The Sehnsucht of the 1980 Strawberry Shortcake Theme Song

My 4-year-old daughter has liked Strawberry Shortcake (in her modern incarnation) for a long time, but recently she has also discovered the classic 1980s version--which I explained to her was "the old Strawberry Shortcake"--and now enjoys watching those cartoons as well. My sister used to watch the original show back in the early '80s, and, although I can still recall a couple of songs from it, the theme song of the original special, The World of Strawberry Shortcake (1980), did not definitely sound familiar to me when I first watched it with my daughter the other day. It did, however, rather charm me, and I have found myself, at times when I am home alone, looking up the song on YouTube:

 

The song initially won me with its simple, bright happiness, which my daughter seemed to enjoy as well. After hearing it a few times, however, I noticed that this little children's ditty began to have quite a different emotional effect upon me. It was not the emotional reaction I would have expected in response to a cheery, bouncy theme song for an old children's TV show. Strange as it may sound, I actually find the song deeply moving. In fact, it can almost bring tears to my eyes.

It is difficult to understand this reaction, let alone explain it. It is hard even to define exactly what the deep emotion is that the song arouses in me. I cannot chalk it up to simple nostalgia since, as I mentioned, I do not distinctly remember it from my own childhood. It is true that even items I do not specifically remember may sometimes produce nostalgic feelings in me because they evoke the era of my childhood and bring back a bittersweet taste of that lost world. In this case, however, the nostalgia factor seems relatively small. I must look elsewhere for an explanation of my strangely profound emotional response to what seems such a slight item of children's entertainment.

Though it is not really an explanation, I do at least have a word for it (thanks to German, as there is no real equivalent in English): Sehnsucht. This is an emotion I have discussed on this blog before, and it figures prominently in my literary work, particularly in The Bluebird of Happiness and Rainbow. In my essay on Gen X I defined it this way:

the realm of bittersweetness, of inexpressible longing, ... what the Germans call Sehnsucht, a deep and aching yearning for who knows what--something we can't name or describe, but a longing which we nevertheless feel viscerally and painfully. 

This quite accurately describes how the old Strawberry Shortcake theme song makes me feel, so that is how I identify the emotion as Sehnsucht. It is not sadness, exactly, though it certainly contains sadness within it. In fact, it has a touch of grief. It is almost as though I am longing for a long lost loved one and wishing they could come back just for one day. It is a deep, aching warmth that can easily well up into silent tears.

But it is more than just a sad longing. There is a subtle joy to it as well--an equally warm sensitivity to life, a softening of the heart, a quiet sense of wonder at the world--perhaps even something like gratitude. While listening to the song, and afterward as it replays in my mind, I somehow feel more alive, suddenly more aware of the preciousness and the beauty of things. The emotion even has a moral effect too, for it makes me want (even more than usual) to be a good person and to treat everybody with love and kindness and empathy.

Such effects show, I would think, that this is a healthy emotion. Even grief is healthy and natural, and may be considered a form of celebration (since, by grieving, we acknowledge and proclaim the worth of the lost person or thing). But in this case, as with Sehnsucht in general, what exactly it is for which the heart yearns--that which it grieves, celebrates, and is inspired by--is difficult to discern and remains a mystery.

The things that trigger Sehnsucht are seemingly random, often even trivial. On the surface of it, they may appear to be rather unlikely sources of profound emotion. But Sehnsucht is often a highly personal and subjective phenomenon. While some triggers (such as the sight of the ocean, or a sunset, perhaps) may seem quite understandable to most people, others may appear entirely inexplicable and even slightly absurd as instigators of deep longing (like, say, the Strawberry Shortcake theme song).

In any case, my recent experience of being so profoundly moved by a happy little children's song dovetails with my blog post earlier this week, particularly with respect to the significance of the title Rainbow. I have been coming to see more and more of late how the novel's title is rather perfect, despite the fact that it was originally meant only as a working title. It did not occur to me at first that I might actually call a serious work of literary fiction Rainbow.

But, quite unintentionally on my part, that one-word title, in its childlike simplicity, turned out to be quite well suited to the novel's protagonist, Martin Lane. Martin's art is all about taking things that seem childish, trivial, silly, or kitschy, and, by his own unique creative alchemy, transforming these unpromising ingredients into something quite beautiful, moving, and profound. His art, like mine, is play: as I put it last time, "[t]he kind of serious and sacred play that celebrates the mystery of existence, that joins the significance of the lowest and humblest things to the highest and the greatest."

I don't know if I realized it when I wrote it, but that is actually a pretty good description of what the emotion of Sehnsucht accomplishes as well. It is hard to imagine something much humbler than a children's song; yet equally hard to imagine being more deeply moved by a work of art. Unbelievably, yet wonderfully, the effect the Strawberry Shortcake theme song has upon me is almost akin to the cathartic, rain-washed freshness of feeling, the ennobling sensation of tenderheartedness, that I experience after I have finished writing, reading, or viewing a tragedy: akin, in fact, after the dark storm has passed, to the sight of the rainbow.

On the Eerie Similarities Between Sex Scenes and Horror Stories

Sometimes it is not what you say, but what you don't say.

We live in vulgar times, an age in which the explicit and graphic depiction of sex and gore is the norm. My problem with graphic depictions of sex and violence is not that they are too strong, at least not in the sense of achieving their intended effects (though they are often too strong in the way that the smell of a garbage heap is, i.e., extremely offensive to good taste). Rather, my problem with them is that they are too weak.

They are weak and ineffectual because they show too much. They represent an unrefined sensibility that works on the assumption that more is always better. Take it from me: sometimes more is less.

See, the problem is that explicit depictions of sex and violence work against the full power of eroticism and horror. Both of these qualities relate to some of the deepest and most powerful of all human feelings, those connected with sexual love and the continuation of life, in the case of eroticism, and in the case of horror, those connected with fear, particularly fear of death and the unknown.

H. P. Lovecraft, one of the greatest horror writers of all time, famously said that "the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown". Old horror movies were far less gory and violent than today's, but they tended to be more mysterious, atmospheric, and moody. Classic horror (as opposed to modern horror) aimed to suggest rather than to show, and this is precisely where its power resided. The more you leave to the imagination, the more room is given to genuine psychological horror--those creepy feelings that something dark and fearsome and possibly evil is lurking out there, or perhaps very close at hand. This type of horror--which I consider to be true horror--is more often than not caused by the presence of unknown and unknowable supernatural entities or forces, rather than by bland and banal human murderers. True horror suggests that there is more to reality than our modern scientistic worldview affords, and therein lies its truly subversive power: it challenges our very concept of reality, our philosophical assumptions, the very ground beneath our feet.

The depiction of sex works very much the same way. Pornography, whether written or visual, leaves little or nothing to the imagination. It is focused on the physical body to a degree that could be considered clinical and therefore the very opposite of sexy. Truly erotic art, however, like true horror, focuses more on the psychological aspects of the experience, and suggests more than it shows. Its power lies in allowing the reader to fill in his or her own blanks, just as classic horror does. As the Symbolists said, "To name is to destroy; to suggest is to create." The power of suggestion is very powerful indeed, and is a potent artistic weapon that is too often neglected in our age of vulgar--and totally unexciting--excess. Trying too hard often results in failure; my advice to writers and filmmakers is to kick it up a notch by taking it down a thousand.

Ode to the B-Movie: or, Why Ed Wood is a better director than James Cameron

Science fiction films, and particularly those in the low-budget subgenre known as B-movies, have a hard time finding respect. At least since Star Wars (1977), science fiction movies have in some sense become "cool", like the scrawny, awkward nerd who transformed into a handsome, musclebound star athlete (who still wears glasses when he is not on the field). But the old sci-fi B-movies of the 50's and 60's still garner "bomb" ratings from all self-respecting film critics and serve as little more than fodder for mockery and laughter for most viewers.

But is all this derision really fair? After all, when Leonard Maltin gives Citizen Kane a (quite justly deserved) 4-star rating and Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s anti-masterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space a "bomb" (0 stars), one must ask if it even makes sense to judge these two pictures by the same set of cinematic or artistic standards. Was Ed Wood even attempting to create the same type of work as Orson Welles? Actually, if one goes by Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood, it would seem that the answer is perhaps yes, that Wood might just have been deluded enough to believe that he was creating high art in the fashion of his hero. Or perhaps he was self-aware enough to realize that he and Mr. Welles were operating not so much in different leagues as in different spheres of film art.

The primary reason, it seems to me, that B-movies get the short shrift they do is their poor technique. It's true that great art usually requires great technical skill to pull off successfully and effectively, but technical skill alone is not sufficient. In fact, enormous budgets and the most sophisticated special effects can often produce rubbish that some film buffs may find far less worthwhile and interesting than many of the cheaply and quickly made B-movies tossed out by the likes of Wood, Roger Corman, and many others whose names are less known.

Witness James Cameron, the director of such blockbusters as Titanic and Avatar, two of the most expensive and most commercially successful movies of all time. Such bloated, grandiose, and self-important pictures, like many others that are churned out by the modern Hollywood machine, seem to be attempting to reach not only for box office success but also some level of artistic seriousness which they sorely lack. Long on special effects and spectacle, short on imagination and vision, today's big budget spectacles are the true bombs. James Cameron perhaps likes to think of himself as a serious film director, but he is actually a glorified purveyor of kitsch.

What many critics and viewers do not seem to understand about B-movies is that they cannot be judged by the same standards--at least not the same technical standards--as big-budget pictures. Many of their technical flaws are the result of low, in many cases practically nonexistent, budgets. And there is no wrong in giggling when, for instance, you can see the strings holding up the spaceship. But the technical flaws alone do not necessarily make these films any less effective in accomplishing what they set out to accomplish. B-movies vary widely in terms of their worth and interest, but what makes them successful are the same non-technical qualities that make any film successful: a good story, entertainment value, and above all, especially in the genre of science fiction: imagination and wonder.

I have watched countless science fiction movies from the 50's and 60's in my day, ranging from venerable classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, and 2001: A Space Odyssey to bottom-of-the-barrel fare like Robot Monster, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and of course Plan 9 from Outer Space. What I can say about the sci-fi films of this era is that their value as art and as entertainment--and not merely of the unintended comedy variety--has no direct correlation to their budgets. There is, however, a very close correlation to their writers', producers', and directors' imaginative visions, even if they were prevented by a lack of finances and/or a lack of technical competence from realizing these visions quite as smoothly or convincingly as a lot of bigger-budget pictures.

What is required above all in enjoying all that a good B-movie has to offer is a childlike sense of imagination, the type of pretend that allows the make-believe to be real despite the boring and irrelevant protestations of the rational and empirical mind, and an equally childlike sense of wonder, that ability to marvel at the world and its infinite possibilities, its strangeness and delight. The virtue of many a low-budget science fiction film is in that tingling sense of wonder or horror (often both simultaneously), and in that thrilling imaginative vision of the universe, that it is eminently capable of communicating to the child in all of us.

The Once and Future American Classicism

When I worked as the serials librarian at St. Petersburg Public Library, I was in charge of a large collection of periodicals, many of them in old hardbound volumes, spanning a range of time going back to the late 19th century. I undertook an inventory of these periodicals, since the vast collection had never been catalogued and the library needed to know what exactly it had (what we librarians call "intellectual control").

During the course of this inventory (a project which took up many months), I enjoyed glancing through these thick volumes of old magazines, each volume a sort of time machine taking me to a particular moment in the history of American popular culture. As I explored these weighty, dusty volumes with their crumbling, brittle pages, I was struck by the high aesthetic quality of much of the graphic design exhibited in the pages of these old magazines. Particularly in magazine covers, advertisements, or illustrations from the mid-20th century, I admired the simplicity and elegance in these images, whether they were paintings or photographs.

This graceful visual aesthetic, so foreign to the cluttered and gaudy visual culture of our Internet age, is something I see not only in graphic design but also in much of the architecture, furniture, movies, and fashions of roughly the middle third of the last century. This is, of course, what is commonly known today as "midcentury modernism", but what occurred to me as I viewed the wonderful and tasteful images in old magazines such as a 1930s Fortune or a 1950s Collier's is that this midcentury aesthetic is a kind of American Classicism.

When I call it "classicism", I'm deliberately comparing it to the aesthetic culture of ancient Greece and Rome. There have of course been revivals of "classical" aesthetics before, most notably in the Renaissance and later in the Classical Revival of the 18th century. The early American Republic, which consciously modeled itself after the ancient Roman Republic, constructed many of its important public buildings in a modified neoclassical style. But after World War I, and all the more so after World War II, when the United States came of age as a dominant world power, American culture and aesthetics seemed to come into its own as well.

Rather than imitating the style of the Greeks and Romans, it was as if the United States had suddenly discovered its own voice, its own unique style and aesthetic expression. In this way, American modernism was decidedly unclassical, a distinctively modern and forward-looking aesthetic that left the past far behind. However, I came to see that it was fitting to describe this new style as a new kind of classicism. The simplicity, grace, and elegance of this visual culture--interestingly balanced by an energy and movement that the ancient classicisms often lacked in their static grandeur--were simply a new expression of the classical spirit, a new way of formulating these enduring aesthetic ideals in a fast-paced, technology-dominated modern age.

Like the classicism of Greece and Rome, the postwar American aesthetic expressed the highest aspirations of its civilization, a modern civilization of electricity, speed, and the promise of space exploration. Though these qualities may seem uniquely modern, they are just variations of the perennial American values of renewal, freedom, expansiveness, optimism, energy, ambition, progress, and prosperity.

In another sense, of course, this style seems a thing of the past. We find ourselves now in the very future to which midcentury modernism looked forward with such anticipation, but the future is not what we once thought it would be. This is, of course, inevitable because midcentury futurism was a utopian vision, and utopias have a way of never quite becoming reality. What we once might have imagined as the marvelous space-age tomorrowland of 2010 has turned out to be just the same old real world.

But the real world needs ideals, and real life needs dreams. Whatever problems existed in the United States in the mid-20th century--and for those who have forgotten history, there were many--it possessed a wondrous vision of the future that made it seem like, no matter what darkness we were going through at present, a bright and better tomorrow lay ahead. It's true that too much optimism is naive and ultimately leads to bitter disappointment. But a complete lack of hope in the future deadens the soul, of an individual or a nation, and leads to demoralization, defeatism, and despair.

Just as Western civilization once looked to the glorious past of Greece and Rome and was inspired to renew itself, to reach for the future by looking to the past, perhaps the jaded, cynical United States of the 21st century can look back to its glory days in the middle of the 20th and seek once again to attain new heights.

Whence Tomorrowland?

On New Year's Day I told how I had come to realize the scope of the changes that had occurred during my lifetime, even if they were not the changes I and many others had imagined. It occurs to me that there is a significant difference in kind between the mid-20th century's vision of the future and the actual technological changes that have taken place. My wife Kara pointed out that our "progress" has essentially consisted of an accumulation of gadgets (like the ones I listed in the aforementioned post). But, as I also noted in that post, the look of things is basically the same. For the midcentury vision of tomorrow was to a large degree an aesthetic vision. Our streamlined, googie buildings, together with similarly futuristically styled clothes, vehicles, and yes, even household gadgets, would all communicate that we had arrived in the space age.

In the 50's, it probably seemed that modernist design (together with the fledgling space program) was well on the way to realizing this vision, and indeed the 50's futurist aesthetic is essentially a colorful and imaginative extension of midcentury modernism. It might have seemed logical to suppose that the modernist movement would evolve into something very much resembling the Googie or Tomorrowland aesthetic as the Space Age took us to other worlds while remodeling our earthly home in an exciting, fresh, and forward-looking style. Aesthetics, especially the aesthetics of our environment, has a profound effect on our psychology. Our built environment expresses and makes concrete our ideas and ideals and at the same time greatly influences our thinking and feeling. It's true that the Tomorrowland look is not the only one that might have provided a positive aesthetic for the 21st century, but no one came up with anything better in its place. Instead, it was given up for the anti-style and anti-vision of post-modernism.

My First Library

The first library I remember is the Lakeland Public Library in Lakeland, Florida. This is what it looked like in the early 70s, a rather interesting and cool 1960s modernist building that was only a few years old at the time:


This is the equally modernist interior:



Unfortunately, the Lakeland Public Library no longer looks like this. It was renovated in the 80s in the style that shall be known as Post-Modernist Bland (if you're curious, you can view pictures at the Lakeland Public Library website, where I found these photos).

I revisited the library in 2007 and thought it looked different from how I had remembered (other than simply looking smaller, which was to be expected), but I wasn't sure exactly how it had looked in the 70s, my childhood memories being vague. So I was quite happy when I discovered these photos, not only to find that a photographic record of the old library exists, but also because I was glad to know that it looked so cool back then. Of course, it is also sad that they had to do away with something stylish in favor of something not so much, but you can't really blame the city of Lakeland entirely. They were just following the 80s trend (which has continued up to the present) of making buildings boring.

2010 vs. 2001

Last night I watched the movie 2010, in honor of the fact that the futuristic setting of the film has become contemporary. Throughout my life I have made it a habit to read or view science fiction works at the actual times they are supposed to take place, whenever this has been possible. For instance, I read a Reader's Digest condensed version of 1984 on the two days in April 1984 when the action was supposed to have occurred. On New Year's Day 2001, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, and during the year I read the novel. I had seen 2010 in the theater when it came out back in 1984, but, despite my regular habit since the mid-90's of watching old science fiction movies, I had never seen it since. In general, science fiction movies since Star Wars haven't excited me as much as older ones (with a few notable exceptions like Blade Runner), and 2010 became in my mind one of those mediocre 80's sci-fi movies that I just didn't care enough to revisit. However, since it is now the namesake year of that film, I decided to watch it again just out of curiosity, to compare its vision of the year 2010 with the reality.

Many people who have seen 2010 have pointed out that it has become much more dated than the older (1968) film to which it is a sequel, 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is true. The computers, for instance, look pretty much like PCs from... well, 1984. However, there is one brief shot of the main character, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider), sitting on a beach using a laptop, which is interesting. The two home interiors that are glimpsed look like very mild versions of 1980's futurism (think Omni magazine or EPCOT, toned down). The movie is also dated politically, since it assumes the continued existence of the Soviet Union (with whom we are on the brink of a nuclear war... how 80's can you get?).

In other ways, though, the movie's predictions are way too advanced (artificial intelligence on the level of HAL 9000, manned spaceflight to Jupiter), but these are elements it borrowed from 2001, which, after all, posited the existence of such things nine years ago.

So why does 2010 date so much more than the older 2001? This is an interesting question, and I think it has an interesting answer. 2010 dates more, I think, because it is more realistic. That is, its vision of the future was based on the reality of 1984, with some reasonable guesses as to how things might change over the course of the next 26 years. The fact that these educated guesses about the world of 2010 were so cautiously "realistic" is precisely what has made the movie seem like a product of its time rather than a timeless masterpiece like its predecessor. 2001, while one could argue that its vision of the world 33 years hence was also reasonable given the rapid advances in space exploration in the 1960's, was not so constrained in its imagination. Stanley Kubrick's classic film dreamed big... it was a movie of vision. It was notably realistic in its details of space travel (no sound in the vacuum of space, for instance), but it was not "realist" in its imaginative scope. By "realism" in this sense I mean the sort of pragmatic, sober-minded outlook that rejects the grand visions of romanticism. 2001 is romantic in its bold imagination, its epic grandeur, and its mystical, transcendent yearning. 2010 possesses none of these qualities, but is instead a much more pedestrian affair. Where 2001 is magical and mysterious, 2010 attempts to demystify it, to explain the unexplainable and to convert the poetic myth of 2001 into bland literalism.

The very aesthetics of the two pictures attest to these vast differences in vision. The world of 2010 is actually much more realistic than the futuristic fantasy of 2001, but that is precisely the problem. 2010 presents us with a mundane vision, barely different from the reality we know. 2001 showed us something magnificent, inspiring, and wondrous. The interior of the Russian spaceship in 2010 looks like every other depressing, workmanlike spacecraft interior in 1980's science fiction films (something like the inside of a submarine), a far cry from the pristine white minimalism of the interior of Discovery in the earlier film. The interiors of the space shuttle and space station share this stylish futuristic aesthetic, which has the effect of making the imagined world of 2001 seem like a wonderful place. It is of course an idealized vision, but this is exactly what makes it inspiring. We are not inspired by imperfect realities, but by ideals.

All of this is not to say that 2010 is a bad movie. It's actually a decent, if not particularly memorable, science fiction film. The problem is that it suffers in comparison to its predecessor. Granted, 2001 is one of the high achievements of 20th century art and it would be unfair to expect any sequel, even if it had been done by Kubrick himself, to match up to it. But if you're going to touch a classic, the stakes are high. Disappointment is inevitable unless you really, really know what you're doing, which doesn't mean having a big budget or the most sophisticated special effects, but in having vision. And in any artform, that is one of the hardest resources to come by.

One last difference to point out: in 2010, there is just too much talking.