Since this is an E-zine devoted to popular culture (however the hell one defines that), what's your relationship to various manifestations of The Popular? Do you have any interests in music? TV? Movies? Sports? Or is it something you try to avoid?
As anyone who's read The Savage Girl has probably guessed, I have something of a love-hate relationship with pop culture. I guess this is especially true when it comes to movies, which I see far too many of (in part, in the ever-frustrated desire to be where it's at--to be, if only vicariously, at the focal point of the culture) and then walk out of wondering how it is that they managed to take my money again. I think that's one of the reasons heist movies are so popular--people go see them hoping on some level to learn how to make out like bandits, while the entertainment industry (i.e. the ones who really do make out like bandits, repackaging the same product time and again in a gloss of novelty while raking in the dough), enjoy making them as a form of self-aggrandizing autobiography. (You can tell I'm conflicted when my sentences get parenthetical).
Funny you should say that to someone who, in the last week, has watched Gone in 60 Seconds on cable, rented Snatch, and went to the mall megaplex to watch Ocean's 11. Do you think it's possible to enjoy manifestations of popular culture without becoming the sort of hipster doofus who drops gratuitous Seinfeld references into his daily discourse as a sort of defense mechanism? Or is that the mark of the pseudo-intellectual on the slum? If so, should people like this be shot, or just parodied?
Seinfeld is pretty good as popular culture goes--it showed us a lot of things about ourselves, a lot of our little everyday selfishnesses, in a way we hadn't thought about before. I haven't seen those movies on the assumption that they sucked, but in general the demographic they're aiming for is teenage boys. As long as they can make a fantasy suitable for teenage boys then they can basically count on infantilizing the rest of us. Women will go see movies about men but not the other way around. Men will go see movies as long as they promise a little violence and sex. These things are all charted out way in advance of the making of any film as everyone knows.
I should also point out that I went to Kandahar as well. Seriously, turning to the novel, I was interested when one of the trendspotters has a change of heart and, after years of following around children and teenagers to see what's cool, suddenly becomes aware that this activity was highly exploitative of children. As I was reading scenes where the trendspotters were interviewing children, I remembered a Fellini quote. He says in effect (complaining about the fact that because teenagers are the largest available market for movies, an incredible number of films are directed at teenaged markets), "when a civilization starts listening to its young for direction, it is doomed." Would you agree? Was this important for the novel?
Yes, with the "fun-loving hitmen" movies on the one hand and the "Conspiracy Against the Children" campaign on the other, I was trying to show how this cultural trend is bad for children and adults alike, how it shunts us all into some kind of shadowy infantilized-sociopathic nether-state, if you will.
The author's blurb for your first collection of stories, City in Love, says that you are working on a book about trendspotters. And if memory serves, the working title of The Savage Girl was in fact Trendspotters. What brought about the change in title?
One working title was The Trendspotters' Handbook. I liked that title for a while, so much that I was trying to force the story to revolve around a trendspotters' handbook for a couple of years. But over time, as the story evolved, the handbook went away and the title went with it. The Savage Girl was, by that time, the obvious choice--a minor character in the book, but one around whom a great many of the themes revolve.
In the process of writing those early drafts, did you compose large chunks of the actual handbook? Or did you find in various pre-existing sources (marketing textbooks or those supposedly visionary business texts that give us catch phrases like "Total Quality Management," etc.) enough material to save you that labor?
I did a lot of research, found a lot of creepy stuff, and then let my own imagination run with it. The first really significant discovery was Ernest Dichter's Cold War era book, The Strategy of Desire, in which he compares American marketing with Soviet propaganda, saying that on the surface the two things look very similar, but that the difference is that whereas Soviet propaganda exists to make its citizens feel content with their lives, American marketing exists to foment discontent in its consumers, to make them want bigger homes and newer cars and younger spouses. And this was a good thing, Dichter patriotically argued, because it was this perpetual discontent which would drive our economy forward and give us the edge that would ensure our victory in the Cold War. Eerily enough, I think it's fair to say now that he was right. But the idea that we live in an environment of engineered discontent made me start to see the world around me in a very different way. I started to watch commercials and look at advertisements with an eye toward what was having an effect on me and how, and gradually I came up with the idea of "paradessences" (the theory Chas teaches Ursula in the supermarket), how every product has a paradessence, or paradoxical essence, two opposing desires that it promises to satisfy simultaneously. So for example, the paradessence of coffee is stimulation and relaxation, and all of the most effective ads for coffee will promise you both of these things.
Next page: Satire, surrealism, and other parts of "the corporate arsenal"
