Spectator Sport

More than half a century after the death of Nathanael West, his name continues to be invoked in an effort to explain some of the more puzzling aspects of our culture. “It’s like something out of Nathanael West,” a Chicago newscaster opined as he watched live video of the burning and looting that took place throughout Los Angeles during the 1992 uprisings. Eighteen months later another journalist made a similar observation as she watched Los Angeles go up in flames yet again--this time not as a result of insurrection but of an arsonist’s fire that raged for days through the desiccated canyons of Southern California.

During the succession of Bible-sized earthquakes, fire and floods that have plagued Southern California since then, West’s apocalyptic imagination has been cited repeatedly and endowed with the authority of prophecy. Even NBC’s Tom Brokaw got into the act, invoking the name of Nathanael West in astonishment as crowds of people lined the freeways of Southern California to witness the surreal, slow-motion chase of O.J. Simpson. Why West? Why now?

The obvious answer is that ever since “The Day of the Locust,” West has been closely tied with Los Angeles, where that novel takes place. As Los Angeles has come to assume a greater place in the national imagination, West’s importance has grown. But that does not explain why an obscure writer from the 1930s should speak to us so powerfully today. West’s obscurity then is at least partly attributable to his own prescience. While many on the left were preoccupied with an anachronistic (and romantic) vision of America as a battleground pitting heroic factory workers against bloated plutocrats, West was quietly chronicling the emergence of a consumer society whose principal actors were not the radicalized masses but a disenchanted and isolated mass man.

That is not to say that West did not share the political convictions of those on the communist left, but he never allowed those convictions to obscure his reading of the forces remaking American society during the period. Much of the drama of his work lies in his attempt to preserve his political convictions in the face of this brave new world. As we become more and more intimately acquainted with this brave new world ourselves, West has become both a point of reference and an illuminating guide. Indeed, one might say that West’s continuing popularity is attributable to the fact that he is one of the most insightful critics of the culture of capitalism and its most recent forms--consumerism, postmodernity, etc.--available in American literature.

No doubt these comments will strike some as extravagant. But just think of one of the more memorable scenes in “The Day of the Locust,” Tod’s description of the evening crowd on Vine Street. West writes: “A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. Their sweaters, knickers, slacks, blue flannel jackets with brass buttons were fancy dress. The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office. . . . Scattered among these masquerades were people of a different type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, bought from mail-order houses. While the others moved rapidly, darting into stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred.”

Nearly 40 years before West wrote this passage, American sociologist Thorstein Veblen took the fashionable clothes he saw on the avenues of New York and Chicago as evidence of “conspicuous consumption” by which a newly moneyed class proclaimed its status. On West’s Vine Street, consumption is still very much in evidence, but here it obscures more than it reveals. These yachting caps and Tyrolean hats bear no relationship to what they signify: i.e. yachts and Alpine mountains. They are proof only of their owners’ capacity to spend money. This is more than just a matter of conspicuous consumption. The world literally begins to dissolve under this new ethos until nothing is left but costumes, performances, actors. In West’s hands, Vine Street has become a masquerade in which social relations are invisible, society itself unreadable. The yachting caps and Tyrolean hats are thus more than mere fancy dress; they herald the emergence of an entirely new social order with a grammar all its own. Whether one chooses to describe that order as a masquerade or postmodernism, the problem is essentially the same. It is impossible to know how to interpret this world, much less act in it--or better yet, on it.

This poses serious consequences for those who cannot afford to participate in this masquerade. On West’s Vine Street, there is little left for the “mail-order house” crowd to do but watch. Their former status as the proletariat gave them an exalted role as the agent of history. But in a consumer society (which embraces haves and have-nots alike) that role no longer exists. Instead, these people have become little more than a group of sullen voyeurs who contemplate the evening crowd of consumer-exhibitionists not so much with ideas of revolution as with the far more reactionary politics of envy and ressentiment. In this way, West has redefined the nature of social relations in American society, and he has done so with a brevity and deftness so subtle that only now are we beginning to take in the enormous consequences.

This reading of West illuminates recent events in Los Angeles. West has almost nothing to say about the vexing question of race, which was, of course, at the root of the uprisings. But there were other aspects of the uprisings that took on a specific Westian cast--most notably the manner in which they quickly became enmeshed in the politics of representation. From the moment the beating of Rodney King was captured on videotape, to its ritual reenactment each night on the 6 o’clock news, to its use in the trial of the four police officers accused of using excessive force (and later charged with civil rights violations), it was clear that the representation of race relations was at least as important as race relations themselves. Race has always been one of the most theatricalized elements of American society, but America’s theater of cruelty has recently taken on a life of its own, obscuring a densely woven fabric of race relations in a series of spectacular melodramas that have provoked a deadly combination of apocalyptic rage and numbing apathy. This would hardly come as a surprise to West. More than most social critics then or since, he is keenly aware of the extent to which a complex social world has been absorbed by a “daily diet” of “lynchings, murder [and] sex crimes” provided by the media--making us connoisseurs of our own destruction.

West helps us to understand other aspects of the uprisings as well, particularly as they moved from rage into what can only be described as a demented shopping spree. The haunting depiction of the burning of Los Angeles in the painting of the same name in “The Day of the Locust”--”He wanted the city to have quite a gala air as it burned [and] the people who set it on fire [to] be a holiday crowd”--seemed to anticipate if not prophesy the gala air of the looters as they emerged from burning buildings pushing shopping carts filled with plunder: toiletries, car batteries, stereo components, stuffed animals, milk.

Perhaps the most thoroughly Westian moment in all of this--the moment that seemed to reveal the complicated social dynamics of Vine Street most exactly--was the theft of Madonna’s bustier from the Lingerie Museum in Frederick’s of Hollywood. That theft is the quintessential gesture of the consumer, the revenge of those who buy their clothes from the “mail-order house” against “the stores and cocktail bars” frequented by masqueraders. In the aftermath of the melee, this side of the riots (and here the word “riots” is appropriate) was aptly summed up by a quip that appeared on T-shirts throughout the city: “My parents went looting and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Not until the Simpson-Goldman killings and the bizarre chase scene that followed would that surreal concatenation of eroticism, celebrity and violence be played out again with such clarity and force. The Simpson trials are in many ways the perfect redaction of the uprising, their (ostensibly) depoliticized variant. Somehow all the issues raised by the uprisings seem to have been telescoped into what can only be described as a tawdry made-for-television movie, complete with movie stars and their homes, a slew of bad performances and plenty of commercials.

West would have understood, along with Geraldo Rivera, the extent to which this sorry melodrama tells us who we are. Once again we find ourselves on Vine Street watching the masqueraders as they dart into cocktail bars--this time with names like the Riviera Country Club, Mezzaluna and Starbucks. We note with a mixture of envy and resentment the Bruno Magli shoes, the mansion at Rockingham, the vacations in the Caribbean, the late-model sports coupe whose license plate--”L84AD8”--seemed to sum up the sublime insouciance of the whole infamous masquerade.

It is possible that we may come to forgive Simpson. Certainly, the crowds that lined the freeways of Southern California--holding signs aloft that read, “Go Juice!”--indicated their inclination to do just that. But we will never forgive Simpson for letting us peek behind the mask, for revealing the emptiness of our own aspirations as a culture.

Most of us already suspect the truth. But we must not, cannot, confront that truth directly. That is why Simpson must keep smiling, and we must keep watching. To do otherwise would be to acknowledge that we are, after all, no different from the loiterers on Vine Street who have discovered, as West puts it, that “sunshine isn’t enough”; or, to be more accurate, that the whole wild paradisal promise of E-Z Living in “the land of sunshine and oranges” (otherwise known as “the California dream”) does not offer the satisfactions it proclaims. Few people have exposed the emptiness of that promise more dramatically than O.J. Simpson. Fewer still have explored its radical insufficiency with more insight than Nathanael West.