Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories

by Douglas Coupland

  Caption: It was a shock for Alana to learn that her tall and broody son, Ashley, 19 (above), was in intensive care for the second time in a year and a half. Now she’s happy to have him back at home and help him recuperate, only ten months after he flew the coop for a headline wedding and whirlwind marriage to Shannen Doherty.

  Within the limits of her biology and intellect, Monroe went as far as it is possible for a human to travel into the hyperspace of fame. After this occurred, sex, high culture, temptations and the sating of earthly desires had lost all attractive charms for her. She had realized the limits of how far the body can take one.

  The story of Monroe’s life had been stripped away. She had been denarrated and there seemed no other possible narrative arc to her life. No stencil. Marriage? Who would she have married—the president? A career? Been there; done that.

  In the end it seemed she was trying too hard to put a pleasant facade onto—nothingness. Her body had become a liability. She had become post-famous. She was first; maybe JFK was second; Elvis was third.

  Monroe, empty child of Los Angeles, blank screen, according to Norman Mailer, “free of history.” One local guidebook lists 23 separate addresses within Los Angeles where Monroe had lived since her birth.

  Monroe, not an accumulator by nature, lived in a blazing white, L-shaped red-tiled Spanish-style house furnished casually with junky, funky Mexicana furniture. It contains chunky pine tables, chairs and benches; serape blankets; “Hacienda” ’50s motel-type lamps, a small hi-fi in a suitcase with a folding chair next to it stacked with 331/3 records; a tri-level glass bar; a display wall surfaced in knotty pine. The feeling is anonymous and hotel-like, places where Monroe had lived much of her life.

  Her bedroom is a disaster. Teenagers have been grounded for less. Purses and bags heaped up on the floor against a wall. Papers, scripts, pill bottles everywhere.

  In the end the police tried to locate a family member of Monroe, but the only person they could locate was her mother, institutionalized and incompetent. Exhusband DiMaggio was entrusted with providing a narrative thread to the rituals of entombment.

  In the event of no narrative at all, fantastic narratives have forever zoomed in to fill the vacuum.

  In Brentwood one sees a certain blankness in the eyes, and if not a blankness, then a wanting, as though some form of information has been deleted, personal history and narrative cashed in like frequent flyer points on vacations that failed to amuse within a frighteningly short period of time.

  Brentwood is a region of Los Angeles that speaks eloquently of the amorality of cash in its inability by itself to act as a narrative stencil to life. Money is an invention just as much as is a spoon or a plate, and as such is neither moral nor immoral, it is simply an invention like the toaster or the zero. This is always a shock to learn, for Brentwood’s first or second generation of upwardly mobile, brood-spawning wealth. What seems to leave its inhabitants almost naïvely stunned is the emptiness of the money once it arrives; its inherent disconnection to morality.

  Neither fame nor money add storyline to one’s life. This is, since biblical times, the irony of human pursuit and a torpid punchline enacted daily amid Brentwood’s salons, cafes and spotlessly clean, freshly beflowered households.

  If life is a car traveling down the road at 55 mph, money and fame will change the color of the car, but it won’t change the speed or its direction. It is interesting to note that most entertainment whiz kids buy and sell the red Ferrari within a year, almost immediately converting to Audis and Lexuses, and staying there ever thereafter.

  There is a sadness. When asked what they want nowadays, young people, with alarming frequency, ask for fame or money, wishing nonlinearity and denarration upon themselves.

  Brentwood is a suburb of indeterminate verdicts and unclear death. Murders aren’t solved here. Monroe; Brown Simpson; the Menendez brothers in nearby Beverly Hills—their investigations simply drag on until amnesia sedates any enthusiasm for a full solution.

  From The Brentwood News (August 1994):

  SIMPSON’S VOCAL COACH NOTES TONE

  Morton Cooper, Ph.D., whom O. J. Simpson began consulting in September of 1983 begins, “How do you plead? O. J. Simpson answered in a firm, full voice: ‘Absolutely, one hundred percent not guilty.’ This was the voice I had known, outgoing and resonant.” Cooper continues to note that Simpson had been repeatedly “benched” by sore throats and vocal polyps. “He was becoming a vocal has-been. Worse, his style of speech was vocal suicide. Constant misuse could wipe out his voice altogether. What is vocal suicide? It is the incorrect use of the voice.”

  Cooper continues to tell of how he rescued O.J. from vocal suicide, and how: “If and when O. J. Simpson testifies, he may very well be the most listened-to man on the planet. Will his voice get him heard, liked and listened to, as it has in the past?”

  There exists the notion of “Post Fame.” Post Fame is about the intersection of human biology with information overload; it is about the erasure of privacy in the personal and media realm; it is (pointedly but not measurably) about the limits of fame itself.

  Post Fame is when fame becomes a liability to its possessor, or rather, the deficits begin to frighteningly outweigh any conceivable benefits. It’s when having an actual body becomes either a liability or somewhat beside the point. Pornographic.

  Steve Wisbauer

  Physical existence—the fact that a person can actually eat an apple, wonder about the weather, defecate or pick flowers in the garden becomes unbelievable; titillating yet somehow…boring.

  The increased number of outlets for media has had an effect of both trivializing fame and privacy for both the public and the famous. Never has the line between torpor and fascination been so thin.

  Unlike the earnest Photoplay obsequiousnesses of the 1950s and 1960s where the star did what was required of him or her for their fans, there is no longer linkage or responsibility between the star and the audience in whose imagination he or she rests. The relationship now has become almost predatory; vampiric.

  The notion that the media is something “manipulable” is increasingly being viewed as naïve and untenable.

  Post Fame points out the diminishing nature of privacy in modern culture, the unwillingness of celebrities to surrender what few shreds they still possess and the anger of the public at not being able to possess those few shreds. Julia Roberts reports in People magazine, “My relationship does not fall under the Freedom of Information Act.” While one assumes that the famous have unlisted home numbers, other aspects of their lives become unlisted to the point of public outrage. Many stars are simply refusing to hand out any private details. Revelation is no longer an issue of “privacy” but of dematerialization—fear of becoming a living ghost.

  We have reached a point where the limits of fame seem to have been finally articulated. Inasmuch as we have learned limits of corporate growth: GM circa 1988; IBM circa 1987; we have perhaps also learned the new growth limits of fame: Michael Jackson circa 1993; Madonna circa 1992.

  Post Fame’s biggest drawbacks for the famed ones themselves, is the manner in which Post Fame strips life of any conceivable narrative, leaving the Famed one to merely bask in a pool of Famedness, with no storyline, no narrative arc and no pictures of possible futures.

  The West Coast, with its lack of history, places a daily psychic pressure on its citizens for continual self-reinvention. If one does not change mates, religions, hairdos, bodies, politics or residence periodically, the secret and vaguely pejorative assumption among natives is: That person really isn’t trying.

  The Simpson episode pornographically exposed the full infrastructure of fame-generating technology in all of its scope, beauty and ugliness. It brought to the forefront issues of semi-stories, contrived stories, and meta-stories.

  Post Fame asks: Are we making it more difficult for people to reinvent themselves? Is the price of reinvention worth the effort? Is charisma now simply too dangerous a thing to be had
by its possessor?

  On August 1, it was official: Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley (schooled in Brentwood) were, indeed, married.

  The next day the Los Angeles Times reported (on page B-1, the Metro section, but above the fold): “In an unprecedented merger of pop dynasties, Elvis Presley’s daughter confirmed through a publicist that she and Michael Jackson were married about ten weeks ago in a private ceremony outside the United States.”

  On the same page (below the fold) it was reported that “feminist” attorney Gloria Allred called on District Attorney Gil Garcetti to ask for the death penalty against Simpson. “Allred contended at a downtown news conference that if Garcetti declines to seek the maximum penalty of death, it will indicate that he is showing favoritism to a celebrity defendant.”

  Allred wore what appeared to be a laminated ultraglamorous color photo of Nicole Brown Simpson, roughly the size of a playing card, attached to the front of her business suit with a small-size black document clip.

  Overheard at Mezzaluna: “They’ve stopped inventing supermodels.”

  AP/Wide World Photos

  Conventional wisdom in Brentwood is that “O.J. never looked better than he did in court.” He receives 3,500 pieces of love mail a week.

  People magazine (August 8, 1994):

  CASHING IN

  “Innocent or guilty, O.J. isn’t simply the accused, he’s a brand name.”

  The New York Times Magazine (June 26, 1994):

  TALKING ABOUT THE MEDIA CIRCUS

  Barbara Ehrenreich: “There’s a new standard. It used to be, get the scoop and be first. Now you want to be 14th or 23rd: ‘No, I didn’t do it until after NBC did it and ABC did it.’ You have to be the last one to do these stories and wear the badge of purity.”

  Jerry Nachman: “When I was editing the Post, I’d get calls from colleagues at newspapers, whose names you would instantly recognize, wondering when and if we were going to pop the ‘X’ story. And I would ask, ‘Are you going to try do it first?’ And they would say, ‘No, we want to go the next day.’ There was a race to see who would be first to go second.”

  SUNSET/EVENING

  No matter what anyone says, Monroe looked different during the last few months of her life. Pregnancy? Cosmetic surgery? Depression? During some of the final photos of Monroe taken near the end of her life, her skull began to show through more clearly. She began to resemble someone other than the self that had been manufactured, an actual person.

  Her body, her “franchise,” was on the brink of erosion. Imagine if McDonald’s restaurants suddenly all began to crumble and stink and became sex hangouts; urine-stenched vines growing up the cracked vinyl signage, interiors looted and smeared with feces, graffiti. Entropy is not permitted in the realm of fame.

  The notion of body-as-franchise raises a question, the question that perhaps other means of developing idea franchises are going to have to be created other than personality-centered structures. Perhaps charisma has become too deadly for those who are seduced by its charms, or too deadly for the charismatic him or her self.

  People magazine (June 13, 1994) cover story:

  Diana’s Daring New Life: Topless bathing? Holistic healing?

  Aromatherapy? Anything goes as a liberated Diana struggles to find herself.

  The cover photo portrays her as a secular Gap goddess, an honorary Brentwoodian: white-toothed, clad in an American football-team jacket, more All-American than effete British. Inside, however, the article then goes on to portray the Princess of Wales as rudderless, filling her days with obsessive, meaningless, body-centric activities.

  What makes the case of the Princess of Wales so fascinating is her almost instantaneous and complete rejection of all media and media-mediating technologies, bodyguards and so forth. It is interesting to note that the “search for personal freedom” invariably is a quest sought by the denarrated. It is as though the vision of denarration visited her in a dream, and when she awoke, her life could never be the same.

  Her narrative problem is almost Monroe-esque: Who to date? How to date? Where next from here?

  While fame in itself adds no narrative dimension to a famous person’s life, fame does add an element of chaos to one’s psychic environment that increases its probability of going nonlinear.

  Magazines feature endless maps of houses that accompany Brentwood’s Post-Fame deaths, blueprints as pornography, the assumption that there exists an empirical blueprint for murder. “Well, the living room is adjacent to the bedroom.” “The alley led to the front door, and her condo was on the right.”

  From the Los Angeles Times (August 4, 1994):

  WHEN HOME SECURITY LOOKS LIKE SIEGE MENTALITY

  Two Texans have developed a half-inch thick siding, Safe Shield, that for roughly $4,000 “will cover the inside of your doors, roof and garage, and for additional protection, sliding panels that cover the windows at night.”

  The notion of corporeal security is one of Brentwood’s most seductive appeals.

  Like left-shoulder inoculation bumps, each Brentwood yard, without exception, brandishes a metal spike-pegged sign indicating the security system(s) with which that property has been vaccinated: Westec, Knight, Brinks, E.E., Southland Home Protectors, Bel Air Home Patrol, and Protection One (1–800 GET HELP) are but a few. Westec is by far the most common.

  Multilayered exclusion devices insulate properties from the outer world; a perimetric fence and gate (often monitored by cameras) encloses thick hedgerow vegetation which in turn enclose dogs which in turn surround the house which is tripwired with magnets, beams, contact points, numeric input pads and alarms.

  From an April 1994 Brentwood region homeowners association newsletter:

  “Follow-home crimes are frequent—use your car mirror and look around! Can you back into your driveway? This is a suggestion from the local police.”

  “Air bags are now being stolen from cars.”

  “Summer bunco scams: be forewarned about those great bargains for house-painting, driveway refurbishing, etc.”

  [Phone number for a West L.A. volunteer graffiti removal organization]

  “Louvered windows are unsafe and easily removed. By using superglue, you can ensure they won’t be removed.”

  The Veterans Administration Land

  On the east side of the 405 is the Los Angeles National Cemetery, still in ZIP code 90049, with 80,000 buried; room for no more.

  But this is not Arlington. This cemetery is extremely under-tree-ed, and feels eternally parched, its infinite-seeming rows of graves ever in need of water. Like all cemeteries, it is, of course, a landscape of utter uneventfulness.

  Land across the 405 and Sepulveda Boulevard is soon enough going to be transferred from the Veterans Administration to the Department of Memorial Affairs to effect a 50 percent expansion of burial capacity. An additional 80 acres at the site’s neglected north end will be converted into an arboretum. But this is not a decision that happened easily or lightly.

  As one drives from the Los Angeles National Cemetery along Wilshire and underneath the 405, one loops right and is back in Brentwood again turning again right, into the Los Angeles Veterans Administration property: 546 acres between Sunset and Wilshire housing several score of oddly outdated, underfunded-looking Sad Sack-era structures, the only modern building of which, the 17-story that houses 25 agencies, exudes a bizarre aura of time-travel experimentation gone wrong.

  This is not 90049; it is 90073.

  In the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration declared 109 acres at the north end of the property as surplus, sending ballistic a collection of local interest groups including the American Legion, AMVETS and, not insignificantly, the Brentwood and Westwood homeowners groups, who in turn formed the Veterans Park Preserve and effectively killed the land-sale deal, instead initiating a program to enhance the grounds.

  The dead in this particular cemetery fulfill a valuable civic function, a function calculated in 1888 by owners of the Santa Monica Land
and Water Company, a function more than to simply remind one of wars and the necessity of vigilance for the maintenance of democracy. The permanent inertia of the dead lends the land a commodity available almost nowhere else in Los Angeles: undevelopability.

  Los Angeles National Cemetery, by default, pulls great municipal weight through its sheer inertia in two specific channels. First, it helps maintain nearby land values; its de facto undevelopability implicitly inflates the value of all land nearby. Second, it further serves as a physical buffer for Brentwood from the relative brashness of Beverly Hills, Westwood, the Miracle Mile and the 405 freeway.

  Angelenos with whom one passes the cemetery invariably gaze wistfully and say, “Can you believe how valuable that land must be?”

  Archive Photos

  August 4 has been a hot day. The First Federal time/temperature clock on San Vicente had read 85 degrees at one point. One looks at the forever parched, under-tree-ed graveyard and thinks of water. One remembers the floods of the Mississippi in the summer of 1993, when water stole the river’s banks, of stories of whole graveyards vanishing, their coffins dislodged like baby teeth inside the muck of a dissolving Hershey bar, of coffins landing days, weeks later on the front lawns of strangers a hundred miles away.