Prehistory and Postmodernism

Andrew Levy

Department of English
Butler University
Levy@Butler.edu

 

Labor Day Weekend, 1984. Erik Huber signs a “drive-away” contract with a man from Queens to drive his car to Reseda in the San Fernando Valley in two weeks time. Erik then lets nine days lapse, packs his college belongings in the back of the car, and offers to show me Los Angeles, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the “eating tour” of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. Across the country, there was a record heat wave that week. We drove during the days, drinking six packs of warm diet coke to keep us nervous. At night, we slipped into campgrounds with our headlights off, spread sleeping bags under the stars and between the Winnebago campers, sipped from a bottle of Jack Daniels, and whispered conjectures about what invisible landscape would materialize around us in the morning light: strawberry fields in Missouri, a giant red rock in New Mexico.

 

On the third or fourth day, driving a high mountain highway in Arizona, we saw a tall, slender pole rising in the horizon. Amid the aged pines and desert landscape that neither of us had ever seen before, we assumed that the pole was an Indian totem. As we approached, we made out a vaguely human icon atop the pole. As we approached nearer, we recognized the figure: it was Fred Flintstone. We drove through twenty more miles of pristine desert, and found Bedrock: a campground, tourist shop, and restaurant modelled after the cartoon, a place to sit in a Flintstone car, sleep in a Flintstone home, eat a Brontoburger, shake hands with one of the two unlucky individuals dressed in bulky Fred and Barney costumes in the Arizona heat, and buy postcards or t-shirts.

 

We bought postcards. They flew out the car window on a long downhill several miles out of “town”; we stopped the car in the middle of the road, ran back to where the cards lay unmoving in the road, and looked up, horrified, to see a gasoline truck mount the top of the hill above us and begin its hurtling descent toward our parked, purring, borrowed car. We raced back, pulled the car onto the shoulder, and listened to the peeved whistle of the skidding truck, its driver too stunned to curse as he passed.

 

We drove on to Barstow and Los Angeles. Erik had so laden the back of the car that the exhaust pipe had been skipping against the highway for three thousand miles, sending out sparks in our absurd trail. In Reseda, we saw that we had worn the exhaust pipe down to a sliver. We listened to the car’s owner complain about the pipe, all of us confused about what might constitute adequate compensation, and then drove our rental car back into Los Angeles.

 

There we got drunk, relieved and giddy about being in California, about not having started a conflagration in Arizona over a couple of Flintstone postcards, and about not having to drive anymore. Late at night, we wandered through downtown, and came across the La Brea tar pits, a dark hole behind a chain-link fence amid the skyscrapers of central Los Angeles. Erik explained how fossils would periodically rise to the surface, where paleontologists would retrieve them, and set to work determining how the new find altered our modern vision of prehistory. I looked through the chain link fence, and saw a sculpture of a saber-toothed tiger being pulled down into the pit with a graphic look of displeasure on its face.

 

Nobody should ever be too proud of their practical joke ideas, but I can’t seem to forget the one that Erik and I devised that night in Los Angeles. We would return to Bedrock, get those Fred and Barney costumes, stuff them with medical school skeletons, and toss them at night over the chain link fence into the tar pit, just so, for a few moments at least, the researchers at the La Brea site would have to say to themselves, and to the world: the Flintstones are not fiction; prehistoric man wore a tie and punched a time card.

 

Meanwhile, six thousand miles away in Paris (picture a camera panning at great speed over desert, heartland, ocean, and stopping in an oaken office with ostentatiously Parisian monuments prominently displayed outside its windowsill), the philosopher Jean Baudrillard was composing his own kind of practical jokes, in the manner of postmodern French philosophers. Throughout the 1980s, Baudrillard released a series of slim volumes of playful, iconoclastic philosophy, published in the Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series and bearing titles like Simulations or The Ectasy Of Communication. In these works, which by the end of the decade would become a philosophy of choice for many American academics, graduate students, cyberpunks, and consciously hip adolescents, Baudrillard wrote of the shifting relationship between what has previously been called “the real,” and its many reproductions in mass media. For Baudrillard, the postmodern age was marked by the rise of the “hyperreal,” mediated experience that is more ‘real’ than the authentic experience from which it is generated, and which is, in turn, used as the model for the production of further authentic experience. The map, to use Borges’ and Baudrillard’s famous metaphor, does not mimic the territory anymore; the territory mimics the map.

 

In an era where a Presidential candidate overtly emulates the glamorous media image of a previous President, and becomes President himself, the presence of the “hyperreal” in our daily lives surprises nobody. It is useful, perhaps, that Americans look to France for intellectual authority, that Derrida and Foucault and Lyotard and Baudrillard find larger, more spirited audiences in our country, just as Jerry Lewis, Clint Eastwood, and Edgar Allan Poe have found smaller, more respectful audiences in theirs. It might be more useful, however, not to wait for foreign recognition of our more unlikely sources of genius, a tedious process that leaves a persistent gap between what we choose to teach in schools, and what our students, still untutored in the ways of professional education, psychology, and literature, might choose to understand.

 

I have wanted to write this essay for a long time, frustrated for nine years by the nagging fact that Erik Huber and I never tossed those faux Flintstones into the La Brea tar pits, that we never forced the official guardians of the distant past, those sun-bronzed Californian paleontologists, to admit even momentarily what we, in our hyperreal way, already knew: that we really were descended from the Flintstones. I have not written this essay because the channels of intellectual authority in America leave little room to maunever: one can attempt to write about a cartoon, and face derision for choosing such low brow subject matter; or one can choose an scholarly pedestal from which to discourse, Popular Culture or Child Psychology for example, and then write an aggressively jargoned and analytical essay that anyone who ever enjoyed an episode of the show would recognize as bizarre and even hostile to the program’s intent. This is an especially awkward situation, given the fact that most of the teachers, academics, psychologists, and other professional assessors of culture under forty in America today received much of their early intellectual development in front of a TV screen. I learned about the hyperreal from Fred and Barney, not from Jean. We are Flintstone intellectuals; we should act like Flintstone intellectuals.

 

As with most inexpensively made cartoons, the Flintstones seem like a child’s primer to Cubism. Wilma and Betty, the two wives, each wears her hair parted, and the part faces the audience no matter whether the character is facing left or right profile. They are, of course, impossibly slim: Wilma wears a three-pearl necklace beneath which her neck disappears, and their legs, rarely apart except when running or walking, taper down into tiny feline feet. The men are several times wider than the women: they wear cylindrical animal skins, although they have no shoulders that might support the garments. Their heads, which seem to float above their animal skins, remain perfectly level as they walk, although their bodies move up and down. Height seems irrelevant: although Barney is several times wider than Betty, he is also several times shorter, anatomical details that probably explain why the couple had to adopt.

 

They live in a place called Bedrock, which takes on the characteristics of either a large city (a stone-age Los Angeles, it seems) or a small town, depending on the dramatic demands of the episode. In Bedrock, every proper name contains at least one reference to some mineral object: Rock, Slate, Stone (it would be as though every name in our own era, the Atomic Age, bore some reference to nuclear technology). When modern celebrities appear, their names are altered appropriately: Ann-Margaret becomes Ann-Margrock, Tony Curtis becomes Stony Curtis, Rock Hudson (who in theory could have made the transition to Bedrock life with his name intact) becomes Rock Hudstone. The Bedrock code of dress is strangely formal, and unutilitarian: the women wear stones on their wrists and necks that are larger than their hands and heads. The men wear ties but no shoes. On formal occasions, they wear spats, but still no shoes.

 

There are two reasons to watch an episode of the Flintstones as an adult. The first is the show’s amiable spirit; it is among the least dour works of art ever produced in this country. Like its progenitor, The Honeymooners, the Flintstones is noisy, and full of motion. Musical themes and sound effects shift constantly on the soundtrack; on the screen, brightly colored characters move through a visually memorable rock-laden world, sliding down dinosaurs’ backs, bumping into stone impediments, racing into each other’s arms. The characters themselves are cartoon-sized, energetic and elemental. Fred, a loudmouth and a buffoon, possesses a broad capacity for kindness and self-realization; he loves to shout with joy (Yabba Dabba Doo, of course), and dance on his oversized toes. His body, which is sketched just slightly convex of a perfect cylinder to suggest overweight, is surprisingly fluid in movement. Barney, his best friend and neighbor, is a simpleton, but he is also instinctively inclined toward pleasure: his head bounds rapidly up and down inside the cylinder of his animal skin when he laughs. Wilma and Betty, frustrated and wise in the manner of early 60s television housewives, still sing, laugh freely, and live with the consanguinity of women who know they are unconditionally loved. Flintstone episodes do not conclude as ordinary situation comedies do, with difficult situations resolved by the introduction of moral principles; they end when an effusion of good humor rises to the surface and usurps the dilemma. They end in song, in laughter, with babies cackling happily, or with Fred and Wilma “smooching.” In some mythical anthology of American culture, the Flintstones would be winking on the page opposite Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger, telling children not to perfect themselves, but to enjoy themselves.

 

The second reason to watch the Flintstones is the pleasant buzz of anachronism. It is perhaps only as an adult that one can recognize the clumsy but gentle affection with which the Flintstones’ writers constructed their Bedrockian era. In this stone age, for instance, unlike the one that paleontologists record, dinosaurs and humans roam the earth together. Interestingly, only the docile dinosaurs seem to remain: uncomplaining brontosauruses function as cranes and earth movers, pterodactyls substitute as planes, but there are no tyrannosauruses in sight, no meat eaters except for Fred and Barney, who wolf down giant platters of oversized dinosaur ribs. Similarly, while some Bedrock technology is unquestionably modern–their radios, televisions, and telephones all function normally–most of their machines have been configured to accomodate a world before electricity. Fred starts his car, a redwood and granite sedan, by lowering his feet to the ground, and running for a few yards; the car then glides effortlessly up and down cartoon hills for miles. The Flintstones camera is a box that contains a bird that pecks out a picture on a 3 X 5 square of stone. Their vacuum cleaner is a small, somber wooly mammoth who sucks up dirt while Wilma and Betty converse; like the bird in the camera, or the weary animals that function as sprinklers, lawnmowers, or brooms, he also provides ironic commentary on the actions of the human characters, or shrugs at the camera and tells us something like, “It’s a living.”

 

Watching the Flintstones, one often suspects that the stone- age technology is the real star. The Flintstones re-invents all the technologies upon which we are most dependent, and makes them at once ludicrous and comprehensible. One wants to say that the show provides childrens’ explanations for complex machinery, but these Flintstone appliances are not purely children-sized: it is likely that more adult Americans are more familiar with the bird inside the Flintstone’s camera than they are familiar with the actual contents of their Kodaks. It is possible that the Flintstones reminds us how technology makes us infants or aborigines amidst our sophistication, dependent upon large, mysterious forces with almost supernatural powers: ATM networks, telecommunications highways in the sky. That is the part of us that watches the television in an entranced and docile spirit. But the Flintstones also startles us back into a sense of wonder about these machines we have created and so easily take for granted. It reminds us instead what we have suspected all along, that our machines have animal hearts and human feet. That is the part of us that refuses to be alienated from, or intimidated by, our technology.

 

As these machines roil and putter in the background of every Flintstones episode, however, the characters in the foreground are acting out an ancient national drama. The Flintstones seems to have been created by people in a state of infatuation about the success of the American dream: not the big American dream, where we become idealized versions of ourselves living in a City On A Hill, but the little American dream, where the land is rich and forgiving enough that persistent good humor, if nothing else, can save us. As I wrote this essay, friends with children reminded me how impossible it was to get their children to not watch the Flintstones. But friends without children shared with me images they have retained of watching the show: how Fred and Barney snapped their fingers without actually touching forefinger to thumb; the way Wilma’s jewelry seemed to float without touching her body; or the rock group “The Way-Outs,” four Beatlesque mopheads with abdomens that detached into separate tire-shaped pieces during performance epiphanies. All of these images, and the pristineness and affection with which they have been preserved in memory, suggest that the Flintstones was also a kind of primer for living in a world slouching toward Bethlehem: a lesson that there were real pleasures living in a world that was just barely falling apart, or just barely not coming together. Watching the Flintstones, we were ending our careers as modernists, beginning our careers as postmodernists, and we were barely five years old.

 

We were Flintstone intellectuals; we could have done worse. Entire schools of thought could be founded upon the Flintstones. Traditional archaeology, the archaeology in vogue during the period of the Flintstones production, maintained that primitive man had primitive social structures, was id-driven and animal-like, and was technologically naive. More recent discoveries have suggested that mankind developed at irregular paces in different geographic locations, and developed complex, mannered, and self-conscious social structures while remaining in a state of comparative technological innocence. This is Flintstones archaeology. The Austrian Iceman, frozen suddenly in his everyday dress 5000 years ago and discovered in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, has given modern researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study Neolithic Man: they found that he wore well-tailored leather clothes, kept his fingernails trimmed, and, just like Betty Rubble, wore a single white stone on a strap around his neck.

 

There is also Flintstones Child Psychology. According to the US Census, American children rank drugs, pollution, and the environment as the three largest problems facing America today. 62% of all ten year olds worry that a friend might get AIDS, while 84% have used a remote control device. Nearly half of all American boys polled by the Gesell Institute of Human Development believed that they had adequate information about sex, while studies published by Nintendo report that American boys now consider “game prowess” a “fundamental male social marker.” If sentimental (and sometimes academic) Child Psychology holds that childhood is essentially an innocent state, these statistics suggest that contemporary children are growing up wizened and self-conscious, while maintaining aspects of the childlike innocence that most adults still expect. The Flintstones, pumping out of TV screens across the country, is like CNN for five year olds: it gives them an emotional roadmap of innocence and experience, and tells them that the seemingly anachronistic state where those two traits exist in the same person is a natural one. It confirms their image of the world as a place full of absurd but wonderful machines and adults full of unanticipated motion and desire.

 

It also provides an early lesson in what it means to have free access to the global media village. In Don DeLillo’s novel, Americana (1971), one character remarks that television came over on the Mayflower. What DeLillo’s Pilgrims carried on the Mayflower was not a real television, of course, but the idea of television, or what television, a neutral and faceless device, would become when yoked to the visions of fresh lands and new selves that the settlers brought with them, and which have never left. The Puritans, weaned on infant capitalism and a media revolution of their own, the printing press, took the Bible and, for better or worse, beat back the forest with it; they taught us that the distance between our literature and our landscape was slight by any measure, providing that we had the resolve and the technology.

 

It should come as no surprise that someone has built a version of Bedrock in the desert in Arizona; Americans have been building visionary communities in the desert from the very start, a fact that suggests that the idea of the hyperreal is not so postmodern after all, or that postmodernism is older than we think. But now we build communities on television as well as land. It is as though we have two countries: the shared space from sea to shining sea, and the cable-equipped television. Both are vague, inchoate, diverse: but, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, only one anymore is commensurate to our ability to wonder. The child perched daily in front of a television screen is face-to- face with something older than television, something older than America, the primal core of all our ingenuity: the sheer beauty of awakening self-consciousness, the epic moment of inventing a new country or the tiny thrill of finding the bird who takes the picture. Watching TV is like watching someone else’s dreams.

 

Bedrock in Arizona is not a radical utopia, like Plymouth or New Harmony; it is a tourist stop. But Bedrock on television, Bedrock in our homes, in our memories, is something different. Bedrock in Arizona is a parable for the turn of the twentieth- first century. It is a reminder that, for those Americans who have come of age in the last thirty years, the icons of popular culture are not artificial attachments to our conception of what constitutes our real life and our land, but are now integral to those things. Fred Flintstone on a totem pole is exactly right: television is aboriginal and mythic, and its icons flit through our REM sleep (that is, after all, where they came from). Bedrock in the Arizona desert is striking not because it is anomalous, but because it resolves. Television came over on the Mayflower, but it was invented in the Stone Age. And it was invented by children.

 

Say their names: Rock Derrida, Michel Foucaultstone.