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Polaroids From the Dead
By Douglas Coupland
HarperCollins, 198
pages, $22
In
his introduction to this collection of essays, most of which began as
magazine articles, Vancouver author Douglas Coupland points out how distant
the situations described in the pieces now seem. The most recent article was
written in 1994, but the world it evokes already seems like a lost era. That
is symptomatic of a more general acceleration taking place throughout the
world. Ideas and beliefs supersede one another ever more quickly; religion
or nationalism — in North America, at least — seem increasingly quaint or
outmoded.
The
easiest response to that development is cynicism. But Coupland, to his
credit, is never merely dismissive about the corners of the world he
examines. Nor does he claim to offer a unifying theory that will explain any
of what he has found. A good portion of Polaroids from the Dead
examines the collapse of exactly the kinds of theories it was once hoped
would make sense of it all: McCarthyism and the Cold War (“Postcard from
Palo Alto”), communism (“Postcard from the former East Berlin”), western
capitalist democracy (“Washington, D.C.: Four Microstories, Super Tuesday,
1992”).
As
Coupland slyly illustrates, humans have not changed that much, even as their
tools mutate and improve more and more quickly. They still want meaning,
some deeper sense of community and narrative. But the speed of the digitally
encoded zeitgeist makes it increasingly difficult to find anything that is
not instantly obliterated by some new development.
Coupland’s dispatches offer something deeper than mere reportage: his
ability to identify atomized “micro-cultures” and the reasons people choose
to embrace them. The disparate tribes congregating at a Grateful Dead
concert find even that brief commonality more attractive than being part of
a world they find too awful, confusing or depressing to be part of.
There are echoes
throughout the book of the deceptively affectless, factual tone of Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr. Coupland has the same ability to write as though trying to
explain the world and its inhabitants to a visitor from another planet. And
although sadness and cool terror permeate Polaroids, Coupland’s sharp
observations and dry humor leave the reader oddly hopeful. |
