THE
TWISTED AGE
Look magazine gets the future hilariously wrong
(2007)
The
other day I wandered into a second-hand furniture store in
downtown Victoria. The retro-bric a brac didn’t interest
me, until I saw a stack of old magazines on a
teardrop-shaped, Eisenhower-era coffee table.
The cover of a Look
magazine
from 1964 caught my eye. A motion-blurred photo of dancing
figures bore the legend: “The Twisted Age: today’s dances
are only symbols of a mad and often frightening era.” You
couldn’t make this stuff up, even back then. I snapped up
the mag for five bucks.
Newsprint slowly burns up over time (the yellowing of the
paper is through oxidization) but magazines can weather
decades in dry storage environments. That’s good, because I
consider weeklies and monthlies to be bonafide time
capsules. Because they’re aimed at contemporary readers
rather than archivists, magazines offer entertaining x-rays
of their times’ most cherished shibolleths.
For
a while, Look
was
serious competiton to Life
magazine,
with more than 75000,000 in circulation. By 1964, the
editorial gatekeepers of this middlebrow mag sensed some
troubling signs on the horizon. “It looks as if a new Jazz
Age has arrived,” the cover story began. “Americans are
dancing again, staying up late in night spots to do so, as
they have not for many years. Girls are showing their
knees, as they did with their rolled stocking tops and
flying short skirts in the twenties.”
The horror. The author’s reefer madness angle on the twist,
frug and funky chicken, is supported by “an expert on human
behaviour,” insisting that ungrateful youth “are codifying
language” into cliquish catchphrases and jargon. “The bop
and bebop talk of a number of years ago, the names of
current dances, are examples. So are the sick comedians,
the fads for silly jokes like elephant stories, and the
topless bathing suits.”
Judging from the many liquor ads in my copy, Look’s readers
of yore were encouraged to get hammered on a regular basis.
In the golden age of America’s dominator culture, it
appears men were more in touch with the liquor cabinet than
their own feelings. Perhaps a certain desire for oblivion
was understandable at the time, given the early carnage in
Vietnam, and the deadly marksmanship in Dealy Plaza. (In
1964, Look
and
every other respectable publication genuflected before the
Warren Commission, pronouncing the JFK assassination the
isolated work of an ex-Army misfit.)
It’s easy to laugh at the schoolmarmish tone of Look’s
writing, and the essayist’s inept triangulation of social
trends that would soon explode the comfortable, Ozzie and
Harriet cosmos of the postwar generation. But old magazines
like Look have a lesson for us. We may pride ourselves on
our retrospective smarts, but how silly will our official
North American culture seem fifty years from now?
Years before Look’s Twisted
Age, the
Boston newspaper reporter H.L. Mencken nailed it:
“The
whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by
menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of
them imaginary.” Two
major, media-massaged fears of the sixties - the threat of
international communism, and a “missile gap’ with the
Soviets - proved to be based on deliberately exaggerated
intelligence estimates. But what about today’s newshour
dreads? It seems inevitable that one day many of them will
be regarded as more laughable than legitimate.
Or perhaps not. Canada could stay on its present course for
decades to come, playing spearcarrier to the US Globocop.
We could end up with a shrunken middle class and a command
economy driven by military procurement and private
security. In which case, we probably won’t have the
opportunity or the inclination to look back on our
blinkered past, being stuck with a future that’s a bizarro
fusion of Huxley’s Brave
New World, Orwell’s
1984,
and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Then again, things might work out. At some point, our
leaders at home may choose to grow up and stop signing us
on to foreign campaigns and resource-gobbling trade deals.
With luck, the thing under the bed (Bird flu, the human
papillomavirus, al Qaeda) will seem as dated and daffy as
Look magazine’s dancefloor apocalypse.
In
some ways, the world is better than it was in 1964. On the
plus side, we have far more media options today than our
parents ever did. We have the Internet, with all its mixed
blessings. Long gone are the days when National Geographic
was the family resource for foreign lands, and Walter
Cronkite was the kindly uncle speaking from a glowing
corner in the living room. 1964 was nice place to visit,
via a magazine from a used furniture shop, but I wouldn’t
want to live there. I’m hoping fifty years from now,
another generation will be able to say the same thing about
our own twisted times.
Geoff Olson
