Mark
Gottdiener, The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media
Fantasies, and
Themed Environment
(Boulder:
Westview Press, 2001, Second Edition).
Mark Gottdiener's The Theming of America is an investigation into why the built
environment
we inhabit is increasingly cluttered with shopping malls, theme parks,
fast
food franchises, and various hybrids of all three. Gottdiener describes
these
all as commercial spaces decorated with images and signs conforming to
"overarching symbolic motifs." These symbolic motifs, he observes, are
usually
drawn from commercial media products and have little functional
relationship to
the goods and services sold in these spaces. In a series of highly
readable
chapters, Gottdiener seeks to explain this condition by first offering
a
telescoped history of consumerism and marketing in the United States
and then
embarking on a tour of the contemporary landscape of themed commercial
environments. This adventure includes visits to Disney theme parks,
Minnesota's
Mall of America, hotels on the Las Vegas strip, some logo-infested
restaurant
chains, and a few of the airport terminals in between which might best
be
referred to as shopping malls with planes.
For this lively itinerary alone the book
will
interest a wide range of readers who will find their journey devoid of
the
poststructuralist jargon found in much of the cultural studies
literature.
Gottdiener's tour is guided by the thesis that "due to increased
competition,
businesses increasingly use thematic and symbolic appeals in order to
sell
their product" (p. 74). This process, he argues, is an aspect of
general trends
in the development of 20th century capitalism where, in
order to
continually stimulate the consumption of mass produced goods, the
artificially
generated symbolic-value of products has increasingly overshadowed
their
intrinsic use-value. Following Baudrillard, Gottdiener roots his
argument in a
critique of classical political economy and its emphasis on production
and the
use and exchange value of goods. In doing so, however, he assumes
little prior
knowledge on the part of the reader and works his way from the ground
up
offering valuable capsule overviews of many important trends within
sociological and cultural studies theory.
As a result, the book will prove highly
accessible to
all readers including undergraduate students. While the second edition
has been
produced with classroom use in mind, several years ago when I taught a
course
on tourism I used the first edition and found the text useful because
it not
only surveys a diverse range of themed environments but also provides
students
with a concise introduction to elementary semiotics, the development of
Fordism, and the cultural study of consumerism. In particular, I found
his
overview of the experience of Disney theme parks effective because it
succinctly presents observations about the design of Disney theme parks
(such
as how they give visitors the opportunity to experience as a pedestrian
a
simulated urban-type environment) which students can relate to their
own
tourism experiences and thus gain a better appreciation of the value of
sociological analysis.
Overall, the book is suitable for an
introductory
student's first tour of themed environments and cultural studies. That
said,
while Gottdiener is a fine guide, the experienced traveler to these
parts will
likely be disappointed by the necessarily superficial nature of the
analysis
which covers a wide and diverse landscape while seeking to maintain
narrative
simplicity and theoretical parsimony.
In the end, the journey feels
somewhat like a briskly paced pre-packaged,
all-inclusive tour attempting to cover too many destinations on a
single trip. While Gottdiener focuses on a
worthwhile and compelling set of cases, it is not always clear that the
concept
of "theming" best serves as the investigation's overarching explanatory
device. Gottdiener develops a well
grounded explanation for the origin of non-functional theming but he
goes on to
present each of his wide-ranging cases as if they fit in a seamless
stream with
little warning to the reader that at points a focus on theming might
overplay
its significance and be overlooking alternative perspectives. When
discussing
cases such as the Mall of America, Las Vegas, and the Hard Rock Cafe,
Gottdiener's theming thesis is apt and persuasive. But once we move
from, for
example, the highly themed Mall of America to other shopping malls and
then to
commercial spaces at airports the relevance of non-functional
overarching
symbolic motifs for understanding the design and use of these spaces
begins to
wears thin. The narrative thread connecting the cases is often left
hanging on
the claim that all commercial environments mask their profit making
function
from consumers by the deployment of symbolic motifs which connote
something
else such as the "urban pedestrian experience" or the "romance of
travel." But in some cases non-functional
themes
might be incidental or applied as an afterthought to conform to other
(non-commercial) functional needs.
Commercial facilities at airports and the sign systems they
generate, to
take one example, are often developed for functional (or use-value)
reasons
such as for the increased convenience of busy travelers and to meet the
needs
of airport employees. At the same time, increased consumer spending can
also be
induced by spatial factors such as location and layout which do not
rely on
symbolic motifs but exploit
urban-like pedestrian traffic flows to generate rents and
positive
external economies. Alternatively,
an investigation focused on the concept of theming might have
been
better served by exploring cases such as Colonial Williamsburg which is
a
seemingly "authentic" historical site that nevertheless could not
function
without the aid of the theming techniques and consumerism at work in
Disney
theme parks (see Handler and Gable 1997).
Readers eager to explore all the sights
and meet the
locals are likely to feel that the text offers little opportunity to
linger
over interesting and challenging questions which are quickly breezed
through by
the author's self-contained narrative driven by the
triumph of symbolic-value over use-value and bounded by
the concept of "theming." For example, the text might have explored the
connection between flexible production techniques (Harvey 1989) and the
increasingly symbol-rich landscape of consumerism. There are also many
moments
when an engagement with Dean MacCannell's notion of
"staged authenticity" was expected and might have proved
useful in an effort present a more complex picture of the nature of
tourism sign
systems and how they produce meaning. More generally, the topic of
globalization floats into the narrative at several points but its
relationship
to the author's theming thesis is never directly addressed. Finally,
and most
irksome, is the division between actual "use-value and artificial
"sign-value"
undergirding the text's central story line. This
superficial and untenable dualism seems responsible for
Gottdiener's failure to take seriously the agency of consumers and the
deeply
meaningful aspects of consumption where "commodities permit the
realization and
inscription of the self in the world" (Norton 1993, 52).
Nevertheless, while The Theming of
America might feel like a
package tour to some, it operates
effectively as a
familiarization junket. It is a well guided survey of a vast number of
sights
which will give readers unfamiliar to the cultural study of the built
environment a taste for the topic and encourage them to come back on
another
visit for deeper investigation.
-- Waleed Hazbun
The
Johns Hopkins University
Handler, R.
and Gable, E. 1997. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the
Past at
Colonial Williamsburg,
Durham: Duke University Press.
Harvey, D.
1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins
of
Cultural Change, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
MacCannell, D.
1999 [1976]. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, New Edition, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Norton, A. 1993.
Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.