One Day In an IKEA Showroom

Notice the arrow on the floor so that, like a theme park, you
experience IKEA in the sequence its designers intended

Entering an IKEA showroom distinctly resembles entering an airport. After finding parking in the subterranean garage, so huge that you have to remember alphanumeric codes if you ever hope to find your car again, you have to ascend two different escalators just to reach the front door. These escalators pass multiple displays of featured product, lovingly arranged just like airports arrange displays from local history and tourist attractions.

This demonstrates just one way IKEA attempts to structure its store like a full-immersion experience. The faux-Scandinavian place names (the children’s playground is called Småland) and the notorious free meatballs remind customers we’re entering an embassy from another nation. And quite an embassy it is, too: if you don’t claim your free map at the door, you’ll certainly get lost. And also forget your intended purchases.

Because the IKEA showroom isn’t, fundamentally, a store. Within the first few displays, it becomes clear you’ve entered a museum. The massive, intricately curated displays of furniture, arranged to recreate examples of how you could arrange your room, don’t involve any stock you’d actually buy. IKEA doesn’t invite you into their store to shop, they invite you in to witness their multiple lush displays of simple-colored middle-class aspiration.

One display near the door, in the Living Room area, features a fake-leather couch facing a wall-mounted media center. The wood veneer on the media center is color-coordinated with the couch, with doors and sliding drawer pulls in contrasting colors. Upon the media center, a 70-inch television is running cupcake competitions from the Food Network, that orgy of bourgeois pretension. IKEA hopes to sell you a lifestyle.

A life completely free of clutter. Or, y'know, windows.
So you don't have to see the messy world outside.

In today’s economy, this makes their approach particularly insidious. Where Target or Walmart assumes their customers already have intended purchases in mind, and permit customers to create their own itinerary for picking their product, IKEA requires you to pass through their showroom in a particular sequence, Living Room to Workspaces to Dining Room to Bedroom, before making any purchases. You have to immerse yourself in the IKEA experience.

The furniture is all arranged to mimic how you’d arrange your house, in a perfect world free from children or pets or workaday fatigue. Beds are carefully made, with fluffy comforters and hospital corners. Dining chairs are pushed in. TVs are turned on, but not loud. Perfect people who don’t get tired or frustrated or take their surroundings for granted could live here. It jibes perfectly with progressive Americans’ idealized Scandinavia.

Despite what I said previously, the showroom has occasional items for purchase. Displays of small items—paper napkins, macramé accessory hangers, collapsible storage boxes—serve to occasionally remind guests they’re here to purchase lifestyle aspirations, not merely drool over them. I never saw anybody carrying anything from these displays, merely picking them up and examining them. But they aren’t really there for purchase, just as reminders.

At points, the showroom includes homages to the Tiny Home movement. Areas walled off from the showroom floor, but with open doors inviting exploration, show customers how to organize a bachelor pad in 270 square feet, or a young couple’s first home in 370 feet, using design elements available in-store. They advertize a beautiful world, completely free from laundry on the floor or dishes in the sink, a world we’d live in if we didn’t have, y’know, stuff.

Designers try to make IKEA shopping as much about life
as possible, down to the family photos on the headboard

After the showcases, you pass into a restaurant area. Like an airport, or Disneyland, IKEA expects customers to dedicate most of their day to experiencing the showcase, and recognizes that you’ll need sustenance. Unfortunately, my brain was already in shutdown mode, overwhelmed by crowds and colors and constant sensory input. I’d already found the floating shelves I wanted; I longed only to buy and escape.

So down the escalator, to the actual shopping space. Only after the halfway mark does the company even provide shopping carts. The shopping happens below the showroom, as though filthy lucre is closer to earth. And unlike the lavishly appointed showroom, the shopping space is remarkably sparse. The weekend I shopped, heavy weather had isolated distribution centers in the Northeast from retail spaces nationwide.

We emerge, blinking, into the sunlight, clutching most of our intended purchases, full of meatballs and lingonberry soda. IKEA has eaten an entire day. We’re bleary-eyed and confused, as the clutter-free showroom surrenders to the dirty, carbon monoxide-choked parking garage. We must leave the aspirations behind and return to life. But we have the map, and can return any time. IKEA, like Disney, is more real than mere reality.

Living the Latin American Nightmare

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories

A driftless young woman finds an abandoned skull in a Buenos Aires park, and becomes obsessed with reassembling the body. An apparently abandoned house turns out to be full of arcane artifacts and ethereal light, and an unhappy young girl wanders within, never to return. An angry urban husband mocks his wife, scorns the hickish truck driver who rescued them, and apparently packs his bags and wanders into an urban legend.

I can find precious little prior information on Mariana Enriquez. Though she’s apparently a well-respected journalist and novelist in her native Argentina, this is apparently her first book-length publication in English. She comes to Anglophonic readers a virtually blank slate provided we can avoid the temptation to make her resemble Jorge Luis Borges. Her short stories more resemble Edgar Allan Poe or Thomas Ligotti anyway.

Like Poe or Ligotti, Enriquez’s fiction uses foundations in the real world, incidents of the massively commonplace, as entry points into moments of overarching dread. When a woman, a sort of Argentinian do-gooder hipster, reaches out to a starving street child, we recognize a social justice warrior in action. When that child mentions a gripping fear of the monsters living across the railroad tracks, we wonder what monstrosities this child has experienced. And when that child disappears, we start seeking the real monsters.

This sense of creeping dread dominates Enriquez’s storytelling. As we read, we adjust our mental rhythms to Enriquez’s slow, sometimes soporific pace, and enter a sort of dreamland. As in our own dreams, this guided tour of somebody else’s phantasmagoria dwells more on mood than content. We start conjuring images of what could be, and our anticipations drip with creeping dread. We wonder: am I worse than the pending monster?

Some stories include actual monsters. “An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt” features a local tour guide having visions of an historic Buenos Aires murderer (an actual person, though English speakers will need to Google this). In “The Neighbor’s Courtyard,” a disgraced social worker looking to redeem herself breaks into a house where she suspects abuse is happening, only to find a cave of horrors worse than her frequently vivid imagination.

Mariana Enriquez

But many stories involve no literal monster, or something glimpsed only in passing. Three young girls on self-destructive benders watch an anonymous woman get off a bus in the wilderness, in “The Intoxicated Years,” only to see her years later, untouched by time, luring them into the forest. Another girl, in “End of Term,” mutilates her own body to appease an invisible man behind the mirror. Is she merely schizophrenic, or is her illness somehow contagious?

Two themes emerge as the stories mount up. In some stories, young women on the cusp of adulthood do something vindictive and ruinous, to themselves or others, and suffer consequences they never anticipated. Or an unhappy wife’s inability to express her gloom leads herself or her husband into a death spiral. Either way, a woman’s inner turmoil manifests itself upon the outside world, often at great cost to human life.

At her best, Enriquez couples this inner violence with Argentina’s history of literal violence. In my favorite story, “The Inn,” two teenage girls, one a closeted lesbian, attempt to gaslight a local hotelier. But the hotel they target was a police academy—read, “torture chamber”—during the Peronist years. When the ghosts of Argentina’s bloody past chase the girls through the present hallways, it’s impossible to not wonder who’s passing judgment upon whom?

Parapsychologists like Joe Nickell and William G. Roll have long noted the apparent correlation between deep emotional turmoil and seemingly supernatural occurrences. This seems especially prevalent with poltergeists; seems the movies weren’t wrong associating this phenomenon with an emotionally high-strung adolescent girl. Enriquez simply assumes these correlations are real, and asks herself: how would they manifest in my homeland today?

As in the best horror fiction, Enriquez conjures the most powerful scares, the most lasting nightmare fuel, by withholding information. She creates rich mindscapes, certainly; her storytelling is resplendent with small but telling details that immerse us in her world. But she conceals the Big Evil. Stephen King this ain’t, and anybody expecting the big reveal moment American horror writers savor waits in vain.

But audiences willing to suspend their Anglophonic expectations will find Enriquez rife with crawling disquiet, the kind that gets under your skin. Like Borges, Enriquez creates an interstitial world on the borderline between reality and dreams. Unlike Borges, she reminds us that our dreams are something to fear.

This is the Future Americans Have

William F. Buckley, Jr.

William F. Buckley, Jr., founded the magazine National Review in 1955, a time when conservatism seemed in disarray following World War II. Though a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, was in the White House, he was a committed centrist who brought conservative legislators to heel and openly disdained Joseph McCarthy. Vestigial conservatism still survived, but the side lacked what later Republicans considered a “movement.”

In his magazine’s inaugural op-ed, entitled “Our Mission Statement,” Buckley wrote that his brand of conservatism “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” The image of an ideological purist, attempting, by sheer force of personality, to stop history happening, conjures images of somebody trying to shout down a river, or perhaps an oncoming train. Whatever your prefered metaphor, the fact remains: that person must either get with the movement, or get killed.

I couldn’t help remembering Buckley’s strange, retrogressive philosophy last week. If you follow Blue Facebook, you already know the seriocomic outrage explosion that happened when a hard-right-wing shill posted the following tweet:

This is the future that liberals want. pic.twitter.com/QwterpqQbH

— /pol/ News Network (@polNewsNetwork1) March 1, 2017

For conservatives, the outrage here seems clear: a world where minority religions and alternative sexual identities feel no compunction in public is a marker of social decline. Progressives, by contrast, noted two people with very different cultural expectations sharing public transit peaceably, which they considered a triumph. Exactly what anybody takes from this encounter depends on what they brought into it.

My oldest friend asked, over the weekend: “Please explain to me what's so bad about this picture?” He intended the question for the self-professed conservatives among his friends, but as a former conservative myself, I think I’m qualified to answer: they find this picture objectionable because it represents change. The America they grew up in, an America defined by homogeneity and unified values, is sundering into different ethical codes.

But as a former conservative myself, I’m also qualified to say this explanation is moonshine. It relies upon something rhetoricians call the Fallacy of Composition, the mistaken assumption that the whole resembles its visible parts. Presumably the pseudonymous tweeter offended by Muslims and transvestites sharing public transit grew up, like me, in an economically and racially uniform suburb. And, unlike me, that tweeter never questioned that reality.

America’s historical lack of homogeneity has been extensively documented. For mass audiences, authors like Howard Zinn and James Loewen have combed the primary sources to create readable accounts of America’s racially, religiously, socially diverse Mulligan stew. Escaped African slaves settled among Native Americans in the territory that’s now the United States a generation before whites did, according to Loewen. Diversity is history’s rule, not an innovation.

For me, becoming aware that the standardized blandness of my childhood didn’t really represent America, forced me to evaluate, and finally change, my political views. But I suspect this tweeter didn’t perceive diversity as something he (she?) became aware of, but as something new, forcing itself onto society’s existing frame. If, like me, this tweeter knew only other white, or slightly off-white, faces on the school bus, diversity on public transit may seem new.

This is how freedom looks like . Mr. President, we have no problem with diversity and we embrace the freedom of religion. It is in the constitution. I believe You should read it sometimes and Kazir Khan will be more than happy to lend you a copy. I can also purchase one for you sir. . . Not sure 🤔 how she found it, but she responded positively to my post @gildawabbit. #freedom #faith #freedomofchoice #freedomofreligion #freedomofexpression #theconstitution #resist #respect #newyorkcity #mta #nyctransit #subway #newyork

A post shared by Boubah (@boubah360) on Feb 21, 2017 at 10:14am PST

The photo as it originally appeared, posted on Instagram

To anyone who perceives all change as decline, all history as something we must stand athwart, yelling Stop, then evolution from the white uniformity of childhood to today’s vast, multi-hued complexity becomes something to resist. Childhood’s whiteness was fixed and comprehensible. The world outside childhood, which requires constant reconsideration as its color wheel constantly evolves, forbids citizens to rest on their haunches. Some people find this threatening.

Diversity’s inherent threats have been common philosophy at least as long as there has been a United States. George Washington, in his farewell address, urged Americans to not be divided by politics or geography. But this same Washington, as President, prosecuted Indian wars in the Ohio River valley and mustered the militia against frontier tax protesters, to create a unity he knew didn’t really exist. Even then, diversity needed quashed.

The superficial irony of this controversy is that the political forces who would force Muslims, transsexuals, and other non-conformists into isolation, simultaneously believe Libertarian economics would free society’s innovators to create beneficent change. So they want to select society’s outcomes based on their preconceptions. When President Obama funneled money to clean-energy research, Rex Tillerson condemned “picking winners.” But who’s really picking winners here?

This isn’t the future liberals want. It’s the present Americans have. How we respond defines who we as Americans are. Will we stop history, roll back development to some utopian childhood that only existed under controlled circumstances, and pretend the last fifty years didn’t happen? I certainly hope not.

Boston Murder Supernova

Peter Swanson, Her Every Fear: A Novel

Young Londoner Kate Priddy worries about everything; she has major anxiety disorder. Too bad some of her anxieties are real. Kate accepts an apartment swap with an American cousin she's never met, to escape the memory of the recent violence she's endured. But the very day Kate arrives in Boston, her new next-door neighbor turns up murdered. Kate tumbles into an investigation so intense and baroque, it threatens to undo all the healing she's accomplished.

Throughout reading this massively intricate thriller, I kept looking forward to writing this review. Peter Swanson crafts a complex plot, populates it with interesting characters, and kicks it into motion so that, the more momentum it has, the more it picks up. I really enjoyed reading this book. Then we get to the resolution, and... um... squeak? It doesn't really resolve, just end, and Swanson kicks the victory to the wrong characters. What a letdown.

The story alternates between four viewpoint characters. Kate is younger than her age, having lost prime years to an abusive lover's violent jealousy. (Swanson withholds exactly what happened for nearly 100 pages, but the suspense is undercut because the secret is explained in the dust flap synopsis.) Her disorder has her seeing menacing boogeymen in dark corners, a tendency she restrains with prescriptions and self-talk. This, sadly, means she winds up missing the real threat.

Alan Cherney lives in the same complex as Kate. His strange obsession with Audrey Marshall, the murdered woman, gives him insight into the investigation, but also makes him creepy. He and Kate have immediate chemistry; perhaps their contrasting neuroses make them soulmates. But the investigation's surprise turns put these two damaged people at odds, and everyone quickly starts doubting everyone else. As if murder wasn't intense enough, who could've guessed romance would make things worse?

Corbin Dell, Kate's American cousin, has secrets too. Last time he visited London, he left a trail of destruction nobody's yet cleaned up. He's weirdly cagey about his relationship with the deceased Audrey, and his motivations are contradictory at best. The more the police seek his statement, the more evasive he becomes. Soon, Kate worries that a mere ocean isn't wide enough to protect her from a stranger who might kill to protect his secrets.

Peter Swanson

Then there's the fourth character. Experienced crime fiction readers know enough to start a suspect list, and test it against mounting evidence, so we quickly determine who really killed Audrey Marshall. The motive remains less clear, and we wonder whether the characters will twig who their real enemy is before the violence has time to escalate. The killer dribbles clues slowly, and not always inadvertently, daring the others to act before becoming the next victims.

Swanson plays out the theme of different ways people see the same event. His story unfolds mostly from Kate's perspective, as she attempts, mostly ham-handedly, to assist the police investigation. Then suddenly, he'll shift to another viewpoint, Alan's or Corbin's or the killer's, and replay the same events with new knowledge, forcing us to re-evaluate what we thought we understood. By replaying single events through multiple frames, Swanson demonstrates the difficulty of truly understanding anything.

We readers progress thus, seeing the same events several times, becoming aware of the real story only by increments. It's a dark story, too: Swanson creates a Stieg Larsson-ish world of subtle, invisible brutality, a world deeply divided between savage criminals and desperate victims. Though I disagree with that Manichean worldview, Swanson nevertheless spins it into a taut, gripping yarn, populated by tragic heroes and ambiguous villains. I found sticking with his story very easy.

Then, in the final forty pages, it whirls apart under its own weight. Swanson creates an overpopulated climax, tosses viewpoint scenes onto previously minor characters, and lets someone else vanquish the monster. I won't reveal the conclusion, since somebody may want to read this book. Its first 285 pages are quite awesome; as I say, only in the final forty pages does it unravel. I just wish the ending had the setup's tense, exciting texture.

I can't entirely blame Swanson. Many of my favorite authors have difficulty writing endings. And perhaps he's set the standard so high, with his rising action, that he couldn't possibly craft a conclusion to measure up. It just hurts, after enjoying the book so much, to see Swanson's story splatter like an egg dropped on a sidewalk. These characters deserve better. They've paid their dues; their conflict deserves a proper resolution, not a sudden stop.

Race and the Frontier in HBO's Westworld

Teddy Flood (James Marsden) and Delores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood)

This essay contains spoilers

HBO’s viral sensation Westworld is profoundly dependent on Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis.” First published in 1893, Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” pushed the idea that the frontier, the opportunity to move outward and settle wilderness, defined not just American culture, but individual American character. Westworld character Maeve Millay channels Turner directly in her scripted speech: “This is the New World, and we can be whatever the fuck we want.”

The frontier belief looms large in American thinking. Even after the Census Bureau declared the “frontier line” closed in 1890, Americans pursued new, less literal frontiers. Alaska declared itself “the last frontier” long before President Kennedy called space “the final frontier,” a line pilfered by Captain Kirk. We praise the “frontiers of science,” likewise of medicine, of technology, of the Internet, and whatever. And Westworld implies, if we can’t find a frontier, we’ll make one.

This all, unfortunately, overlooks how profoundly racist Jackson’s Frontier Thesis actually is. Jackson stratified cultures into degrees of development, from white Euro-American settlement at the top, to nomadic Indians at the bottom. The frontier, Jackson said, gave whites opportunities to shed settled, emasculated habits and “live like Indians,” tempting death, pushing their limits, surviving by their own wits, discovering their inner, half-savage nature. With the implication they could, at will, return to settled white civilization.

Except, historically, Indians didn’t “live like Indians” unless they had to. The traditional image of nomadic Native Americans, sleeping in tipis and following the bison herds, arose only after white settlers chased Indians off lands they’d cultivated for centuries. The frontier of “unsettled wilderness” was an entirely white invention, based on the belief that any land untouched by anything they considered civilization was theirs for the taking. Though outright taking has ceased, the theft remains.

Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and some of his creations

Audiences will notice Westworld has few Indians. It’s racially progressive in some ways, including having an integrated Union Army even though America didn’t desegregate its armed forces until 1948, and the technical personnel making the park possible are thoroughly integrated. But Indians don’t much enter except as background characters. Though I didn’t keep technical count, I noticed few or no speaking lines from Native characters. They simply exist as enemies for white characters to fight.

In one episode, William and Delores get chased by the Ghost Nation, a band of scalp hunters. In another, a corporate story agent proudly displays an array of “hosts,” artificial people who occupy Westworld, explaining the characters for an exciting new storyline, displaying the brothel whores players can seduce, outlaws they’ll defeat, and Indians they'll flee. He says this standing before a tall, buckskin-clad native with feathers and facepaint, stock villain from a dime novel.

Without stating anything explicitly, Westworld accepts that frontier-style self-discovery absolutely requires prior humans. The true frontier is never unoccupied; it’s been cleared of brush and boulders by someone before, who then accedes to the permanent settlers. This extends to all frontiers: Star Trek postulates a universe teeming with life, which Starfleet then sublimates into a larger, homogenized Federation. Battlestar Galactica, possibly the first mass-media franchise showing a lifeless universe, also treats “settling” as giving in.

The Man in Black (Ed Harris)

Please note, the actual American frontier didn’t last very long. Though the Oregon Trail opened in the 1830s, only the Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, made mass white settlement in the American interior possible. Thus, the Wild West happened between 1869 and 1890, when the frontier formally closed. James Arness played Marshall Dillon on Gunsmoke longer than that. And in Westworld, we learn the Man in Black has been attending the park for thirty years.

So not only has the frontier myth lasted longer than the practical frontier, but Westworld keeps replaying the same single generation for decades, as paying customers keep indulging the same vices. White people keep chasing Indians off their land, Mexicans from their towns, and squatters off their farms, then returning to “real life.” In essence, they keep paying money to replay America’s racist past, a past many Americans would, in present times, like to forget.

The big, season-ending reveal, that our gentle hero William grows into the callously destructive Man in Black, makes plain the implications Turner’s original Frontier Thesis never addresses. When conquest stops being a means, and becomes an end, it strangles the human part inside us. We invent moral justifications for continued conquest. Without a purpose, we become the thing we once hated. If America really is Frontier Nation, we need to settle down soon, or die.