Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Was optimism (if that's what it was) justified in Shampoo Planet?
Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet came out in 1992, yet it doesn't read very different from some of the new dystopia novels I've been reading. It's set in Lancaster (read Hanford), eastern Washington, a radio-active town that rapidly falls into decay when "the Plants" are closed down and the Ridgecrest Mall is boarded up store by store. Tyler and his friends still cruise the mall and find it fun to be there, a place where they can maintain and expand their collections of hair products and other goods. Tyler, child of raging hippies, born on a commune, seeks to be "modern." He calls his room at home "The Modernarium," as it's his high tech, German-stark, oasis in his mother's house that's filled with sand candles, crystals, spider plants, and hash paraphernalia. Tyler aspires to work for "Bechtol" and loves the hotel hospitality industry (in a hotel room there's no past or future: only an "essence" of now). He calls his car the "comfortmobile." And he observes the contrast between the old world (Europe) and the new, which he sees as a land of freedom and opportunity. (Oh, Coupland, are you secretly a Tea Partier?) Here's an exchange between Tyler and his girlfriend Anna-Louise:
"I wonder," says Anna-Louise, "if the future is going to be like Ridgecrest Mall."
"How so?"
"You know. Improvised sort of. Solid cement and steel structures from our own era, but with cardboard and straw for windows. Exxon stations with thatched roofs." "Goats feeding in the dead fountains of the fashion plaza."
...
I think her idea over. "You know, Anna-Louise, I wouldn't mind if consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking around the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst?"
"What?"
"If we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet--with just one person inside even--I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.Reagan-era Tyler is ambitious, reads "Entrepreneur" magazine, but holds the somewhat Socialist view (perhaps, more accurately, Coupland's view?) that there shouldn't be a wide wealth gap or above-it-all privilege for the wealthy.
Dystopia. Why am I so gratified reading all these end-of-the-world novels? Before this, I read Coupland's Player One: What is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours, (2010) about the point at which the world runs out of petroleum and anarchy breaks out. Even in this novel life goes on. There's even an out-of-body near-death scene. Douglas, what do you think happens after death?
I finished Shampoo Planet out on the deck on a temperature neutral day--75 degrees, gentle. Later a massive and dark cloud bank rolled in, but before it plastered over, the sky had been just gauzily veiled. At one point the sun burned through, the light quickly got brighter and brighter, like a supernova, and the sun's heat, as though it was passing through a magnifying lens, seared my skin. I almost leapt up to run for shade, but then it faded back.
Coupland, Douglas. Shampoo planet . New York: Pocket Books, 1992. Print.
Labels: book review, culture, dystopia
// posted by Janiasea @ 11:54 AM 
