Just in case we Americans wanted to forget the calendrical punctuation known as the end of the millennium, the Y2K problem has arrived to give our visions of apocalypse a handy metronome. The delicious irony that a society so suffused with tech optimism should find itself anxiously beholden to a global system error is not lost on Mark Dery; indeed, it is just one of a slew of cultural contradictions he catalogs in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, a collection of essays - or, to invoke one of his examples, a "cabinet of curiosities" - stuffed with the relics of an age marked by carnivalesque excess, mawkish sentimentality melded with affectless violence, and the desire to harness nature to the machine.
For Dery, it's beginning to look a lot like Coney Island, the "dreamland" of last century's end, a "carnival of chaos, a madcap celebration of emotional abandon and exposed flesh, speed and sensory overload, natural disasters and machines gone haywire." All the attendant tensions on hand at the last fin de siècle have returned, and, as Dery notes, "the fin de millennium simply turns up the volume tenfold." Or does it? This book's central shortcoming may be the millennial packaging; history, after all, tends to be a rather leaky vessel. Just what is our "historical moment," and when does end-of-millennial culture begin? Dery is vague; he argues that the paranoid movie thrillers of the 1990s harken a new ascendance of conspiracy theory (leaving one to wonder what the 1970s batch of espionage films signified), then he allows that conspiracy theory actually stems from the Age of Reason. While our "historical moment" may indeed parallel "Coney's in its heyday," what do we do with the same mixture of technological wizardry and social anxiety found in between?
When not grappling with millennialist overreach, Dery proves a provocative and cuttingly humorous guide to topics ranging from our fear of clowns to the juncture of "scatology and eschatology" (evinced by South Park and Jim Carrey, among others). The author shows a particular brilliance for collecting cultural detritus and bringing unseen connections to light. In the end, Dery is the kind of critic who just might give conspiracy theory a good name.
The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink by Mark Dery: $25. Grove Press: (800)788 3123.
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