Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [87]
Likewise, in the East, flashy cars are considered at best nouveau, at worst narcissistic. Top-out-of-sight classes drive beat-up station wagons, Fussell tells us. And he is correct: One would not have been likely to spot the late Jackie Onassis tooling around in a pink Corvette, pink Porsche, pink Jaguar, pink Mustang, or any of the other roseate conveyances in Barbie's garage. Yet cars have a different meaning in southern California, particularly for adolescents. They are like shoes. Transportation, autonomy, separation from parents—all these teenage "issues" are difficult without wheels. Regardless of social class, cars are a marker of puberty—as much as are female breasts or male beards. To display oneself in a fancy car seems as legitimate an adolescent impulse as to parade around in the absurd outfits one sees on MTV. True, perhaps to East Coast preppies, the cars and costumes are a tacky masquerade, a vulgar outdoor display. But having grown up in California, I can understand Barbie's pink Porsche; had my budget and my superego not had a say in the car I bought, I, as a teenager, might have driven one too.
In Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham explains how he came to comprehend the centrality of the automobile in southern California culture, and the way that this influences a southern Californian's perception of space. "The first time I saw it happen nothing registered on my conscious mind," he writes, "because it seemed so natural— as the car in front turned down the off-ramp of the San Diego freeway, the girl beside the driver pulled down the sunvisor and used the mirror on the back of it to tidy her hair. Only when I had seen a couple more incidents of this kind did I catch their import: that coming off the freeway is coming in from outdoors. A domestic or sociable journey in Los Angeles does not end as much at the door of one's destination as at the off-ramp of the freeway."
To drive from, say, the Hotel Bel-Air to Mattel's headquarters in El Segundo is to experience Los Angeles County as a theme park. Crawling at breakfast with film-industry types—faces as familiar as Mickey's and Goofy's—the hotel, with its quasi-Spanish pretense, its swan pond, and its burbling fountains, reminds one of Disneyland's New Orleans Square. Then one pulls onto the San Diego Freeway, a speeded-up Disney autopia, and cruises past the Los Angeles International Airport, where landing airplanes, as if part of a heart-stopping ride, appear to descend within inches of the sunroofs on the cars ahead. On the left there is a vast memorial park with a sparkling faux-classical temple. As readers learned in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, even death can be themed.
Mattel Headquarters, too, rises above its clean, new industrial plaza like a theme-park corporation. It is gray, erect. Inside are Barbie dioramas and baby dolls; outside it is almost comically masculine—no postmodern whimsy, no coy touches of pink.
Traveling this path each day for a few weeks (though not throughout my entire stint in Los Angeles), I quickly unlearned eastern verticality. I did not unlearn archaism, but I grew tolerant and curious about the new. Even if Los Angeles, as some believe, has proved to be a failed evolutionary experiment, a basin of crime and drought and fouled air, I understood what its horizontality might have meant in the postwar world—a patch of green for every citizen; a romance with the earth; an urge to flee the aridity of sky-box living for the succulence of freshly sprinkled soil. To Banham, it represented "the dream of a good life