A few random things I've been meaning to post for a while

[xiphias]

1. Lis and I saw a Dippin' Dots, Ice Cream of the Future vending machine at the mall that had a different name. I don't remember what it was, but it WASN'T called "Dippin' Dots", and it DIDN'T say that it was "of the future", which means that we are now in the future. And it's dystopian. So we went and looked at puppies.

2. Happy birthday, Leila.

3. I was thinking about the play "You Can't Take it With You" that Theatre@First put on a while back, and something about it disturbed me. So, the whole play is about this lovely, eccentric family that effectively drops out of society and does their own thing, unconcerned with the outside world. They get into some trouble because the grandfather refuses to pay income tax, because the outside world just doesn't matter. Who cares who's president, or what's happening in the world?

The play was 1936.

There's something fundamentally disturbing and somewhat evil about a play whose message is "Don't worry about anything outside your own home, or about the country, or about the world," in 1936.

Comments

[navrins]

I had much the same reaction when I watched the movie late in 2001 as I was considering wanting to direct it - and that was without particularly realizing that it was 1936. It's one of the reasons I didn't decide I wanted to direct it, or to audition for it when T@F did it.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Having not been alive during that era, it would be wrong of me to try and second-guess what audiences of the day wanted to see, or what made this particular play such a popular hit. But the fact that America was coming out of a brutal depression would certainly have something to do with any general lack of global worldview. They didn't know what was going on in Europe, and what was about to happen, because for most families the focus had been on daily survival for years.

Grandpa's lifestyle is, of course, pure fantasy. It was no more feasible to live that way then as it would be now. The family essentially lived without money, which can only happen via the magic of fiction (don't even get me started on "freegans"). Grandpa's world offered escapism for the world-weary, and a few lighthearted hours to laugh and sigh "If only..."

I don't think the family was entirely uninterested in the outside world, though. Having played a guest to their home, I was amused at how captivated they were by the Dutchess. Granted, they were captivated for all the wrong reasons, but they did enjoy emmensely an outside presence in their midst. They also had the benefit of Kolenkov, who serve as a human newspaper oftentimes.

I think for me, it lacked the sinister message of "don't worry about the outside world," because it was a play written for people who didn't have the option of living like Grandpa. When they left the theatre, there were jobs to go to (or jobs to desperately search for), chances are there was a newspaper on their porch that got read every day, and as much awareness of the world as struggling people could digest. This play, I feel, was meant to wisk the audience away for a fantasy break, rather that urging them to attempt the impossible and try to live that way.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I don't know the play but it was called isolationism, and it was a respected political philisophy and I think that was very very common in 1936, in Britain as well as the US, and that's one reason why things got as bad as they did in re appeasement. As late as May of 1939 Roosevelt was asking for promises from Hitler and Mussolini that they wouldn't invade any European powers "for ten years", in return for which he'd tell people to stop picking on them about the countries they'd conquered already. I'm not kidding, and he meant it entirely seriously. (Mussolini had just conquered Albania, incidentally.)

1936. The year Auden wrote:

"And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking, Dachau."

And in some ways it's always 1936. Going inside your cosy shell and leaving the world to it is always wrong.

"In order for evil to triumph, it is only necessary that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke.

[brooksmoses]

I have sort of the counterpoint to your point 3, in a way: A cheap hardcover book, printed in early 1939, written by a German who was trying to warn the rest of the world that we needed to pay attention....