Drive-Ins Aka “Ozoners”

1 Who's Afraid of the Virgin WolfMan? Or, the Other Meaning of Auto-Eroticism Eric Mark Kramer Live dangerously. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius. -Nietzsche Pretext literature and documentary text is appear ing as a manifest ersatz nostalgia for the Web sites, books and articles dedi old "ozoners." Boomers miss them but cated to the accounting of the drive-in they were precisely the people who aban industry are readily available. They duti doned them in the first place and for rea fully record how the number of drive-ins sons selective memory censors. exploded during the optimistic 1950s and Since several chapters in this volume declined in the 1960s and '70s, nearly have set out to recount the technological dying-out altogether in the 1980s with the and political-economic history of the advent of home video machines, cable drive-in theater form along with its television and the like. They reveal how retroactively glorified "B-grade" contents, audience demographics changed over this chapter seeks to take a different path. these decades. How World War II with its In this chapter, I attempt a very cursory rationing of rubber, gasoline and other survey of the phenomenology of the drive essentials to auto-mobility forced many in theater experience, the necessary con drive-ins to close for the good of the col ditions for its birth and the romantic lective. Other articles describe the efforts memories it has spawned in the wake of of some loyalists to the form trying to its decline. In this chapter, I focus on the "keep hope alive" with a pseudo-revival at folk phenomenon and its essentially local the turn of the millennium. Optimists form, for in the instance of the drive-in anxiously chart progress with about 11 DIs theater the form competes with the con reopening and fully four new ones built tent for significance, asserting locale as a since 1995! They mark the rebirth with meaningful part of personal geography. special showings featuring "classic cars" With the continual individuation of the carrying equally, though not so classically, American psyche, the great "people's aging "Baby Boomers." More and more palaces" that showcased the Depression 9 10 DRlVlNG IN 1. Who's Afraid of the Virgin WolfMan? (Eric Mark Kramer) 11 era cinema have become minimalized British Museum spend hours staring into all representational art, in fact this entire .1 in size and decor. At the center of the glass cases peering at "actual," handwrit mortal world, is merdy a shadowy mimic entire shift is the emergence of what ! ten texts by Charles Dickens, Charles of true forms. Of course the post-mod Jean Gebser has called hypertrophic Darwin, James Joyce, Winston Churchill ernists protest. I have seen them quiver, egocentrism, perspectivism as an ironic and so forth. despite their self-loathing, with the excite ideal} For both the grandiosity of the Once, while at the museum in Lon ment of seeing the "real live" Jacques Der big outdoor screen and the reduction don, I noticed a crowd of people gathered rida enter a conference room. He is not a ism of the palace to the strip mall around one display case in particular, leav trace or a graft after all even though some "multiplex" owe everything to the ing hundreds of others practically unno consider his work a type of intellectual superabundance of personal motorized . ! ticed. Indeed, it was not the form of fraud (graft of another sort). They rush to transportation in the form of the auto display, but the "contents" that were sup get his autograph on his books and then mobile, which in turn presupposes an posed to be the point of focus. And so it jealously protect their prizes like religious attitude ofincreasing individualism and was that some content was particularly relics. Maybe it is the trace that authenti at the same time neocolonial resource alluring at drawing a crowd. The cases cates the origin. consumption on a scale never before that displayed English manuscripts by Despite logic, watching taped or seen in human history. While one may Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and other filmed performance somehow makes us, argue that all art is a wasteful luxury, "greats" drew no attention except for me the viewers, seem less real too as compared the drive-in is a perfect example of looking at something by .Emily Bronte. with watching a live performance. Passiv kitsch art, a moment in time where the What could be in the case that com ity, the modus of the couch potato, means mob can afford extravagance, where . i manded such interest? When I finally got to act like a vegetable passively following high production values occasionally close enough to peek over someone's the Sun through phototropic reflexes meet an adulterous medium, where the shoulder, there below were handwritten without really seeing it. We switch on the rubber meets the gravel. poems and cartoons by the pop legend tdevision, not so much to see a specific John Lennon. show but to watch it. The act of being a potato is meaningful in and of itself. We Being Here bask in the glow of the tube, lackadaisi Locale as a Particular cally relaxing. We rarely turn it off even Museum space is a special, mod Split-Infinity when "nothing's on." We just keep graz ern form of sacrality.l It is quintessen ing, hunting and gathering. We switch tially modern in that it deploys objects For all our post-60s sophistication away from performers in mid-verse, with in a form of space created primarily for and college-educated abstractionism, do impunity, because they aren't really real display. Rarely can one touch. Modern we not now recognize that as one "pro anyway. Maybe we do this more and more space is space for looking. And with the gresses," one progresses away from things in face-to-face interaction too. To appre ocular distance comes a cool reverence. as well as toward others? And as we were ciate dissociation, we must return to the Once put in a museum, a thing be taught that "movies" were an "art form" to beginning of drama when the ancient comes "culture" sui generis, an object be properly called "cinema," what was left Greeks built lenses, amphitheaters with revered but no longer part of daily life. behind? Look how we have developed into rows of passive observers focusing on a The magic of the museum is the homdess cosmopolitans (global citizens). new kind of staged space with "actors." attempt to get as close to authenticity The old human, that inferior anachro Thus we have the birth of the "actor" and as possible even if you can't touch it. nism, just had to die to make room for the the "reactors." When this happened, the But it is also a sort of death sentence as evolved post-human. Superior in every magic and mythic holism of ritual was it reduces a relationship to pure objec way, the "New Man" dwdls in the realm fragmented.3 The dance no longer in tivity. Despite our idealistic attempts to of scientific abstractions, formulaic truths cluded everyone. Some, in fact most, just flee this fleshy world of unwashed and perfect forms. watch now, even too ashamed to dance horde into the realm of transcendental In the pre-modern (yet extant) world, when asked. Thus we have the modern truths, still presence has magic power. performance happens now. "Live" means individual with her heightened self-con For instance, visitors of all ilk to the real. But for Plato (the first true modern), sciousness isolating her from everything 12 DRIVING IN 1. Who's Afraid ifthe Virgin WolfMan? (Eric Mark Kramer) 13 and everyone else. This is why communi pokes, which constitute the "actual" places a new Pythagorian religion, the mathesis that the embodied subjective fallible self, cations has taken on a millenarian status. where the artist's personal touch is pre universalis. As Plato and Pythagorus had with all its animalistic defilements, be cel "Communications," not informatics with served, we are inexplicably excited. The taught, virtue is in the virtual while the ebrated rather than despised. Rather than its high speed data transmission, but talk original is worth far more money than the actual is nothing but shadows on cave worshiping death, the pure realm of ing and listening have become "central" reproduction and it's not simply because walls, or across screens. But "act" is the absolute referential perfection, which once only because we sense that we are failing it is rare, the "brightest" or oldest version. root of "actual." With the ascendance of achieved spells the blessed end of pain and at it. The dissociative gaps are expanding Thanks to mass reproduction, the image the virtual as more real than the actual, striving, of living, many rebel in favor of everywhere. In part, this is because of the is available in various media sizes, and first in religion and then in mathematics, this world of mere mortal failings and modern sense of chronic urgency and qualities. For instance, one can wear a this world of real men and women endless heterogeneity that defies general hyper-individualism: In the drive-in, you Dali on a t-shirt or open a Cezanne on an becomes a "shame."8 The virtually derived izability. They note how the light con have to wait until it's dark. umbrella. What is missing is the object as average is more "significant," more pow stantly changes and the mood with it. We Why do we like the new solipsism? more than just an image, but as a thing erful (exhibiting more "epistemic force") find meaning in those who champion this For one thing, we can hide while we watch in-itself with a unique history.

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