in consumer capitalism.”19 The disruption of
British society, the injection of women into the work force, the swift rise of post-
colonialism, the shift within the country toward something like a meritocracy, allow
for the rise of a character like Bond. His very modernity is tied to the transcoding of
all discourses to the sexuality of advertising and branding, which opens up a space
for men to look, but also women. At the beginning of the first Bond film, Sylvia
Trench (Eunice Gayson) invites herself over to Bond’s flat in London after meeting
him at the same place we do, at the Chemin de Fer table at the club Le Cercle. When
he gets home, she is already there wearing one of his shirts—and nothing else.
While the series has certainly always emphasized Bond’s right not only to look but
to represent the male viewer’s prerogative in order to enact the male gaze of the
film audience, by placing such an emphasis on the scopohilic aspects of film, the
Bond movies, like a mass-produced version of Persona (1966), call attention to the
physicality of the gaze. Like the films, the original novels emphasized the physical
aspects of sex, but often contained much more graphic and hard-edged endings
than the films, making it clear that the consummation of the novel itself is in the
extreme satisfaction that Bond takes in his final sexual conquest of the lead female
character and love interest. While the films are more liable to represent these
moments through quips and indirection, Connery does get the forceful aspects of
Bond’s sexuality right, if anything often overplaying the sadistic edge, especially in
a film like Goldfinger.
In Casino Royale we finally get a version of Bond that makes him seem genuinely
vulnerable and he is given, in the character of Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), a lover who
is equal to him in terms of mental toughness and agility. In her mixture of French,
Swedish, and English backgrounds Green echoes the sort of complex identity that
Bond himself is supposed to have as the son of a Scots father and a Swiss mother.
Likewise, Bond and Lynd’s banter, especially upon their first meeting, suggests their
compatibility and similarities. For perhaps the first time since Diana Rigg, Bond
seems to have a serious female counterpart, one who could even be his wife. When
it later emerges that she is a counter agent who has betrayed him (but sacrificed
her own life for that reason, at least in the novel), it is clear that the main event that
shapes Bond into the hardened version that we know is this emotional situation,
for which the various physical manifestations are perhaps secondary.
Those physical aspects, however, are far from superficial and open up the film
to the other aspect of sexuality in the franchise generally: the threat of the villain,
which is at least in part the threat of homoerotic association. The villain must be
damaged in some way physically that represents not only his sexual dysfunction
(whether homosexual, asexual, or sadistic) but his disjointed view of the world as
well, his megalomania or desire for chaos. Bond may well be, as Dr. No accuses him,
a “blunt instrument,” but he is supposed to have the correct desires on his side:
protect the free world and bed the girl. Part of the complexity of this formula is its
triangulation. The Bond girl is frequently associated with the villain by being herself
the victim of some kind of violent sexual past such as Honeychile Ryder in Dr. No or
Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. As Kingsley Amis notes, the women in the novels often
have some type of physical defect as well: “Honeychile … has a broken nose and
Domino Vitali limps because one of her legs is an inch shorter than the other.”20 Her
sexuality, if not her identity itself, has to be realigned by Bond and made whole
again. This process can include making her sexuality heteronormative, although in
some ways that is shown to be a side effect of the rescuing of the heroine from her
past. By getting so close to the girl, Bond gets close also to the villain and becomes
associated with both of them in equal measure. The villain’s obsession with Bond,
his ability to allow him into his confidence and into his lair, is emblematic of his
desire for an equal, a confidante, a partner in knowledge. By discounting the girl
as either beneath his gaze or much less interesting than Bond himself, the villain
forges a homosocial bond with Bond that is frequently the strongest nexus of
desire in the film.
In Casino Royale, the villain Le Chiffre is given a facial scar that weeps blood and,
for good measure, an inhaler, but otherwise is devoid of conspicuous monstrosity.
In the film as well as in the book he mainly functions as a go-between, someone
who aids and abets evil-doers and who has found himself owing a lot of money
to the wrong people. As his name suggests, he is a sum, or a number, to some
extent an abstraction. While accused by some viewers of the film of coldness, even
of homosexuality, because of his lack of response when his girlfriend is threatened
with an amputated arm by a gang of African henchmen, his main role is as a
torturer of Bond in a scene that not only echoes images from Abu Ghraib but that
in the original novel consciously confuses sexuality and pain. Bond is tortured by
being stripped naked and placed on a hollowed-out cane chair. Le Chiffre, played
by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, swings a knotted rope at Bond’s genitals and back
side.21 As Fleming notes, after a point Bond feels
a wonderful period of warmth and languor leading into a sort of sexual twilight
where pain turned to pleasure and where hatred and fear of the torturers turned
to a masochistic infatuation.22
The mixture of pain and sex, the very definition of Bond’s identity, is here controlled
by his archenemy, who, like Goldfinger and his remarkably large laser, threatens Bond
with castration. When Bond fails to give him the information that he wants, Le Chiffre
knocks Bond and his chair over, draws a knife, and says, “I am going to cut this short.
And feed you what you seem not to value.” Bond’s torture is relieved only by the arrival
of Mr. White (Jesper Christensen) who kills Le Chiffre in the name of “our organization”
the same way that Bond had killed Dryden, with a bullet to the forehead. Scarred and
bloody, Bond is sent to Lake Como for an extended convalescence; the implication is
that he is damaged almost beyond the point of repair.
This slower, more stately section of the film switches tone and tempo as Bond
is shown to go through several stages of recovery that take place over a very long
time. The final stage involves the arrival of Vesper and the cementing of what
Bond thinks is their romantic relationship. Even here, however, Bond’s brush with
physical incompleteness is referenced several times as Vesper and he play a game
of openness and deception in which they both have secrets they do not share.
As the one left most vulnerable, Bond eventually lets his guard down with Vesper,
though mainly because he is falling in love with her. At one key point she accuses
him of putting his armor back on, to which he replies, “I have no armor left. You
stripped it off and tossed it away. Whatever is left of me … Whatever is left …
whatever I am, I am yours ….” Whatever is left of Bond seems to reference, among
other things, whatever is left of his manhood, his genitalia and his ability to resist
the complications of marriage. Earlier in the film, as he bedded Solange, she asked
him, “Why do I think you’ve been in this position before? You like married women,
don’t you, James?” “It keeps things simple,” he replies. The idea that he would now
be the married one complicates his sense of identity in a way that is radical for
the formula. Bond eventually defines his incompleteness in a different way: “You
do what I do for too long and there won’t be any soul left to salvage. I’m leaving
with what little is left of mine. Is it enough for you?” His bodily metaphors having
eventually become spiritual or mental ones, what he fails to understand throughout
this section of the movie, though it is first hinted at when Bond and Vesper have
a celebratory dinner in Montenegro, is that Vesper is not who she seems to be. “I
fear I am a complicated woman,” she tells him, and indeed, in addition to being
in love with a French Algerian, she is also in league with the organization that is
blackmailing her and her lover as well. Bond’s coming to awareness is one of a
double double-cross in which he, the spy and the one who should be a master of
identities, is taken in by trusting his own heart. The defibrillator that Vesper repairs
in an earlier scene outside the Casino Royale that allows his heart to start beating
once again after he is poisoned at the table is soon to be broken by Vesper’s
betrayal. The ability no longer to have a heart is what Bond must learn in order
finally to become 007, a nameless number like Le Chiffre himself, a function within
an organization.
In Bond’s final debriefing with M before his visit to Mr. White and transformation
into the James Bond that we have always known, M says to him, “You don’t trust
anyone, do you James?” “No,” he replies. “Then you’ve learned your lesson.” M goes
on to suggest that Bond may need more time off, to which Bond replies, “The bitch
is dead”—the same line that ends the novel. Fleming, like the producers of the
Bond franchise today, knew that Bond could be Bond only with the steely attitude
that reminds the audience of the sacrifices that he has to make to create a seamless
and impregnable outer surface. This is Bond as performance, always playing the
part, because, as Judith Butler has theorized about gender or heterosexuality, there
is no definitive script, there is no natural reality to which masculinity corresponds.
One must, therefore, constantly invent and iterate it in order to create a never-
ending chain of signifiers that posit an identity, a subjectivity that others may see
and understand and to which institutions and governments might grant rights and
responsibilities. In an early version of the script, the section after their conversation
reads, “M replaces the phone, knowing that she has sacrificed a man to create a spy,
and for the briefest of moments, not happy with herself.”
In the main title sequence of Casino Royale we see playing cards come to life as
the central metaphor of the film is the notion of the game—Baccarat in the novel,
poker in the film—especially games that are about lying convincingly. The hearts
on the playing cards become bullets and then actual hearts. Though one might
think that the blood that is been spouted is that of the villains, it may well be Bond’s
blood. Early on in the film we see Bond chase a bomb maker through Madagascar
seemingly as a way to demonstrate the athleticism of the new Bond, which quickly
eclipses that of any previous star in the role and eventually comes to resemble the
mixture of acrobatics and running that is “Parkour” and which had recently been
featured in Luc Besson’s Banlieue 13 (District B13, 2004).23 We feel every bit of Bond’s
body’s weight as he jumps onto a crane or down from a rafter. This new physicality
is carried over into a sequence in Miami involving a prototype aircraft that Bond is
trying to prevent from being blown up. Upon first arriving in Miami, Bond attempts
to thwart a drop off for the enemy occurring at the “Body Worlds” exhibit—the
naked flaying of flesh that is the signature of these controversial pseudo-scientific
events becomes a metaphor for the film’s emphasis on the body, on Bond himself
as exhibit, posed naturally, but with his interior forever exposed.
The new Casino Royale allows the audience a glimpse into the creation of Bond,
a rare and privileged spot to behold. Casino Royale was the first Bond novel in 1953
and the first Bond filmic version as well as in the 1954 CBS network show Climax! It
was never available to EON Productions because of a dispute between MGM and
Sony that was finally settled when MGM agreed to exchange the rights to Casino
Royale for the rights to Spider-Man (2002). Finally given the opportunity to film
the story for the first time, the producers (which included Barbara Broccoli, the
daughter of the co-founder of EON Productions, Albert R. Broccoli) wisely chose to
revisit the origins of the Bond franchise. In doing so, the producers of the franchise
could restart the original without in fact having to worry about the difficulty of
making a period film or even of providing a background that will necessarily have
to be referenced in subsequent films. As Broccoli argued at the time of the film’s
release, “But it’s not a prequel or a period piece or anything like that—it’s set today,
right now.”24 Like the last season of the television show Lost, one might argue that
the Bond franchise has created an alternative universe in which Bond is, and is not,
given a back story. Whether it is a prequel or something else, the film emerged
in 2006 at the time of the intersection of several audacious prequels: Batman
Begins in 2005 and the conclusion to the trilogy of Star Wars prequels that ends
the same year. Casino Royale is quite different from the bloated, high-tech films
of the Brosnan 1990s and seems much more in alignment with the Bourne films
of the twenty-first century, maybe especially Bourne Supremacy from 2005, which
itself seemed to reference From Russia with Love from 1963. Both From Russia and
Casino Royale return to the physicality of Bond and to the dangers and vicissitudes
of his body, which remind us that he is human, a man not just an archetype. But
while there have periodically been tweaks and changes in the series’s formula
throughout the years—For Your Eyes Only (1981), The Living Daylights (1987), and
even GoldenEye (1995) might all have suggested a turning back to the 1960s or to
the novels’ original intentions—only Casino Royale returns us to something prior
to that formula, perhaps even prior to Fleming himself, and, by inventing a layer of
Bond we never had before, gives Bond back to us to enjoy again as we probably
haven’t since 1969 or earlier.
At this time, Casino Royale has grossed $595 million worldwide. The film that
followed Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace (2008) also did well, though without the
same critical support. Quantum of Solace functions as a sequel that immediately
picks up on the action and delivers a short, action-packed film. The villain is even
less marked as evil or abnormal than is Le Chiffre. The Bond girl is even more
independent, even disdainful of Bond. It is difficult to know where the Bond films
will go from here as they barrel through their alternate timeline, forever attempting
to outrun a history that is a trap, a burden, and a much-needed fantasy realm.
Rumor has it that the films will continue to provide some origin stories, for M and
for Q, for example, which would suggest that the franchise will continue to be both
in the present and somewhere in the past as well.
Notes
1 Ian Fleming, Ian Fleming’s James Bond [From Russia with Love; Casino Royale; Live and Let
Die; Diamonds Are Forever; Dr No; Goldfinger] (New York: Octopus/Heinemann, 1985),
493, 411–549.
2 Fleming, 496, 815.
3 In his autobiography, Ken Adam calls the “Rumpus Room” “school of Frank Lloyd
Wright.” Ken Adam and Chris Frayling, Ken Adam Designs the Movies: James Bond and
Beyond (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 56.
4 As Fleming writes in another context, “It was a window into a queer world and into a
queer business” (359).
5 In one version of the script for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Blofeld is
supposed to have received plastic surgery since he and Bond met in You Only Live
Twice (1967). The fact that this is dropped from the film created an error in continuity.
“On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969),” The Internet Movie Database, 12 March 2009.
Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064757/
6 In the novel version of Dr. No, the villain’s base of operations is disguised as a guano-
manufacturing facility.
7 Diamonds Are Forever, dir. Guy Hamilton, perf. Sean Connery, Jill St. John, and Charles
Gray. United Artists, 1971.
8 The title song is at least as sexually suggestive as “Goldfinger,” which made references
to the villain’s fetish for gold. The song “Diamonds Are Forever” accompanies a title
sequence that shows a large diamond hanging down between a female dancer’s legs.
The words to the song could suggest both a clitoris or a penis, but definitely the idea
of substituting parts for wholes: “Diamonds are forever, / They are all I need to please
me, / They can stimulate and tease me […] Hold one up and then caress it, / Touch it,
stroke it and undress it ….”
9 Adam, who also designed for operas, describes the interior suite that Bond uses at
the Hughes-like character’s Willard Whyte’s hotel as “operatic, less realistic …” than
other Bond films. As Christopher Frayling notes, “The colour schemes for the Vegas
sequences, with deliberately kitschy pinks, were uncharacteristic of Adam’s usually
restrained palette—more Sodom and Gomorrah than Bond …” (80; ellipsis in original).
The exterior establishing shots of the Whyte House are special effects—part real
building (The Las Vegas Hilton), part painting (82).
10 Rats are also connected to Mr. Wint, whose cologne Bond refers to as smelling “like
a tart’s handkerchief.” The odor later identifies Wint to Bond, who concludes that it is
“strong enough to bury anything”; “And I’ve smelt that aftershave before, and both
times I’ve smelt a rat.”
11 Played by American sausage king Jimmy Dean, Whyte makes frequent references to
his bathroom office and, when finally rescued by Bond, is seen emerging from the
bathroom. The first line uttered in the film comes from Blofeld: “Making mud pies,
007?” One of his last lines is delivered to Tiffany Case: “… my dear, we’re showing a bit
more cheek than usual, aren’t we?”
12 At the funeral parlor, the character of the director, Morten Slumber (David Bauer),
bears a striking resemblance to Cary Grant, a denizen of Palm Springs, the actual
location of the Elrod house.
13 Distortion is referenced throughout the film—from the fun-house mirror that Tiffany
Case looks into at Circus Circus to the children’s freak show she stumbles into that
features “Zambora—strangest girl ever born to live” in which an African-American
woman is turned into a “ferocious 450-pound gorilla.” Race and sexuality sit side by
side as uncomfortable nodes.
14 See, for example, John Cork and Bruce Scivally, James Bond (New York: H.N. Abrams,
2002), 13.
15 As many critics note, Bond is to a large degree modeled on Fleming himself, especially
his “fussy particularity,” which went well beyond how his martinis were made. Simon
Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of
James Bond (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 113. Throughout most of
Diamonds Are Forever, Bond wears a tux, with button hole, or a suit, and references on
at least one occasion the moment in Goldfinger where he pulls off his wet suit to reveal
a dinner jacket. The dandy side of Bond is perhaps heightened within the American
landscape of the film.
16 Casino Royale, dir. Martin Campbell, perf. Daniel Craig, Eva Green, and Judi Dench.
Sony, 2006.
17 Cubby Broccoli put it this way: “To be candid, all the British actors I had interviewed,
while very talented, lacked the degree of masculinity Bond demanded. To put it in
the vernacular of our profession: Sean had the balls for the part.” Albert R. Broccoli
and Donald Zec, When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli (London:
Boxtree, 1998), 165–6. Connery as Bond is itself a complicated matter. Though he is
widely seen now as the best of the actors who played Bond, his physique and manner
are off-putting to some. It may be just as important not to associate Connery with
Bond if we are to analyze the use made of masculinity in the films. As Richard Rambuss
notes, “Male masculinity sometimes sustains misogyny, but I don’t think that it is
reducible or has any necessary relation to it. Virility … need not be coextensive with a
patriarchy that enjoins a political gendered inequality.” Richard Rambuss, “After Male
Sex,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(3) (Summer 2007): 585.
18 At one point Solange tells Bond, “I’m also afraid you slept with me in order to get to him.”
19 Quoted in Michael Denning, “Licensed to Look: James Bond and the Heroism of
Consumption,” The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, (ed.) Christoph Linder
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 73.
20 Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (New York: The New American Library, 1965), 46.
21 Le Chiffre begins by telling Bond, “You’ve taken good care of your body. Such a waste.”
22 Quoted in Toby Miller, “James Bond’s Penis,” The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical
Reader, (ed.) Christoph Linder (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 236.
23 This sequence was suggested by a similar roof-top scene filmed for On Her Majesty’s
Secret Service, but later deleted. “Plot summary for Casino Royale (2006),” The Internet
Movie Database, 19 March 2008. Available at: http://imdb.com/title/tt0381061/

plotsummary
24 Quoted in Benjamin Svetkey, “He’s Bond. He’s Blond. Get Used to It!” Entertainment
Weekly, 31 March 2006: 13.
5
Reverse Empire: Architecture in Native American Casinos
Of the many regional casinos—those outside of Las Vegas—the most successful is

on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation near Ledyard, Connecticut. The design of
the casino subverts the typical theme of a Vegas casino by offering an interpretation
of the “white” culture of coastal Connecticut and by providing a retroactive mythos
about the origin of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe—a particularly small one whose
extraordinary wealth has caused much consternation both from within and without
Native American populations.1 The casino’s attempts at theming call attention to
the tribe’s self-consciousness about its position vis-a-vis other tribes and what is
being said about the phenomenon of Native American gaming from within the
Native American national communities. These disputes about self-representation
seem to have complicated the thematics of this particular casino.
The casino design of Las Vegas is often seen as paradigmatic of what is possible
in the deployment of an architectural style that is related to the gaming industry.
Vegas seems to represent a sort of on-going experiment in monumental thematic
design, the most recent chapters involving the 1970s turn toward the family-
themed mega-resorts on the Strip, such as MGM and Luxor, and now the European-
themed extravaganzas of Bellagio, Paris, and Venice, which actually downplay
gaming for a kind of upscale thrill reminiscent of Disney’s EPCOT Center resorts,
only in Vegas you don’t just “visit” Paris or Rome, you now stay there without ever
leaving the country.
While Vegas certainly offers important architectural design that reflects the
cutting-edge of what is possible—or palatable—for the theming that is appropriate
for the hyperreal environment of Vegas, other countries—and other regions of the
US—have offered themed alternatives to Vegas. Though large corporations such
as Harrah’s or Bally—companies that often recreate a generic version of Vegas
theming—carry out much casino construction outside of Vegas, not all theming
is based upon the Vegas model.2 In the United Kingdom, for example, gambling is
fairly strictly regulated and tends to be high-end. Gambling in London—one of the
rare exceptions of casinos located in a capital city—tends to be geared towards top
5.1 Foxwoods
5.2 Interior of Foxwoods

Reverse Empire: Architecture in Native American Casinos 111
players and table games and the extent to which there is any theming at all is in the
form of private homes—elegant, small entrances, carved wood work, and so forth,
in townhouses that are over 200 years old. The middle market—that geared toward
longer-stay, repeat visitors—is regulated by rules that are much stricter than that
found in most of the US gaming industry: no credit, no alcohol at tables, and
memberships required. The result of rules such as these is that all casinos are pretty
much alike and the only hope you have for differentiating yourself is through your
theming—a phenomenon that is beginning to catch on and which seems to work
to produce higher profits.3
In most of the world, middle-market casinos invest in the Disney paradigm
of “deep theming”—that is, going beyond mere decorations and costumes to
involve a set, cast, role, and story for the visitor to enjoy. The further into the Disney
paradigm that the designer goes, the more expensive the casino becomes, yet the
more chance there is for the visitor to escape into a fantasy world to which they
might want to return. These “show business” aspects of theming have now become
the conventional wisdom of gaming, as it is the theme that not only pulls together
the different aspects of the product that a casino is selling—and acts as the hook
for the clientele—but also function as the package for the product. Theming,
indeed, defines the product.4
That theming might be Disney-like does not mean that casino theming
reproduces Disney. One need only look at Vegas’s Excalibur to see how very
different an interpretation of the famous Neuschwanstein Castle the Excalibur
resort provides in comparison to the version that is Cinderella’s Castle in Disney
World. All theming does not have to seem so fanciful, however, and although
casino architecture is hardly ever what we might define as invested in realism (as
some Disney design can be), that does not mean that there isn’t sometimes an
interest in authenticity—or at least what we might call theming—that contains an
ideological purpose. In Australia, developers for a casino in New South Wales set out
to design a theme that was neither Vegas nor Monte Carlo, but uniquely Australian.
They developed a casino called The Eureka Room named after a stockade built
after gold was discovered in the region in 1851. The gold was gone within three
years, but during that time the miners had to fight against the UK’s punitive gold
licenses. The theme of regional pride and nationalist anti-British feeling might
account for the fact that elements in the design of the Eureka flag are still used by
some unions in Australia. The casino itself is based on the physical design of the
stockade with a main entrance that includes water running from a sluice that you
have to cross as you enter an elegantly appointed interior of wood and gold.5 Like
most casinos aimed at the lower- to middle-market gambler, the architects of this
casino have had to lean heavily both on theming and high-tech effects such as the
audio-animatronic technology pioneered by Disney.
The casino design at Foxwoods reflects both the attempt to theme a regional
idea—such as we see at The Eureka Room—as well as the incorporation of high-
tech concepts borrowed from Disney via Vegas. The story that Foxwoods tells
through its theming is the story of the Pequot Tribal Nation. In 1637 the Pequots
were massacred and nearly destroyed by Puritans at Mystic Fort in Connecticut.
The bloodshed was so enormous that Herman Melville eulogized the slaughter
by naming his doomed ship in Moby-Dick the Pequod. The word Mashantucket
translates as “the much-wooded land” and one might argue that the casino’s
design reflects the densely-forested area of Eastern Connecticut as its theme—a
detail that immediately sets it apart from theming used in Vegas—where the
indigenous desert landscape is ignored except in the older, low-market Wild West
themes.6 At Foxwoods the theme of the forest manifests itself in the waterfall at the
Atrium Lounge and in such names as Two Trees Inn. Yet the main symbol for the
natural world is surely one of the centerpieces to the main casino, the multi-media
Rainmaker Statue.
The Rainmaker is a giant translucent sculpture of an Indian brave on bended
knee shooting an arrow into the clouds. Wearing only a buckskin loincloth and
boots, he turns slowly over rocks and water drenched in artificial fog. At about
ten minutes to every hour he comes to life as the atrium above him closes and a
sound and light show—narrated by a distinctly Anglo-accented voice—tells the
story of his tribe. Actually, the story turns out to be about “the land,” and unless we
don’t already know that land and people are synonymous in most Indian lore, the
statue shoots a green laser light into the clouds bringing rain (here, literally, from
5.3 Rainmaker fountains and sprinklers and the revving up of the fog machines). What exactly is
statue going on here is perhaps not clear at first. Apparently, the Pequot people brought
down rain and helped to sculpt the earth, to make it prosperous. The theme of the
woods turns out to be that of both the tribe and of Connecticut itself.
The use of the Rainmaker statue as an icon for the casino seems both subversive
and questionable. On the questionable side is the small size of the Pequot nation
and the fact that though it is a miracle both that they have survived and that they
are now the dominate employers for a region, their distinguishing characteristics
seem to be few. Does their story tell us that they prospered because they were
good farmers? Because they trusted the land? Though these are hardly minor
points of pride, the Pequots seem to miss an opportunity to tout aspects of their
culture that might be used specifically as narrative.
On the other hand, it is the very lack of a distinctive story that makes the
Rainmaker idea an interesting one. The designers seem not to care that their story
is that of simply existing in harmony with nature. Indeed, the very lack of cutesiness,
à la Disney, or of a “borrowed” story as one might get in Vegas focuses the viewer’s
attention on the non-European aspects of the narrative. One does not feel that this
is a representation of history that comes out of a European sense of time. For this
reason alone, the sound and light show counters the cultural hegemony of white
culture—without having to make direct reference to it.
Where European culture is directly referenced is in the casino’s other theme.
Foxwoods is located near Mystic, Connecticut, an old whaling village that has 5.4 Themed
turned itself into an historical theme park. In its original manifestation, the main shopping area
5.5 Store sign pedestrian area within the resort complex at Foxwoods was a version of the idea
behind Disney’s Mainsteet, USA, except that one walked through a replica of
a New England fishing village instead. Although this section was called Indian
Nation (perhaps referring to the Indian crafts sold in the gift shops), what was
most striking was the representation of white culture that was presented in the
form of three audio-animatronic figures that came out onto balconies over the gift
shops to spout bits of dialogue. The three figures were a pirate, a “Madam,” and
a missionary (monk). As I read this display, European culture, fittingly, is seen to
be composed of theft, prostitution, and the excuse that organized religion once
supplied for invading and enslaving non-Western cultures.7 Unfortunately, neither
the architectural design of the “village” nor the technology employed in the
design of the robots (barely above any typical mall’s Christmas snow-land display)
suggested theming at the level of Disney. What is interesting is that the theming of
white culture contained a concentrated critique of what the white people brought
to the Pequots and how the indigenous inhabitants saw this culture. For the Pequot
ancestors, these stereotypes pretty much sum up what white culture had to offer.
All that was missing was the soldiers who came along with them.
Foxwoods’s themes seem to attempt to bring the outside inside, to collapse not
only public and private space, but interior and exterior as well. The mall-like spaces
that connect the casinos and bingo parlors are otherwise reminiscent of a souped-
up mall with high-tech Iwerks theatres and rides, a food court, and so on. The
boundary between the mall and the actual casinos, however, are heavily policed
by security guards who do not allow anyone in whom they suspect to be under 21.
Unlike some other casinos, the food, entertainment, and other attractions are in
the mall area, while the casinos are strictly slot machines and gaming tables—
otherwise the set-up is similar to casinos in Vegas. What is perhaps most original
in the casino’s design are the elements that are not strictly themed: the real Native
American exhibits on display, or the new museum on the grounds that contained
at its opening the country’s largest collection of Indian artifacts ever installed in
one place.
The Pequots complete the idea that they are not simply creating a fantasy
world from which one can escape, but rather one in which one can remember
and learn just where Indian culture comes from and of what it is composed.
Bucking the Vegas notion that theming must be all about control and escape, the
design for Foxwoods suggests that one can also use a casino for pointed political
comment and cultural reeducation. The opening of the adjacent museum seems
to underscore the determination of the tribe to emphasize their heritage even as
it perhaps clashes with the casino’s simulation of cultures by seeming to present a
more “authentic” version of Pequot civilization in the historical theme park tradition
of Plymouth Plantation or Williamsburg, Virginia. Indeed, the casino at Foxwoods
is not an innocent space. There are no windows or clocks as one is encouraged to
forget the outside in order to gamble more.8 Yet Foxwoods’s other design elements
suggest that casinos can play more expansive roles. The architects seem to have
taken seriously the idea that they had a mission to do more than simply build a
popular casino; they had to make sure that it reflected the plight and historical
situation of their people as well.9
The Pequot casino presents a difficult problem: How do you theme your own
culture—and do so within a built environment that exists primarily for wagering
and betting? How do you avoid placing your own culture “under glass”? By
attempting to represent their history to the Euro-Americans who come there to
gamble, the Pequots have entered into the paradox of displacing their own culture
out of its context. Greg Sarris, who has theorized this general problem in relation to
the exhibition of Pomo baskets, notes:
[T]he object produced by a marginalized culture loses its connection to the

culture from which it came, along with its differences and its history. You can go
to a movie and understand what the movie represents because you are familiar
with the world of the movie. Viewing a Pomo basket in a museum is like viewing
a movie frame depicting a close-up of water; it could be water anywhere, or
nowhere.10
To articulate this interchange, the designers of Foxwoods have to tell the history of
this confrontation and of the viewer’s relationship to what he or she sees there. The
casino attempts to place the visitor into some sort of relationship with the past—
whether it is Rainmaker’s retelling of the tribe’s connection to the surrounding land,
or the story of the relations between Pequots and Europeans, of which the Indian
Village hints. The more detailed retellings of the cultural center fill in other gaps.
For all of the ways in which Foxwoods might seem like just another big casino, it
does gesture toward what Sarris seems to have in mind when he argues that:
The context of presentation will always signify a certain kind of relationship and,
not unusually, the history of that relationship. Where Walter Benjamin saw the
emancipatory potential in what film and other forms of reproducible art might
accomplish (when ‘aura’ has been diminished), we might look at exactly what
these forms of presentation cannot accomplish. The museum must tell a story of
its relation for the Pomo basket, and extend that story to the viewer.11
The Foxwoods casino shows that you can focus both on one’s cultural past and
on entertainment based on gaming. While certainly not perfect, the Foxwoods
complex suggests that casino design can have a progressive side even in an era
of postmodern simulacra. As more and more casinos open on Native American
reservations we will see other attempts at this quixotic presentation of self. What is
clear is that casinos are restoring pride to many Native Americans who once lived
in, or with, poverty and who now can hope for a middle-class existence within
the country that has denied them their heritage, their past, and their identity. By
looking for a past—and rethinking the ways in which the context of seeing allows
this past to be presented, especially to those very people who erased it—Foxwoods
also represents an attempt to theme a future.
Pequot Cultural Museum
Seen as a whole, the Foxwoods casino complex seems to model itself after Disney
5.6 Pequot World with all the basic civil services—fire, police, and so forth—controlled and
Museum provided for on the site itself in ancillary buildings, some of which are themed.
5.7 Pequot Museum tower
5.8 Interior of museum

Other than the casino buildings, the most important building is the Pequot Cultural
Museum, which is sited away from the main casino area in a wooded expanse. The
architecture of the museum itself could be described as modernist with warm
colors and a sloped, curving roof that reminds one of Scandinavian architect airport
design (Dulles or Kennedy). After you enter you are in what is called the “Gathering
Place,” which has a huge, two-floor glass roof that I overheard someone say, “must
be to bring the outside in,” which I think is true and which is one of the themes of
the casino itself. This is the only place where one can take photos—otherwise one
risks damaging artifacts (according to the ticket taker).
In the Gathering Place there is a quotation from Edward Winslow, May 22, 1637:
The Pecoat follow their fishing and planting as if they had no enemies. Their
women and children are gone to Long Island the strong guard of the Pecoat.
The display shows two canoes: the first has men in it; the second, men, women,
and children. The men are taking the women away from the danger of European
settlers. All of the figures are extremely life-like.
From the Gathering Place one then takes a ramp down to the first section
of the museum’s permanent collection, “Pequot Nation.” The very first thing
one encounters is an image of trees (enlarged photos), a trope that is echoed
throughout this room and in an image of autumnal foliage as one exits. There is
5.9 Gathering
Place exhibit also a photo of the entire tribe outside one of the houses and one is struck by how
overview small the tribe is; how middle-class they look; how ethnically diverse they are. There
5.10 Gathering Place exhibit
5.11 Gathering Place exhibit detail

are many small display cases that emphasize such things as school sports, health
care, ethnographic studies (a micro-cassette recorder, for example, in one case).
In another case is a uniform for the security police. One sees only one reference
to gambling—a slot machine tucked away in one corner of the room, as though
gambling were a part of the tribe’s definition, but only one small part. In the middle
of the room is a scale model of the entire reservation (one can press a button to
light up a building) and one can see that there really is a Disney-like grand design,
with housing developments (called “Phase I,” “Phase II,” and so on) and large-scale
infrastructure (water purification, for example). All in all, there is a sense of the
massive scale of the enterprise and how many different aspects of the lives of the
Pequots are affected by what is happening there, but little acknowledgement
that this is all fueled by the riches of the casino. The myth of the land and tribal
integrity is continued as a theme coming from the casino (and will be developed
throughout the museum).
One descends an escalator past a replica of a glacier to the next section of the
museum, “Life in a Cold Climate.” The first thing one sees is a large globe that shows
the ice-cover from tens of thousands of years ago to the present. Obviously this
story is going to be not only temporal, but also based on a sense that here time
is not really human, but geographic, that time and space in this spot exist prior to
European colonization or notions of it. The next room presents an array of artifacts
(haphazardly arranged). We then come upon a variety of dioramas. One is of the
land (what sorts of creatures lived here—raccoon, snakes, and so forth), with the
largest depicting a Caribou hunt (with some sound effects). Some of this material
is interesting, though some is also simply like what’s found in any Natural History
museum (no real difference, since the temperate climate and wooded topography
of Connecticut is similar to much of the rest of the country’s). We see the first of 13
films and videos.
The next section, which is also the most elaborate, is the “Pequot Village.”
Before entering this area one is handed a high-tech “telephone” on which one is
supposed to punch in the number found on a disk embedded in the floor before
different sections of the “village.” Essentially a larger diorama that is made to
seem somewhat continuous, the various scenes are pedagogical. The information
contained on the audio disk corresponding to each scene is somewhat detailed.
The best part of the exhibit is the fact that you can usually choose a “background”
story that gives further information about some aspect of what you are seeing. I
believe specific members of the tribe narrate these sections. Often the basic story
is told in a way that assumes a non-native listener (“You might think that the baby
looks uncomfortable wrapped that way”). Though many of the scenes elsewhere
in the museum seem somewhat predictable (people trading skins for trinkets, for
example), here the narratives go into more detail. We see the interior of a leader’s
hut contrasted to a regular one; we see harvesting, hunting, and fishing; we see
basket weaving, cooking, and tanning; we see a palisade (to keep out Europeans);
and so forth. I liked best the scene of a leader, his wife, and an older woman who
was a widow. The voiceover explained the significance of their jewelry, that the
leader and his squaw had better tattoos than most, and that the widow’s black
face paint and cropped hair indicated that she was not interested in remarrying. I
thought that this description brought some insight into the tribe’s social traditions
and interpersonal interactions and helped to humanize them, to bring the dioramas
alive, so to speak. The attention to detail is, in general, impressive, though I assume
that we are getting a look at the pre-European aspects of the tribe—the almost
utopic part of the past when they were one with the land. While there are references
to trading with some Europeans for metal pots and to death from smallpox and flu,
there is a sense in which this depiction of the everyday life and social customs is
supposed to be the heart of the tribe’s history. As with the whole museum (and
mythos of the tribe), much is made out of a little, the construction of an entire
culture out of a fairly small number of people. One question that is perhaps called
for but not answered is how different were the Pequots from other tribes? What
separates them from other Native Americans—rather than Europeans? This is not
really dealt with here.
The museum’s fourth section, “Pequot War,” contains more films (throughout
the museum, I just caught snippets of various ones, which seemed professionally
done and appeared to feature tribe members). The wars section is interesting
because it tries to deal with the problem of European expansion. However, very
little is mentioned of wars with other tribes. We see a number of high-tech displays
that show us trade routes, as well as showcases of armaments used by both sides,
models of forts, and other artifacts related to the war. If the museum itself is
designed as a timeline, then this is the time of contamination—the end of paradise,
and prepares us for the last, and most interesting section, “Life on the Reservation.”
This display is the only part of the entire museum that really seems to be based
on history that isn’t somehow reprocessed for the sake of fostering a legend or
way of remembering the Pequot for the sake of legitimization. Indeed, we have
remembrances of how the Pequot served in various wars and dealt with modern
problems, but we also get glimpses into the lives and memories of Pequots who
are still living. Of course, the harsher realities of reservation living are now probably
gone—we don’t have glimpses into current living conditions, for instance.
By far the most arresting display is an actual trailer—painted yellow, with
sculpted light-brown carpet on the interior. One can hear voices as one stands near
it. Apparently some Pequot came back to live on what they considered their native
soil and this was the beginning of the modern reclamation of the tribe. This entire
section is the most interesting historically—and potentially the most complex.
It also tells us more about the tribe as it is today than does all of the rest of the
museum and acts as a sharp counterpoint to the “Village” diorama.
The very last part of this exhibit is a room of tribal portraits. Though this might
have been a part of the “Temporary Exhibit Gallery” the effect is an almost Schlinder’s
List-like coda to the whole museum that shows us who the current Pequots are and
what they look like (and sound like—more recorded testimonials) today. While a
bit heavy-handed, it still reminds one of the circular nature of the museum—which
opens with the photoportrait of the tribe in toto.
The exterior of the museum reflects ideas developed early-on in the museum’s
design, which received input from a number of different architects. The Gathering
Place lobby’s large expanse of glass emphasizes the importance of the sun and the
tracking of seasons and observation of topography. Its curved shape reflects “bent
samplings.” The striking tower can be seen as “a perch in a tree.”12 And the descent
from the lobby down into the exhibits is a movement through time and space,
almost like an archeological dig, that takes the visitor through Pequot history
from the past to the present.13 While Native American casinos vary a great deal
throughout the boundaries of the United States, others also attempt to remind
visitors of the ways in which they are not Vegas, or are, more precisely, a part of the
environment of which they are sensitively made. A completely different approach
is taken by the Pequots’ new neighbors, the Mohegans, who opened their own
casino seemingly to follow in the footsteps of Foxwoods. The Mohegan Sun Casino
similarly attempts to theme the land and natural phenomena—the wind, water,
and rocky landscape especially—but does so with a bombast that is much closer
to Vegas glitz and appears, by contrast, less sincere and also less distinctive. While
the Mohegan complex feels larger and more upscale than the somewhat dated
Foxwoods, it also feels more corporate and slightly less original—which, in fact,
it is. The museum at the Pequot facility grounds the museum. Coming before the
opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, it deals
with the complex problem located everywhere in contemporary Native American
architecture of how to represent one culture through the lens of another. How
does one preserve and educate the public about Native American culture when
that culture itself is in many ways the opposite of Anglo culture?
To a large extent Native American history exists temporally, but not spatially.
5.12 Mohegan
The mere existence of a culture such as that of the Mashantucket Pequots
Sun emphasizes their culture’s ability to endure and persevere despite attempts by
white European culture to scatter them, strip them of their identity, or claim that
it has been hopelessly diluted through intermarriage with people from outside
their community. With almost no architectural reminders of their past, the culture
emphasizes time, which itself emphasizes place (Southern New England) over
space. Native American architecture pushes at the temporal as a way to preserve
place, which is subservient to time. The built environment, as a definition of
space, is subordinated to the interconnectedness of time and place. Postmodern
Native American architecture, therefore, must represent that which is non-
representational, or anti-representational by Western terms. The built environment
must exist as little as possible, or must make the user of it aware of its opposite—
the mobile architecture of tribes, the importance of living at one with nature, an
identity that is based upon a place before it was changed by European settlement.
The architecture of Native American casinos is, therefore, in a delicate position as
casino architecture, like Disney parks, absorbs themes and influences from outside
to mold, bowdlerize, and change them into something else. In order to do this to
their own history, tribes must find ways to present themselves to the outside world
that simultaneously separates them from Vegas, preserves some of the stereotype
about their difference as Indians, and creates an image of tribal culture that is
recognizable to the members of their own tribe.14 This tall order is compounded
by the creation of a museum, or any representations of their past that places it at a
remove from the present, either spatially or temporally.
The dioramas at the Foxwoods museum, like those at other tribal museums,
don’t separate the figures from the public under glass.15 To some extent, the figures
remain accessible—frozen in time and space, but somehow not separated from
the present. Native American works of art at museums tend to be based on crafts—
weaving, textiles, pottery that represent objects from everyday life done at a high
level of craft. Native American experience, in other words, is not cordoned off
from the real world but represents an interconnection with it. This approach also
reflects an attempt to deal with the history of museums that hold Native American
objects and artifacts without ignoring what Amanda J. Cobb calls “the tragic ways
in which they were acquired.”16 Native Americans are often separated from their
own history and fail to have authorship over it.17 The alternative is to change “what
has historically been a cabinet of curiosities into a community-centered gathering
place for the celebration of living cultures.”18 While Cobb is referencing the new
national museum in Washington, DC, a similar guiding principle lay behind the
Pequot museum, which mimics a village or a place for people to come together
and experience a tradition as something that is part of a community. At the
National Museum of the American Indian, this sense of community is taken further
by creating a museum where the objects themselves are given meaning through
community only. Individual tribes or communities are allowed to curate their own
sections of the museum and “objects, texts, photographs” “do not offer narratives
with clear beginnings, middles and ends” but rather a “collage … that becomes an
elaborate self-portrait.”19
Objects in a Native museum, in other words, only have meaning to the extent
to which they are used. Native museums attempt to represent not dead but living
traditions and histories—to become, in other words, anti-museums. This model
is defined by Cobb as a move away from “more familiar forms of display and
organization and toward a dialogic system that demands the critical engagement
and interpretation of its visitors.”20 One might call this “a combination of Native
worldviews and postmodernity,”21 which is perfect, perhaps, for the Mashantucket
Pequots, who constitute, according to Mary Lawlor, not“a modern”but a“postmodern
… tribal community.”22 The Pequots are part of the “moment of decolonization …
when history begins to not only include accounts of marginalized peoples, but to
be produced by them in various forms of self-representation. The process involves,
as it has for the Pequots, the rediscovery of origins.23
The notion of origins is a particularly complicated one for the Pequots, who were
not only faced with extinction by the Pequot War of 1637 and disease epidemics,
but who were even earlier declared dissolved as a nation by the Treaty of Hartford
in 1638.24 The Pequot population was further shrunk by defining identity as based
on full blood and on maternal ancestry. After the Pequot war, Pequots were, in a
sense, presumed to be either extinct, almost extinct, or on their way to inevitable
extinction. By the nineteenth century the notion of racial purity presumably based
upon blood (as opposed to ethnography) attempted to finish the erasure of any
Indian claims on US soil or territory by either relocating Indians off their lands
or declaring that tribes had been “terminated.”25 State legislatures responded in
different ways, but at the local level, various cultural ceremonies, histories, and
texts preserved signs that various tribes had continued to exist and had, in fact,
continued to more or less occupy their original tribal lands. By the 1970s a return to
recognition for many tribes had begun. The Mashantucket Pequots were restored
1983 and the Mohegan in 1994. Despite various attempts to say that they no
longer even existed, Native Americans in New England re-entered the timeline
at the point of modernity, or perhaps postmodernity, a period they were never
supposed to see.
The problem of finding an origin to Native identity is that it assumes that identity
is based upon white European notions of universality. As Andrea Smith notes,
“Consequently, Native studies often rests on a Native subject awaiting humanity.”
This project is doomed from the start because, as she notes
aspiring to ‘humanity’ is always already a racial project; it is a project that aspires

to a universality and self-determination that can exist only over and against the
particularity and affectability of ‘the other.’26
The ethnographic trap that native peoples fall into is one in which they inadvertently
make themselves into objects “equivalent to nature itself, things to be discovered
that have an essential truth or essence.”27 A search for an origin story for Native
peoples can be said to reproduce the worst features of Lee Edelman’s desire for a
queer futurity in reverse by extending into the past an uncritical dialogue about
the social power structures that shaped Native identity—indeed, to assume that
tradition means some sort of Eden prior to “discursive economy.”28 Much as Judith
Butler points out the impossibility of the “theorizing a prediscursive body,” so do
Native historians risk the possibility of “masking power relations through evoking
lost origins.”29
Given the literal, governmental, and cultural attempt to erase Native peoples
from the American landscape, one might say that the Native future has already
been queered—already exists under the sign of “no future.” The Native child
doesn’t need to be queered by Edelman, but already exists as a “challenge to the
reproduction of the social order ….”30 This assumption, of course, is that queerness
is itself liberatory, that white Western queer subjects do not have a history that
supports non-white suppression, and that queerness must be supported over and
above other definitions of difference—that is, race, nationality, and tradition must
be removed as impediments to sexuality.31 Native American identity is constantly
invoked as coterminous with the natural and the original, yet the performance of
Native Americanness suggests that someone else must do it because real Native
Americans don’t exist, or if they do, that they are always already pre-postmodern.
The “logic of genocide” never leaves the equation as “a logic of biopower whereby
Natives must die so that postmodern subjects can live.”32 Someone has to perform
the “Indian,” whether it is the real Indians, or the white subjects who perform their
absence physically and psychologically.33 Natives are always dying, “disappearing,”
vanishing. In order to be “the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous,” they
must not actually exist or have their identity performed by someone else.34
One way out of this logical bind may be for Native Americans to see themselves
not as a part of the sovereignty of nation-states, of heteronormative patriarchal
traditions, whether Nativist or European, but as stewards of the land in critical
dialogue with the traditions of their past. It may be important to avoid the “logics
of settler colonialism” to “draw on forms of indigenous governance that call
into question many of the logics of nation-state forms of governance.”35 Native
peoples are often drawn into legal battles to fight for their own land, but rather
than seeing it as “commodity” or “property,” they should redefine sovereignty as
“being responsible for land.”36 Native approaches to the land—the all-important
symbol at Native American casinos in New England—should be not to see it in
an “exclusivist” way but to queer it and remove the definitional “boundaries to
include and exclude.”37 In this way a critical Nativist approach can reach the goal of
“deconstructing Western epistemology and global state and economic structures
in the interests of building another world that could sustain all peoples.”38 The
ultimate aim of a Native philosophy, in other words, is not to save oneself, “but to
save the world.”39
Notes
1 While historically the casino complex has done quite well financially, at present
it has fallen upon hard times. See, for example, Michael Sokolove, “Foxwoods Is
Fighting for Its Life,” New York Times, 14 March 2012. Available at: http://www.nytimes.
com/2012/03/18/magazine/mike-sokolove-foxwood-casinos.html?pagewanted=all
2 The design of the Silver Star Resort and Casino on the Choctaw Reservation near
Philadelphia, Mississippi, would be one such example of typical Vegas-like theming
with little or no reference to the region in which the casino is placed.
3 Nigel Kent-Lemon, Creating an Environment: Theming for the Smaller Casino, sound
cassette (1994).
4 Paul Rubeli, Theming—The Casino Marketing Strategy of the ‘90s, sound cassette (1991).
5 David Costello, Creating an Environment: Theming for the Smaller Casino, sound cassette
(1994).
6 “The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation Proudly Presents Schemitzun ’95,”
promotional brochure.
7 According to John J. Bodinger de Uriarte, the three characters were “Captain John
Barnes, Abby Wilson, and Father Tom,” a whaler, tavern owner, and priest, respectively.
These figures were eventually removed and, indeed, many changes have been
made to the casino complex over time as it has been renovated and expanded. My
comments on the casino and on the Pequot Museum reflect several trips taken to each
from the mid-1990s until the present with notes on the latter taken primarily on May
20, 1999. John J. Bodinger de Uriarte, Casino and Museum: Representing Mashantucket
Pequot Identity (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 80.
8 John J. Bodinger de Uriarte notes that the original casino did have windows, which
were later removed during remodeling (86). Windows do remain in the many
transitional spaces between gambling halls and hotels and allow one to contemplate
the beauty of the natural scenery. In Vegas, even this amount of contact with the
outside world is impossible to find.
9 While the actual gambling floors don’t contain windows, the hallways and other
public places do, which is a change from Vegas design. As Carol Herselle Krinsky notes,
casinos on Native American reservations often employ light as a way to appear open
and inviting with nothing to hide—to appear to contrast Vegas casinos, in other
words, and to look “more wholesome.” Carol Herselle Krinsky, Contemporary Native
American Architecture: Cultural Regeneration and Creativity (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 158.
10 Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 56.
11 Sarris, 59.
12 Krinsky, 212.
13 Krinsky, 213.
14 Bodinger de Uriarte theorizes that Vegas casino complexes went from “an intense
overlay of mythohistoric themes” such as King Arthur’s court at Excalibur (or, I might
say, the strange crypto-Egyptian sci-fi of Luxor) to “the grounding of narratives …
directly to other existing and located sites” like New York, Paris, and Venice
(73; emphasis in original). In this sense, Vegas theming moves somewhat away from
space (as time) toward place, but the sense of place at Foxwoods is much more intense
as it is not meant to be a simulacrum as it is at the newer Vegas casino complexes.
15 As noted in Krinsky, 218.
16 Amanda J. Cobb, “The National Museum of the American Indian as Cultural
Sovereignty,” American Quarterly, 57(2) (June 2005): 488.
17 “… Western epistemologies, systems of classification, and ideological assumptions
… when applied to Native Americans, have functioned in exploitative, objectifying,
and demeaning ways. By using a historically unquestioned authority to take Native
objects ad remains and to define who and what Native Americans are, museums have,
in many ways, trapped Native Americans behind their glassed-in cases, rendering vital,
contemporary Native voices silent, dynamic Native cultures invisible, and abstract
conceptions of legal and cultural sovereignty difficult to exercise in meaningful ways”
(488).
18 Cobb, 489.
19 Cobb, 469.
20 Cobb, 503.
21 Cobb, 503.
22 Mary Lawlor, “Identity in Mashantucket,” American Quarterly, 57(1) (March 2005): 157;
emphasis in original.
23 “The enormous weight, force, and speed of contemporary Western circuits of capital
and political power mandate the revision of conventional history by colonized peoples
…” (Lawlor, 159).
24 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England
25 O’Brien, 191.
26 Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler
Colonialism,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(1–2) (2010): 42.
27 Smith, 42.
28 Smith, 46.
29 Smith, 46.
30 Smith, 48.
31 Smith, 49.
32 Smith, 54.
33 Smith, 53–4.
34 Smith, 53.
35 Smith, 59.
36 Smith, 62.
37 Smith, 63.
38 Smith, 63.
39 Smith, 63.
6
Philip Johnson and the Architecture of the Body
Philip Johnson’s death in 2005 left a large hole in the architectural world. Johnson
had held the position of arbiter of architectural taste for many years, perhaps even
decades. Arguably the best-known architect to the general public at large, he was
certainly the most famous in terms of self-invention and self-advertisement. The
Glass House estate and his most prominent work from the 1960s through the
1990s represent an often unsettled attempt at a personal style and in some ways a
liminal position on the architectural scene. That is, Johnson was often treated as a
tastemaker whose actual corpus was considered fairly insignificant. He was a major
figure whose work remains minor. The one exception to this judgment may well be
his home.
Since its construction in 1949, the Glass House has been an icon of the
modernist movement. Johnson never shied from admitting that in his formative
years he was primarily a disciple of Mies van der Rohe, which can be seen especially
in the many ways that Johnson’s house reflects Mies’s design for the Farnsworth
House (1945–51) in Illinois, which was built around the same time. Mies’s concept,
however, emphasizes strong horizontal planes that, along with the stilts built to
accommodate the surrounding flood plane, give the house a feeling of floating
abstractly above the earth. The house is elegant, sophisticated, European. Its lines
look back not only to Mies’s earlier design for the Barcelona Pavilion (1928–29) but
ahead to the New National Gallery in Berlin (1968).1 Superficially, at least, Johnson’s
house is similar. He seems, in fact, to have out-Miesed Mies in his rejection of any
solid interior or exterior walls in this perfect prism of glass. Yet Johnson’s house
suggests a different effect: pushing the glass toward the foreground causing the
house to dissipate into the surroundings—to surrender itself, at least in the right
light and weather conditions, almost completely to nature. Johnson claimed that
the original idea for the house was inspired by the ruins of a burned-down house
in which only the chimney and foundation remained. In his final design, Johnson
uses a brick circular core that rises from a brick floor as an anchor for a glass cage
slipped over it. Unlike the Farnsworth House, the Glass House rests solidly on the
rocky New England ground on which it is built and to which it is visually tied.
6.1 Glass House The tension set up between the interior and the exterior is mirrored in the small
scale of his work for himself and the sometimes grand scale of many of the projects
for his clients such as the theatre at Lincoln Center, the Boston Public Library, or
the string of 1970s skyscrapers such as Pennzoil Place in Houston, the IDS Center in
Minneapolis, and the AT&T building in New York. In all of his designs for himself, at
least, he kept the scale intimate, as though small scale were more suggestive of the
body. The Glass House itself is small and all of the other buildings on the estate are
equally sized, including the last building, a welcome center for visitors to the estate
designed for use after his death.
Indeed, the Glass House is not what it seems. It appears almost toy-like on the
outside. The glass walls don’t seem at all significant. At first you don’t even notice
them, as the black steel is more important. The I-beams and overall exoskeleton
create strong dark lines that weigh heavily on the glass despite the lack of overhang
that one might find in Mies and which Johnson eschewed after the early 1940s.
The house is Miesian because of this dark form, which seems to expand when one
enters it. Though the ceilings are ten and a half feet high they feel much taller. The
interior is striking mainly by the way in which, though a domestic space, it is crafted
like a commercial property: a home designed like the interior of a bank, the shock
of finding a steel and glass building in the middle of a rural New England landscape.
The interior’s various islands of organization—the living room, kitchen, dining
room, bedroom, and study—feel uncramped and generous, a fact accentuated
by the large floor-to-ceiling doors that bisect each side of the house and seem to
be used throughout the compound (and apparently allowed in lots of leaves and
Philip Johnson and the Architecture of the Body 131
insects that would litter the floor). Otherwise the house feels not only domestic but 6.2 Interior of
lived in: cheap paneling for the kitchen counters; a smoky fireplace; cigarette burns Glass House
on one of the Mies chairs; spots on the rug (even though the National Trust forbids
you to walk on it); dings on a lamp that has obviously fallen over. The bedroom
area seems like an afterthought. The house seems primarily to have been devoted
to elaborate parties—candelabras hanging from the I-beams, drivers pulling up in
front, elaborate exterior lighting developed for Johnson by Richard Kelly at Yale.
The Glass House is by far the most impressive structure at the compound. The other
buildings seem ancillary by comparison: subordinate additions that try not to get
in the way. The best one can say is that they are all follies. The Guest House provides
the only counterpoint or tension that you need. In a sense, all of the other buildings
and structures are redundant or unnecessary.
This voyeuristic nature of the Glass House is emphasized by the fact that
Johnson always conceived it in relation to the all-brick Guest House begun at
the same time and actually completed before the Glass House. In addition to
housing the heating and other services, it mirrors the main house and reverses
its valence. That is, the Guest House projects interiority and privacy against the
Glass House’s decidedly exterior, public role. The relationship is binary: each house
always differing and deferring, in the Derridian sense, literally and figuratively
necessary for the Glass House’s very existence and meaning. The interior of the
Guest House was significantly redesigned in 1953 when Johnson placed delicate
modernist arches against walls draped with gold fabric. The bedroom became a
sort of decompression chamber that cut off the occupant from the outside world.
6.3 Guest House The arches, however, lend the space a kind of stylized drama and emphasize the
fact that Johnson devised his own homes as theatre sets—private places that
nevertheless function as stage sets on which proper living can be demonstrated.
The Guest House seems small from the front (less so from the rear). The pool,
added to the estate later, is a mistake and unfortunately seems to have taken
the place of a Lipchitz sculpture that worked much better in front of the house.2
The other buildings and landscape work to varying degrees of success: the art
gallery, a nod to everything from Greek architecture (the Treasury of Atreus, 1250
BC, Mycenae) to 1960s earthwork structures, is a bunker doubling as a second
domestic space with its own wine racks, kitchen, bathroom, and generator. The
sculpture gallery, with its giant glass roof, steep interior steps, and general sense of
airiness, of the outside being brought inside, is the place that people like who don’t
like the rest of the compound and, in its openness, is the opposite of the painting
gallery (much like the Glass House is to the nearby Guest House). The sculpture
gallery has served many functions over the years such as classroom and studio. The
latter function was eventually taken over by the free-standing library/study added
to the left of the glass house in 1980. It should have kept its original white exterior
color, which has been altered a couple of times over the years to become a dirty
non-color that ruins the effect of its Orientalized shape.
The site as a whole seems laid out like a farm with strong rectilinear lines that
follow the suburban road it is built along. Stone walls and bridges are everywhere.
Perhaps in part as an attempt to keep the farm-like effect, the site is a bit too de-
nuded. Johnson hated bushes and took out many trees, but the buildings and
6.4 Art Gallery
6.5 Sculpture Gallery

6.6 Interior of Sculpture Gallery
6.7 Library/Study
structures on the site need more backdrop. The entrance gate added in the early
1980s is monumental without seeming overwhelming. It’s campy, an abstracted
tongue-in-cheek homage to Johnson’s own AT&T building and 1980s postmodern
architecture generally. The final structure added to the compound, the Gate House
(1995), was designed as a visitors’ center but never used. Based on art by Frank
Gehry and itself a reference to 1990s deconstructive architecture, it now seems a
bit odd in that it has no function, no purpose on the inside. Just like Mickey and
Minnie’s houses at Toon Disney in Disney World, it is composed of irregular rooms
and doors set at odd angles—more theme park fantasy than deconstruction.
In its playfulness and non-usability it echoes the estate generally and its theme
park elements in particular. Just as Johnson’s park has classical references hidden
everywhere like secret Easter eggs, one expects to find hidden Mickeys here
somewhere in the design.
The more important lesson that Johnson may have taken from Mies is the
emphasis on procession throughout the entire Glass House compound, which
accentuates the proto-postmodern effects Mies anticipated. In order to enter the
Farnsworth House, for example, the visitor must first walk up steps to a terrace
before ascending a second flight up to a porch before then turning right to
enter the house’s living room. The effect is to control, delay, and theatricalize the
transition from nature into the interior. Johnson’s own theories on the processional
aspect of Mies’s buildings go even further in an attempt to establish time, not
space, as the primary definition of architecture. In doing this, Johnson clearly also
borrows heavily from Le Corbusier, Johnson’s favorite architect of original forms, 6.8 Entrance Gate
6.9 Gate House
6.10 Interior of the Gate House

and the modernist architect most closely associated with procession. From his own 6.11 Carpenter
masterpiece of domestic architecture, the Villa Savoye (1929–31), to later works Center, Cambridge
such as the Carpenter Center (1962) at Harvard, Corbusier used ramps to dictate
how his visitors would move through space, seeing that movement as central to
the organization and experience of architecture itself. It is Corbusier who invents
the pilotis to raise building above the street as a part of the “machine for living”
that was to replace domestic space as it had been historically defined. While in his
house Johnson resists this aspect of modernism, which he probably redefines for
his own interests, he carries the notion of procession in a new direction.
Johnson was a master at manipulating scale and perspective to force the visitor
to see his estate as a series of painterly vistas in which buildings, trees, lawns, even
rocks have all been arranged into a series of compositions with some objects in the
foreground, some in the background, and a highly-developed sense of how the
buildings, especially, are framed by what is around them. Procession, for Johnson,
meant both that one walks through and by a building and that one experiences
space as a series of fragments or shards that that are hung or stretched out along
a temporal axis. At key points on the estate Johnson creates what would, in Disney
World, be considered “Kodak Picture Spots”—places to stop and photograph a
building from a certain vantage point as if there were some perfect (or at least
preferable) places on the property where a building could be seen in its most
favorable light. What is striking about the Johnson estate is that as it grew in
complexity Johnson seems to have regarded it more and more as a complex chess
problem in which all of the buildings had to be considered both in relation to each
other as well as in relation to the landscape. The Glass House is Johnson’s Cinderella
Castle—all of the outlying buildings and structures on the estate are subservient to
it—are not allowed to distract from it—with the Glass House at the center. Though
Johnson said that he put beauty above everything else in his work, it’s also clear
that on his own estate with himself as a client aesthetic concerns were also highly
personal. If architecture is temporal, then it is also dangerous and precarious, a
theme made even more interesting when one considers that Johnson willed the
estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In other words, Johnson
designed his estate eventually to be used by the public as a sort of theme park
devoted to his own artistic sensibilities.
One of Johnson’s signature examples of the manipulation of scale as procession
on the estate is a floating architectural pavilion placed in an artificial pond that
Johnson designed in 1962—the first major addition after the completion of the
Glass House. A sort of gazebo as designed by Mondrian, the structure is built to
roughly half scale with ceilings that are four feet high. When viewed from above
the rocky promontory upon which the Glass House sits, the false scale gives the
impression that the pond is larger than it is, as the folly seems to be farther away
from the ledge than it actually is. Johnson adjusts our perception of reality, in other
words, by playing with scale to create a trick of the eye that changes our way of
seeing the landscape itself. Upon entering the structure, one is made aware of
the body’s inability to fit easily within it. Even getting onto the island is difficult as
one must leap from the shore. The Pavilion establishes a common theme for the
other structures built on the estate after this point—namely, that all is not what it
6.12 Lake Pavilion appears to be, and nothing is completely safe.
The underground painting gallery is accessible via a thin, narrow, and

purposefully wobbly footbridge built for the stream in front of it, while the
Mosque-like study that Johnson built in 1980 lacks any approach at all—Johnson
had to wade through the grass to reach it from the Glass House. The Lincoln Kirstein
Tower, built in 1985, exists only to be climbed, a monument whose dedicatory
plaque rests at the very top.3 Johnson’s estate, in other words, thematizes the body
and the possible dangers to it. Like a “dark ride” at a Disney theme park, Johnson
miniaturizes the world and builds into his estate the possibility of physical harm,
of obstacles in one’s path, of decisions that have to be made. In this sense, each
addition to the Johnson estate has been one more new ride with the Glass House
as the castle at the park’s center. Unlike Cinderella’s castle, which functions as the
stable center and symbolizes the overarching theme of fantasy, the Glass House
represents and creates spatial disorientation. In the underground art gallery, his
famous collection of pop art is hung on panels that can be moved about like giant
hanging rug samples designed to be viewed from the vantage point of short round
footstools. The lack of stable orientation adds to the sense that Johnson is playing
with the mind and the body in order to defamilarize his guests. If in the all-brick
Guest House you don’t know whether it is night or day, in the Glass House you
cannot not know. The architecture purposefully defamilarizes a seemingly natural
bodily perception.
The growth of Johnson’s estate was like that of a Deleuzian rhizome—lateral,
multitudinous, unexpected. The buildings constructed after the Glass House spread 6.13 Interior of
out in all directions from the original structure to represent different moments in Art Gallery
his career, differing obsessions, but also the desire on Johnson’s part to adapt. His
architectural style was not based on one unwavering set of concepts à la Mies or
Corbusier but, rather, perhaps out of necessity, on change itself as he took on or
shed various architectural doxa over time—not just modernism, but historicism,
postmodernism, deconstruction, and, finally, a sort of neo-expressionism. Johnson’s
approach to architecture was, in that sense, quintessentially homoerotic—
plugging in with different people, in different places, at different times. Johnson
noted in interviews that part of the meaning of the Glass House is sexual—that
it connotes danger, risk. As a gay man who spent most of his life with his partner
David Whitney, Johnson’s sexual life was mostly an open secret in New York. For 50
years the Glass House was the literalization of their relationship—a gay domestic
space open, at least in theory, to the prying eyes of the public.
Even though the Glass House is at the center, Johnson’s plan is ultimately non-
hierarchical, anti-oedipal. To live in the Glass House or use any of its facilities would
be possible only if one’s life could be transformed into an aesthetic totality of the
most ascetic kind. Johnson returns architecture to the time of the Victorian fin-de-
siècle in his emphasis on the idea that life itself should be artistic. Even as early as
his student residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Ash Street house (1942),
the disordered accoutrement of ordinary life—newspapers, coffee cups, children’s
toys—are rendered invisible, or are simply not present. Johnson’s residences
are perfect bachelor machines, the epitome of pristine interior decoration that
nevertheless functions also as pure architectural design. Corbusier famously wanted
the house to become a “machine to live in” in the naïve but touching belief that
architecture could cure society’s ills.4 If people could live in beautiful surroundings,
then all would be right with the world. Machine architecture, for Corbusier, was
simply the most efficient way to mass-produce beautiful architecture on a large
enough scale to change society. Johnson keeps the machinic notion, but replaces
the idea of social responsibility with the desire for the pure creation of a personal
aesthetic experience.
In a discussion of Rem Koolhaas’s history of the Downtown Athletic Club, Arie
Graafland calls it the ultimate bachelor machine in which men can perfect their
bodies by becoming one with their athletic equipment in the hushed luxury
that a male-only space can alone truly evoke. “This mechanical eroticism,” writes
Graafland, “proclaims a new connection. A new power is liberated.”5 Johnson might
be said to have evoked his own version of this power, replacing the perfect body as
the object with the perfect mind for appreciating his aesthetic forms. In Koolhaas’s
history, the price that the athletes have to pay for their modernity is sterility—the
inability to reproduce.6 Through his architecture, Johnson reproduced himself and
his body over and over again in an attempt, perhaps, to resist the mechanical, into
turning into that which he had created—the desire for, and the fear of, perfection
itself.
Completing the compound but often unnoticed by critics of it are three
traditional houses: Calluna Farms, built in 1890 and purchased by Whitney as
a residence and the home to his succulent garden (1989); Popestead, a late-
nineteenth-century barn made into a timber house in the 1920s; and Grainger
House, built in 1735, and remodeled in 1999. This last house, across the road from
the Glass House property, is painted a dark gray and contains Whitney’s peony
garden (1991) in which Whitney and Johnson are now buried. One might say that
they have never left the estate. In a sense these three houses are the domestic
space that the famed compound is not, containing, as they do, such seemingly un-
Johnsonian luxuries as television and air conditioning and housing for Johnson’s
long-term guests. To some extent these houses seem to serve the Glass House and
its ancillary buildings as a sort of staging area behind the scenes, much like the
backstage area of Disney World and further play up the idea that the buildings
built by Johnson on the estate were always a part of a museum or one of several
pavilions for entertaining and raise questions about the extent to which Johnson
ever really lived in the glass house. The three vernacular structures also underline
the extent to which the whole compound suggests Johnson’s wealth, not just at
the end of his life but throughout his career as an architect. He desired power and
always had wealth and on his 47-acre estate you get the sense of how much of
both he actually had.
His power not only to have spectacular clients (Lincoln Center, AT&T), but to
shape the architectural tastes several times (the International Style, postmodernism,
deconstruction, but also the ‘Grays’ and the ‘Whites’) shows an amazing influence
not only on architecture but on painting, sculpture, and celebrity culture in general.
He was primarily a product of self-invention, someone who decided relatively late
in life to pursue a career in architecture. His fame initially rested in conservation
and scholarship via his work at founding the architecture section of the Museum
of Modern Art. Later, via the Seagram building (1958) and Mies, he began to
establish himself as a significant architect in his own right. His designs, while
never as influential of those of Mies, Corbusier, Wright, and Kahn (or more recently,
Gehry), have nevertheless proven to be at times significant even when his overall
oeuvre has been dismissed. The Glass House, the AT&T (1978) building and the
succession of important postmodern skyscrapers of which it was a part (Pennzoil
Place, the IDS Center, PPG, and the Lipstick building), and the Garden Grove
Crystal Cathedral (though not its loathsomely overdone bell tower, 1980/1990) are
considerable and show a consistent reinvention of forms that, though stretched
out over a long career, are important landmarks for the transition from modernism
to postmodernism in American architecture. His influence on the aesthetics of art
places him somewhat against the inherent social aspects of the original modernists
(Bauhaus, Corbusier, and many others), but also perhaps looks to the future in that
modernism has triumphed over postmodernism—the latter seems more now like
a blip on the modernism landscape—and is as strong today as it ever was, if only at
the level of form (Meier, Zahid). (Or, perhaps, modernism has just been reduced to
a style, in which case maybe postmodernism did win.) But Johnson’s emphasis on
aesthetics was a necessary shift to architecture as a chosen way of life, a career that
was interwoven into his performance of everyday life. The Glass House makes this
literal: life as a screen or stage on which to perform the job of modernist architect.
Johnson and Whitney created a version of the gay power couple as fame brokers.
Johnson manipulated careers, power, influence. Those were as much his building
materials as stone, glass, and light. In this sense, we should pay more attention to
other aspects of his career: his use of landscape (at the Glass House estate, MOMA
sculpture garden, and Ft. Worth Water Park); interior design (at the Guest House
redesign, Dumbarton Oaks, and the ‘balletic’ style of Lincoln Center, the World’s
Fair, and elsewhere); and in the thoughtful designs he often gave to obscure public
spaces (the Port Chester Synagogue, Sheldon Museum, Amon Carter Museum, the
Museum of South Texas); the spatial control that he exercised over larger landscapes
of processional movement (the Glass House estate as a whole, the St. Thomas
College); as well as significant buildings that are more important because of their
forms and siting that occur throughout his career (the Kline science tower at Yale,
the addition to the Boston Public Library). Far from being unimportant, this array
of successes needs to be reconsidered not just as architecture and the successful
manipulation of space, but also in terms of how his career and his built environment
work with each other to create something that is larger than either by itself.
*****
To some extent the Glass House seems to be a work that was so famous and that
came so early in his career that it overshadowed everything that was to come after it.
Despite the historicizing influences in Johnson’s work that were there from the very
beginning, the modernist aspects of the Glass House seemed to get reconfigured in
Johnson’s design for years to come, perhaps especially in the domestic architecture
that he was to build in New Canaan and elsewhere. There is a tendency in Johnson’s
work of the 1960s, especially, when he was designing both houses and professional
buildings, for the two to look the same—the domestic space looks controlled, kept
6.14 Seagram to a high standard, but seen together the architecture of the first 20 years or so
Building seems the same—as though everything had to fit one schema and/or the box
6.15 Seagram Building detail
6.16 Boston Public Library addition

was the answer to everything (even when highly inappropriate). The Schlumberger
Administration Building (1952) looks just like the Mrs. Alice Ball House (1953).
Various attempts to accommodate families and other domestic tastes results in
houses that don’t quite work—maybe especially because they introduce ‘impure’
or mixed forms to the plan. While the Mr. and Mrs. Richard Hodgson House (1951)
works by expanding on “a pavilion plan,” to the Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Wiley House
(1953) Johnson adds a wood stove, cantilevering, and an opaque first story made of
stone.7 It is not clear whether the resulting mishmash is Johnson’s attempt to please
his client or experiment with his own successful form. Many of his 1950s houses just
don’t work as well as the (more monumental) buildings, which is ironic given the
iconicity of the Glass House compound. Johnson tried too hard to make the forms
and ideas of each period translate from one type of structure to another (usually
from civic building to domestic house). A case in point is the Mr. and Mrs. Henry
C. Beck, Jr., House, 1964, which shows Johnson’s propensity for creating modular
homes—even large domestic structures are connected modules. As Stephen Fox
notes, the Mr. and Mrs. Eric H. Boissonnas House, 1964, on the coast of France is the
best house “of the early and mid-1960s” maybe in part because “Johnson treated the
small compound as landscape design, positioning a slate-paved, canopy-covered,
open-air court as the house’s central living space.”8 Here Corbusier and several other
architects are brought into conversation with each other.
In contrast to his domestic structures, Johnson’s civic structures during
this time are temples—rectangular, Renaissance-like. Johnson’s neo-classical
experimentation is especially evident by the late 1950s (Cf. Congregation Kneses
Tifereth Israel Synagogue, 1956, and Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1960). In
the early 1960s, he begins to experiment with the “ballet school manner.” Already
having completed the interior design for the Four Seasons (1959), this new style
is composed of arches formed of delicate cruciform columns that taper to the
bottom. In reference to Johnson’s Amon Carter Museum of Western Art (Ft. Worth,
1961), Stephen Fox describes the arches as “shallow concave volumes, plastically
activating the entrance screen and giving the small, isolated pavilion the presence
and historical resonance Johnson felt it needed ….”9 The revival of classicism that
we see, especially, in the repeated deployment of the arch as an abstracted, slender,
almost fluted shape also appears in the work of another underestimated American
architect, Edward Durrell Stone, in, for example, the 2 Columbus Circle building
in New York (1964) and the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building on the East Campus
of Duke University, 1974. Like Johnson’s 1960s architecture, Stone’s US embassy
in India (1954) or Kennedy Center in Washington, DC (1962) similarly emphasize
surface and symbol, rich marble and symmetrical design. The Kennedy Center,
especially, works well as a jeweled box next to the Potomac River, an elongated
pavilion (whose grounds were never completed) that, like Johnson’s lake folly,
echoes the river on a massive scale. Like Johnson, Stone was, especially in his later
work, at the same time both classicist and proto-postmodernist, historicist and
modernist, monumental and personal.
Johnson’s most prominent commission during this period was for the New
York State Theatre, 1964. Combining his interest in the body in space with the
choreography of Balanchine and the friendship of Kirstein, the Theatre projects
a social vision of [its] audiences as glamorous urban elites whose public rituals
occurred in a setting that assimilated the classical to the modern, much as
Balanchine’s style of choreography did.10
Johnson decorated the lobby with a giant version of the Louise Nadelman pop
art sculpture that resides in the living room of the Glass House, thus connecting
the two spaces by association. The lessons that Johnson learned in doing the
courtyards of domestic houses was applied to the New York State Pavilion, 1964–
65, which was originally conceived of as pop art. Warhol decorated the exterior.11
The interaction between Johnson’s domestic and public architecture, his own
Glass House estate and the work of others, can also be seen in other successful
high-profile works of this period, such as the Museum for the Robert Woods Bliss
Collection of Pre-Columbian Art (1963; Dumbarton Oaks) in Georgetown: “… the
building functioned more as an exercise in spatializing inversion than as an art
museum.”12 In its play between architecture and landscape design, inside and
outside, the museum suggests some kind of combination of Mies and Wright, of
Glass House and Guest House. The rectilinear becomes curved, outside and inside
blur. The interior pays special attention to rich surfaces that are so self-consciously
presented that the art is displayed on Lucite blocks. At the time of its opening, the
design “created intense, and to judge from contemporary critiques, destabilizing
erotic sensations.”13 If Dumbarton Oaks seemed to mirror the interior of the Guest
House or the interconnection between inside and outside that is central to the Glass
House compound as a whole, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery (1963) in Lincoln,
Nebraska, referenced procession.14 For all of the success of Dumbarton Oaks and
the Sheldon Gallery, the other important pubic building of this period, Johnson’s
Kline Biology Tower, 1965, which seems like a precursor to the AT&T building, has
not aged well. Though Johnson seems to have always been pleased with its siting
and setting, as Fox summarizes:
The Kline Biology Tower represents the limits of Johnson’s critique of mid-century
modernism. The issues that were of such importance to him—monumentality,
spatial and textual sensation, historical resonance, structural expressiveness—
were pursued as though they were extraneous to the purposes of which the
building was built. Instead of imbuing modernist architecture with conceptual,
experiential, and tectonic depth, Johnson’s design practices seemed to detach
and isolate these phenomena ….15
The Kline building’s main importance may be as a foreshadowing of Johnson’s

interest in verticality and even taller skyscrapers to come.16 By the 1970s, Johnson
had teamed up with John Burgee in a partnership that seemed to give Johnson new
energy to continue his experimentation with bodily displacement in sometimes
mammoth ways. One of their successful early buildings—the Art Museum of
South Texas, Corpus Christi, 1972—looks looks like a somewhat abstract white
object set out under the bright Texas sun and whose sculpture-like shape seems
to foreshadow Johnson’s own Library/Study of 1980. Major critical success with
Burgee would have to wait until the next year with the IDS Center, 1973, whose
unusual tapering edges seem to distort reality itself. The design for the IDS Center
restored Johnson’s critical reputation, began his long phase of major corporate
skyscrapers, and ended his New Formalism.
With Pennzoil Place in 1976 Johnson and Burgee
discarded the ethos of economy that provided the ideological and performative
basis for US skyscraper design in the 1950s and 1960s, replacing it with a new
architectural ethos based on striking imagery and marketable appeal.17
While Johnson had yet to arrive at the postmodernist mode, the famous twin
trapezoids that formed this complex looked ahead to skyscraper design that could
once again stand out as a distinctive shape on the horizon of a city and, like IDS,
contained a surface, here “bronze anodized aluminum curtain wall” and “silver
reflective glass,” that created a visually sensual experience.18 While not completed
until 1984, Johnson’s striking design for AT&T (now Sony Plaza), first published in
1978, pointed the way toward postmodern design in skyscrapers but was a failure
in and of itself: bad design of the curtain wall and lack of set-backs made the shaft
“inert.”19 Too much emphasis was placed on the entrance to the building, while
the whimsy of the top is not itself creative or interesting. The building makes
postmodernism as an architectural style legitimate, but is also an example of
everything that can be wrong with it. At the time, the advantage of Pennzoil Place
and AT&T was that they were not cubes. Yet, rather than creating a prominent
example of postmodernism, Johnson may have been simply extending ideas that
he had had much earlier when he wrote, “As a highboy gives emphasis to a great
Colonial room, so a gazebo gives focus and meaning to an outside ‘room.’”20 One
could argue that this building references the need for buildings to communicate
via signage much as Venturi theorizes in Learning from Las Vegas.21 The highboy
top communicates in the vast Victorian and modernist desert that is New York
City at the end of the 1970s—abstract neo-classical and art deco buildings that,
until Johnson’s skyscraper, eschewed this type of ornament. While the building
threatens to reduce itself to a brand or a sign of luxury or leisure, it is also a witty
inside joke disrupting the architectural flow of the city in a grand way, prominent
immediately by dent of the company it represents.
The AT&T building seems to activate the latent historical references in all of
Johnson’s buildings that come to the fore in his work in the 1980s. Transco Tower
and Water Wall (now Williams Tower), 1983/84, solitary and monumental, seem
to quote the Empire State Building.22 Republicbank Center (now Bank of America
Center), Houston, 1984, combines “seventeenth-century Dutch architecture” and
the IDS Center—solid, with its Swedish red granite, yet with edges that dissipate.23
PPG Place, 1984, is one of his great postmodern masterpieces.24 Centrally located
in the city—almost more of an image than a skyscraper—its curtain walls advertise
the fact that PPG manufactures glass. Reflecting both the Cathedral of Learning
at the University of Pittsburgh as well as the Houses of Parliament in London, the
skyscraper combines modernist materials with postmodern historical reference.
Like the Garden Grove Cathedral, it plays especially with the effect of light on
glass. Here flat panels alternate with “V-planned bays” to create a ripple effect.25
Other minor postmodern buildings that quote from history include 580 California
Building, 1984, which is topped with fiber-glass figures by Muriel Castanis and a
sloping roof that nods to San Francisco vernacular architecture and echoes Parisian
Victorian as well.26 Likewise, the Five Hundred Boylston Street Building, 1985,
attempts “neo-Victorian classicism.”27 The string of postmodern buildings comes to
a close with the famous “lipstick” building at 53rd and Third in New York in 1986.
Like an art deco object, the building seems to refers to Manhattan’s own past, but,
as its popular moniker suggests, resembles most a pop art object as designed by
Claes Oldenburg.
While a case can be made for Johnson’s skyscrapers during his postmodern
phase as at least appearing to be older than they actually were, the extent to which
Johnson was actually creating new forms is questionable as is the extent to which
his actual work is sometimes a triumph of image (or concept) over detail, client over
artist. While many other works by Johnson during his postmodern phase continue
his work in procession and the body in interesting ways such as Thanks-Giving
Square, 1976, Dallas (addition, 1996) or the Dorothy and Dexter Baker Center for
the Arts, Muhlenberg College, 1977, Allentown, he also produced many extremely
unsuccessful, often blandly exurban buildings as well. Some of these, like One
International Place, Fort Hill Square, Boston, 1987, were openly mocked. By the
1990s, after Johnson had freed himself of Burgee and begun working instead with
architect Alan Ritchie, his work moved toward deconstructionist architecture such 6.17 AT&T
as the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, Toronto, 1992; Puerta De Europa, Madrid, Building (Sony
1995; and Celebration Town Hall, 1996, which, though it necessarily follows the Plaza)
6.18 Five Hundred Boylston Street, Boston
6.19 Lipstick Building
dictates of New Urbanism, in its massing of multiple colonnades, creates a sense

of haptic confusion as well as an amusing parody of Southern architecture.28 Ever
the historicist, Johnson’s work ultimately turned back toward Germany to the neo-
Expressionism of the Philip-Johnson Haus in Berlin in 1997. The warping of the
computer-based styles that takes as its most famous example his own visitor’s center
in 1995, shows up as well in the Chapel of St. Basil, University of St. Thomas, Houston,
1997, with its torn curtain façade; Turning Point, Case Western, 1996; and the John
Thomas Memorial AIDS Bell Wall, Cathedral of Home, Dallas, 2000. The last is a part
of a cathedral for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people and may have
been Johnson’s first real coming out gesture 30 years after first meeting Whitney.
*****
Philip Johnson’s fame as a tastemaker and celebrity was frequently a double-edged
sword that suggested that he was all fame and no talent, or more likely, that his
powerful influence on architecture produced a great amount of envy within the
field itself. Johnson’s personal life, however, is often blithely ignored. The fact that
he was a gay man living in a long-term committed relationship is not factored in to
an assessment of his work, even when the substance of this identity clearly overlaps
with the criticisms of Johnson and his oeuvre. The emphasis on Johnson’s celebrity
6.20 One
often ignores the gay network of which he was a part: Warhol and other figures International
associated with pop art from the 1960s onward. His fame was also very much a Place, Boston
social phenomenon cutting across the celebrity field and reaching far outside
that of architecture (Willie Nelson, Paloma Picasso, and the rest). Johnson’s field of
work, in other words, was, to some extent, personality itself—or style as a personal
product. He designed, whether buildings, china, parks, or something else. The
Glass House was itself something of a staging area for social events, guests, dinners
that built his reputation and his network. The implicit criticism of him seems not
to take into account the extent to which these extra-architectural elements of his
career were central to what he created and how.
Johnson’s work, instead, is often dismissed as either exercises in mere style—
elegant, but generic—or seen as the indulgences of someone who was a dilettante
within a world of professionals. He is not, in other words, manly enough for
architecture. The infamous reduction of his output during the 1960s to the balletic
school of architecture when he was experimenting with the futuristic arches that
would adorn his lake pavilion, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, the
redesigned interior of his Guest House, and the New York Pavilion at the World’s
Fair suggests the implied effeminacy of his work, with the snide implication that it
was beneath even the contempt of comment. Johnson’s work, in other words, was
marked as queer, but only in an attempt to marginalize it and discount it through
(then) damning insinuation. That Johnson was showing his historical knowledge
of classical design, and was attempting, in some ways for the first time, to move
from modernism back toward a more avowedly historicist plastic language, went
unexamined.
Johnson did not help matters at that time by not acknowledging publicly his
relationship with Whitney, but by the 1970s, tastes had changed enough that
he felt comfortable bringing him with him everywhere. By that point, Johnson’s
power, during the postmodernist and deconstructive phases of his career, was
such that the criticism was somewhat muted. Johnson’s success in the commercial
market of the skyscraper, however, forced him away from the domestic and the
smaller-scaled and toward the phallic, monumental, and extremely public at the
very point when his private life was beginning to align, perhaps for the first time,
with his public one. The dichotomy between his domestic life and his public fame
continued a self-conscious tension in his life between the public and private that
one sees in much of his architecture.29 His Ash Street House in Cambridge contains
a high wall to shield the house from the street. In the Glass House this privacy is
done away with, yet the amount of land around the house emphasizes the sense of
apartness that the wealth of a country home in Connecticut symbolizes.
The Guest House that was built concurrently with the glass house might seem to
suggest the opposite: built of brick and almost completely dark inside, it essentially
consists of a bedroom. Redesigned in the “ballet” style of the late-1950s and early
1960s, the interior is the most luxurious in the estate and suggests a campy appeal
that is wholly lacking in the Glass House itself. The Guest House might appear, in
other words, to be the portrait to the body, pace Wilde, or simply the interior symbol
to the body’s surface. Yet the modernism of which the Glass House is so a part is
itself an example, at least in Johnson’s hands, of the ultimate aesthticization of life.
Everything in the Glass House is expressive of its designer/owner’s personality and
everything is artistic—from the arrangement of the objects on the coffee table to
the design of the bricks in the floor. There is no frame, except, perhaps, the glass’s
framing of the landscape outside the house—an effect that is itself so unnatural
in its purity as to call attention to itself as a gesture. The house expresses the fact
that nothing is not already designed, chosen, and created through the taste and
sensibilities of Johnson, including the space outside the windows themselves.
Like lines on a Mondrian painting that are supposed to go beyond the frame or
edges of the canvas to control and aesthticize all of space itself, Johnson’s house
spreads out over the compound to control and rectify the landscape it inhabits.
Johnson spent the next 50 years not only adding to the property, but also planting
trees, removing groundcover, and generally shaping nature into a backdrop for the
house and the inordinate views from its glass walls. Everything within the purview
of the house became malleable and subject to control from the house itself. No
detail was left to chance and the house became a symbol of Johnson himself. The
most domestic of his properties, the most personal, became at the same time his
most public. That the house itself eventually became a part of the National Historic
Trust is due in part to its popularity with the public, ranked by them with the House
of Seven Gables: an actual house that is based on a story about a house that never
existed.
While Johnson’s house is popular, it is arguable that its appeal for most people
comes mainly from its idea or concept—a glass house—rather than its actual
embodiment. That is, is the house a gimmick, or does it function more as that
which most people would probably reject: a fairly pure example of modernist
architecture, of the type of building in which most people would not want to
live? To what extent does the Glass House, in other words, represent the erasure
of American middle-class ideals? To what extent is it an escape from them? If so,
what does it represent in most people’s desires? At one level, the house seems to
function as the ideal bachelor pad—a place for the aestheticized man, someone
who is taking the Corbusierian machine for living in literally. The lack of children,
especially, seems to suggest a queer space. But Whitney domesticizes the picture
and, by introducing two dogs into it toward the end of Johnson’s and his lives,
actually brings more chaos than any number of children might have.30
The modernism of the Glass House as well as its domesticity leads the viewer
back to the body. The haptic aspect of the estate is everywhere discernable in not
only the rich textures, echoing Mies, but in the sense of danger and pleasure as well.
The Glass House compound contains a series of borders between sections or fields
that suggest not only the Ohio farms where Johnson grew up but also the borders
and barriers between different zones or areas and the frisson of their rubbing up
against each other. The grounds are littered with footbridges, stone walls, and
paths that suggest not only the transition from one section to another, but also the
movement of the body through space. Perspectival shifts and framed moments
suggest not only the landscape but also the viewer looking at it and the point of
view of contemplation and movement as well. One has to jump from the shore to
reach the floating pavilion, climb up the steep Kirsten statue, descend into the art
bunker, and trudge through tall meadow grass to the study. Moving through these
different structures reminds the visitors they have bodies. The danger of living in a
glass house is magnified throughout the estate by the corporeal qualities required
to negotiate it. But the dangers are not without their rewards: the wine cellar in the
bunker, the fireplace in the study, the view up from the pavilion or down from the
Kirsten tower. The art that surrounds the visitor—whether two-dimensional, three-
dimensional, or seemingly natural—emphasizes the deployment of the body in
service to the aesthetic realm.
Johnson’s sense of style, of the aesthetic over all other things, places him firmly
within the tradition of gay male dandies created by Oscar Wilde and running at least
from his self-invented career to the present. The combination of aesthetic interest
and queer sensibility—seen, for example, in the Warhol portrait of Johnson housed
in the art gallery—stitches together the various facets of Johnson’s personality as it
is reflected in the property. As Aaron Betsky notes:
The Glass House and the real house [Guest House] together are probably the most
succinct statement of queer space built in this country in the last 50 years. They
condense and abstract into their essences the whole history of interior decoration
and the impulses of an aesthetic modernism, reducing them to their purest and
most sensuous pose.31
The point of the Glass House, however, is not mere pose, an apolitical camp on
modernism. Instead, Johnson was making an artistic statement, a manifesto
that suggested his own work was more than simply a copy of Mies. The original
Glass House is also historicist, a serious exploration of the anxiety of influence. It
suggested already a break with modernism and a turn toward a multiplicity of
tastes, styles, influences, media, and signatures that are united, like the varied
artificial forms in the park-like setting of the compound, by taste and the creative
restlessness of a personal style.
As Julie Abraham notes, the notion of place, for gay men and women, does
not have a positive association: “To discuss homosexuality in terms of geographic
place—in terms of a country/city opposition—is also always to trade in assertions
about social place as well.”32 To some extent, to self-identify as gay or lesbian
means, often, to attempt to find another place to live—to escape to a place in
which one might find community and identity. Place, therefore, becomes the rural
while space—as in the concept of queer space and time used by Lee Edelman,
Judith Halberstam, and Samuel R. Delaney—is supposedly the safe urban center,
or at least suburbs, to which queers are supposed to “flee.”33 That not all queer men
and women do—Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena—suggests the extent to which
queer identity is not just defined by geography and social place, though for these
victims the desire to reiterate their need to have a fixed place in a society and a
sense of place-bound rootedness had dire consequences. The space of cities for
many gay men and women is often a ghetto or a gentrified neighborhood that
is both within the city and without. The argument that there is a separate queer
time and place assumes a certain homogeneity about queer lifestyles—that one
is necessarily urban, childless, wealthy, and white. In theorizing the notion of
“reproductive futurism” Edelman believes that we conceptualize “the social only
by means of compulsory submission to the temporality of community.”34 He
attempts to counter this with “a homosexuality distinctively abject as a figure”
from “the political situation in which it’s permitted to have no place.”35 While clearly
Edelman’s notion of queer futurity is suspect, especially in terms of its blindness to

race, class, and national identity, his vision of a non-reproducing futurity that exists
more in the past than in any kind of livable future describes Johnson’s Glass House
project aptly as well. As Noreen Giffney notes, “Batille’s work concentrates on the
way in which eroticism has been reduced through normalisation to sexuality in a
similar way that Edelman … comments on the disciplining of sexuality by turning
it into reproductive futurism. By figuring the death drive, queerness makes visible
the uselessness of all sexualities, lays bare reproductive futurism as fantasy and
while embodying the negativity that the social has conferred on it, refuses to
facilitate its continuation.”36 The sterile and machinic aspects of Johnson’s estate—
its function as a Duchampian bachelor machine—are precisely its strengths as a
queer space. If straight time represents linear time—time as organized through
Renaissance perspective that “often takes the form of a present created by
moving the future into the present …”—then Johnson’s estate, despite its use of
perspective and landscape, really argues for a queer time and a queer sense of
alternative perspective.37
The blending of art and life that is arguably a part of the gay male aesthetic
some critics would claim lies at the heart of Johnson’s compound can be traced
back at least as far as the fin-de-siècle decadence of a figure like J.-K. Huysmans
or Oscar Wilde.38 Johnson’s particularly domestic environments—the Glass House
compound’s sprawling series of personal buildings, monuments, and follies—
suggest the notion of life on display—the home as art gallery—that one sees in
Wilde’s famous Tite Street residence. Much of modernist domestic architecture—
Corbusier’s house for an art collector, Maison la Roche, for example—seems to be
made as a perfected environment, a controlled Spartan one in which every element
is made to count and every wine glass, chair, and lamp is part of an overall aesthetic
effect. The Purist Bedroom of La Roche house seems much like the bedroom on the
side of Johnson’s Glass House: a bed and table to hold a book, almost as though
the need for sleep was an afterthought. Solitary human needs are reduced to
the private and the secondary while public displays of art, conversation, and the
social are elevated within the design. As Yeats has famously written about Wilde’s
domestic life, it seemed to be one perfected composition in which wife, children,
and home were blended into a utopian effect. Wilde’s living room echoed one of
Whistler’s paintings for an exhibition in 1883 in London entitled “Arrangement in
White and Yellow,” where
[t]he entire exhibition space served as the frame for the etching, a frame so
dominating that the artwork seemed to recede into a dizzying yellow haze.
Where the artwork began and ended was difficult to judge.39
Wilde reproduced this effect in his own house where he had the designer, E.W.
Godwin, create an unusual system for framing Wilde’s art:
If a picture is normally set back into a frame, Wilde’s pictures were to be set
back into the wall itself. The wall was built out around the pictures in concentric
framing squares with wide margins between frames. […] The existing picture
frame was augmented to produce a double frame that blended picture and frame
together. The pictures were submerged in the wall, smoothly joined with the
architecture of the room. Rather than ornamenting the wall, the pictures seemed
to become the wall, part of the sustaining structure of the building. The boundary
between picture and frame, between frame and wall, was greatly diminished.40
The de-emphasis of the frame added to the sense of “the drealization of family
life” and, of course, acts as a commentary on Wilde’s one novel, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, especially in terms of that novel’s splitting of the protagonist into
two parts—that is, the private life of Dorian is trapped in the portrait, while his
public life becomes a perfected work of art inhabiting a real body—social, yet
increasingly aestheticized.41 The obverse of nature happens, in other words, one
in which art takes on the signs of old age and disease while the body remains
perfect, youthful, and becomes the work of art.42 Johnson’s original Glass House
mirrors this theory by splitting Johnson’s (then) private gay life off and placing it
in the dark space of the Guest House. Much like the attic room in which Dorian
keeps his painting in the closet, Johnson’s Guest House seemed to make real and
symbolic the parts of his life that he would not share with the public—the queer
interior of design and decoration that acts as the lie to the seeming dissolution
of privacy that is the Glass House itself. Taken as a whole, Johnson’s compound
reproduces a city in miniature, what could be called a “queerscape,” based upon
“dialectics, including those between expanding sexual expression and repression,
between zones of public and private, between sexual acts and various communal
identities. Each queerscape is a mixture of desire and power ….”43 While much
work is yet to be done on the vicissitudes of queer domestic space and the often
contradictory nodes and zones of queer domestic space as well, Johnson’s highly
personal private home functions as an example of pop art’s attempt to turn action
painting on its head. Whether it is Tom Wesselmann’s American Nude series or
David Hockney’s intimate line drawings of his gay friends taking showers—the
dominate artistic trope of the visual art at Johnson’s compound is pop art, which
did much to overturn the polar opposites of “high” and “low” art forms, often
parodying the former by placing them within the interiors of average American
homes—domesticating and sexualizing them at the same time.44 The notion of
the connoisseur or the collector was a powerful mid-twentieth-century trope
that was not exclusively gay, but definitely tied to consumption, the bachelor, the
playboy.45 As an arbiter of style and taste, Johnson was, as he famously declared
himself, “a whore.”46 His job was to bring taste to the masses (who could pay for
it), which he did as much through decoration and landscape design as through
building. His work seems to ask to what extent a work of art finds its proper home:
in the studio, the museum, or the private home? To what extent is it public or
private? From where does its value emanate?47 Johnson sets into motion a series of
questions that will be asked for the remainder of the century and that get bound
up with issues of gender and sexuality. To focus on the home, whether for Wilde or
for Johnson, is to focus on the feminine realm, to become a purveyor, finally, of a
“lifestyle,” and to find one’s completion not in the athletic, manly pursuits outside
the home, but in the bookish, womanly pursuits of the study and the gallery.48 As
the body-oriented art of the 1970s increasingly came to play an ever more serious
and influential role in conceptual art and performance, the question of the home,
the private, and the domestic appears in Vito Acconci’s architectonic work, Chris
Burden’s self-destructive impulses, Carole Schneeman and Karen Finely’s feminist
work, and in everything from John and Yoko Ono to Robert Rauschenberg and
Talking Heads.49 The dissolution of the boundary between art and life becomes a
hallmark of a number of artists, writers, and performers of all kinds and brings the
modernist aesthetic of the avant-garde to a surprisingly popular level.
While to some extent an example of the modernist idea of the perfected object
in a park-like setting, Johnson’s Glass House is also at home with parody, jokes, and
the vernacular architecture that surrounds it in its New England setting. Johnson’s
work prefigures postmodernism or perhaps the critical/creative playfulness of
someone like Koolhaas by creating a linear playground of ideas in which Johnson
could indulge fantasy, realism, and the mixing of art with both his life and with
other works of art. In many ways, it resists the Parthenon-like separation of Mies’s
Barcelona Pavilion from its setting. Johnson’s work contains an objectness about it
that is arguably anti-modern. Still, K. Michael Hays’s description of van der Rohe’s
masterpiece could work for Johnson’s as well:
Though it exists to a considerable extent by virtue of its own formal structures, it

cannot be apprehended only formally. Nor does it simply represent a preexisting
reality. The architectural reality takes its place alongside the real world, explicitly
sharing temporal and spatial conditions of that world, but obstructing their
absolute authority with an alternative of material, technical, and theoretical
precision. A participant in the world and yet disjunctive with it, the Barcelona
Pavilion tears a cleft in the continuous surface of reality.50
While one might not claim the perfected classicism of Mies for Johnson’s work, one
can recognize in this formulation the attempt by Johnson to create a synthesizing
function that brings the conflicts and contradictions of the real lived world to some
sort of un-chaotic unity and finish. The Barcelona Pavilion, long seen as an example
of “the architecture of forgetting,” is coterminous with the world and of it as much
as Johnson’s own seemingly purely conceptual house of glass.51
Johnson’s theoretical writing on architecture and published interviews on the
topic suggest that he initially rejected the functionality of Bauhaus in favor of a
sort of fetish of the beautiful form. Johnson attempted with modernism to add to
the historical record of forms rather than breaking with the past—or in any way
sublimating form to utility. As Johnson wrote:
The main question is, were the products of the International Style beautiful, and
not even eternally beautiful, but relatively beautiful to those of us who enjoy
looking at well-designed buildings.52
While some critics would later see Johnson’s work as a way to develop an individual
style above all else, Johnson early on emphasized the historical aspects of his
approach (“We cannot not know history”) and that ideas precede or outweigh
forms in architecture.53 While by the end of his career Johnson seemed to see
architectural development as a seeking after novelty and difference, there are
moments in his long career in which one sees a variety of contradictions. There
are, for example, certainly moments of anti-architecture such as his own art gallery
from 1970, which is buried in the ground in part as a way not to compete with
the Glass House but also as an attempt to respond to earthwork architecture (a
trend that resurfaced again late in his career with such projects as Mr. and Mrs.
James Grier House, 1965, Cincinnati, and Burden Hall at Harvard). Likewise, his own
career not only expands outward from International Style to eclectic historicism
to postmodernism to deconstruction to expressionism, but maintains at different
points overlaps and elements that can only be described as late modernist. A desire
to create new forms often exists simultaneously with an impulse to place them
within some sort of reference to the form’s original intellectual context. As Johnson
argues, even if one is quoting from history, one is changing history by putting the
forms within a new context. Even modernism is historical; on the other hand, any
historical form is changed by a new temporal or geographical context as well.
The question of form is perhaps not the primary one when looking at Johnson’s
work anyway in that he emphasized throughout his career, but especially at its
end, the extent to which his work could be seen within the context of landscape
(gardens), decoration (interior design), and, especially, time (procession and
motion). As early as 1953 Johnson claimed that the roof of Corbusier’s Unité
d’Habitation at Marseilles (1952) was the greatest work by the twentieth-century
architect that Johnson was to praise the most (even over Mies, his mentor, and
Wright, for whom he had a great deal of admiration). It is significant that Johnson
picked the part of one of Corbusier’s most famous works that is out of doors and
that constitutes, to some extent, landscape (mountains, sky) as part of its design.
Like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Johnson admires the exposed functionality
of Corbusier’s architecture and its control of scale. As Johnson argues in another
context
‘gardens’ constitute a vital part of the art of architecture. By ‘gardens’ … I …

mean … landscapes that have form and incident much as a great interior space
must have form and incident.54
His own most famous gardens include not only the landscaping of his Glass House
estate, in which large numbers of trees and shrubs and undergrowth were removed
or replanted to create a studied backdrop to the house, but also his famous design
for the sculpture court of the Museum of Modern Art (1953), where he imagined
the courtyard as a series of outdoor urban rooms organized around two pools
crossed by bridges.
Johnson’s fondness for landscape can be seen as well in his frequent use of the
penetration of inside and outside, the blurring of nature and artifice. The games
that the Glass House’s windows seem to play with nature are further reflected in
his use of interior gardens or fountains or placement of buildings within a park-like
landscape that becomes as much a part of the architecture as the actual building.
The Rockefeller Guest House in Manhattan (1950) contains an interior stream that
has to be crossed. His own Ash Street residence in Cambridge opens out onto a
walled garden. The Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian gallery is built around a
fountain courtyard and is surrounded by essential landscaping that reflects its

undulating form. Johnson also designed several outdoor parks—the water park
for Fort Worth, Texas (1974), for example—and two open-air churches. Landscape,
for Johnson, was about playing with all the elements available to the architect—
controlling space itself—and was linked to the notion of decoration or fantasy,
which by contrast, one might argue is as much about interior space as landscape
is about exterior. In designs such as the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram
Building or the re-design of his own Guest House, Johnson proved himself to be a
major purveyor of decoration almost divorced from the incidentals of built form.
For those who would attack Johnson via covert homophobic remarks, all of his
work might be termed interior decoration. And indeed, some of his most striking
architecture might be considered as such: the interior of the State Theatre at Lincoln
Center, for example, or of the Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center (1979). Interior
design, along with a fascination with gardens, were tied to Johnson’s delight with
scale and the ability it had to create illusion for the spectator, to have a bodily effect
on the viewer. The theatrical—architecture as presentation and drama—looms
large in most of his designs. Johnson’s love of garden follies and pure fantasy
architecture, which can be seen as early as his own lake pavilion or as late as his
design for a Chain Link Garden Pavilion (1999), in North Salem, New York, show the
extent to which the non-functional within architecture was connected to landscape
and interior design—flip sides of the same thing: that which architecture, in its role
as functional space, resisted.
Both landscape and decoration are connected as well by the major trope in
Johnson’s thinking, the notion that architecture is fundamentally not about space
but about time. As he argued in 1965, “Architecture is surely not the design of space,
certainly not the massing or organizing of volumes. These are auxiliary to the main
point, which is the organization of procession. Architecture exists only in time.”55
With a slight wink to Corbusier’s famous definition of architecture, Johnson reorients
it away from built structure per se and toward the experience of architecture by
the viewer, the effect it has on the viewer’s senses. As Johnson notes, “Kinesthetic
experience has to do with aesthetic experience.”56 Or, as he bluntly states later,
“Architecture is motion.”57 In this important reformulation of architecture, Johnson
emphasizes the role that memory has in architecture and that visual memory in
particular constitutes much of what we experience as we move through and around
architecture. While Johnson’s theory helps him to explain what is most dynamic
about his own architecture and that of those he admires, it places an emphasis
on architecture resisting the static and places a premium on good architecture as
processional architecture. This point immediately ties architecture to landscape,
but also to other media—film, television, kinetic sculpture, site-specific art, and
many other forms and effects as well. Johnson linked his architecture not only to
the past, but to the vernacular as well—architecture as event:
In the Labor Day celebration my hometown had, we loved it. The bands would
come in and play, in just an open pavilion.58
To some extent, this definition de-emphasizes form and places architecture within
the realm of multimedia experience.
For Johnson personally, much of the use of time within architecture had to do
with adding elements of danger that were of a distinctly Freudian type. Both the
Ash Street House and the Glass House were designed not only with landscape in
mind, but privacy as well—landscape provides isolation, despite the glass facades
of both buildings. Of the dangers in the possibility of being seen, Johnson noted
that this effect “has sexual overtones that I don’t understand” though “[p]ower,
being also sex, is a very wonderful feeling.”59 In response to one critic who said that
if one has a glass house one should have sex in the basement, Johnson replied
… I don’t have a basement, so I don’t ball in the basement. But much more
important than exhibitionism is the interface of architecture and the desire for all
kinds of sexual experiments. Whether you want to close yourself in is Freudian in
one way, but exposing yourself is Freudian in another way.60
The tension between seeing and being seen, hiding and exposing, is linked
throughout Johnson’s discussions to the pseudo-dangerous effects he employs
throughout his estate. Frequently commenting on his delight in scale—the Pavilion
is based upon the Duke of Mantua’s housing for dwarves—he emphasizes the
“treehouse” or “playhouse” effect of the Pavilion, the Ghery-inspired Ghost House
(1985), the Kierstein Tower, and even the many walkways and concomitant bridges
added to the property.61 An admirer of Williamsburg, Johnson obviously delighted
in the childlike recreation of a past that was not really a past, but like Disneyland, a
simulacrum of the real world—an architectural playground that is more related to
the fantasies of scale and perspective of Buttes-Chaumont in Paris.62 As someone
who once compared Corbusier’s Carpenter Center to Coney Island, Johnson
emphasized the sense of fun (his word) that architecture must literally embody.63
The extension of this literalization of the body can be seen not only in design
that emphasizes procession, but also in its extension into other media. Johnson
once said that “movies especially are anti-spatial,” and indeed his work is
everywhere linked more to the temporal instead. His Glass House and emphasis on
procession de-realize the spatial or transform it into another substance entirely.64
As Beatriz Colomina argues, though the Glass House was designed to contain no
media (television, telephone, and so forth), “the Glass House itself was operating
as a TV set ….”65 Not only did it broadcast Johnson’s increasing fame, but it invited
viewers in to see a private life unfold on a giant screen. Later projects of Johnson’s
such as the Glass Cathedral for television evangelist Robert H. Schuller employed a
squashed nave, much like a television screen, and gigantically large glass windows
that made the screen metaphor literal by having the contents of the service inside
the church broadcast on a television screen outside the church for people to watch
without leaving their cars.66
Thanks in large part to Mies’s never-built design for a glass skyscraper, the most
important component of Johnson’s design is the use of glass. Glass is perhaps
the material most associated with the modernist movement, as the reflective
qualities of glass are one of the reasons that some critics associate modernist
architecture with a turning away from volume and toward the building’s skin or
surface.67 Miesian modernism, such as the Farnsworth House, begins to suggest
the effects of depthless, cinematic space—architecture as a screen on which to
project effects. Johnson’s design for site four of the Times Square redevelopment
project from 1997 shows a building completely engulfed in LED display technology
(even more than the 120-foot screen ultimately built at the site by other architects).
Johnson foresees the work of Koolhaas and others who saw space as data and
demographics. To some extent, Johnson is the link between OMA and CIAM’s view
of the world from the air
… the view of the city from the air … or from a sheet of statistics … met the
challenge of developing a mechanical consciousness. They illustrate the new
freedoms of mobility and spatiality to be won from within the machine body ….68
The avant-garde modernist view of how space changes via technology unites with
the post-postmodern notion of space as the background display engulfing life itself.
Like Corbusier, whose desire for “maximum circulation” included separating roads
from housing, Johnson wanted to remove the road from architecture and return us
to the pedestrian, to the body walking through space.69 Koolhaas’s writing attempts
a Sigfried Giedion-type of intellectual history (note, for example, Koolhaas’s history
of the elevator in Delirious New York). Johnson, too, hated elevators and saw them
as the enemy of good architecture. What constitutes architecture, what should go
into its definition, is a question that Johnson asked consistently throughout his
career.
What Johnson’s estate and architecture make clear are the multiple valences with
which architecture is associated with the body. For Johnson, life, like architecture,
was about aesthetic form. As Johnson was to argue, “A culture gets the monuments
it desires.”70 What we can’t tell about the Glass House is whether he created a
perfect form to reflect his life, or if he created the form and then molded his life
to fit. Johnson used modernism not as a new form of classicism, but as studied
disorder, to break up the sense of order and harmony that Mies and others seemed
to build so carefully into their designs, to suggest that architecture’s role is that of
change, instability, and subtle expressionism.
Notes
1 An expert in the use of the plaza, Mies often used this form to place nature and the
manmade into dialogue (though often in a controlled way that emphasized the
primacy of the latter). The visual plane, as one can see in his Barcelona Pavilion, is often
a balance between the plaza or open space (or plan) and the solid wall. The experience
of moving through Miesian space, however, is different from grasping the overall
effect of a Miesian structure from a set of architectural plans.
2 The huge cracked sculpture by Donald Judd at the beginning of the procession to the
house, Untitled, 1971, which no one writes about, is also a big mistake.
3 Its design seems to represent dance, bodies in space, in an homage to Kirstein’s
connection to the New York City Ballet, which occupied Johnson’s New York State
Theater and was a home to Balanchine.
4 In his infamous diaries, Warhol chronicles Whitney’s abuse of alcohol and especially his
fondness for martinis. Warhol also includes, however, a touching observation about
visiting Whitney and Johnson at their apartment in New York while Johnson was
overseeing the building of the AT&T tower: “And their places always have nothing in
them, no knick-knacks, no flowers, no food in the refrigerator.” Andy Warhol, The Andy
Warhol Diaries, (ed.) Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 298.
5 Ad Graafland and Michael Speaks, Architectural Bodies (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers,
1996), 64.
6 Graafland and Speaks, 65.
7 The Architecture of Philip Johnson, foreword Philip Johnson, photography Richard
Payne, essay Hillary Lewis, text Stephen Fox (Boston, MA: Bulfinch Press, 2002), 50.
Much of my discussion of the major buildings in Johnson’s career owe a debt to the
descriptions given them by Stephen Fox, who pays acute attention to the affect that
Johnson’s buildings have on the body.
8 Architecture of Philip Johnson, 108.
14 “He assigned special importance to the ‘elevating’ experience of ascending,
descending, and crossing the stair-bridge, and the space-making properties of the
aligned interior openings. Johnson’s effort to construct static space, then animate it,
is a recurring theme at the Sheldon. Like his fascination with spatializing planarity
in much of his New Formalist work or spatializing inversion at Dumbarton Oaks, this
hidden narrative on the erotic sensations of bodily displacement and projection recalls
William Jordy’s observation that Johnson’s ‘classical’ work of the early 1960s possesses
a dream-like undercurrent” (Architecture of Philip Johnson, 98).
16 The Kline building may also be considered an attempt at New Brutalism, though other
buildings by Johnson are probably more successful examples of that style: Henry
L. Moses Institute, Montefiore Hospital (Medical Center), 1965, Bronx; Kunsthalle
Bielefeld, Germany, 1968; and the Albert and Vera List Art Building, Brown University,
1971. Traces of New Brutalism continue through his New Formalism period and come
together in the addition to the Boston Public Library, 1972 (Architecture of Philip
Johnson, 161).
20 Philip Johnson, Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 251.
21 Mark C. Taylor, “Stripping Architecture,” The Virtual Dimension: Architecture,
Representation, and Crash Culture, (ed.) John Beckmann (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1998), 197. Interestingly, Johnson talks about the idea for a casino
for Steve Wynn in Atlantic City that would be composed of two grids, that of the
casino and that of a hotel, that would be smashed together. Philip Johnson, Layout:
Philip Johnson im Gespräch mit Rem Koolhaas und Hans Ulrich Obrist = Philip Johnson
in conversation with Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Köln: König; New York, NY:
Distribution outside Europe, DAP, 2003), n. pag.
22 “Watching the cascading water, viewers experience a sensation of bodily

displacement, as if they were rising” (Architecture of Philip Johnson, 221). Johnson
claimed that snowfall had the same effect from inside the Glass House, which would
feel like an elevator.
24 “All components are faced with variations of an aluminum-framed, silver reflective
glass curtain wall …” (Architecture of Philip Johnson, 233).
29 As Walter Benjamin notes: “For the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the
first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the interior.
Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with
reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions.” Walter Benjamin,
“Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Selected Writings, (ed.) Howard Eiland
and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al., vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2002), 38.
30 Johnson hated them; they were once found roaming outside the estate. Ghost House
(1984) is not only an homage to Gehry (and the tradition of architects making their
names through the design of domestic space such as Venturi’s home for his mother),
but a dog house. The Philip Johnson Glass House Blog, “The ‘Dog’ Days of Summer—
Glass House Message from the Director” 15 October 2011 Available at: http://
philipjohnsonglasshouse.wordpress.com/?s=dogs
31 Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William
Morrow and Co., 1997), 115.
32 Julie Abraham, Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (Minneapolis, MN:
33 Abraham, 278.
34 Lee Edelman, “Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social,” South Atlantic Quarterly
106(3) (Summer 2007): 471.
35 Edelman, 472.
36 Noreen Giffney, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human,” Queering
the Non/Human, (ed.) Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 68.
37 Tom Boellstorff, “When Marriage Fails: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time,” GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13(2–3) (2007): 231. Thus: “The paranoid stance is
fundamentally linked to a unidirectional, straight framework that is complex in that
it can burrow both backward and forward—but not laterally, in a circle, up or down”
(231). And as Kevin Floyd argues, “With the buying and selling of psychoanalytic
knowledge of the self … sexual knowledge becomes knowledge of a reified, abstract
temporality, a temporality specific to sexual desire. Far from being integrated into
other temporalities, the psychoanalytic narrative of sexual development, a narrative
in which fundamental, polymorphous sexual impulses are repressed and then
repetitively, symptomatically manifested, attributes to sexuality a temporality that sets
it apart from social life, that represents it as independent of other social temporalities;
indeed, psychoanalysis takes an additional step and contends that the temporality
of desire is centrally determining of social life. Sexual desire assumes the form of a
temporality of symptomatic repetition.” Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a
Queer Marxism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 54.
38 For more on Wilde, Johnson, and the feminization of queer space see Alice T. Friedman,
Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New
York: H.N. Abrams, 1998) and Paulette Singley, “The Importance of Not Being Earnest:
‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,’” Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning the Avant-
Garde, (ed.) R.E. Somol (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 156–79.
39 Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005), 45.
40 Rosner, 48.
41 Rosner, 51–2.
42 As Rosner notes, “For Wilde, who calculated every aspect of his appearance and self-
presentation to produce a desired effect, a house decorated by Godwin seemed an
ideal frame for his personality” (47).
43 Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolinda Retter, “Surveying
Territories and Landscapes,” Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of
Resistance, (ed.) Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter
(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1997), 109.
44 Cécile Whiting, “Pop at Home,” Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern
Art and Architecture, (ed.) Christopher Reed (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996),
226.
45 Whiting, 233.
46 The Charlottesville Tapes: Transcripts of the Conference Held at the University of Virginia
School of Architecture, Charlottesville, Virginia, November 12 and 13, 1982 (New York:
Rizzoli, 1985), 19.
47 Christine Poggi, “Vito Acconci’s Bad Dream of Domesticity,” Not at Home: The
Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, (ed.) Christopher Reed (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 239.
48 Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed, “Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernism,”
Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, (ed.)
Christopher Reed (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 267.
49 Poggi, 249–50.
50 K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta, 21
(1984), 25. As he notes later: “Mies does not accept a preexisting frame of reference;
he represents neither an authoritative culture nor an authoritative formal system”
(27). Riley also notes of the Pavilion: “In this seminal chapter, Koolhaas’s revisionist
interpretation of the Barcelona Pavilion, the most modern of architecture icons, is
complete, presenting a vision of Mies that is no longer pure, classical, and sober, but
queer (or ‘bent,’ as he says), Hollywood, and delirious. No longer an object wrapped in
a distant, unreachable, or perfectible past, the Barcelona Pavilion has been reworked
for current consumption; the image of a buff athlete showering [replaces] Georg
Kolbe’s cast-bronze maiden captured within the Pavilions courtyard reflecting pool ….”
Terence Riley, The Un-Private House (New York: The Museum of Modern Art distributed
by H.N. Abrams, 1999), 31.
51 Robin Evans, “Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries,” AA Files; Annals of the
Architectural Association School of Architecture, 19 (1990): 66.
52 Johnson, Writings, 103.

58 Philip Johnson, Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words (New York: Rizzoli
International Publishers, 1994), 34. Johnson was fond of calling some of his
architectural folies “events” on the landscape.
59 Johnson, Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words, 42.
62 Michael Sorkin, “The Plot against Architecture,” Philip Johnson: The Constancy of
Change, (ed.) Emmanuel Petit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with
the Yale Uuniversity School of Architecture, 2009), 155; Johnson, Philip Johnson: The
Architect in His Own Words, 142.
65 Beatriz Colomina, “Johnson on TV,” Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change, (ed.)
Emmanuel Petit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Yale
University School of Architecture, 2009), 73.
66 Johnson, Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words, 100. The church complex
seems to have anticipated the rise of mega-churches, which function like their own
miniature cities with audio-visual shows during services, televisions to play them on,
CDs for sale in the lobby, beepers to hand out to parents with children in the nursery,
retreats to sign up for, free mugs to give-away, and golf carts available to transport
parishioners across the grounds.
67 Certainly, Johnson’s and Mies’s houses do not exist to redefine volume—something
that Johnson’s contemporary, Louis Kahn, a sort of anti-Johnsonian modernist, could
perhaps be credited with doing all on his own. Johnson’s work, especially after his
Miesian period proper, would be associated with superficiality, style, and an interest in
fashion.
68 Mitchell Schwarzer, “CIAM: City at the End of History,” Autonomy and Ideology:
Positioning the Avant-Garde, (ed.) R.E. Somol (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 241.
69 Schwarzer, 258. Cf. Guy Debord’s thesis number eight: “The breaking up of the
dialectic of the human milieu in favor of automobiles … masks its irrationality under
pseudopractical justifications. But it is practically necessary only in the context of
a specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the problem are
permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the present society.” Guy
Debord, “Situationist Theses on Traffic,” The Anarchist Library, 8 January 2011. Available
at: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Guy_Debord__Situationist_Theses_on_Traffic.
html
7
Bodies in Space: Architecture and the Films of Stanley Kubrick
The architectural metaphors that accumulate around the virtual have as their
origin not only theme parks but films as well, especially those films that have been
constructed not as linear answers to an initial scenario but as a series of puzzles
whose answers continue to unfold in numerous directions. While obviously any
number of films could be said to fit this pattern, and the very notion of cultural
studies as an interpretive model makes these interpretations nearly infinite with
the death of the author’s intentions and the birth of the audience’s desires, the work
of directors like Stanley Kubrick suggests the prefiguring of a postmodern cinema
that is constructed as a series of alternate possibilities—a series of ambiguities that
mirror the different narrative possibilities that one might take in a video game.
Steven Spielberg, for example, has spoken of Kubrick’s films as an immersive
experience in which the audience enters a world parallel to their own, one that is
perhaps more intense and meaningful for some than reality itself.1 If so, this effect
is perhaps first promulgated in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose special effects
create a profound sense of being in a futuristic version of the present that is solid
and believable. The seemingly linear narrative of the film—one gigantic timeline
that stretches for four million years—actually breaks down when one gets to the
center of the film, to the year 2001 itself. At this point, interpretation inevitably
multiplies and the film seems to offer a plethora of competing possibilities: Is HAL
malfunctioning or simply carrying out orders? What, exactly, does he know, or
what does he suspect? Why do the two astronauts on board his ship not know
what the purpose of their mission is? Why does Heywood Floyd lie when he does,
and to whom? Angela Nidalianis terms this sort of multiple narrative displacement
the “neo-baroque,” which connects especially with theme parks and film, both of
whose “special-effects technology is similarly intent on immersing the spectator in
the fantasy induced by the effects by highlighting intense sensory experiences that
often seek to collapse the representational frame perceptually. Unlike their small
screen companions, however, the sheer size of the cinema screen and theme park
attraction invites the dual sensation of the audience’s immersion into the alternate
world and the impression of the entry of this world into the space of the audience.”2
This effect is compounded by Kubrick’s filming 2001 with 70-millimeter film. For an
audience seeing the movie in that format in a technically-appropriate theater, the
film experience would have been a genuine journey. Much like the effect of seeing
James Cameron’s Avatar in IMAX 3-D (2009), 2001 would have been as close to a trip
through space, a sense of leaving the Earth, as film audiences could have hoped.
Kubrick’s film, like Gilles Deleuze’s theories of the baroque or the fold, would
have presented filmgoers with an enfolding of meaning, a spatial disruption of the
linear unfolding of the temporal experience of film narrative. Essentially a highly
personal avant-garde film, 2001 ultimately betrays its sense of genre, or, one might
say, acts as the precursor of the multi-leveled story telling that is to become the
hallmark of the science fiction genre especially. Ridley Scott’s film Alien (1979), for
example, morphed from film to franchise to comic book, one that combined the
Alien films with those of another series, Predator (1987) and Predator 2 (1990). It
then became a game and then a film about the game, Alien vs. Predator (2004),
and then an altogether new film series. More recently, the film Predators (2010)
attempts to go back to the original Predator film series, to some extent ignoring
the two Alien vs. Predator films altogether. The interbreeding of various franchises
is not unusual within the science fiction genre, especially, and any narrative of
development is certainly complicated now by the existence of countless computer
games as well. That comic books are increasingly the preferred medium for film
ideas—starkly eclipsing novels or original screen plays, at least in terms of many
high-grossing films—suggests the extent to which the cross-fertilization of media
has become entrenched, with Hollywood not only feeding on other visual or semi-
visual media, but assuming that its audience will understand the various allusions
within its convoluted narratives. Films have become, like theme parks, not only
virtual special effects rides but secondary narratives that exist not to tell original
stories but to mine unexplored aspects of other stories—to happily function as a
secondary art form feeding off another one as a series of homages, updates, and
references. The viewer of the film is constructed as an automaton, the sum of the
reactions to the mass of effects. Much like the character Dave Bowman in the star
gate sequence of 2001, the audience member is all eye, watching but not fully
understanding the effects show before them, a dim creature always on the brink of
understanding but never quite able to put all of the pieces together. Film becomes
eye candy and the filmgoer the child-like consumer of the swirl of allusions. Young
people become the preferred audience because they represent both the best
judges of the visual but, by lacking a full knowledge of the past, cannot wholly
critique the film based on anything but its newness—its de-historicized aspects, its
putative shock of the new.
*****
From the very first film of his career, the short entitled “Day of the Fight” (1951),
Stanley Kubrick’s work began to evidence the themes that would dominate his
oeuvre. Based upon a photo essay he completed for Look magazine on the amateur
New York boxer Walter Cartier, the film, sold to RKO pictures, follows the young
boxer as he prepares for a match with Bobby James. The 16-minute short evidences
Bodies in Space: Architecture and the Films of Stanley Kubrick 167
both Kubrick’s life-long interest in using compositions that mirror stationary

cameras as well as his emphasis on the body, specifically the male body, as it moves
and operates in space. A lifetime sports fan, Kubrick often vacillated between the
tense static shot and the build-up of tension released in sudden, violent bursts of
energy and speed. In many ways, then, Kubrick develops this rhythm of extremes
at the very beginning of his epochal career.
Boxing, specifically, is the central metaphor for all of Kubrick’s films from the
second half of his career, since most of them are reducible to some kind of hand-
to-hand conflict between two individuals. This conflict is obvious in “Day of the
Fight” and in other actual boxing matches such as the one in Killer’s Kiss (1955)
and the one between Redmond Barry and the fellow British soldier in the first
half of Barry Lyndon (1975). Boxing is also seen in the opening section of the HAL
sequence of 2001 when the astronaut known as Poole is shown shadowboxing
within the spinning chamber at the head of the Jupiter-bound Discovery space
ship. When fellow astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea) actually confronts the HAL
9000 computer (Douglas Rain) later in the most charged dramatic moment of
the film—the one that imprints and changes Kubrick’s oeuvre more than any
other—not only does Bowman confront HAL with his partner’s dead body in a
Pietà position, but human finally confronts machine in a duel, a fight that has
gone from being hand-to-hand to one involving technology and the cybernetic
extension of hands. As in the film’s famous opening sequence, when something
used to hunt food becomes a murderous weapon to scare off another clan, in this
scene a benign instrument of technology finally becomes corporeal and strikes
back. Humankind is indeed boxing with itself, or more particularly, confronting
one last obstacle in the ceaseless three-million-year battle to master technology
and overcome the elements. The mechanical arms with which Bowman holds
Poole’s body are extensions of himself, but in their uncanny, ghostly way, remind 7.1 “The Day of
us that Bowman’s pod is, like the spacesuits and the ship itself, an extension not the Fight”
only of the human body but also reminders of the stages of the development Source: Warner
of the human fetus and of evolution itself. For a film that is so demandingly Bros. Pictures.
literal in its sense of linearity, this
sequence brings all of the temporal
development of mankind together
in one spatial place. The Discovery,
which essentially is HAL, is the final
evolution of the tool used by the ape
at the beginning of the film, while
the pod and the astronauts external
to the ship are merely small beings
trying desperately to re-connect
with the technology that gives them
life—a technology that might or
might not be alien in nature.
The point of the confrontation,
however, is that it finally comes
down to Bowman (whose Odysseus-
like name suggests his ability

both to improvise and to be
patient) and the super brain
that is HAL (however paranoid,
mechanistic, logical, or mis-
programmed he might or might
not be). It is still an elemental
conflict, and in that sense,
despite the many films filled
with technically sophisticated
filmmaking, philosophical ideas,
and avant-garde storytelling
structure, Kubrick’s oeuvre
involved the pitting of two
7.2 Barry individuals in some sort of physical conflict, one often based, in part, upon mental
defends himself agility as much as physicality, but one in which the conflict itself mattered. The boxing
Source: Warner
match in “Day of the Fight” was soon followed by the noir-esque The Killer’s Kiss in
Bros. Pictures.
which the putative hero, Davey (Jamie Smith), must confront his nemesis, Rafello
(Frank Silvera), in a claustrophobic mannequin factory. Several shots as framed by
Kubrick emphasize the extreme uncanniness of the life-like appendages, heads,
and torsos that surround them, sometimes swaying slightly from the vibration of
the fight. The uncanny takes a turn into the surreal when Davey is finally forced to
use a mannequin’s head and torso as a weapon with which to defend himself—
foreshadowing Alex’s use of the penis sculpture in A Clockwork Orange (1971) as a
murder weapon as well as the design of female tables and “milk” distributors in the
Korova Milk Bar scenes. The de-humanization of mankind, seen most profoundly,
perhaps, in Clockwork Orange, is a part of the process of self-defense. Humans in
general, and men in particular, are made to appear small. Much as Bowman and the
lifeless Poole float outside the mammoth dinosaur-bone-like ship, so does Davey
enter the neighborhood of the factory via a small, dark alleyway that takes up just
the lower-left quadrant of the film screen. Like mice entering a mouse hole, or Alice
her rabbit hole, the men disappear into a dream-like world in which they must
confront some form of themselves as other.3
The notion of the fight, therefore, is also tied to the concept of the double, and
the other that one confronts, especially during the first half of Kubrick’s career, is
another man. In this sense, there is an implied erotic attachment, both narcissistic
and homoerotic at the same time: seeing oneself in the mirror and falling in love
with one’s own image is self-love but also love for someone who is gendered male
and, therefore, potentially homoerotic as well. Women come into Kubrick’s films
slowly, quietly, liminally, from the German singer at the end of Paths of Glory (1957)
to Shelley Duvall’s Wendy in The Shining (1980), women are mostly significant
by their absence. A part of this analysis, however, is the focus on the dichotomy
within gender that is taken up with conflict, with a life and death struggle for
dominance. Just as the apes in 2001 fight each other over a watering hole, so,
too, does every other major protagonist in a Kubrick film also have his nemesis,
however misplaced: Heywood Floyd

(William Sylvester) and the Soviets,
Bowman and HAL in 2001; Alex and
everyone he encounters, but finally,
the State in Clockwork Orange; Barry
and Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon; Jack
and his wife and son in The Shining;
the marines and the sniper in Full
Metal Jacket (1987); Bill and Alice in
Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Earlier films
also frame this basic conflict, whether
it is Humbert Humbert and Quilty
in Lolita (1962), Kirk Douglas’s Col.
Drax and his commander (played by
Adolphe Menjou) in Paths of Glory, or
the various pairings in Dr. Strangelove 7.3 Running toward the mannequin factory Source: United Artists.
(1964): president and premier, spy and
spy, and so forth. Dramatic conflict is
nothing new, but Kubrick emphasizes
the nakedness of it, the psychological
nuances of it, and the violence that
frequently comes from it.
From “Day of the Fight” through
2001 one could also say that he made
clear that the conflict or struggle
that he framed was almost always
between two men and the analysis
of gender that we have emphasizes
the homoerotic nature of combat.
The specific bodies in space in a
Kubrick film are male bodies and
their displacement of space into
time is one that is particular to the 7.4 Interior of mannequin factory Source: United Artists.
doubling of the male body via either
technology or coincidence. While this emphasis on maleness may indicate a lack
of awareness on Kubrick’s part of the importance of female sexuality until after
the dawning of the Women’s Liberation movement after the late-1960s, it does
provide an opportunity to understand what Kubrick seemed to be saying about
the male body, which remained an object of scrutiny in his work, if only because of
the emphasis he would continually place on the physical danger that men’s bodies
were placed in via violence. Men, in other words, were treated as singular in some
situations, one of which was war, the only topic to which Kubrick actually returned
to twice. In other instances, men were seen as essentially universal. This point is
perhaps most starkly made in 2001 when we see the first intertitle, “The Dawn of
Man,” and then witness men, or pre- and post-men, acting as the instigators of
history, of temporality as defined by movement through space.4 Heywood Floyd,

the paradigmatic beaurocrat who is ultimately the real villain of the film, is defined
by four females: the flight attendant who replaces his floating pen, the receptionist
who greets him at the station, his daughter (and absent mother and babysitter, both
female), and the female Soviet scientist whom he seems to know well but to whom
he tells a bold-faced lie. Although one might view this world, as Elis Hanson does,
as an all-male world in which men ultimately find a way to bypass female birth in
order to procreate, the very maleness of the world is shown to have its dark side, one
that might in fact trump any sort of hopeful meaning suggested by the Star Child at
the end of the film.5 As the archetypal male of the world of the future, Floyd lies to
everyone he meets, male and female alike. Only in the videotape released at the end
of HAL’s conscious life when Floyd explains what little they know about the monolith
does he ever actually tell the unvarnished truth. As Michael Bérubé notes, one way
to look at 2001 is as Strangelove in space, specifically, part two of two films about the
Cold War, or the paranoia of that period of time.6 The future that Kubrick imagines is
not that of the original Star Trek series where prophet, greed, and poverty have been
subsumed into a sort of socialism of the future, but a world of Hilton Hotels, Pan Am
space shuttles, and AT&T picture phones. One of the timeless aspects of the film lies
in Kubrick’s three-dimensional creation of the future, not as fantasy, as some place
we would like to be parallel but different from our own, but as an extension of our
own present (or the present of the mid-1960s) into the future. Kubrick worked closely
with NASA, IBM, and AT&T to come up with a world that in many ways did eventually
come about, at least in terms of design (“I’d like the hardcopy on that, HAL”; touch-
screens like iPhones; constant video surveillance; two-way picture phones, and so
on).7 Kubrick displaces much of the drama of the film into the realism of the spatial
design—from the sense of displacement in interiors in outer space (where there
is no up or down) to the extreme silence of space and the high contrast light in
which objects in space would exist. Kubrick single-handedly redesigned the look of
science fiction film and set a standard that has never been reached again. The Star
Wars (1977) saga that succeeded 2001 opted for science fantasy instead (“A long
time ago in a galaxy far, far away …”), which has continued to be the approach taken
by most films that deal with the future.
Kubrick’s world is extremely real, but that sense of reality extends also to the
emotions on the screen. Floyd’s main mission is to keep a secret, and he does this
expertly well. He lies to the Russian scientists and then during his “briefing” tells
the US members of the station that the cover story will be maintained “as long
as the Council deems necessary.” He also adds, almost as an aside, that oaths will
have to be signed by all of those present. This level of relative truthfulness is, of
course, more than he gives the Russians, to whom he denies even the cover story.
The extent of Floyd’s ruthlessness places the viewer into the same position as those
to whom he speaks. We, too, do not know what the truth is, or even how much of
anything he says is ever wholly true. When Floyd pauses with his fellow beaurocrats
for a group photo before the monolith on the moon, their behavior, as innocent
and collegiate as it might seem, is just as pointless and juvenile as the behavior of
the alpha apes over the watering hole at the beginning of the film (and of human
time). The audience has no reason to trust Floyd and the extent of his lying doesn’t
become clear until the end of the Jupiter mission sequence when we learn that
neither of the astronauts who was on the mission knew what their actual mission
was—information that was known only to HAL, who malfunctions (perhaps) either
because he was asked to lie or asked to carry out his mission no matter the human
expenditure.
Within this less than optimistic view of human nature, albeit a nature that might
well end with the birth of Bowman as the Star Child, women might at least be said
to be spared the blame of turning the future into one in which boys still battle
each other for control of the sandbox and perhaps that is Kubrick’s point and his
exclusion of women is as simple as that. The problem with this solution, however, as
Hanson also makes clear, is what he calls HAL’s “queer voice”: the mid-transatlantic,
undecidedly gendered quality of the mechanized voice that Kubrick gives to
HAL. To some extent HAL, like the Russian scientist we meet earlier, is given traits
that appear to be both male and female, almost as if, in order to become female,
one has to become androgynous. While there is no sense that Elena (Margaret
Tyzack) is uncomfortable with her gender role, there is considerable reason to
believe that that isn’t true with HAL, who takes on, at different points, an almost
overly emphatic sense of communication with the two men in his midst: trying
to psych Bowman out about the mystery surrounding the placing of the other
three astronauts on board “already in hibernation after four months of separate
training on their own”; and, most uncannily, the emphatic way that he often states
a sense of alarm (“Just a moment … just a moment …”). HAL seems to become
the replacement for the feminine presence in the film, but one in which the gay
man represents the biologically female. If Hanson is correct, Kubrick would have
mistook sex for gender, or vice versa, and created the gay man as an example of
the third sex theory of the nineteenth century that confuses gender and sexuality
by seeing gay men as women trapped in men’s bodies. Part of the problem with
this idea is the fact that, on the one hand, HAL is a program, perhaps, as Bowman
mentions to the BBC interviewer, one that is programmed to respond to them, and
that, no matter what, is to some extent a projection or a reflection of its makers
(scientists, but also, possibly, Floyd as the one who makes him lie or suspect the
full truth). But also, that HAL’s intimacy with the two astronauts often mirrors or
intensifies the homoerotic aspects of the two crewmembers’ time together on the
7.5 Bowman
holding Poole’s
body
Source: Warner
Bros. Pictures.
ship—the moment that culminates in Bowman’s cradling of Poole’s lifeless body.

HAL, no matter his seeming gender undecidability, is definitely constructed to be
male, but toward what end?
In many ways the use of Poole and Bowman on board the ship merely mirrors
the use of the male body that we see in “The Day of the Fight” and becomes the
trope that culminates in 2001. Kubrick’s first short film spends most of its time on
the preparation for the fight, opening on the morning of the day with Walter in
bed with his identical twin brother, Vincent, who, we are told, acts “as his manager
and trainer.”8 Like HAL, he seems to provide all of Walter’s autonomic functions,
to be, in a sense, a “wife.” He cooks breakfast for them (Walter feeds some of it to
their dog), attends Mass with him, and most importantly, oils down his body just
before the fight begins. We are reminded repeatedly throughout the short film
that the most difficult aspect of the day of a fight is waiting, the pent up suspense,
preparation, and tension that comes from the expectation. What we mainly see in
the two handsome, well-dressed young men is the way that their domestic duties
are used as a way to dispense with waiting, as a form of distraction before the
much more manly task of punching other men’s faces begins. Just like the two men
aboard the Discovery, the Cartier brothers look alike, act alike, and seem to form
one inseparable unit. In a striking moment at the beginning of the film, we see
Walter and his twin brother cross a busy street and we can only tell them apart by
the difference in their ties—Walter wears a bow tie, Vincent a straight tie. Likewise
in 2001 Poole rarely appears without Bowman, and they look so much like twin Ken
dolls that only subtle differences separate them: Poole is left-handed and parts his
hair on his right side; Bowman, the opposite. The absence of one man is usually
signaled by an empty chair next to the other, as if they were supposed to always
be complete or together. Their separation, first through Poole’s space walk and
then via Poole’s death, is heart-wrenching, though perhaps emotionally inferior to
the death of HAL himself. Poole and Bowman form one complete unit, but only
one of them will survive. HAL literally comes between them—first, as the eye that
sees them both and who insinuates himself with each of them via one-on-one
conversations. Like the Cartier brothers, Bowman and Poole must spend much of
their time distracting themselves: chess and shadow boxing for Poole, sketching
for Bowman. HAL has time to talk with the two men, and to try, for reasons never
made clear, to test them. He tells Poole that a move that he has made will ultimately
result in his checkmate (it won’t), and he attempts to query Bowman about the
“rumors” surrounding their mission and the “melodramatic touch” of having the
other scientists placed in suspended animation before boarding. The audience
never knows what HAL does or does not know for sure and the extent to which
we can or cannot attribute something like a sense of motive or purpose to him.
What we do know is that at least dramatically HAL comes across to the viewer as
the most emotional sentient being on the screen. Floyd, despite his parlay with
his daughter, is finally a cold manipulator; Poole and Bowman, despite acting as
the residue of humankind’s progeny, are a bit too flavorless and lifeless, almost as
though they are meant to function as a sign that it is time for humankind to move
on into another evolutionary leap if its technocratic scientists seem more machine-
like than their machines. In this hyper-machinic or hyper-masculine universe, it’s
not surprising that HAL comes across as

the most human character on the screen.
This impression is made complicated
by HAL’s actions toward not only
Poole and Bowman but also the other
completely defenseless astronauts whom
he terminates with all the emotion of a
ruthless opening move in a chess game.
If we are to locate HAL’s humanity, or
HAL’s queerness, it might be not in what
he says but in what he doesn’t say. In a
film famous for its lack of dialogue, and
for dialogue that, during the first half,
consists mainly of Orwellian language,
we can look instead at the purely visual
as a sign of what Kubrick might be up to instead. One strikingly pregnant scene 7.6 The Cartier
shows Poole sunbathing in a chamber of the ship. Until Poole asks HAL to lower brothers
his headrest just a bit, we are unaware that HAL is a silent presence in the room: Source: Warner
Bros. Pictures.
one that, with his all-seeing Benthamite eye, is, we assume, gazing on Poole’s
body. Poole, like Bowman, is almost doll-like in his perfection—like a prototype
for a male figure rather than a real one. Manufactured as if from a mold, he is
caught in a moment of self-satisfaction masquerading as relaxation, pretending
to be alone at the beach when countless people are all around you watching
you while you close your eyes. The body of Poole becomes the center of the film,
the gaze on the male body a requirement in order to understand the function of
space in the film. Millions of miles from the Earth’s surface, Poole recreates one of
its pleasures: the absorption of the sun’s rays as one studiously wastes time. This
intensely erotic moment, impossibly neither wholly narcissistic nor homoerotic,
is interrupted by the first of several interruptions that we will experience in the
film with an announcement from HAL that a birthday greeting from his parents
has come through. This time-delayed recording is run by HAL on Poole’s ascent
and is greeted by Poole with a stony response that calls attention to itself. The lack
of reaction suggests the poverty of speech that we first see with Floyd, only here
7.7 Poole
sunbathing
Source: Warner
Bros. Pictures.
it underlines Poole’s potentially de-humanized technocratic function. The other

possibility, however, is that he knows he is being watched. When the broadcast
is over Poole says, in reference to his headrest, “A bit flatter, please.” The situation
of dominance is reestablished; the lover is once again acknowledged, just a bit.
The screen returns to the lack of intimacy just shown to us between one male and
another.
The doubling that we see in Kubrick’s oeuvre suggests not only the notion of the
uncanny, but of the human as automaton as well.9 Poole and Bowman are not only
doubled throughout the ship, but possibly tripled or multiplied even more times
by HAL’s fishbowl eyes scattered throughout the ship’s structure. The astronauts
come closest to resembling HAL when they are in their spacesuits or aboard the
pods, looking out through enormous single eyes, just like HAL. It is while inside
their suits, especially, that they most resemble their interchangeability, the suits
dangling in the pod bay, unanimated, much like the mannequins in The Killer’s Kiss
or the robots in the shop toward the end of AI (2000). The uncanniness of human
doubling is outdone by the ability of machines to replicate humans in space—
either in a somewhat disembodied way like HAL, or in a real way as in AI. In either
case, something unreal comes to replace that which is human, to take on human
characteristics in a mimicry that undoes not only the original but what the original
seems to stand for, the organic or the emotional.
In Kubrick’s next film, A Clockwork Orange, he pushes further on the notion of
the human as machine, rather than the machine as human, creating a completely
different idea of the future, one that owes as much of a debt to the 1970s as
2001 does to the 1960s. In contrast to 2001, A Clockwork Orange presents a very
human narrator and protagonist who is almost hyper-verbal. The look of the film
likewise contrasts with the monochromatic, immaculate interior sets and trippy
special effects of the final sequence, which are replaced with location shooting
and the multi-chromatic look of 1970s design. While Kubrick’s film hardly feels
improvisational, there is a wide array of emotions and cinematic effects displayed. At
different times the film indulges in broad comedy, extreme horror, social satire, and
even domestic farce. Though set slightly in the future of 1971, the film itself seems
to take most of its visual cues from 1960s pop art, that is, from the decade of the
writing of Anthony Burgess’s novel. The pop/op visual look appears on the screen
7.8 Forgotten
helmet
Source: Warner
Bros. Pictures.
in the alternating primary and secondary colors that accompany the titles before
we switch to the face of Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). The cracked visage of
Alex, his one gender-bending false eye lash on his otherwise very put-together
face, suggests his dandical futurism. Echoing the lipstick worn by the Droog to his
left (Dim; Warren Clarke) and the face paint of the one to his right, Alex is a literal
example of how the 1970s will be different from the 1960s. The influential costume
design of the film emphasizes a number of signifiers simultaneously: a slight
foppishness, as seen in their very British hats, especially Alex’s bowler; the clean,
white efficiency of their clothes with its contrasting black boots; the exaggerated
phallic aspect of their jock straps, worn outside their clothing and filled with large
rubber balls. When combined with the phallic noses of their masks, their “look” is
menacing, though overall, the combined effect shades toward the surreal, which
is perhaps suggested by the eyeballs sewn into their cuffs. To some extent, their
combination of phallic strength and feminine attention to detail suggests Bowie’s
Ziggy Stardust avant la lettre. In the scene in the “abandoned cabaret,” Alex and his
boys dispense with Billy Boy (Richard Connaught) and his followers with chilling
alacrity, the sloppy, hippy-ish other gang being no match for the club-wielding,
boot-wearing, highly choreographed Droogs.10 Alex, Kubrick seems to be saying,
poses a greater threat to the future than does the Cold War. The male body itself
will become a battleground for what will be possible.
The scene at the cabaret begins with a close-up on a trompe l’oile painted
above a stage. We pan out to the stage as a whole as a naked woman is dragged
by Billy Boy and his friends to a bare mattress to be raped. Even with four men
involved, the rival gang is so inept that they are almost unable to keep control of
the scared but struggling victim (Shirley Jaffey). By pulling back, Kubrick uses one
of the many techniques in the film to distance the viewer from the violence one
sees on the screen, especially in the film’s first 30 minutes. By placing the scene on a
stage, Kubrick invokes the proscenium arch to further distance the action from the
spectator, a point underscored by the version of Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie”
that provides the scene’s musical overlay. The music and the setting suggest the
values, sensibilities, and aesthetics of a more decorous time, one that contrasts
with the brutal violence of the assault and the slovenliness of the repulsive young
men who are attempting to carry it out. The action is interrupted by the arrival
of Alex and the Droogs, like a punk band from the future, who enter the space in
perfect symmetry as Alex begins verbally to berate Billy Boy with a string of insults
aimed primarily at Billy’s sexuality. This tirade triggers an immediate response
from Billy who answers, “Let’s get her, boys!” and jumps down from the stage into
a melee with Alex.11 The look on the former’s face is one of excitement, Kubrick
making quite clear that the homosocial pleasure of the fight is preferable to the
quasi-sexual joy of the rape. For the first time, the camera breaks from the general
point of view of Alex to show the young woman escaping stage left. When we cut
back to the skirmish, Kubrick employs yet another distancing device by turning the
actual fight itself into something out of a Hollywood Western: chairs are broken
over heads; bodies are thrown through windows; punches are landed. The fighting,
in other words, is fake, or even more so, stylized in the form of a film genre. From
stage to screen, the space of the scene dissolves into that of the screen one is
watching reminding the viewer that they are seeing a film, but one that is itself
made up of the parts of other films, or types of films or effects from films, that they
have seen before.
This self-consciousness about the materiality of film runs throughout A
Clockwork Orange, though it slowly becomes more pronounced as Alex moves
increasingly from actor to victim, from active to passive, subject to object. At the
beginning of the movie Alex imagines himself as the star of his own “horrorshow,”
whether it is in the brutal beating and rape of Mr. Alexander and his wife, shot
with a handheld camera by Kubrick in a form of cinéma vérité, accompanied with
music and dance steps by McDowell, or in the form of Alex’s imagined music video,
almost ten years before MTV, as he listens to Beethoven’s Ninth in his room with
his snake, nude statues of Jesus, and Beethoven window shade. The rapid editing
to music of this scene is pushed even further with the under cranking used in the
three-way sex scene with the two young women Alex picks up at the record store.
These fast editing techniques are put into contrast with some similarly slow, liquid
tracking shots such as the one away from Alex’s face at the Korova Milk Bar and,
later, following Alex as he negotiates the record store’s curvaceous aisles. Kubrick
seems to include techniques from Eisenstein, Ophuls, Welles, and other directors
to show a mastery of space, the perfectly apt matching of technique and scene.
Clockwork Orange is as baroque as 2001 is classical: displaying a dizzying array of
techniques to match the many moods of the film.
As the movie becomes more serious, however, even melancholic after Alex’s
capture, rehabilitation, and release, the film’s self-consciousness about film
becomes less showy and more an invisible part of the film’s structure. Alex imagines
the old testament of the Bible as a sword and sandals epic filled with sex and
violence. But when he undergoes the Ludovico Technique to cure him of his own
sexual and violent tendencies, the experience more closely resembles a science-
fiction episode in which he is psychologically re-engineered to create a modern
Frankenstein monster, a clockwork orange, a marionette without a soul. As the
prison chaplain says, “Choice! The boy has not a real choice, has he? Self-interest,
the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. The
insincerity was clear to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to
be a creature capable of moral choice.” By the time Alex gets to Mr. Alexander’s
house the second time, he has entered into his own stereotypical imagination.
The realistic horror films that he saw while undergoing treatment have become
real: Mr. Alexander, as performed by Patrick Magee, acts like a mad scientist or a
crazed serial killer. His desire to inflict revenge on Alex is heighted both by Magee’s
B-horror acting and the lightning accompanying the thunder storm on the night
of their second encounter. Alex, who has an active imagination and sensitivity
to film (“Viddy this …”), is unable to see the irony in his situation, one in which
he finally gets to star in his own movie, only the script is not of his choosing. He
becomes a plaything for the political forces of his day, the conspirators who help
Mr. Alexander and the government minister who ultimately manipulates him for
his own promotional gain in order to keep his party in power. Alex is never capable
of changing his lot until the very end, when he and the minister finally have an
agreement to help each other, thus ending Alex’s lack of authorial power, as can be
seen in the final image of the film where Alex imagines the sex he will have again
while people look on in Victorian garb and applaud. The space of Alex’s dreamscape
is strangely undefined, a white background that could be an extension of the movie
screen itself or of the real world finally merging with his fantasies, implicating the
viewer and extending our imagination into his.
*****
Alex’s world is one of seeming sexual dimorphism, the bodies of women are objects
of sexual pleasure and objectification. Yet it is Alex himself who is frequently
the object of scopophilic and tactile homoerotic pleasure.12 Heterosexual sex in
the near future, Kubrick seems to have theorized, becomes a somewhat sterile
and apathetic affair. The pickup scene between Alex and the two women seems
strangely formulaic, as though Alex is going through the verbal paces and the
two women are quiet but inevitably available. The resulting sex scene plays like a
parody of a homemade porn film (again, prior to the popularity of home porn via
video and digital recording) that mainly emphasizes Alex’s stamina and dexterity.
Throughout the film as a whole, sex between men and women is often held up as
either parodic or sinister. When Alex is recovering after his attempted suicide, we
hear the groans of a male doctor and a female nurse while they have sex behind a
curtain just at the moment that Alex, like Moonwatcher (Daniel Richter) or the Star
Child, awakens. Alex’s desire to have sex with the beautiful actress who is brought
in during the Ludovico demonstration to show his inability to act on his own desire
is described by Alex in his own thoughts (in voiceover throughout the film) as
violent: the desire to “have her,” but also to rape her. The future as imagined by
Burgess and Kubrick is about the heightening of sex and violence, a commentary
on the changes in youth culture since its rise in a post-World War II environment.
While perhaps accurate, the sex and sexuality of the film don’t just describe
heterosexuality but homosexuality as well. The violence of advertising, upon
which much pop art is based, is about the sexualization of everything—the yoking
together of sex and violence in one seamless whole that appeals to both sides of
the human psyche simultaneously in an act of overstimulation. Alex is frequently
aware that he himself is a potential victim of sexual violence and his interactions
with most male characters in the movie involve some form of sexual intimidation,
almost always sublimated and replaced by other forms of violence directed at both
his body and his mind.
In roughly the first third of the film Alex and his body are almost always expressed
via phallic power. Alex rapes, tortures, and ultimately murders as part of his own
gratification. Kubrick makes clear that Alex is never really concerned with his victims’
suffering. Alex is defined by his distinct lack of empathy. He is into sex and violence
because they please him. A product of the state—an exaggerated version of the
nanny state of Great Britain of the dole and National Health Service—he wants to
pass the time in as distracted a way as possible. He has grown up (he is supposed
to be a teenager in the book) in a benighted environment in which his parents
are ineffectual (his father is scared and sniveling; his mother vain and complicit
with the youth culture); the state (in the form of Mr. Deltoid [Aubrey Morris], his
probation officer) has taken the place of his parents but failed as well; and his
physical environment is Stalinesque—great concrete bunkers (Thamesmead in
reality) for flats complete with Moscow-subway-like murals on which someone

(Alex?) has drawn oversized penises and other graffiti. The film makes clear that in
this dissolute and truncated world Alex is king. His creativity with language makes
poetry out of Burgess’s version of Orwellian slang: a mixture of Russian endings
and creative mishearing. In such a demotic environment, Alex’s very energy—
however horrific and self-serving—almost begins to seem heroic. One is drawn
in to his world through his verbal acrobatics, grace, and attractiveness. The last
is important as Alex’s actions are, to some extent, forgiven by the state merely
because Alex is handsome and young. Though called “vicious,” and he is, Alex is
also called “handsome.” He has gotten by on his good looks with his mother, but
also with Mr. Deltoid, whose interest in Alex’s body is made clear in the scene in
Alex’s parents’ bedroom where Mr. Deltoid confronts Alex on the bed, placing his
arm around Alex’s unclothed shoulders in an intimate gesture that ultimately ends
with a fist in Alex’s crotch. Deltoid, a finely-drawn comic figure, is clearly attempting
to repress his physical attraction to Alex, which has become violent if only for the
fact that Alex himself has finally become too violent to be under Deltoid’s care, who
is now losing access to him as Alex outgrows the juvenile system.
The state, as represented most poignantly by Deltoid, is consistently represented
as large, adult, male, gay, and strangely passive. At the Korova Milk Bar giant, silent
men watch the drugged denizens of the bar as they space out on the ingredients
suspended in the otherwise wholesome milk. They stand, pose, and observe with
a cocked wariness somewhere between ennui and sexual interest. Even when Alex
whacks Dim across his legs for unleashing a raspberry during the bit of Beethoven’s
Ninth sung by one of the “sophistos” who have entered the bar for a night-cap,
the bouncers do not intercede. Alex’s attack on Dim triggers the events for the
rest of the film as Dim and the other Droogs argue, correctly, that Alex is just
into robbery for the mayhem, which makes him shortsighted as what they seek
is something more lucrative. He is confronted again by Dim, even after a brutal
knife attack by Alex, when Alex emerges from his apartment to find the Droogs
waiting for him in the lobby. Alex intimidates Dim, who is seated, by straddling
him and placing his oversized jockstrap in his face. The mixture of sexuality and
violence is unmistakable. Dim, despite his name and his inarticulate conversation,
nevertheless harbors a plan that is carried out when the four of them attempt to
rob the “Catlady” (Miriam Karlin) at the local health farm. At the end of this last, most
disturbing example of “ultraviolence,” Alex is hit in the face with a milk bottle. The
sexual intimidation against Dim is replaced with actual violence, not cartoonish or
distanced, that is shocking not the least for the fact that it is finally being aimed at
Alex himself.
At this point in the film Alex’s fortunes change, not to be reversed until the final
scene and fantasy sequence. Alex must spend the rest of the film atoning for his
action in an attempt by the state and society to find an answer to the sins he has
committed. Alex is first subjected to physical intimidation at the police station after
he is apprehended. While in police custody, before being sent to prison, Alex is
confronted by Det. Const. Tom (Steven Berkoff ) who remarks on Alex’s bad cut
across his nose, “nasty … spoils all your beauty.” He proceeds to push on the cut.
Alex responds by grabbing the detective’s genitals, which results in Alex getting
beaten by two other officers. Presently, Deltoid shows up and is encouraged to do

whatever he wants to Alex: “he must be a great disappointment to you.” Deltoid
satisfies himself with spitting upon Alex with spittle that is wet and suggestive of
the sexual nature of Deltoid’s uneasy relationship to Alex’s youth. Now at the mercy
of the state, Alex is transferred to prison. During his orientation Alex is stripped of
his name, his immediate possessions, and his clothes and subjected to a full cavity
search by the Chief Guard (Michael Bates) in a comic performance that suggests
the homoerotic ogling in store for Alex in prison. Up until this point in the film Alex
and his body have been a constant source of physical suggestion with the Nadsat
dialogue that accompanies the register of the body and is filled with references
to sexual excitement, male body parts, and questions about manhood—the usual
elements, in other words, of male bravado, insult, and communication. As he finally
transitions to prison, Alex literally becomes these body parts as we see his penis and
his ass. As Murat Aydemir notes in reference to an argument by Daniel Boyarin, the
slippage between the phallus and the penis is made complete when there ceases
to be any hiding of the penis. At the moment it is revealed, no longer veiled, it can
no longer be the phallus: “As soon as the distinction between phallus and penis
rigidifies into a clear opposition … it yields two equally unproductive effects. On
the one hand, the phallus, when detached from the male body, can reign supreme,
uncontaminated by that body’s contingency and historicity. On the other hand,
the penis, if detached from the phallus, promises to be accessible in its pseudo-
objective, anatomical, or historical reality.”13 Alex is naked in his body with only his
mind to protect him. Without the power of the phallus, the viewer goes on to learn,
Alex’s body is subjected to much physical abuse and his mind to even more.14
In the middle part of the film, however, as Alex is subjected to the Ludovico
Technique, it is not his body that is under threat but his mind. While his eyes are
pried apart to create the most famous image of the film, Alex’s body is not touched.
It is not until the last third of the film, when Alex is released back onto the street and
must endure the effects of the treatment, including the inability to defend himself
from physical assault, that Alex’s body once again comes into play as he is beaten,
drugged, and even water boarded by two of his former Droogs, Dim and Pete, who
have now, appropriately, become police officers. At his most physically helpless,
having crawled through the rain to the door, once again, of Mr. Alexander’s, Alex is
held in a pietà by Mr. Alexander’s assistant, Julian, another oversized male bouncer
who has replaced Mrs. Alexander as Mr. Alexander’s helpmate and, presumably,
lover.15 As Aydemir makes clear, the completion of the circuit for Alex is not simply
the “debate concerning the phallus/penis distinction” but the fact that the covering
of the penis, its outline within clothing, suggests performativity. As in a porn film,
there has to be not just a performer but also a watcher: a body part and someone
who acknowledges it via desire. The part or the person has to be both visible and
taken away, there and gone but framed in shape and outline. It is always present,
but its meaning comes from the slippage between signifier and signified.16 The
penis, pace Kaja Silverman, “contaminated by the visual.”17
In the dystopic future of Kubrick, the liberal state, which tacitly encouraged
Alex’s behavior by indulging him and providing ineffectual parenting, is replaced
by the technocratic state that intervenes to prevent Alex’s bad behavior through
the miracle of science. The heterosexual, which is linked to both violence and the
phallic, is replaced with the homosexual, which is linked to the objective and the
feminine. The audience is never completely allowed pleasure at seeing Alex suffer
as it is constantly reminded of the costs of Alex’s proper behavior. The dichotomy,
also, is not so simple. If science represents the right, and freedom of choice the
left, then the latter is on the side of religion, of the pastor who is clearly coded as a
conservatively moral figure. As in all of his later films, Kubrick sets up an irresolvable
paradox between two possibilities and allows the audience to provide the answers.
What is clear is that the film uses the notion of freedom to mean freedom to use
one’s body as one wants to, yet this freedom becomes problematic once it impinges
upon the bodies of others. Alex’s real problem—the problem of the male body in
particular—is the problem of violence. The film represents a Foucauldian answer to
the problem of surveillance and punishment, which is to internalize it. Alex’s body
can’t be touched; therefore, his mind has to be made to function differently. As
Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and Punishment, the regulation of the body
in Western Europe, particularly in Foucault’s own country of France, went from the
notion of the punishment of crimes in which the body was not only made to suffer,
but to suffer publically by becoming a spectacle, to one in which suffering was to
become internal through the form of the prison. From the Middle Ages until the
eighteenth century, the body of the prisoner could be drawn and quartered, made
to display suffering of the utmost graphic quality, the better to make the point to
the crowd and with which to entertain them as well. With technologies such as the
guillotine, we begin to see a concern with the supposed humanity of execution by
the state. How can one minimize the suffering of the body? But also, how might
technology aid in the swift execution of the body—whether to stem suffering
or to speed up the efficiency of mass executions? The concern with minimizing
physical suffering ultimately leads Foucault to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a
prison where the activities of each of the inmates can be observed by the guards
in the most efficient manner possible by placing the cells in a rough circle around
the guard post.18 According to Foucault, physical punishment is eventually banned
in Europe as inhumane and replaced, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
with internalization. Prisons do not harm the body directly, but instead enforce
surveillance. Prisoners are supposed to change by being watched, by internalizing
their external observation and eventually instilling it within themselves as a
new code of behavior. Like Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation, eventually
prisoners police themselves. The Ideological State Apparatuses—education, law,
religion—are much more efficient at regulating ideology than are Repressive State
Apparatuses—the military, the police—and there is perhaps less guilt involved for
those who remain in power.19
A Clockwork Orange essentially presents another version of the same idea. The
film moves from the externalized to the internalized and then back out again.
Spatially, the film moves from primarily exterior shots to interior shots within
the prison and then back out again to the environs of London. While inside the
prison, behind closed doors, Alex is subjected to the Ludovico Technique, which
literally conditions Alex so that he cannot reproduce the actions that the state does
not want him to produce. The technique becomes, to some extent, a parody of
Bentham in which Alex does not have to undergo a conversion of consciousness—
to realize that what he does is wrong—but his mind is conditioned instead to obey
in a Pavalovian response that is actually controlled by the nausea that grips his
body. His mind, ironically, is forced to go blank while his body takes over control
of his actions even more completely than it did when he was addicted to sex
and violence. The screen-like cells of the Benthamite prison are literally replaced
with the movie screen that Alex is forced to watch with his eyelids pealed back
in a spectacle arguably more disturbing than any other image in the movie. The
effect of the technique is to de-sensitize Alex to the very effects that the film itself
replicates—that is, violence and sex. The effects of the film—the intensification of
colors and music almost to the point of distortion, the frequently fast cutting and
wide use of film techniques and film genres—allow us not only to see what Alex’s
consciousness is like, but also to feel his sense of claustrophobia in the prison and
depression and anxiety upon his release.20 The film mirrors his mental state and
becomes yet another screen that echoes Kubrick’s point while maintaining a sense
of futurism, of presenting to the viewer a glimpse of what film and television will
be like soon: the effect that digital technology and the Internet have indeed had on
motion and still photography.
With its radiating spokes coming out from a central core, the exterior of the
prison does indeed suggest Bentham’s structure. The actual prison used for the film
is H.M.P. Wandsworth outside of London. The second of three prisons to hold Oscar
Wilde, it was opened in 1851. In one scene in the film Alex can be seen walking in a
circle with other prisoners exercising in a courtyard—an activity mentioned by Wilde
in The Ballad of Reading Gaol and even shown on the cover of some book editions of
the work. The prison itself, like Bentham’s theories, is the product of prison reform
at the time—harsh, but equal, treatment for all prisoners; hard labor; a regimented
diet and schedule. To some extent Bentham’s ideas have continued to dominate
the approach the Victorians took to punishment, replacing the corporeal with the
purely mental. Prisons become not workhouses but places of severe boredom
in which prisoners are simply kept out of society’s way. Just as Alex takes prison
with him in the form of the conditioning of the Ludovico treatment, so does the
atmosphere of the prison environment expand to effect society as a whole, where
the increased blurring of work and leisure is linked to increased surveillance. One’s
credit cards, bank drafts, and other activities are constantly monitored. Cameras
capture one’s activity whenever one is on private property and, increasingly, in
public as well. In London, for example, the city center is honeycombed with close
circuit television. Surveillance takes on even greater form through the Internet,
where social networking sites, web-based e-mail, and any number of other sites
keep track of what you are doing and when. To some extent, people avidly turn
their freedom over to electronic surveillance. To allow oneself to be tracked is part
of the entertainment: market niching in exchange for un-productive products
and services. As Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, one
effect of Bentham’s prison reform was to lead to the development of the discourse
of sexuality. To internalize stricture was to make everything an act of confession.
Identity could no longer be seen as a marker on the body and to therefore
become something confessed,

identified, and created as part
of a typology. The cataloging
of the human mind, especially
in terms of criminality and
sexuality, provides for the
invention of modern notions
of sexuality and subjectivity.
As Foucault famously writes,
homosexuality goes from
being an activity to being an
identity. That which was before
free-floating and inchoate is
resolved into a set of actions
that contain, at their core, a
7.9 Exterior of Wandsworth Prison Source: Warner Bros. Pictures. scientific label.
In an important study of
pornography, Frances Ferguson
argues that the version of
Bentham created by Foucault
is not really an accurate
representation of Bentham’s
theories and ideas. For
Ferguson, Foucault’s crucial
error was in seeing Bentham
as interested in internalizing
the notion of punishment
when in fact Bentham’s goal
was to do away with the need
for punishment altogether.21
The Panopticon as devised by
Bentham was a way to allow
7.10 Exercise in the prison courtyard Source: Warner Bros. Pictures. participants in it to see what
correct behavior was and to
build a group dynamic in which self-correction would happen as a part of micro-
group interaction. The Panopticon was a structure that could be used in any
number of settings—schools, for example—to serve the process of Utilitarianism,
which is, to Ferguson, closely linked to “Rousseau’s and Kant’s transcendentalism.”22
Bentham saw his structures as something like a meritocracy in which individuals
could participate and have an equal chance to improve. The Panopticon made
visible that which had been private and regimented activities of the body.
This openness, however, was only visible by those who were inside of it. That is,
everyone in the prison could see what was happening, but the interior workings of
the prison were off limits to those outside of it. In this sense, according to Ferguson,
the Panopticon and its regulation is similar to the internal logic of pornography in
which niches of taste are used to create group identity and the regime of pleasure
in the representation of sex is ultimately internal either to individuals or to those

interested in the systematics of pornography itself.23 As Ferguson argues, “Bentham
… collapses pleasure into the utilitarian schema by proposing that our slightest
actions are pleasure-oriented. If the Benthamite project is to replace metaphysical
accounts of morals with utilitarian structures, the motive is not to eliminate morality
tout court but to give morality a new language—not that of remote moral maxims
but that of representations of perceptible choice.”24
Narrative is the key to understanding how the pornographic deploys the
exposure of the private to public scrutiny. Specifically, the novel provides both the
mechanism by which a gendered reading of reality comes to stand in for reality itself
and empower women and the domestic sphere. This notion, borrowed from Nancy
Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, is one with which Ferguson ultimately takes
exception.25 For her, Armstrong’s subtle theory nevertheless privileges categories
of identity, while Utilitarianism focuses much more on actions. To go back to the
Panopticon, Utilitarianism focuses on the democracy of individuals and, especially,
the “constant comparison of actions.”26 While Ferguson agrees with Armstrong’s
focus on the novel as a structure, especially its importance as social realism, what
interests her is its ability to render judgments of individuals. Even in representing
supposedly private life, the novel takes a somewhat objective perspective in which
the novelist, or the implied narrator, not only presumes to judge the characters but
the generic form of the novel itself all but requires it.27 Plotting and hierarchy allow
the novel to participate in evaluation and in the possibility, via someone like Sade
or Flaubert, to expose the inner workings of society in a new way. If pornography
has any value, Ferguson concludes, “it is because it constitutes not just a message
but an environment, a set of circumstances that succeeds in identifying what one
is with what one is worth in an inflexible way. It aims to discover the entire value of
a person in the process of discovering a local value.”28
If films have become the novels of our time, Kubrick seems to do with A
Clockwork Orange much of what Ferguson claims for novels and pornography: to
create within a lurid tale the attempt to see one person, at least at one point in
their life, in full. This novelistic desire is not uncommon to Kubrick and reaches its
peak in Barry Lyndon, which devotes itself to the attempt to see one entire society
in full. But one could argue that, in Alex, Kubrick has attempted up to that date his
liveliest protagonist and one that the film attempts to see in the round. Kubrick’s
basic film style can be called a form of realism, or Classical Hollywood realism,
despite the fact that he obviously experiments a great deal with structure. The
medium of film arguably allows him more flexibility than a novelistic structure in
that he can layer effects onto his films, mixing genres or registers in such a way that
they play off each other. While Kubrick seems to use the form most appropriate
to the goals of the individual film project, the one non-realistic structure that he
most seems to privilege is that of the dream. While this trope or theme can be
seen most elaborately in Eyes Wide Shut, it shows up in A Clockwork Orange as well
and arguably complicates the sense of realism in the film. Namely, the symmetrical
structure of the film in which the third section, post-prison, repeats in a completely
different tone the first pre-prison section of ultraviolence lends the film a sense of
allegory or of being in a dream state, or, perhaps more exactly, a nightmare. The
mixing of the personal development of Alex as a character and the sociological

analysis of what to do with him combine to create an essentially pornographic
structure: the public valuing of private actions and the complex ways in which Alex
should, but does not, learn from Utilitarianism.
The architectural structures in the film, whether the exterior of Wandsworth or
of the Alexanders’ suburban house, contribute to the overall thematics and to the
sense of design of the film as a whole. One might even argue that in so architectonic
a cinema as Kubrick’s the use of the built environment is always both a metaphor
and a literal extension of the meaning of the film—never merely a backdrop or
location. Space as non-space in 2001 becomes dystopic and urban in Clockwork
Orange, one in which personal taste struggles against the non-taste of the state.
The use of the Thamesmead housing project as the location for the scene in which
Alex retaliates against the suggested coup by cutting Dim’s hand and striking the
other Droogs in their codpieces suggests Alex’s lack of fear of going public with
a private row, of even making a spectacle of it. He depends upon a combination
of surprise attack, cunning (he knocks Dim into the water, holds out his hand to
help him out, and then slices Dim’s wrist with a knife hidden in his cane), and gross
physicality to teach his Droogs a lesson. They do indeed learn it, but only as a
strategy to use against him at the health farm. Alex’s correction of them goes too
far, just as his attack on the Catlady does, and has a causal effect on the punishment
he latter receives. Kubrick’s use of Thamesmead suggests the sterile futuristic
environment of Alex’s life—especially its public areas—but by using Brutalism as
the symbol of the future, Kubrick also suggests what Owen Hatherley calls “a vision
of future ruins.”29 With its “rough-hewn rawness” the concrete used in Brutalism is
the last example of architecture in a modernist state before the coming of Disney
gentrification and the wholesale expunging of people from urban areas based on
class.30 In that sense, there is a link between modernist architecture in the 1930s
and the heyday of Brutalism in the 1960s and 1970s in England, where architects
embraced it more fervently, or at least less tepidly, than did other countries. For
the British, Brutalism represented the social contract between the state and
individuals, especially in terms of the notion of security, equality, and descent living
quarters. The prison-like aspect of Brutalist architecture might seem menacing to
some while strangely apt or comforting to others.31 The architectural future of 2001
came to pass in the 1970s when the look of condos and shopping malls became
the standard for contemporary design. The reality created in 2001, rather than
being criticized for its “datedness,” lacks the ability to invoke awe because of its
“prescience.”32 The life that Kubrick satirizes in 2001:
the impulse to retreat from nature, to lead a ‘life’ of perfect safety, regularity
and order in some exalted high-tech cell, and to stay forever on the job, solacing
oneself from time to time with mere images of some beloved other is … the
fundamental psychic cause of advertising.33
In A Clockwork Orange the aesthetic of advertising has become the dominate

visual trope of the physical and aural environment and the subtle social satire in
2001 becomes purposefully harsh and shrill, symbolized, in part by the use of new
forms of commercial and industrial modernism via Brutalism and its cousins. The
long, low lines of much of the design

echoes the rivers, marshes, and lakes
of Great Britain and the design overall
can seem both ancient and futuristic
at the same time.34 The unadorned
gray concrete settles into the damp
weather of London and stains easily
in the rain. It would now be difficult
to imagine England without many of
its more successful Brutalist buildings,
such as Denys Lasdun’s Royal National
Theatre (1976), as the Brutalist
aesthetic has formed something
like a signature architectural style for the UK from the 1970s until today.35 The 7.11 Thamesmead
functionality of the aesthetic, as can be seen in the elevator shafts that form the Source: Warner
vertical elements of the National Theatre, link the design to Constructivism in the Bros. Pictures.
early Soviet Union but also represents, according to Hatherley, an expunging of
“sexualised surrealism” from modernism in favor of “ascetic Constructavism.”36
By juxtaposing Brutalism with the sexual themes of his film, Kubrick links
the architecture in the film to this other past. The white, relatively unadorned
functionality of the Droogs’ costumes echoes the clean lines of the film’s modernist
buildings but also suggests the dream-like world that lies close to the surface, the
flipside of rationalist policy and design. The Ludovico Technique is nothing if not
functionalism gone wrong, an extension of the state’s control that enters into one’s
actual dream state to affect the body through other means. Kubrick understands
that the two parts of this trajectory—the hyper-real and the surreal—are linked in
their purity, their desire to eradicate the error of the other side. Most of his films
can be seen as an attempt to mediate these two extremes, to understand how the
rational often leads to the irrational—how they are the opposite sides of the same
coin. The seeming lack of sexual content of Brutalist or even modernist architecture
is belied by the sculptural qualities that someone like Corbusier was able to bring
to it. Brutalist masterpieces like his Carpenter Center at Harvard University suggest
the sensual possibilities of the polymorphous shape of raw concrete, especially
its ability to hug the topography of a location and adapt to an already-existing
flow of space. For Hatherley this trajectory leads to the Soviet “house-collectives”
in which people are encouraged to live communally, dormitory-style, in order to
rethink lovers, family units, and collectivity at the most basic level.37 The sensuality
of Corbusier, aspects of which can even be seen in the rich textures and colors
used by Mies van der Rohe, belies the simple functionalism of almost all canonical
modernism. While it can certainly lead to the extremely phallic heterosexuality of
the film on the surface, it also suggests the opposite. In the same way that Alex
both dominates other males and is dominated by them via a sort of homoerotics
of challenge and subordination, so can modernist architecture itself be seen both
as leading toward a fantasy of the orgy and as an eradication of the previously
homoerotic aesthetic of the nineteenth century. The supposedly pure, ornament-
free style of high and late-modernism defines itself against the clutter-prone,
elaborate style of the feminized late-Victorian era. Modernism, by contrast, is not

only masculine but heterosexual. As with the move in the 1970s from Interior
Decoration to Interior Design, modernist architecture can be seen as a movement
away from what Wilde called “House Decoration” to Corbusier’s celebration of
engineering, steam ship design, grain silos, and fast cars. As Christopher Read
theorizes:
Translated into English in 1927, Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, with

its echoes of the homophobic rhetorics generated around the Wilde trials, offered
British tastemakers an antidote to the transient performances of the Amusing style:
a kind of pseudoscientific essentialism in which houses were ‘machines for living in,’
… thus freeing architects from suspicious interest in idiosyncratic facades.38
The functionality of Corbusier could be seen as a cultural reaction against the

Victorian creation of the type of the effeminate homosexual male that led to the
representation of the body in architectural space that resulted in the universalizing
of the heterosexual male, Corbusier’s Modular Man, as simultaneously socially
progressive and culturally regressive. Hatherley paraphrases Lyotard theorizing
Marx that the result of alienation, of the factory, was exactly what the workers “had
come to desire, that they relished the violence done to them by the machine.”39
The British embraced deracination and removal to the urban centers and “enjoyed
the mad destruction of their organic body.”40 The erasure of identity is, of course,
what happens to Alex, as he becomes an automaton reduced, at the end of the
film while recuperating from his suicidal fall, to miming the clockwork mechanism
of a puppet while literally being fed by the Minister, the embodied form of the
state. Alex’s return to his previous condition is actually tracked in this scene both by
the psychologist who tests him and by the fact that Alex parodies the situation by
manipulating the most powerful person in government to feed him. Alex is once
again in control.
The idea that Brutalist architecture, in its erasure of the self, is not necessarily
a problem in and of itself but in fact a symptom of a change in society, a creation
within culture of a new form of identity, is echoed in the postmodern concept of
the cyborg, of the melding of the human body and technology. Although seen
certainly in 2001, Clockwork Orange also represents this phenomenon, though in
starkly different terms. Kubrick seems to have turned against what little optimism
there might have been in the movement from the threat of HAL to the equally
technological creation of the Star Child. A Clockwork Orange seems to suggest the
social realism of the 1970s in Great Britain, a time for paying attention to the planet,
not outer space. The transformation that Alex goes through is part of a re-coding of
the body by drugs and cinema to create, much like the star gate sequence of 2001,
an out-of-body experience for Alex. The rewiring of his brain and body connection,
however, forces him to become a normal citizen and not the demented Star Child
that he is at the beginning of the film when he possesses not only youth but also
a sped-up, hyper-aware interaction with his environment that is as destructive
to other people as it is prescient. The version of sexuality that Kubrick begins to
suggest in the film parallels that created by J.G. Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition
(1969) and Crash (1973). In Ballard, the melding of people with machines eradicates
normal sexuality, releasing it to become a mobile signifier for which gender and
the homo/hetero divide no longer matter, or at least no longer take precedence.
As Hatherley describes, “the human body will be able to do new things, that the
dream-life of the machine for living in, the libido of the minimum dwelling, will
have all manner of possibilities unencumbered by an accepted idea of eroticism.”41
The textures of the film, the eroticism of the concrete, interior design, elaborate
baroque nature of the 1970s as imagined by Kubrick, suggest “the spark and friction
of man-made surface” and the melding of the body with concrete, steel, and glass
to create surfaces of sustained erotic interplay. Clockwork Orange is a film about
film and other media, one in which the solidity of built space breaks down—“the
immersive architectural or cinematic space.”42 Like Ballard, Kubrick has “eroticized
postwar fragmentation … creating collages of pornography, advertising, medical
diagrams and Modernist architecture to re-imagine sexuality.”43
The comparison to Ballard points up the importance of time and space in
Kubrick, of the way that space in A Clockwork Orange becomes a kind of movie
screen that constantly transmits information.44 In 2001 this information is literal data
that appears on the screens of the film’s various space craft as constant autonomic
real-time reports on telemetry, navigation, and communication and even the two
films that first Floyd and then later a flight attendant watch. In Clockwork Orange
these films have become the generic outlines of Alex’s lively but limited creative
imagination that both reflects and refracts the environment of which he is part.
Kubrick looks ahead to but does not take part in the digitized environment in which
all surfaces become screens and the solidity of architectural space is transformed
by the use of projection, performance, and time itself. While in two dimensions,
film is itself a spatial object that creates the illusion of time and, indeed, emphasizes
time by spooling a narrative. Alex’s balletic attack on various victims throughout
the film shows not only his mastery of space but of movement in space and time.
The solidity of the near future is created by the careful exaggeration of the present,
especially in terms of 1970s design. The restaurant where Alex takes his Droogs
after the Thamesmead incident is an example of this as is the Durango 95 car that
they steal and drive earlier in the film. The use of interior and exterior shots from
real locales is de-stabilized by the use of wide-angle lenses, over cranking (in the
Thamesmead section) and under cranking, quick montage and elaborate tracking.
The stylizing of the film reminds viewers of the very materiality of what they are
watching, breaking the realist effect with various Brechtian distancing devices that
undercut our sympathy with Alex and his plight at key moments and remind us
that the film, like 2001, is one in which we are supposed to ponder a problem and
pay attention to filmic structure.
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, philosopher Gilles Deleuze argues that ”experimental
cinema” breaks down into the mind and the body, two areas that can be either
concrete or abstract. Deleuze acknowledges that, though Eisenstein is associated
with the former in terms of the cerebral effect of montage, Godard has more
recently laid claim to somatic cinema and Resnais to the cinema of the mind.
Antonioni and Kubrick, Deleuze argues, manage to combine both.45 In the former
one has “a dualism which corresponds to the two aspects of the time-image: a
cinema of the body, which puts all the weight of the past into the body, all the
tiredness of the world and modern neurosis; but also a cinema of the brain, which
reveals the creativity of the world, its colours aroused by a new space-time, its
powers multiplied by artificial brains.”46 Kubrick’s cinema is obviously of the latter,
populated with what Deleuze refers to as “automata,” whether HAL in 2001, Alex in
Clockwork Orange, or the giant computer in Godard’s Alphaville (1965), machines
that form “an information network” “across intersections of insomniacs and seers.”
For Deleuze, Kubrick’s later films seem to offer a positive version of this effect,
though “the automaton is the correlate of an electronic automatism. The electronic
image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being,
either had to transform cinema or replace it, to mark its death.” These new images,
for Deleuze
no longer have any outside … any more than they are internalized in a whole ….
They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise
from any point whatever of the preceding image. The organization of space here
loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which the
position of the screen still displays, in favour of an omni-directional space which
constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the
horizontal. And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention,
no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting,
but rather constitutes of table of information, an opaque surface on which are
inscribed ‘data,’ information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye,
replacing the eyes of nature.47
As Deleuze takes pains to point out, the body houses the brain, but the body is
an extension of the brain, takes it signals from it. The movement toward a cinema
of the brain is a movement toward the world as a brain. Kubrick’s work in 2001 is
obviously the model for Deleuze of cinema as a screen of data, the final gasp of
cinema itself, or a sort of limit to the possibility of cinema presaged by the erasure
of the boundary between the inside and the outside: the penetration of HAL by
Bowman; the violence done to Alex by outside forces that get inside his head; the
inability ever to decipher in The Shining what is inside Jack’s mind and what is a
projection from it.48 Only the fetus at the end of 2001 seems to be an escape from
this limit, a “death into a new life.”49
While “modern cinema” may for Deleuze be preoccupied with the merging of
the human with the machine, the body is ever present in Kubrick’s work and never
goes away completely. The normative body is putatively male and more than often
specifically supine. Like Bowman on his bed in the Louis Quinze suite at the end of
2001, the male figure forms the central motif of most of his major films. Whether it
is the long, beefy figure of Ryan O’Neil in Barry Lyndon or Gary Lockwood sunning
himself among the sarcophagi of 2001, the male body is in repose, often floating in
an indeterminate space or time. Barry ends up at the end of his movie in bed, with
his mother as his only companion, symbolically if not literally castrated by the shell
from Bullingdon’s pistol. Alex begins his film as a tumescent, vertical phallus, but also
ends up in bed in a hospital immobilized by a body cast, his final fantasy that of sex
with the woman on top as he lies on his back. 2001, a film mostly devoid of people,
shows the monolith as abstract and vertical until the final sequence, when it is
found floating horizontally in

space and suddenly becomes
a shaft or chamber, a gateway
into a new experience of time
and space. The male body as
object of gaze imprints his
films with gender and calls
attention to the fact that
when women do appear they
do so as a disruption: the slow
disappearance of women from
2001, which ends with a Zeus-
like birth from the head of
man; the marginalization of
Lady Lyndon, who remains an occluded mystery even in the final close-up of the film; 7.12 Barry in bed
the sudden appearance of the female sniper at the conclusion to Full Metal Jacket Source: Warner
where she becomes the literal embodiment of the female body that has up until Bros. Pictures.
that point been rejected by the culture of the Marine Corps.50 The displacement of
the feminine is not at issue in Kubrick, but of the female body, which only appears
when the limits of thinking about gender roles are foregrounded. The female body
as furniture in the Korova Milk Bar tells the audience something not only about
the pornographic imagination of the film, but about the attitude toward women
and toward sex that Alex has been given by the state. The fact that the vaguely
eighteenth century figures also dispense drug-laced milk from their breasts
purposefully confuses the maternal role the state has taken on for young men like
Alex as well as the sexual one that he is seemingly invited to act upon—the same
misfit of feminine roles we see in his real mother. “My wife … used to do everything
for me and leave me to my writing,” Mr. Alexander tells Alex in reference to his wife.
Women are either helpers or victims.
As the latter half of Kubrick’s career matures, he plays with the role of women
more. In The Shining Wendy appears as a sniveling victim at first, seemingly so
devoted to her husband and his dreams of greatness that she is even willing to
overlook his abuse of Danny, to explain it away to the pediatrician who examines
him after his mental collapse. Like the mother in Death of a Salesman, however,
Wendy is not the cliché American mom that she appears to be and possesses
strengths that, like Danny, Jack cannot anticipate. Not only does she run the hotel,
doing all of the jobs that Jack is supposed to do, including, in Rosie the Riveter
fashion, maintaining the various boilers in the basement, but she also serves Jack
breakfast in bed, takes care of Danny, and is the first character in the movie to
commit violence: hitting Jack with a baseball bat not once but twice in self-defense.
The second blow disables him and should have put him out of commission and
would have if not, apparently, for the intervention of the hotel’s ghosts. Kubrick’s
casting and direction of Shelley Duvall was a masterstroke creating a character
who, in her awkward body and inane mannerisms, make her unsympathetic until
her strengths rise to the top and become important not only to Danny but to the
audience’s retreat from Jack as a sympathetic protagonist. As part of the American
nuclear family unit, Wendy and Jack are both victims of their past, but Jack slowly
moves toward the dream of male patriarchy when women were weak and African
Americans were cooks in the kitchen. Jack is also a victim, one who is perhaps
enticed into this past by the hotel, or perhaps is asked to remember his own past
as a permanent denizen of the space, but by using his intelligence cruelly against
his son and his wife he shows himself for the shallowness that he is: a faux creator,
the modern embodiment of the patriarch as pathetic failure. He thinks he is a rogue
like Barry Lyndon, but he is a victim of time, of history, like all of Kubrick’s male
protagonists.
It is not perhaps until Eyes Wide Shut that Kubrick presents a female character
in full: Alice, even more than the sniper in Full Metal Jacket, has the terrain of her
marriage under complete control. In his final film, incomplete and flawed in many
ways, Kubrick nevertheless brings Deleuze’s idea of the inside and the outside
coexisting to the forefront. As a dream film Eyes Wide Shut explores what happens
when dreams disrupt reality and take a character out of their usual experience to
plunge them into a sinister or dangerous situation. Kubrick uses dream logic as the
structuring device for the plot itself. Kubrick seems to want the viewer to understand
the film as at least partly a dream with roughly alternating sections of “waking”
and “sleeping” signaled via coincidence and visual cues. Yet, the film’s dialogue is
often at odds with the visual information relayed by such things as lighting, set
design, and even film stock. Since 2001, Kubrick’s films have all dealt with complex
relations between dialogue and image. Perhaps freed of the authority of genre
for the first time since Lolita, Kubrick seems to be searching for a new cinematic
language for suggesting either the unconscious within the everyday world or the
conscious mind functioning within the world of dreams. In either case, the result is
a film whose most teasing proposition is that it is the audience’s eyes that can never
be open quite wide enough to take in all that they are being shown. The mixing
of interior and exterior here becomes the working out of the public and private
selves: what can we know about someone and what is always unknowable.51 Bill
wants to know his wife’s deepest thoughts and desires, but ultimately can never
7.13 Mandy access her mental landscape—her dreams, her revenge motives, or her fantasies. In
Source: Warner an attempt to try to activate and act upon his own, he is sent out into a mysterious
Bros. Pictures. version of waking life and a series of coincidences that often combine sex with
death, risk with danger,
perversion with desire. In
an attempt, perhaps, finally
to come to terms with his
idea for a pornographic film
that he theorized with Terry
Southern in the 1960s, Eyes
Wide Shut is perhaps Kubrick’s
ultimate working out of the
porn problem: the female
body in space, inhabiting the
dreams of men. Alice is on the
floor when she tells Bill about
her fantasy on Cape Cod; Bill

imagines her on her back in
his black and white mental
image of her and the Navy
officer; Mandy is on her back
in Zeigler’s bathroom where
she has overdosed. The phallic
images are of women’s bodies:
at the Somerton Mansion
orgy, as the statues that Skye
Dumont references, like the
Catlady’s erotic sculptures in
Clockwork Orange. The male
body of Marion’s father, which lies in a bed like Bowman’s, is replaced by the body 7.14 Body in the
of Mandy at the morgue. Female bodies haunt Bill’s landscape, and “whether a morgue
dream is ever really a dream” or not, Kubrick finally replaces the male body with a Source: Warner
Bros. Pictures.
female one, sexualized though it may be, it is the one that tells him to “fuck.”
Technologies of Desire
The linear working out of time in 2001 and Barry Lyndon—the extreme future and
the extreme past—is eventually replaced with the dream time of The Shining and
Eyes Wide Shut: time as non-linear, associational, impossible to unscramble. Whether
referred to as postmodernism or the inability finally to separate the inside from the
outside, the technological futurism of Kubrick’s films—their sense of bringing us
a glimpse of the future, of always seeming ahead of their time—points the way
toward the virtual encoding of sex and sexuality in technology and the merging
of pornography and machines. In 2001 the spaceship Discovery is the male body in
space: HAL as the disembodied queer voice that is neither wholly male nor female,
but the result of a futuristic combination of both. The effect that technology has on
the representation of gender is especially noticeable in mainstream pornography,
which has been sensitive to the alterations in technological reproduction that have
reflected the movement from film to videotape to the Internet during the past
20 years. While HAL can, like Alex, be seen as the embodiment of androgyny or
some kind of queer vision of the future, a sort of human version of the Star Child
phenomenon of disembodied consciousness, it is also possible to see him more
specifically as the uncanny, as the technological double of the already doubled
couple of Bowman and Poole, or perhaps of Floyd, whose secrets he seems to keep.
HAL’s diffusion throughout the ship is made all the more striking by his lack of
grounding in a specific gender. He is observation internalized. He is everywhere to
be seen but nowhere to be found until Bowman enters his brain to disconnect his
higher functions. The rape-like effect of this scene, often noted as one of Kubrick’s
most poignant, is created through the wedding of Kubrick to the machinic aspects
of film: editing, camera work, set design, and so forth. The creation of HAL is itself
disembodied: an effect created for the audience primarily through implication.

HAL is defined by what he is not.
The unsettling aspects of HAL have to do not only with his homicides both
real and attempted, but also with his mixing of man and machine, his undefined
nature. The future represented in the film has come about not so much from the
creation of a super machine that, as HAL’s acronymic name suggests, is heuristic,
like the human brain, but in the ability to network computers together via the
Internet and to connect as well the users of them. The disembodied aspect
of computer identity has moved from one in which people hide behind the
anonymity of the technology, in part because they have to, to one in which, via
social networking sites, they are able to give almost too much of themselves
away. While once the virtual stand-ins for fantasy worlds via CD-ROM or the
Internet, avatars are being replaced by detailed records of users’ pleasures,
desires, interests, and, especially, habits. The merging of human with machine
has taken an unexpected route toward the individual as celebrity. Pornography,
while certainly still more tied to the control of identity on the part of the end
user than other forms of entertainment or networking, has still become a site
where increasingly the user can act like a star. “Amateur” porn has become a
major contributor of content to Internet porn portals and has become a place
where the notion of the personal blog or the Facebook page can be carried
over into a literal pornographic performance. Mediated through a technology
that calls attention to subtle modulations in performance, gender becomes
unstable, difficult to decipher, and ultimately holographic. The body disappears
to be rethought as a problem. The first question to be asked of new users by
Facebook, after “Hometown” and “Current City,” is “Sex,” the first two presumably
necessary for basic networking. Identifying the body is complicated without this
button to push or without accompanying photos to go with the identity—that
is, a “Face.” The original purpose of Facebook was to identify people to meet
socially—an aide-mémoire that could also be a chance to hook up, or not, for
sex. The essentially sexual nature of the fusion of humankind with technology
belies, however, the way in which technology changes identity and makes the
possibility of one’s bodily identity to remain unified and whole—not something
that easy in any case, but made complex in a new way by the advent of new
technologies of communication.
Facebook and other connected forms of communication—whether social
networking or connected viewership, gaming, or cloud—represents the instability
of new virtual technologies in which multiple platforms compete for the delivery
of content—music, television, film, and videos. No one knows for sure how the
technology will play out, though it is clear that the seemingly disembodied aspects
of virtual reality has gone through two phases: one is the sense that the virtual is
the replacement of the body via the hyperreal, the Baudrillardian notion that the
real has not only been replaced, but that the real is now virtual. The other is that
the virtual is always a weak approximation of the real, a failed attempt at that which
always precedes it.52 Yet, as Koolhaas notes, “One inhabits virtual reality in real time
…. VR is not a simulated environment but a new space altogether …. “53 The most
important defining aspect of the virtual may in fact be the importance of the body,
that it “requires a subject to embody the difference …. […] This is obvious in the
context of digital pornography. In the virtual realisation of the world, the subject
acts a pivot between the flaws of the real (especially the drag of space-time) and
the perfection of the virtual (a universal telepresence, from which the sentient and
sensuous body can withdraw).”54
As Zabet Patterson has argued:
The ‘body’ of the computer clearly replaces the body of another human. And
herein lies the ostensible ‘danger’ of cyberporn …. It is an understanding of the
relationship of body and networked computer as potentially, peculiarly, and
unwholesomely dissolvent of the subject. Simultaneously, though, we also see the
danger of a sexuality mediated and transformed through the digital screen.55
Like HAL, identity no longer functions the same way in hyperspace even though
people continue to think of identity with the same metaphors and concepts that
they use in what used to be known as reality.56 The body, then, takes on its own
voice, tactile and kinesthetic dimensions via avatars, handles, and other forms that
are invariably placed within something like a built space. In traditional Internet porn
sites these structures are often a virtual version of “an exclusive club.”57 The point
is to pull computer users deeper inside where their age and, especially, money
will allow access to ever more exclusive, that is explicit, content and further break
down areas of sexual interest into niches of marketability. The choices that one
supposedly makes along the way are a hallmark of cyberporn, which “allows images
to be managed and categorized so readily, allowing the subject to assimilate and
emulate a particular subject position while retaining the hallucinatory promise of
fluidity.”58 The choice, however, is illusory as the freedom doesn’t really exist and is
instead just a function of the site’s design. To some extent users know this and the
anonymity of the site allows for experimentation with sexual identities or activities
that the user may wish to experience but only with the understanding that they
probably don’t want to pursue them.
The architectural metaphors of on-line porn are to some extent mirrored or
complemented by porn as still photography, but arguably eroded by the idea of
moving images. The nowness of the club space can be continued into the notion
of a performance, like a stripper on a table or stage, but the notion of porn as a
temporal phenomenon can create a strange dislocation in space. In one sense, one
becomes the extension of the space of the screen—dishelved bed or some other
kind of interior domestic space—but to some extent the low resolution of most
amateur porn that is supposed to suggest the liveness of the scene also reminds
one that what one is seeing is filmed. The desire for realness or authenticity that an
aesthetics of amateurishness or indifference to technical sophistication suggests—
whether Warhol or early John Waters—struggles against the sense of spatiality.
Streaming video, webcams, and “live chats” emphasize the apartness of the user
while attempting to do the opposite: to suggest that you are not alone, that there
is someone out there who shares your interest, your taste, and wants to know
you, however much a part of the game or the economic contract this connection
obviously is. As Baudrillard says of reality television, in porn, the
viewer is aware of the necessity of televisual mediation and its inevitable

transformation of the depicted lives, but still disavows it in order to take pleasure
in the microscopic exactitude of what it shows and the magnification of the
minutest details.59
As with soap operas, reality television’s popularity is, in part, that it allows for “a
collapse of subject and object and of the poles of activity and passivity.”60 With
web-based amateur porn
[i]t is no longer a question of watching but of a hallucinatory ‘being there’ while

knowing that there is no ‘there’ there (i.e., no reality apart from its mediation).61
Professional pornography works against this new kind of realness by calling

attention to its surface—the conventions of porn, whether the money shot or
the fake sounds of assent, or, now, the tanned, hairless, pumped up bodies of the
men and the fake breasts of the women.62 If so, then amateur porn, which almost
always eschews these effects as it does editing, works from a completely different
aesthetic of the sex act itself. Amateur porn, by contrast, is supposed to put you in
the real, but in its very verisimilitude, also risks breaking the illusion of that realness.
In an almost documentary way, amateur porn creates a prurient fascination with
other people’s lives, yet remains outside complete illusion by depicting unfit
bodies, low lighting, degraded imagery, and generally a performance that only
occasionally makes the viewers want to enter the space of the performance by
forgetting that what they are seeing is staged.63 Body types change over time—in
gay male porn, from the hairy bodies of the 1970s to the buff bodies of the 1980s
to the even buffer ones of the present—but the scripts remain fairly standard and
the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, at least within professional
porn, stable. Whether amateur of professional, porn films, despite their duration,
are supposed to create a somatic loop with the viewer. Like horror films, porn is
expected to do something to the body. All successful porn is supposed to change
the viewer in some way. Just as horror films can generally be graded in their ability
either to be frightening or to be really frightening, cathartically so, so porn can end
(for men) either in orgasm itself or in at least some form of arousal. The film is not
considered functional unless it creates an effect on the audience, who in turn are
also, in a sense, expected to perform. In the case of horror, one asks to be made
uncomfortable; in the case of porn, to become the opposite, sexually charged or at
least open to that possibility.
Porn performances are still governed by the energy of the ones doing the
performing, their bodies, and ultimately the particular ability of the performance
to connect erotically with the viewer as a performance rather than microscopic
voyeurism. Porn depends upon this indivuation and has, via the Internet, made the
specificity of taste more and more specific. Not only does this mean that certain
acts become more popular and more accepted—anal sex, especially, for straight
viewers—but the specifics of the interactivity of the computer are supposed to
allow for some limited choice or control on the part of the viewer. Slavoj Zizek calls
this type of interaction “interpassivity,” in which some aspects of choice are made for
the viewer by the site. A sort of transference takes place that “constitutes a passive
action, but it also constitutes a deferral of this very passivity.”64 The computer does
the work for you but only by allowing you to identify with the ability of machines to
do a certain kind of work for you—in this case, potential arousal. The porn worker
arguably is a part of the machine itself, performing, especially in professional porn,
in a scripted way that is expected by the viewer. The slippage in porn between
the subject and the object is perhaps greater than in any other visual medium.
The tension of the scene, its potential erotic charge, is almost mandated by the
subject/object texture that can be created by the pornographic text’s ability to
create a disjuncture between who or what is on the screen and the viewer. Namely,
when does the viewer identify with one or more of the actors on screen? When do
they want to be one of them, or both of them? Does the illusion only work when
the scene feels real, yet somewhat idealized—that is, one or both of the actors
fits into the viewer’s idea of a fantasy crush object (even, or perhaps especially,
one that the viewer didn’t know they had)? Does pornography only really work
when it allows for the completion of scenes as actual sex with someone else? The
question of Mulvey-esque viewership, the gendered gaze, has been discussed in
detail in most serious study of porn, most especially in the work of Linda Williams,
but the question can never be stabilized in porn precisely because the erotic
charge is predicated on not having to say. Men who watch straight porn that at
least nominally involves the narrative of sex between a man and a woman not only
can look at the man objectively but must. The woman’s subordination is not the
point; the man’s objectification is. The paradox of whether you, the male viewer,
are the subject, object, or transference of desire has been a central question of
porn for a long time, but is now fragmented into a thousand other questions raised
by the plethora of porn scenarios made instantaneously available to straight male
viewers at the click of a button. One does not have to choose, but at the same
time, this fact merely confounds and defers the basic questions raised by viewing
porn. Current common straight loops are either the girlfriend giving a blow job
or the guy jerking off—both, presumably, pleasurable not only because they are
convenient and effective, but because they involve identification on the part of the
male viewer. But identification in what way, especially in terms of masturbation? If
the performer’s penis is too large (or small), body too old (or young), technique too
rough (or gentle), the effect can be significantly diminished. The point of the loop,
in other words, is never simple and clear. One’s fantasy either compensates or, more
than likely, wanders elsewhere.65 All of these questions, however, depend upon the
assumption that computer porn is primarily televisual, but as Patterson warns:
We will never understand Internet pornography as long as we consider the

networked personal computer as a mere tool through which we access the
sexually explicit graphics, for in so doing, we miss the ways in which our sexual
desires are being mediated through the pleasures of the technology itself ….66
The ease with which computers bring us porn is part of the attraction. The need
to create a persona or even to sign up for some kind of on-line identity, to pay for
the access to porn in any way, has finally been eliminated. Porn has become a right
that comes with citizenship at legal age. With the migration of the Internet screen
to ever more multifarious and seemingly private places via smart phones, wireless
tablet computers, and other platforms, the viewing of on-line porn becomes
primarily a private ritual. The laptop computer, especially, has changed the notion
of Internet porn as nominally a public space to one in which the enjoyment of porn
is at least suggested by the computer itself, which becomes the physical gateway
to the site and, by extension, the fetish of the porn itself. That is, the mediation of
the private self occurs within a space that begins as private space only then to open
out into the semi-public space of the Internet.67 As Ken Hillis argues
a Web personal implicitly positioned as a digital human, flows from telepresence.

The idea of telepresence supports the growing belief that the internet is more a
space than a set of textual engagements and, therefore, that a individual can
be both materially ‘here’ at the same time as seemingly ‘there’ by extending
components of identity into the virtual space of digital technologies ….68
The merging of the human body with machines goes back at least to the images
of automatons as puppets in proto-surrealist work like Jary’s and Wilde’s plays
where people act like automatons, those characters mimicking the actual robots
conceived as curiosities by the ancient Greeks and, especially, Enlightenment
culture. By the time of Bauhaus, Dada, and the Surrealists proper the idea of the
merging of man and machine has taken hold so completely as to become a trope
in twentieth-century art and performance. A central image within modernism,
the machinic reveals particularly disconcerting traits around war and the hyper-
gendered sexuality that it can create.
In a study of the female pinup created for the mass consumption of American
troops during the Second World War, Despina Kakoudaki reads this genre as one
that “animates impersonal machinery. It accentuates the attraction of war machines
through sex appeal (the girl-as-airplane).”69 Just as Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
represents two airplanes docking mid-flight to re-fuel as a parody of coitus, so
do the pinups, especially those of Antonio Vargas for Esquire and Playboy in the
1940s, seem to meld the female body with the aerodynamics of planes. Later in
the film Kubrick parodies the phallic exaggeration of war by having gay pick-up
lines painted onto the atomic bombs of the B-52 and, of course, ending the film
with Slim Pickens riding one of the bombs to his death (and ours) in a surreally
queer moment of barebacking. Kubrick’s cyborgs are put into the service of black
comedy, but pinups were seen as essentially patriotic, their explicit sexuality often
downplayed as a way to dissuade homosexuality and as a way to help young
soldiers, to provide some sort of physical stimulus and release.70 The tone, in
other words, was almost inadvertently serious. Pinups now seem either wistful or
strangely un-erotic for the simple reason that they do not age well, often seeming
dated, like the machines they resembled, and very much of an era. Like the pinup
males of the famous Athletic Model Guild, which began in 1945, the female pinup
was rarely nude and depended for its effect on not exposing body parts. This
partial clothing points to the fact that pinups “borrow their energy from a wide
range of elusive cultural, technological, and social negotiations.”71 For this reason,
soft-core pornography is easily dated: it represents an era and a point in time more
than a body, or perhaps even body type, and focuses the culture surrounding it
as opposed to the body underneath. If an actual figure is photographed to create

a pinup that performer as often as not becomes a prop or an actor. The pinup,
however, does not depend upon an actual model at all and can be the invention of
a type by the artist (think Tom of Finland), but a type that represents a cultural idea.
In this sense, as Kakoudaki concludes, pinups are about “technological mediation.”72
The bodies presented in contemporary porn sites, by contrast, are flagrantly
unclothed and either represent a new kind of pinup or are something altogether
different. One might argue that hardcore imagery does not go out of style, which
can be seen in the recycling of porn in the present created in the 1970s and 1980s
despite differences in body type. The 1970s indeed seem to mark a break between
the era of the pinup and that of the unclothed body, though one might argue that
the pinup has simply moved on into other arenas, such as bondage and paparazzi
photographs of celebrities, where the necessity of seeing the body through the
screen and imprint of clothing is still key to the implicit sexuality of the image. The
slippage between the area of mainstream culture and pornography keeps getting
smaller and smaller as the two worlds merge more and more and the notion of
pornography as simply one more form of legitimate entertainment seems to be in
the final throes of otherness.
The inability to separate the body from its technological mediation in modern
pornography is similar to what happens to the body in Kubrick’s later films: the
body is captive to the spaces it inhabits, which are both the actual architectural sets
and locations but also the architectonics of the mise en scène and of the editing
itself.73 The pinup of Farrah Fawcett from the 1970s, with its iconic representation
of hair, seems dated now as a soft-core image emblematic of its time period. The
images from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, however, seem less so. Part of this effect
is due to the sense of futurity we have in all of his films made in England, one in
which the present seems always trying to catch up with the look of his films, their
meticulous design and construction, in their attempt to posit where the present
7.15 Barry with
will lead. Kubrick seemed to be especially aware of this effect in the film he made Bryan
immediately after Clockwork Orange, especially Barry Lyndon, which is, among other Source: Warner
things, a comment on looking, seeing, and cinemagraphic space. Throughout the Bros. Pictures.
film Kubrick creates a sense of
static tableaux, of bodies not
only framed by spaces but frozen
within time itself. Characters
move slowly, as if underwater,
recreating a sense of a different
pace, a different age in which all
actions mattered and, especially
for the monied, all existence
was a social performance to
be enacted before others. In
the second half of the film,
especially, after our handsome
rogue has had his picaresque
rise through the ranks of two
armies into the Prussian secret service, Barry is shown to exist within an arguably
stifling social sphere in which domestic activities—shaving, reading to his son,
taking strolls—are meant to convey the essentially melancholic and frozen aspect
of his existence. At the peak of prosperity, he is also no longer himself, Redmond
Barry, but Barry Lyndon, an essentially borrowed name taken from his wife’s
deceased husband that lacks a title.
Barry’s relentless pursuit of a peerage almost leads to his being financially undone,
but the great tragedy of his life comes about from the intercession of his step-son,
Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali) whom Barry had tortured as a young man and who
now seeks his revenge, which comes in the form of a duel that goes badly for Barry.
The lead up to that duel is a formal challenge that Barry receives from Bullingdon in
Barry’s club. While Barry is slumped over dissolute from alcohol, Bullingdon enters
the club and makes his way past the other members to the room where Barry waits
for him, unconscious, to be awoken by Bullingdon and challenged to a duel for
Bullingdon’s not having received “satisfaction” upon the last occasion on which
they met, that is, the last time that Barry saw him, which was when Bullingdon
disrupted a chamber concert at Castle Hackton and used the occasion to harangue
Barry in public. Barry responds with violent physical force that is, arguably, the most
shocking of any in Kubrick’s films. The tension of Bullingdon’s challenge at the club
is signaled by the extremely self-conscious use of painterly devices. A characteristic
of the film’s cinematography, characters are often posed to appear like eighteenth-
century paintings, especially when outdoors, an effect emphasized by the use of
the reverse zoom, in which a shot begins on a figure’s face only to zoom or track
back to reveal the immediate physical context and proportions to a point farther
back still in which the human actor is dwarfed by the spatial, by the landscape itself.
Despite the fact that the film’s action takes place just prior to the French Revolution
and the people of Barry’s class are at the height of their elegance and their self-
obsession in everything human, Kubrick reminds the viewer of the small place they
7.16 Inside Barry’s
club have within the great scheme of things. Or, if you will, that history is distant and,
Source: Warner like outer space, is a linear context that does not work on a human level. Barry
Bros. Pictures. and his fellow characters carry the weight of history around on their shoulders.
Their actions slowed down, like
the astronauts in 2001, by the
paradoxical weightlessness of
the space they inhabit.
As Bullingdon enters Barry’s
club we see various figures
in the background who are
literally frozen in space. They do
not move. Whether rapt from
the drama that is unfolding or
simply frozen in time, they seem
transposed from a Hogarth
painting. Their immobility recalls
other such moments in prior
Kubrick films, most directly a
shot in Dr. Strangelove where the military and civilian leaders sitting at the War
Room table wait intently on President Muffley’s (Peter Sellers) conversation with
the Soviet Premiere. One is reminded, however, of other moments in other films
as well, though only in these two instances does Kubrick seem to tip his hand
toward still black-and-white photography, in Strangelove, and eighteenth-century
portraiture in Barry London, and to challenge the viewer with the notion of their
own self-consciousness about the visual space. At those moments the screen
literally becomes a solid structure to be filled by the viewer with meaning—an
architecture that is not moving. Space, Kubrick seems to suggest, is created. It is
not in nature. In its epic sweep that encompasses one man’s complete life—from
comic rise to tragic fall—it is Kubrick’s most complete and moving film, giving the
viewer a three-dimensional sense of not only space but of one man’s emotional life
as well. The film calls attention to the dependence of the story upon the materiality
of the medium in which it is told. Kubrick uses voice-over narration to emphasize
the literary, novelistic aspects of the film as well as tableaux vivants and other
effects to suggest the painterly. Only at the end of Barry’s life do we get an explicit
reference to the purely cinematic. As Barry climbs into a carriage waiting to take
him out of England and, ultimately, back to Ireland, there is a freeze frame as Barry
enters, unsteadily, into the coach with one leg. The sudden Brechtian jarring of
this moment reminds the viewer of the entire history of twentieth-century film
and the fact that freeze-frame effect is a purely modern one. As Alan Spiegel has
written:
The use of period culture—music, costume, landscape gardening, as well as

painting—is strictly a matter of fragments and generalized referrals which then
appear in personal and thoroughly transformed contexts. Barry Lyndon isn’t ‘a
collection of paintings,’ but the invention of an autonomic culture.74
The film, like all of Kubrick’s late works, is the creation of an entire universe, a total
experience that is seamless and untransferable, inevitable and profound. The
aesthetic choices are dictated by the subject, which is in kind created out of the
medium itself. Technology, space, and the body merge to create an alternative to
the place and time we think we know.
Notes
1 Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, dir. Jan Harlan, perf. Katharina Kubrick, Malcolm
McDowell, and Tom Cruise, Warner Brothers Pictures, 2001.
2 Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment
3 As critic Christian Metz notes in his final book, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place
of Film [L’énonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du film, 1991], “The internal frame, the
second frame, has the effect of drawing attention to the main frame, that is to say,
to the site [lieu] of enunciation, of which it is, among other things, a frequent and
recognizable ‘marker.’” Christian Metz, “Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film
(Extracts),” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8(4) (December 2010): 349.
4 As Scott Bukatman notes, in 2001 “[o]ne is confronted by a body transcending bodily

limits, defying gravity, mocking the real. It is lighter than air, liberated from earthly
constraints …. [I]t is resolutely a body in space, it is a body that belongs to the space
that it masters.” Scott Bukatman, “Why I Hate Superhero Movies,” Cinema Journal, 50(3)
(Spring 2011): 120.
5 Ellis Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice,” Screen, 34(2) (Summer 1993):
137–61.
6 Michael Bérubé, “Paranoia in a Vacuum: 2001 and the National Security State,” Public
Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (New York: Verso, 1994), 181–202.
7 2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick, perf. Keir Duella, Gary Lockwood, and
William Sylvester, MGM, 1968.
8 “The Day of the Fight,” dir. Stanley Kubrick, perf. Douglas Edwards, RKO, 1951.
9 There is a rich history of discussion of the mechanical man in Kubrick: see Robert
Phillip Kolker, “Tectonics of the Mechanical Man,” A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick,
Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78–158.
And see other references scattered about in essays and reviews such as Mark Crispin
Miller’s: “Kubrick’s films have always been profoundly anti-authoritarian. On one level
they expose the arbitrary danger of detached power in the political realm. The men
who work in the state’s behalf make themselves inhuman, like the semi-robot Dr.
Strangelove.” Mark Crispin Miller, “Barry Lyndon Reconsidered,” The Kubrick Site, 8 May
2006. Available at: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0086.html
10 Mark Crispin Miller sees the flight attendant aboard the Orion III in 2001 who walks
across the cabin with the aid of zero-gravity grip shoes as a sort of jerky parody of “bad
ballet” placed in contrast with the smooth working of machines that we witness with the
space station docking and the moon landing. This contrast appears again in A Clockwork
Orange when Billy Boy and his gang become “a gross parody of ballet” on the stage of
the casino while Alex and his Droogs become the machinic. Whereas in 2001 “the mock
ballet implies no mere assault on the erotic but its virtual extirpation …. Here, every
pleasurable impulse must be channeled into the efficient maintenance of that
machine ….” Mark Crispin Miller, “2001: A Cold Descent,” The Kubrick Site, 8 May 2006.
Available at: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0011.html
11 A Clockwork Orange, dir. Stanley Kubrick, perf. Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, and
Michael Bates, Warner Brothers Pictures, 1971.
12 As Janet Staiger has noted in her work on the reception of A Clockwork Orange, at the
time of its release, a “homosexual motif” was picked up by the gay-friendly magazine
Films and Filming. And while she “would not go so far as to read the film as camp” she
does note that Andy Warhol bought the rights to the novel and made his own film
version, Vinyl (1965) years before Kubrick and that Warhol does more with “the explicit
sado-masochistic possibilities of the plot,” which lends credence to “the availability of a
homosexual motif subtending the action.” As she also notes, “At the time of the release
of A Clockwork Orange in December 1971, a wave of films with scenes of violence
was splashing across US screens. In a preview article for the film, Time magazine had
pointed to Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Dirty Harry, and the recent Bond film, Diamonds
Are Forever as part of a trend in which A Clockwork Orange was also participating.” Janet
Staiger, “The Cultural Productions of A Clockwork Orange,” The Kubrick Site, 8 May 2000.
Available at: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0111.html
13 Murat Aydemir, Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning (Minneapolis, MN:
14 “If we accept this formulation, then it necessarily follows that the male subject is as
dependent upon the gaze of the Other as is the female subject, and as solicitous of
it—in other words, that he is as fundamentally exhibitionistic. The Great Masculine
Renunciation must consequently be understood not as the complete aphanisis of
male specularity, but as its disavowal. In mainstream fashion, as in dominate cinema,
this disavowal is most frequently effected by indentifying male subjectivity with a
network of looks, including those of the designer, the photographer, the admirer, and
the ‘connoisseur.’” Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” Studies in
Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1986), 143. Also: “Last, but by no means least, conventional
male dress since the end of the Great Masculine Renunciation has effaced everything
about the male body but the genital zone, which is itself metaphorically rather than
metonymically evoked (i.e., which is represented more through a general effect of
verticality than through anything in the style or cut of a garment that might articulate
an organ beneath). This ‘sublimation’ is another important mechanism for identifying
the male subject with the phallus” (Silverman, 147).
15 Played by David Prowse—the body, if not the voice, of Darth Vader.
16 Aydemir, 82.
17 Aydemir, 81.
18 “The best critic is, of all people, Virgil Thomson, the famous music critic. He said, ‘Philip
Johnson’s interiors always look as if he got them from jails.’ And you know, that’s
exactly where I got it. If you visit a good jail, it would look like this [New York State
Theater]. They’re usually much narrower, but the little cells are off the balconies. You
can always watch where everybody is, you see. There are some charming interiors of
jails.” Philip Johnson, Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words (New York: Rizzoli
International Publishers, 1994), 81.
19 Cf. Tafuri: “In these [Piranesi’s] etchings the space of the building—the prison—is an
infinite space. What has been destroyed is the center of that space, signifying the
correspondence between the collapse of ancient values, of the ancient order, and the
‘totality’ of the disorder. Reason, the author of this destruction—a destruction felt by
Piranesi to be fatal—is transformed into irrationality. But the prison, precisely because
infinite, coincides with the space of human existence.” Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture
and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta
20 “These charismatic performances often depend on an imbalance between
performance and other aspects of the mise en scène. Cult films do not produce orderly
fictional worlds. Their codes of excess frequently include violence and the breaking
of other taboos. They manifest an oblique, sometimes surreal attitude to the world of
objects, without resorting to complete fantasy. […] Take for example the grotesque
pop-art objects at the cat lady’s house in A Clockwork Orange …. In each case physical
disproportion is accentuated by a deliberated flattening or distorted picture plane. We
are denied the reassurance of depth of field and the balance of classical perspective.
Sometimes such distortion is produced by the inexplicable close-up and flat, analytical
editing ….” Justin Smith, “British Cult Cinema,” The British Cinema Book, (ed.) Robert
Murphy, 3rd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the BFI, 2009), 61.
21 Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 19.
22 Ferguson, 19.
23 As Miller notes: “For Baudelaire, photography is porn’s natural ally through its indexical
link of image and object, tied in the popular imagination to a sexual charge. The
camera is a tool of seduction. To pornography police in our own time, it is said to have
a ‘coercive immediacy.’” Toby Miller, “A Short History of the Penis: ET’s Rendezvous at
HQ,” Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (Minneapolis, MN:
24 Ferguson, 23.
25 Ferguson, 29.
26 Ferguson, 30.
27 Ferguson, 31.
28 Ferguson, 156.
29 Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Winchester, UK; Washington, DC: O Books, 2008),
42.
30 Hatherley, 42.
31 Miller claims that “New Brutalism, which, as applied specifically to campus architecture
in the 70s, was intended to pre-empt further insurrection by eliminating all common
spaces, openable windows and any other points or means of mass agitation or
discussion” (Miller, “2001: A Cold Descent” 11).
32 Miller, “2001: A Cold Descent” 11.
33 Miller, “2001: A Cold Descent” 12.
34 Brutalism is not the disaster some thought. It was mainly about an architecture
expressive of function, though it was also certainly a continuation of Corbusier’s
utopian spirit, though with a British dislike of the formal rigidity and symmetry of
at least Corbusier’s city plans. For Banham, Brutalism meant the continuation of a
modernist rejection of the “Pictorial”: Pollock was important because he reduced the
visual plane to a surface. See Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate
Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). As Banham said of an extension of Sheffield
University, “At first sight the grouping of the blocks of accommodation is as loose
and unrigorous as any Picturesque composition by the Brutalists’ despised elders,
but whereas Picturesque compositional techniques were normally used to build up
images of rich and confusing abundance, the effect of the arrangement offered by
the Smithsons appears in the drawing to be aloof, rebarative and deliberately anti-
graceful, replacing the sweetness and sentimentality of the Picturesque with a blunt
and uncompromising statement of structure and function at every part. Above all, it
made a plain statement of the facts of circulation at ground level, on elevated street-
decks, or on pedestrian bridges spanning between one building and the next (usually
in conjunction with duct-bridges for service-runs, thus emphasizing that human
beings are not the only bodies that circulate). Because of this flourishing display of
the circulation system, the unifying principle of the design—in the absence of any
comprehensible visual aesthetic—becomes the connectivity of the circulation. Hence
the use of the term ‘topological’ to characterize the design ….” Reyner Banham, The
New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (New York: Reinhold, 1966), 43. One need only think
of the Piano/Rogers design for the highly popular Beauborg in Paris to understand
the importance of the anti-aesthetic of the architecture of circulation, function,
and bodies. Whether Corbusier’s “beton brut” or the concept of “musique concrete,”
Banham makes the point that Brutalism is a radical break with landscape, illusion, and
three-dimensionality towards surface, form, and as he is ultimately to argue in relation
to Las Angeles, among other contemporary phenomena, advertising. All of this
leads toward Archigram and postmodernism and away from the nineteenth century.
Whether or not all modernist architecture does away with perspective and landscape
is another question.
35 In the US, modernist buildings in general and Brutalist buildings in particular have
been singled out for demolition or destructive renovation. The need to educate
both the public and critics as to the aesthetic and political importance of Brutalism
is acute, especially since buildings built in the immediate past are the least likely
to be protected through the process of historic preservation. See Robin Pogrebin,
“Architecture’s Ugly Ducklings May Not Get Time to Be Swans,” New York Times, 7
April 2012. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/arts/design/unloved-
building-in-goshen-ny-prompts-debate-on-modernism.html?pagewanted=all
36 Hatherley, 73.
37 Hatherley, 74.
38 Christopher Reed, “Design for (Queer) Living: Sexual Identity, Performance, and Decor
in British Vogue, 1922–1926,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12(3) (2006): 396.
39 Hatherley, 20.
40 Quoted in Hatherley, 20.
41 Hatherley, 78.
42 Hatherley, 125.
43 Hatherley, 79.
44 “2001’s full title is 2001: A Space Odyssey; Kubrick makes, in the title, a very conscious
connection between time (the year 2001) and space. In other words, it becomes a film
about space as time, about what constitutes the future aesthetic. The spaces in 2001
become the experience of 2001 ….” Bilge Ebiri, “Barry Lyndon: The Shape of Things to
Come,” The Kubrick Site, 8 May 2006. Available at: http:www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/
doc/0026.html
45 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
46 Deleuze, 205.
47 Deleuze, 205.
48 Deleuze, 206.
49 Deleuze, 206.
50 Hanson, 141.
51 As frequent Kubrick critic Michel Ciment notes, “[T]the fantastic can only originate
from a background of strongly defined ‘realism.’ For there to exist an opposition
between the real and the imaginary, and conceivably a fusion between the two, the
framework of reality must be scrupulously respected … it is instructive to note that,
from Hoffmann to Gogol, from Balzac to Maupassant, the greatest authors of the
fantastic were also adepts of realism, even naturalism—before Jules Verne and H.G.
Wells used science-fiction to illustrate the encounter between technology and magic.”
Michel Ciment, “Kubrick and the Fantastic,” trans. Gilbert Adair, The Kubrick Site, 8 May
52 Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke, “Virtual Worlds: Simulation, Suppletion, S(ed)uction
and Simulacra,” Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space, and Relations, (ed.) Mike Crang, Phil
Crang, and Jon May (New York: Routledge, 1999), 261–2.
53 Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, Small, Medium,
Large, Extra-Large, (ed.) Jennifer Sigler, photography Hans Werlemann (New York:
Monacelli Press, 1998), 1278.
54 Doel and Clarke, 269.
55 Zabet Patterson, “Going On-Line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era,” Porn
Studies, (ed.) Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 105.
56 As noted by Nguyen Tan Hoang: “To recall … the powerful role of new
communications technologies in reconfiguring queer time and space and queer
relationality, it’s fruitful to consider how the Internet has transformed queer male
cruising. On the one hand, you have the alarming conflation of queer communities
with a singular market demographic—for example, community membership entails
buying a Gay.com membership. On the other hand, cyber cruising has the potential
to proliferate, and hence destabilize, established sexual identities and communities.”
Carolyn Dinshaw, et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13(2–3) (2007): 192.
57 Patterson, 111.
58 Patterson, 107.
59 Patterson, 115.
60 Patterson, 116.
61 Patterson, 116.
62 According to Franklin Melendez, professional porn videos “rely to a remarkable
degree on the same formal structures to convey bodily pleasure. By this I mean that
the techniques utilized to edit together individual shots and scenes become as vital
to the construction of pleasure as the sexual even itself.” Franklin Melendez, “Video
Pornography, Visual Pleasure, and the Return of the Sublime,” Porn Studies, (ed.) Linda
Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 403.
63 Though a sense of realness is not always easy to do, especially if the porn being
depicted does not conform to an already well known scenario, as Heather Butler
describes “a beautifully awkward butch-on-butch anal sex scene” in which “both dykes
wear strap-ons, though only one, the ‘more butch’ of the two, gets to penetrate ….
This short clearly illustrates an attempt, however futile, to represent visually authentic
lesbian desire ….” Heather Butler, “What Do You call a Lesbian with Long Fingers?: The
Development of Lesbian and Dyke Pornography,” Porn Studies, (ed.) Linda Williams
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 188.
64 Patterson, 117.
65 As Ken Hillis ponders, if someone is filming themselves, via Webcam, say, masturbating
while looking at their own televisual image, then the resulting “telefetish” includes
them looking at themselves looking at themselves and the question of subject/object
further breaks down into a hall of mirrors in which there is no longer reality or screen,
subject or object. Ken Hillis, Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2009), 221.
66 Patterson, 119.
67 Patterson, 120.
68 Hillis, 215.
69 Despina Kakoudaki, “Pinup: The American Secret Weapon in World War II,” Porn Studies,
(ed.) Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 361.
70 Kakoudaki, 361.
71 Kakoudaki, 365.
72 Kakoudaki, 365.
73 “What skulls affords is … not a direct apprehension of an alien space that is digital,
but a bodily apprehension of just how radically alien the formal field of the computer
is from the perspective of the phenomenal modes of embodied spatial experience.
In the end, it is this difference that forms the ‘content’ of our experience of skulls:
by presenting us with warped indices of a weird, inhuman topological domain, the
installation provokes an affective response—bodily spacing or the production of
space within the body—that is unaccompanied by any perceptual correlate. In so
doing, skulls extends our previous analysis of bodily spacing beyond the domain of
VR, demonstrating that it comprises the affective basis for all so-called perceptual
experience and that affectivity is also operative independently of perception in
nonvirtual sensory experiences. As an aesthetic mediation of the digital that can only
be felt, skulls furnishes eloquent testimony of the generalized priority of affectivity and
embodiment in the new ‘postvisual topology’ of the digital age.” Mark B.N. Hansen,
New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 205.
74 Alan Spiegel, “Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon,” Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick, (ed.) Mario
Falsetto (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), 205.
Coda:
Virtual Communities
For several years now there has been a debate within architecture about whether
or not we have lost a sense of community or of the social in our architectural
production. While this debate is an old one—stretching from the aestheticized
socialist utopias of Le Corbusier to the many urban planning debates of the Post-
Second World War building boom—a more recent version of this dyad has been
the question of whether or not postmodern architecture represents a real turn
toward the social—to a human scale in architecture and the built environment—
or towards a completely two-dimensional architecture of surface detail and
meta-commentary—of the illusion, if you will, of concern for the populace that
manages to be popular without being seriously committed to anything. While
there are many spokespersons for both sides—pro- and anti-postmodernist
architecture—such as the Prince of Wales and the architectural theorist Kenneth
Frampton, respectively, the question of the social in architecture has continued to
push itself on architectural theory not only in the form of a continued increase in
the use of the themed environment, but also in the development of “postmodern”
communities such as Seaside, Florida, and Celebration, USA at Disney World, where
the simulacrum of community-as-architecture is used to convince residents that
they are in a place where their role is scripted in such a way that they must act
as—among other things—good neighbors and active citizens. The architecture,
in other words, attempts not only to evoke nostalgia—a city square, community
events, codes for building, and so forth—but also to offer the illusion of choice.
In Seaside, for example, residents are encouraged to design their houses with
pseudo-Victorian detailings, but the details and the color choices are dictated
by the architects’ designs. That is, one is being offered the illusion of choice—a
capitalist condition long noted, but seemingly in effulgence once again as we
continue to remain enmeshed in postmodern thinking.
While one might worry about the concept of community that such places offer,
one fact is obviously clear: places like Seaside and Celebration are probably popular
with a certain type of person (who is, at the very least, of the middle class), but not
popular with the masses (for what it’s worth, Le Corbusier’s designs weren’t either).
For those who are entranced, one of the pleasing aspects of these communities
is that their design seems to have been created—or at least suggested—by the
media. One need only think of films, film sets, theme parks, themes of the post-War
suburb, television sitcoms, and so forth, to see that the Seaside-type community
is the lateralization of a concept at least as old as Disneyland itself, which opened
in 1955: that is, why not allow people to interact with three-dimensional versions
of media images? By the 1990s one had to acknowledge that there were at least
two definitions of media that were impacting both architecture and the concept
of the communal or social. One definition could be called “media as a material
substance (like a painter’s medium)” and the “second, media as a virtual or
informing potential.”1 That is, the word “media” now means not only those materials
and methods that we speak of in the usual sense of media—whether television,
journalism, or film, to name only a few instances—but also the concept that is at
the heart of “multimedia”—namely, the use of soft technology, media as data, to
create a simulacrum of the older media via computer. The concept of the virtual
contains within it both notions of media, while also itself constituting a new form
of media—that is, a new medium.
That the new medium of virtuality might create a concept of community
was made clear early on in what Cory Clarke has called the Internet’s “first wave:
communications.” If, as Clarke argues, the “second wave” was publishing—one of
the most successful examples being the self-created web page—this wave has
not lived up to the commercial possibilities for which some had hoped, though it
did make almost everyone with Internet access a potential virtual publisher and
author.2 The virtual 1990s also gave us the chat room, the subscriber’s list, the
discussion group: all metaphors either for community or for architecture, or both.
It is not surprising, then, that the future of the virtual medium, at least the on-line
one, is suggested by the concept of the virtual community—specifically, a virtual
village or neighborhood such as one found on the net at www.cybersites.com. In
business from 1994–2001, CyberSites Virtual Communities boasted 36,493 “citizens”
in five separate “cities.” CyberSites described its cities as “virtual 3D environments”
designed by a team consisting of an engineer, architect, and attorney stationed
primarily at Columbia University, where they had at their disposal “equipment and
software grants … valued at more than $10 million.” The designers of the CyberSites
web page used as an epigraph a line from a review of their site published in the
Wall Street Journal, which described CyberSites’ AncientSites.com as “… a bit like
America Online as programmed by Cecil B. De Mille.” Indeed, the CyberSites project
was anything if not ambitious, including at its web sites statistics and data that
attempted to paint virtual communities as a growth industry. CyberSites claimed
that the basis of their growth was not technology alone but also
a deeper understanding of the importance of social interactions. Combining

state-of-the-art Internet community technologies, high performance database
access and high-quality thematic content, CyberSites creates a setting and
infrastructure in which Virtual Community flourishes and revenues are derived
from advertising, subscription and online-commerce.
That is, CyberSites provided a setting for combining high technology, theming,
capitalism, and old-fashioned community. CyberSites even had a site for
discussing the future of virtual community and ideas for possible projects at its
CommunitySites.com address.
The CyberSites idea could be seen on a smaller scale at another web site, www.
geocities.com. At the height of its popularity in the 1990s, GeoCities was a themed
neighborhood that existed only on the net. When you joined GeoCities you became
a citizen of the community and were allowed to choose a name and neighborhood.
You were also required, however, to share in the neighborhood’s responsibilities.
That is, you might be called upon to police a neighborhood or to participate in
various civic activities. The concept of the virtual community makes more real or
present the spatial idea inherent in many on-line identities—especially where any
sort of role playing or social codes might be assumed to be in effect. Only in a
virtual community one is asked to expand one’s role—much like a Dungeons and
Dragons geek—and to take seriously the idea that one is a part of a social body
whose health depends in part upon one’s actions. Though certainly virtuality will
continue to exist in the commercial form of the CD ROM and even Nintendo, the
relatively democratic version of the virtual that is the World Wide Web and browser
technology seemed to be developing towards a new concept of community that
attempted to bring isolated computer users and electronic game players into a
virtual space that bridged the isolation of the fin-de-millennium.
In GeoCities, one could choose from among many already-established
neighborhoods: Athens, Baja, Paris, and so forth. The names suggested the
activities in which the residents were interested. Athens was the community of
philosophers and literati, while one gay community was named, not surprisingly,
West Hollywood. The elision of the actual with the themed was no accident, as
the GeoCities designers—actual users—were creating nothing short of a virtual
version of the 1973 movie Westworld. Opening one year after Disney World in
Florida, that film presented an adult theme park in which, for $1,000 a day, one
could “live” in one of three themed lands: Western World, Medieval World, or Roman
World. In each “place,” one would find not only perfectly authentic architectural
simulacra, but robots as well. The technology of the latter was so perfect that one
could barely tell the humans from their advanced automatons. Sex and violence, as
means of psychic escape, are the hallmarks of the resort. Needless to say, the movie
is ultimately a dystopic sci-fi look at advanced technology as the robotrons begin
to turn on their inventors by acting in character, but with what a Star Trek: The Next
Generation fan might call “the safety protocols” turned off. Real people begin to die,
and the corporation has a nightmare of litigation on its hands—the true nightmare
behind the film, perhaps. As a variation on the Disney paradigm, the idea behind
the GeoCities community, then, was not new. What was new was that GeoCities
was not made to be visited, but lived in. Since that is the case, sites like GeoCities,
and other virtual communities such as AncientSites.com, raise questions about
just what people want from the concept of community—and just why do they
turn to the net for the answer? A few tentative conclusions: GeoCities’ emphasis
on who gets to live there, which lots get developed, and so forth, could be seen
as an instance of community pride, but also as a form of sterile homesteader

protectionism akin to what Mike Davis in City of Quartz identifies as the fortress
mentality that spurs some people in Los Angeles to live in gated communities.
GeoCities was also a somewhat sad example of the extent to which people would
invest in a concept rather than in the real thing. That is, though the real world might
now include the net, why can’t the energy that one places in a virtual community
go into an actual, lived community instead? Indeed, if the 1980s taught us anything
positive, it was the importance of the community as a site of progressive political
resistance—most especially when the grand narratives of history have been taken
over by something as evil as Reganism. That there are actual communities in need
of the people who are mainly interested in building virtual ones is obvious. How
the latter might provide models for the former—or even interaction with them—
is yet to be seen. Perhaps by modeling virtual communities via a new medium,
some people will come to a better understanding of—or desire for—community
projects in their own physical communities. It’s too early to tell. What is clear is that
a phenomenon like GeoCities further blurs the boundaries between the real and
the virtual, the present and the absent, the physical and the technological.
Perhaps we will know more about how to interpret interactive community when
technology itself becomes more interactive. If one moves into Disney’s Celebration,
one’s home comes hardwired to the net. One’s computer, television, and so forth,
are part of an interactive communication system—all of one’s data lines are fiber
optic. To some extent this interaction is already taking place for those of us on an
interactive cable system, where the black box in one’s home sends data back and
forth to the cable company rather than simply receiving a signal. What does it
mean for the concept of community if it is a virtual one consisting of people sitting
in their living rooms in an actual (if pre-planned) community forming a community
via communication technology? The New York-based architect Steven Holl has
written that
[t]he chaos and uncertainty of fluctuating economies, combined with an

information overload from the ever-increasing supply of new technologies,
contribute to a detachment from natural phenomena, thus giving rise to nihilistic
attitudes. Architecture, with its silent spatiality and tactile materiality, can
reintroduce the essential, intrinsic meanings and values of human experience.3
But what chance does architecture have if new media already erode the community
values that architecture might be said to represent? And does architecture ever
really do that anyway?
The older formation of media—media as art—has already affected our sense
of what a city is. New York City, with Disneyfication at its heart in the form of the
revamped Times Square, is slowly but surely turning itself into a theme park: “Soho
and Chelsea (Artland), Battery Park City (Financial Fantasyland) … and the ‘wild’
Lower East Side (RealEstateFrontierland).”4 Likewise, architects and architectural
theorists have become keenly aware of how virtual media are calling into question
the definition of architecture itself. One phrase that has been used to describe the
meeting of media and architecture is “transarchitecture,” “a multi-threaded, multi-
tasking architecture that weaves the informational and the material, the virtual
and the actual, the possible and the real.” The only way to deal with such a thing
might be to adopt what Paul Virilio has termed “‘stereo-reality’ … the stereoscopic
effect of the doubling of the real by the virtual ….”5 If this is one way to accept
the new reality that the new media have wrought, then the new community, one
can only hope, will emerge, too. Whether or not this will be a community we can
live with, its emergence signals the fact that for the future media will matter and
that community may not be possible without it. The real hope that some had for
GeoCities was that people would pay to “live” there and that GeoCities would
function as a new way to make gobs of money off the net—an activity that, for
many Americans, was once virtually as well as literally free. If that is the case, then
the example of GeoCities, and its many parallel sites, followed the course usually
found in other forms of co-opted community. One can hope for the evolution of a
form of resistance, but the history of utopian communities, as we know, is usually
abandonment, or, something worse, incorporation.
The conformity of the suburbs may have become the model for virtual
community rather than the city. While cites suggest fluid borders in which people
can rub up against each other and be exposed to stimuli outside of their comfort
zone, suburbs suggest a walling off into discreet interests and tolerances. Just as
urban areas have borrowed from the suburbs to model their own revitalization, the
rise of Facebook and countless other examples of social media have emphasized
the danger of using the suburbs as the model for virtual space. As Andrew Leonard
has noted:
Increasingly, those who flock to today’s Net use it as a tool to strengthen their
national, cultural and political persuasions rather than water them down into
an atomistic, free-floating libertarian stew. The new masses of the Net don’t
necessarily want to abolish national borders ….6
Just as parts of the sunbelt have always been suburbs—Atlanta since the 1920s,
for example—the horizontal growth of the web has followed spatial models
that emphasize the sprawl of a place like Houston, Texas, or any number of other
generic pseudo-places that proudly market themselves as departing from the
older industrialized cities of the Northeast coast or of the Midwest. Taking their cue
ultimately from Southern California, the rise of the suburbs on the Internet may
ultimately reflect the permeation of film culture and the idea of architecture as
image rather than built reality.
However conflicted or illusory, virtual constructions use architectural
metaphors to suggest community and to anchor the user in a seemingly familiar
space that is an actual architectural place. While it is beyond the purview of this
book to explore the many permutations of this phenomenon, clearly chat rooms,
social media, porn sites, and games—of the on-line, platform, or downloadable
kinds—all clearly create spaces for their users. Whether Webkinz toys for children
or sophisticated multi-user games, the goal of the design is to find a way to involve
as many people as possible and to connect them with each other via a product.
Often a simulated built environment is used to form elaborate maze-like aspects of
games that allow users to waste time in the illusion of a spatial environment. The
elliptical aspect of these games keeps users hooked on deciphering a mystery or
fighting their way through an environment that seems slowly to unfold through
space but that actually moves through time. Users are encouraged to don an
avatar that is usually made up from a limited number of actual choices to act as the
figure that moves through space.7 While sometimes involving narrative, advances
in gaming are centered on technological breakthroughs in creating an ever-more
cinematic environment, realistic point of view, and/or sensory experience that
creates the impression that the user is transported bodily to another environment.
The effect is escapist, with games themselves rarely used as a means toward some
type of high-art end. While games sometimes form the basis for films, it is more
common for films to ape the look of games, especially films that base their scripts
on graphic novels. The CGI-encrusted films of the post-1990s have created a film
and television environment in which the look of gaming and the pre-digital look of
actual film stock are increasingly blurring into one another, creating an inversion
in reality in which film itself struggles to look like an improved version of the
computer screen. As it becomes more pervasive, the virtual environment threatens
to replace reality itself—or at least realism. Since one of its unintended effects is
to extend architecture into a new realm and multiply the number of architectural
effects that people get to experience, virtual environments raise the question
of whether architecture is any longer spatial or if it has, as prophesied by Philip
Johnson, become now merely an extension of time. Both the themed environment
and the cinematic experience have long suggested this possibility, which has now
become a part of our own lived—or simulated—reality.
Notes
1 Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, “Solid State Architecture,” Newsline (Spring 1998): 2.
2 Cory Clarke, “Columbia University GSAP’s Web Site Launch,” Newsline (Fall 1997): 8.
3 Steven Holl, “Intertwining,” Newsline (Spring 1997): 2.
4 Bill Mankin, “Archigram 1961–74,” Newsline (Spring 1998): 3.
5 Marcos Novak, “Transarchitectures,” Newsline (Fall 1997): 4.
6 Andrew Leonard, “Cyberspacey,” rev. of net.wars, by Wendy W. Grossman, The Nation, 29
December 1997: 31.
7 Of the many examples of avatars, one of the most interesting is the placing of David
Bowie and his wife Iman into the French game Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999) for
which Bowie wrote the music, which later formed the basis of his own album, Hours
(1999).
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Index
Abraham, Julie, 152, 161n32–3 Encore, 87

Adam, Ken, 99, 106n3, n9 Entrance gate, 135
adult, 45 Excalibur, 76–7
advancements, Five Hundred Boylston Street, Boston,
see technology; alcohol, 65n24 148
eroticism, 45 Folly, 30
homoeroticism, 46 Folly detail, 31
also see Kubrick, Stanley Foxwoods, 110
masturbation, 195 Gate House, 136
National Trust for Historic Preservation, Gathering place exhibit, 118–19
138 Glass House, 130–31
America, xiii Guest House, 132
North, 1 La Grande Arche, 27
Andress, Ursula, 101 Lake pavilion, 138
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 187 Le Château de la Belle au Bois
Archigram, 10, 203, 212n4 Dormant, 55–6
architect, 25 Le Grand Louvre, 28
Ando, Tadao, 25 Les Mystères du Nautilus, 56
Eisenman, Peter, 25, 36n68 Library/study, 134
Lipstick building, 148
Tschumi, Bernard, 25
Maison de la Roche, 22
architecture, xi, xiv, 1
Mandalay Bay, 89
house, 144
The Mirage, 76
see Johnson, Philip
Mohegan Sun, 122
kinetic, 4
New York, New York, 80–81
Mediterranean, xiv
One International Place, Boston, 149
see theme parks
Opéra Bastille, 29
architectural photographs, 1 Parc de la Villette, 30
Animal Kingdom, 52 Paris, 90
Art Gallery, 133, 139 Pequot museum, 116–17
AT&T Building, 147 Petroglyph, 82
Bibliothèque François Mitterand, 28 Phantom Manor, 57
Boston public library, 143 Piazza ďItalia, 72
Carpenter Center, Cambridge, 137 Rainmaker Statue, 112
Centre Pompidou, 14 Sculpture Gallery, 133–4
Cinderella’s Castle, 43 Seagram building, 142–3
Circus Circus, 86 Sphinx at the Luxor Casino, 78–9
Disneyland Paris, 54 Statue of Henry Wadsworth
Dr. Strangelove, 99 Longfellow, xiii
store sign, 114 Certeau, Michel de, 4, 18

Themed shopping area, 113 CIAM, 10, 33n11, 159, 163n68
Tomorrowland today, 49 Ciment, Michel, 203n51
The Tree of Life, 50 cinema, 19, also see film
Villa Savoye, 20 Civil War, xii
Waterfront, xii Clarke, Corey, 212n2
The Wynn, 87 Clarke, David B., 19, 34n28, 203n52, 204n54
Atlanta, xii Colomina, Beatriz, 22–3, 35n43–4, 36n63,
Atlanta Braves stadium, xii 158, 163n65
Omni Coliseum, xii colonies, xi
Augé, Marc, 12, 15, 34n18 Craig, Daniel, 101, 107n16
Aydemir, Murat, 179, 200n13, 201n16–17 critique, see scrutiny
culture, 66
Ball, Edward, 66n27 American, 66n35
Ballard, J.G., 20, 186–7 ethnic diversity, 118
Banham, Reyner, 39, 85, 202n34 Indian, 115
Baudrillard, Jean, 33, 39, 48, 192–3 popular, 66n26
Benjamin, Walter, 4, 18, 34n25, 35n45, 37, Sarris, Greg, 115, 126n10–11
116, 161n29 CyberSites, 208
Betsky, Aaron, 152, 161n31 Communities, 208
body, 19 GeoCities, 209
athleticism, 105
Clarke, David B., 19 Davis, Mike, 85, 91n26, 210
Deleuze, 21 Debord, Guy, 12, 163n69
Le Corbusier, 19 Delaney, Samuel R., 152
Jameson, 21, 35n36–8 Deleuze, Gilles,19, 34n20 187–8, 203n45–9
Kubrick, Stanley, 169 Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 187
Boellstorff, Tom, 161n37 DeLillo, Don, 59–63,
Boston, xi New York City, 210, 67n39–41
One International Place, 149 reality, 62
Brown, David, 33n15 Williams, William Carlos, 63
Brown, Denise Scott, 91n1 White Noise, 59
Bruno, Giuliana, 20, 35n32–4 Derrida, Jacques, 26, 36n68
Buchanan, Ian, 91n25 Disney, Walt, 4
Buck-Morss, Susan, 37 see adult
Bukatman, Scott, 200n4 see pornography
Burgee, John, 13, 145–7 see sexuality
Disneyfication, 2
California, xiii culture, 45–48
Campbell, Martin, 107n16 also see theme park
Canadian Centre for Architecture, xv zoo, 49
Capote, Truman, 63 Doel, Marcus A., 19, 34n28, 203n52, 204n54
Carter, Paul, 24, 35n56–60 Doesburg, Theo van, 14,
casino architecture, 1 Dorfman, Ariel, 38, 65n20
Circus Circus, 86 Dunlop, Beth, 66n31
Foxwoods, 7, 110 Duvall, John, xv
also see gambling
Las Vegas, 69 Eagleton, Terry, 32n1, 33n4, 71
Luxor, 78–9 The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 32n1
Mandalay Bay, 89 Edelman, Lee, 6, 124–5, 152–3, 161n34–5
Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, 109 Eisner, Michael, 38, 44
New York, New York, 80 ABC Television, 38
The Wynn, 87 AOL Time Warner 38
index 225
England, xii Giedion, Sigfried, 4, 10, 159

Environment, 3 Giffney, Noreen, 161n36
virtual, 3, 210–11 globalization, 4
EPCOT Center, 43–4, 47–8, 51, 65n17 Disney, 37–38
era, 12 Godard, Jean-Luc, 187–8
postmodern, 32n1; Victorian, 11–12 Goldfinger, Auric, 93, 106n8
Europe, xi, 1 Graafland, Ad, 160n5
French, 66n36 Graves, Michael, 10, 71, 73
Gropius, Walter, 9
fantasy, 51,
Halevy, Julian, 84, 91n21–2 Hadid, Zaha, 32
see Disney, nostalgia, 80, 207 Halberstam, Judith, 6, 152
Faulkner, William, xii Hall, Stuart, 32n1, 33n4
Ferguson, Frances, 201n21–2, 202n24–8 Hansen, Mark, 19, 34n26–7, 205n73
Fierro, Annette, 14, 33n14 Hatherley, Owen, 184–7, 202n29–n30,
film, 5 203n36–7, 203n39–43
Bond, 5, 93–105 Hays, Michael K., 31, 36n75, n77, 155,
Broccoli, Barbara, Albert, 105, 107n17 162n50
Bruno, Guiliana, 20 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24
Casino Royale, 5, 100, 107n16 Hillis, Ken, 196
Connery, Sean, 94 history, 24
Diamonds Are Forever, 5, 106n7–8 Carter, Paul, 24, 35n56–60
distortion, 107n13 Hutcheon, 71
Dr. No, 98, 101–2, 106n6 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 10
Dr. Strangelove, 99 Holl, Steven, 4, 25, 212n3
editing techniques, 176 Hurston, Zora Neale, 41
Eisenstein, Sergei, 20 Hutcheon, Linda, 33n4, 70–73, 91n3–7
EON Productions, 105
also see Kubrick, Stanley Indian, 115
realism, 170 Interior of Excalibur, 77
sex, 177 irony, 73
Spielberg, Steven, 165
Fjellman, Stephen M., 64n10,n12, 65n16 Jaffé, Hans L.C., 34n16–17
Fleming, Ian, 93, 103, 106n1–2, n4, 107n15 Jameson, Fredric, 12, 15–16, 21, 32n1,
“folies,” 27 33n6, 34n21, 35n36–8, 70–74, 91n2,
Folly detail, 31 91n8–14
Opéra Bastille, 29 Jencks, Charles A., 10
Parc de la Villette, 30 Architecture Today, 10
Foster, Hall, 40 The Language of Post-Modern
neoconservative, 40 Architecture, 10
Fox, Steven, 145, 160n7 Jennings, Michael, 34n25
Frampton, Kenneth, 7, 10, 34n31, 71, 207 Johnson, Philip, 4, 7, 129, 160n7–20,
Frayling, Christopher, 106n3, 106n9 161n22–8, 163n52–70
Freud, Sigmund, 24, 45, 158 AT&T, 146–7
Connecticut, 6–7
Gallagher, David, xv Five Hundred Boylston Street, 147–8
gambling, 69, 73 Gate House, 134–6
MGM Grand, 74 Glass House, 6
Pequot, 115 IDS, 146
“Gathering Place,” 118 James Grier House, 156
Gehry, Frank, 72, 84, 135, 141, 161n30 Le Corbusier, 135
Ghirardo, Diane, 66n28, The Lincoln Kirsten Tower, 151–2
Gibson, William, 44–5 Lipstick Building, 147–8
New York State Pavilion, 145 Las Vegas, 69

New York State Theatre, 144 artsy, 86
The Philip Johnson Glass House, xv, Bellagio, 86
129–32 entertainment, 89
The Schlumberger Administration lifestyle, 88
Building, 144 secrecy, 81
skyscrapers, 13 simulation, 82
symbolism, 154 urbanization 85
Times Square, 159 Lautner, John, 97
wealth, 141 Lavin, Sylvia, 27, 36n72
Judd, Donald, 159n2 Lawlor, Mary, 124, 127n22–3
Le Corbusier, 3, 12, 16, 18, 23, 25, 33n11,
Kahn, Louis, 10, 141, 163n67 34n30–31, 207
Kakoudaki, Despina, 205n69–72 Brutalism, 185, 202
kinetic, 4 EPCOT, see EPCOT Center
Kirby, Kathleen, 2–3, 7n6–8 also see Johnson, Philip
place, 2; space, 2 also see Kubrick, Stanley
Klingman, Anna, 17, 34n23–4, 92n31–2 landscape, 23
Vegas, 90 Maison de la Roche, 22
Kolker, Phillip, 200n9, Renaissance, 23
Kōjin, Karatani, 23–4, 35n48–55, space, 23
Koolhaas, Rem, 4, 7n1, 92n27, n29–30 Villa Savoye, 19–20, 23
“Notion of the Datascape,” 17 windows, 22
Vegas, 89–90 Lefebvre, Henri, 4, 12–15, 16, 17, 19,
virtual world, 192 33n7–9, n11
Krinsky, Carol Herselle, 126n9, 126n12–13, Lentricchia, Frank, 67n42, n44
n15 Leonard, Andrew, 211, 212n6
Krocker, Arthur, 65n18 Lyndon, Barry, 167, 169, 183, 188–91,
Kubrick, Stanley, 6, 77, 99, 165–205 197–200, 200n9, 203n44, 205n74
A Clockwork Orange, 168 also see Kubrick, Stanley
Barry Lyndon, 189 Lyotard, Jean-François, 32n1, 186
Brutalism, 184–6, 202n34–5
Corbusier, 185 McDowell, Malcolm, 199n1, 200n11
also see Deleuze Mailer, Norman, 63
Eyes Wide Shut, 190–91 Maine, xi, xii
Foucault, 180–82 Munjoy Hill, xiv
gang, 175 Old Port Exchange, xiii
homoerotic, 168–9, 174, 177, 179 Portland, xiii
London, 181–2 Marcus, Greil, 39–40, 64n4–7
phallus, 179, 191 Marshall, Bill, 36n76,
also see pornography; prison, 182 Martin, Reinhold, 15, 34n19
also see realism Marx, Karl, 13, 21, 24, 162n37, 186,
“The Day of the Fight,” 167 abstract labor, 13
utilitarianism, 183–4 notion of, 13
violence, 177–8 Massachusetts, xi
Wandsworth, H.M.P, 181 Merrifield, Andy, 13, 33n12–13
Kunzle, David, 45, 65n20–21, n23 Miller, Mark Crispin, 200n9–10, 202n23,
202n31–33
Landscape, 22 modernist, 1
Johnson, 156–8 “Gathering Place,” 118
Larson, Magali Sarfatti, 7n2 Johnson, 22
Lasdun, Denys, 185 Kubrick, 186
index 227
modernism, 63 pilotis, 19, 137

Pequot Culture Museum, 118 Plymouth Plantation, xiv
Mondrian, Piet, 14, 138, 151, Poggie, Christine, 162n47, 162n49
Moore, Charles, 10, 39, 71–2 Pogrebin, Robin, 203n35
Morse, Margaret, 67n37 pornography, 6, 80, 194, 204n62–3
Moos, Stanislaus von, 65n17 Bond, 102
multiculturalism, 4 entertainment, 192
Kubrick, Stanley, 183–4
Native American, 2, 6–7 satisfaction, 195
Bodinger de Uriarte, John J., 126n7–8, fetish, 196
n14 Portman, John, 74
Choctaw Reservation, 125n2 postmodernist, 1
Gathering Place exhibit, 118–19 Brown, 69
Lawlor, Mary, 127n22 Cobb, Amanda J., 123–4, 126n16–21
Ledyard, Connecticut, 109 Izenour, 69, 90n1
Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, 109 see Jameson, Fredric
Pequot Museum tower, 117–18 postmodernism, 33n4
Rainmaker Statue, 112 Venturi, 69, 73
Seminoles, 41 Prizer, Edward L., 64n10
also see casino architecture
Smith, Andrea, 124, 127n26–39 Queer Space, 213
New England, xi, xii
architecture, xiv Race, 107n13
Statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rainmaker Statue, 113–14
xiii
Reed, Christopher, 162n47–8, 203n38
New Orleans, 72
Reiser, Jesse, 212n1
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 24
Renaissance, 23
Novak, Marcos, 212n5
Rohe, Mies van der, 9–10, 129–31, 135–41,
145, 151–2, 155–6, 158–9n1, 162n50–
O’Brien, Jean M., 127n24–5
51, 163n67, 185
obsession, 42
Rosner, Victoria, 162n39–42
effect, 43
Ross, Andrew, 64n2
Opéra Bastille, 29
Rubeli, Paul, 75, 91n15, 125n4
paradox, 57
also see Disney; perpetual temporal, 57 Sadé, Marquis de, 18
Parc de la Villette, 30 The 120 Days of Sodom, 18
Paris, 13 Sedean theatrics, 18
Parc Monceau, 29 Sarris, Greg, 115
Pompidou Centre, 13–14 satisfaction, 195
parody, 70 Schlemmer, Oskar, 31
Hutcheon, Linda, see Hutcheon; scholarship, 39
irony, 73 Scorsese, Martin, 75
Jameson, 70 scrutiny, 39–40
Patterson, Zabert, 193, 204n55, 204n57– Seminoles, 41
61 sexuality, 21
Pei, I.M., 27 Bond, 99, 102
Pequot, 120 Foucault, Michel, 21, 35n39–42
Krinsky, Carol Herselle, 126n9, n12–13, Glass House, 140
n15 Johnson, 158
tribal, 124 also see Kubrick, Stanley
Perrault, Dominique, 27 masochist, 103
phallus, 179, 191 Race, 107n13
Philip Johnson Glass House, The, xv, 129–32 Vitali, Domino, 103
skyscrapers, 13 University of Southern Maine, xv

Smith, Andrea, 124, 127n26–39 urban, xii
Smoodin, Eric, 38 also see Las Vegas; new, 149
Soja, Edward, W., 4, 33n10 urbanization, 85
Sokolove, Michael, 125n1 Uriarte, John J., Bodinger de, 126n7–8,
space, 2, 15, 25 126n14
Speaks, Michael, 20, 35n35, 160n5 utopian, 15
Spiegel, Alan, 199, 205n74 Augé, 15
Spielberg, Steven, 165 also see Disneyfication
Staiger, Janet, 200n12 Marin, Louis, 66n29, 32–34
Stern, Robert, 4, 71, 73 space, 15
Stone, Edward Durrell, 144 utopia, 47–48
symbolism, 154
Vegas, 89–90
Tafuri, Manfredo, 10, 32n2, 201n19
Venturi, Robert, 2
Thamesmead, ix, 177, 184–5, 187
Piazza San Marco, 2
theme, 75
architectural, 81 Venturi, 69
also see casino architecture Vermont, xii
Disney theme, 77 Victorian, 11–12
Excalibur, 76 Vidler, Anthony, 25–6, 36n69–70
Interior of Excalibur, 77 Villa Savoye, 19–20
Luxor, 77 violence, 177–8
The Mirage, 76 Virilio, Paul, 4, 33n5, 211
monotony, 83 virtual, 3, 210–11
Taylor, Mark C., 75, 81–84, 91n16–17, Vitali, Domino, 103
n19–20, 160n21
theme parks, 2, 37 Walker, Enrique, 36n62, 36n65–6, 36n71
Animal Kingdom, 52 Wandsworth, H.M.P, 181
Cinderella’s Castle, 43 Warhol, Andy, 145, 149, 152, 159n4, 193,
Disney, 1–2, 4 200n12
Disney World, 2, 37, 64n14 Waterfront, xii
Euro Disney, 37; wealth, 141
Florida, 2 Weiss, Allen, 36n61
Paris, 16, 54–6 Whiting, Cécile, 162n44–5
realistic architecture, 52 Wilde, Oscar, 45, 98, 150, 152–4, 162n38,
Phantom Manor, 57 162n42, 181, 186
Tokyo Disneyland, 37 Williams, William Carlos, 63
Tomorrowland Today, 49 Williams, Linda, 195, 204n55, n62–3,
tourism, 53, 61, 82
205n69
Tree of life, 50
Willis, David, 18, 34n24
Tribe, 109
windows, 22
Bodinger de Uriarte, John J., 126n7–8,
“Gathering Place,” 118
n14
Gathering Place exhibit, 118–19 Winslow, Edward, 118
Lawlor, Mary, 127n22 women, 18, 51, 58, 93–7, 102–4
Pequot Museum tower, 117–18 Kubrick, Stanley, 171
Rainmaker Statue, 112 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 10, 106n3, 141, 145, 156
Smith, Andrea, 124, 127n26–39 Wynn, The, 87
Tschumi, Bernard, 25–6
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 23, 35n46–7 Zizek, Slavoj, 194
zoo, 49, 88
Umemoto, Nanako, 212n1 also see Disneyfication
universalism, 2 San Diego, 50

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The Dissolution of Place

Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series

The discipline of Architecture is undergoing subtle transformation as design

Other titles in this series

Architect Knows Best

Nationalism and Architecture

The Political Unconscious of Architecture

Forthcoming titles in this series

A Life in Education and Architecture

On Frank Lloyd Wright’s Concrete Adobe

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 9781409417682 (hbk)

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the

List of Figures  vii

1 The Architectonics of Post/modernist Space 9

2 The Global Theme Park: Disney in the World  37

3 The Architecture of Time: Postmodern Casinos in Las Vegas  69

4 In Her Majesty’s Secret Closet: Bond’s Body  93

5 Reverse Empire: Architecture in Native American Casinos  109

6 Philip Johnson and the Architecture of the Body  129

7 Bodies in Space: Architecture and the Films of Stanley Kubrick  165

Coda: Virtual Communities  207

3.7 New York, New York 80

7.5 Bowman holding Poole’s body 171

All photographs, unless otherwise stated, are copyright of the author.

Architecture exists, for me, primarily through photographs—often expensively

situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended

Continuity is placed above invention, conventionality before everything else.

“Place,” as Kirby goes on to say,

dislocation in space and time. Johnson picks up on these themes throughout

Modernism and Postmodernism

The historicizing of modernist and postmodernist architecture has been ongoing

as form. Likewise, we need to explore more fully architecture as an influence on

Space and Place

To Jameson, the figure represented is Guy Debord’s spectacle as postmodernism

As he notes earlier, artists such as Paul Klee or architects such as Le Corbusier

understood that things could not be created independently of each other in

As the building becomes progressively more exterior, it might be regarded either

The building disappears, but, more importantly, it disappears to be replaced by

[e]verything proceeds as if space has been trapped by time, as if there were no

In architecture, as elsewhere, the active ‘unthinking’ of Utopia is among those

The tension between modernist and postmodernist definitions of space to

To demarcate the postmodernist aesthetic from this one [high modernism],

For Jameson, postmodernism, perhaps especially in its architectural form, offers

By addressing topics such a drama and ambience as vital ingredients of theming,

If architecture becomes a catalyst for events, performances, spectacles, and

The spacing that comprises the body’s self-intuition as absolute volume

Cinema, though a corollary, finally is unable to be much more than a two-

… a ‘body’ is a composition and articulation of relations, social as well as object

Eisenstein takes this one step further:

in recent memory, so strong that architects find inspiration in these ostensibly

But a materialism based on the individual body … is to be identified as a

As noted by Beatriz Colomina, any consideration of Corbusier’s career needs to take

Viewing a landscape through a window implies a separation. A window, any

Recent discoveries of the structure of subatomic particles … have been

It is difficult to underestimate the significance of Corbusier’s ramps that cut their

finds itself in a unique situation: it is the only discipline that by definition

‘space’ could embrace both an empirical and sensual definition as well as a

At a conceptual level, randomness can be better applied to events, actions, and

Tuschmi’s notion of architecture as “space, event, and movement” is an extension

No new public building in France can be thought of outside the context of

List of Figures vii

1 The Architectonics of Post/modernist Space 9

2 The Global Theme Park: Disney in the World 37

3 The Architecture of Time: Postmodern Casinos in Las Vegas 69

4 In Her Majesty’s Secret Closet: Bond’s Body 93

5 Reverse Empire: Architecture in Native American Casinos 109

6 Philip Johnson and the Architecture of the Body 129

7 Bodies in Space: Architecture and the Films of Stanley Kubrick 165

Coda: Virtual Communities 207

3.7 New York, New York 80

7.5 Bowman holding Poole’s body 171