I'm not especially given to quoting myself, but as I was chugging down my 250-calorie meal replacement shake this morning, a line of my own came back to haunt me.
My novel Tower-102 (2000) opens with the line, "They say the knockout punch is always one-two."
Sometimes that goes for the flash of insight as well.
Yesterday I was watching Bruce Brown's classic surfing film The Endless Summer. I'd seen it before, years earlier. For the record, it was better than I remembered. I'm a fan of surfing, though I'll probably always be too scared of the ocean to be much good at it. I took a few lessons once, fell off my surfboard, went home, wrote about it.
The Endless Summer was made in 1966. As I watched it on my flat-screen home TV 42 years after it was released to theaters, three things leaped out at me right away:
(1) The Sandals' theme music for that film is wonderful. The ultimate in classic surf tunes.
(2) History is inflationary. (I already knew that.)
(3) Our national obsession with being skinny has gone over the cliff.
The first point needs no discussion. Go get the DVD, or find a CD compilation of surf music and see what I mean.
The second is something of a side-note, but I found it amusing when the two young surfers in the film, who are taking an around-the-world trip in search of the perfect wave, make their first stop, in Dakar, Senegal. Bruce Brown, voice-over narrator as well as director, points out the astounding detail that the boys were charged (gulp!) $30 a day for their hotel in Dakar. "They could have stamped 'sucker' on your forehead as you came through the door," he says. $30 was outrageously expensive for a hotel room in 1966. You'd never find anything that cheap now, in Dakar, Oklahoma City or anywhere else.
He goes on to say that the boys found Dakar so expensive they decided to move on quickly. "A cup of coffee cost the equivalent of ONE AMERICAN DOLLAR," he tells his no-doubt amazed audience of 42 years ago. Equally outrageous is the price of gas in Accra, Ghana, also the equivalent of (yikes!) one dollar a gallon. Well, okay, in 1966 the median family income in America was $7,400 a year. Still, to hear in the age of Starbucks a dollar for a cup of coffee cited as outrageous is...quaint. As quaint as Beatle haircuts and striped bell-bottoms, anyway.
But the detail that really caught my attention was the women in swimsuits, the beach cuties encountered by the two surfers in places like Australia and Hawaii. In Melbourne, for example, Brown was joking about the fact that the girls' swimsuits were so skimpy that the lifeguards carried spares...in band-aid boxes. Yuk, yuk. Boys being boys, the surfers were so taken with the sights that they were wiping out, staring at all this luscious pulchritude.
Pulchritude that would be considered obese today.
That's right. The swimsuit gals and women surfers in The Endless Summer were noticeably meatier than the feminine ideal of 2008. In those days curves were to be embraced (no pun intended) everywhere, not just north of the solar plexus. And the boys were not complaining a bit, nor were the girls the slightest bit self-conscious. I'd be willing to bet the girls weren't living on tofu and bean sprouts, either. The Sixties were pre-health-and-fitness, surfers' athletic physiques notwithstanding. Jogging didn't even enter the language until that decade was nearly over. People still smoked, everywhere. And young people consumed cheeseburgers and butterscotch sundaes without guilt and without tut-tutting from a national choir of food police. If you described yourself as a "vegan" in 1966, people would think you belonged to some bizarre religious cult. Yes, there is something to be said for the old days.
I was 10 years old in 1966. I don't remember thinking that the girls I was precociously ogling at the beach were fat. Yes, when I looked at sepia-toned old photos of Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties from half a century earlier, I remember wondering that anyone could find them attractive at all. But the young women of my childhood and youth were none the less attractive to us adolescent boulevardiers of that day generally, for being what they were: unselfconsciously female in every way.
That was Sunday's movie moment. The second punch came on Monday morning. I was sitting in the waiting room at my podiatrist's office, waiting to have the inserts in my shoes given their three-month tire-kick. There was nothing available to read but a fashion magazine, so I picked it up and began thumbing through it.
There, parading before my eyes, were page after page of young women celebrities showing off what they'd worn to the latest Hollywood premiere or whatever. I'm proud to say that I recognized not a single one of them aside from Jamie Lee Curtis, who's closer to my age, and Paris Hilton, who unfortunately is as unavoidable these days as spam e-mail for penis enlargement. Perhaps it was the very fact that I didn't recognize any of them that drew my attention to the most obvious screaming fact about them: they all looked exactly the same, and they all fit perfectly Tom Wolfe's term for the modern ideal of what a woman's body should look like. That term, coined in the pages of his 1998 novel A Man In Full, is "Boy With Breasts."
It's true. Every one of these gals, except for wearing an evening gown that put her breasts on display like a float in the Rose Parade, could have been a 16 year-old boy. The rest of their bodies were almost uniformly linear. Is this really, honest-and-for-true, the ideal of beauty in the age of iPod? It appears to be. But if one stops and thinks about it, it's a bit disturbing. Now, maybe I'm well into creeping fuddy-duddyism and then again maybe not. As I watched Bruce Brown's old surfing film I did think, "Man, those gals are chubby!" But then I caught myself. Were they really? I don't remember thinking so when I was a boy. And then I remembered that famous picture of Marilyn Monroe crawling out of the pool naked.
You know what? Today someone would be telling her to go to Weight Watchers.
And that means something is wrong.
Does a national drift in the direction of androgyny have something to do with it? I don't know, I'm not a sociologist. In 1966 Bob Dylan, before his motorcycle accident anyway, briefly embraced a somewhat androgynous image, of which we were reminded recently when Cate Blanchett played him in a movie. And of course that same year saw the phenomenon of Twiggy, the British supermodel who resembled a kitchen match wearing a sweater. But she was considered a freak in 1966. Today she wouldn't be.
With stories about celebrity anorexia all over the front pages of the trashy tabloids, I think it's time we stop and reevaluate the nationwide craze for ever thinner and thinner and thinner. I'm not saying we should just forget about it and go back to stuffing ourselves without guilt, but I know this for certain: "Moderation in all things" is a reasonably reasonable proposition. "You can't be too rich or too thin" is one of the most idiotic things ever uttered. Plenty of Lotto winners have come to bad ends, and so, let us not forget, did Karen Carpenter.
This morning I was poking around on USA Today's website, and there was yet another story beating the drum about how many calories and grams of fat this or that treat at McDonald's has. Shut the hell up, already! And quit telling us over and over and over again that women are supposed to look like Iggy Pop wearing falsies if they want to be glamorous. If I have a choice between a picture of Marilyn crawling out of the pool and one of Nicole Richie swooping out of a limo and into a restaurant like a coat rack in Prada, there's no decision to make there. Viva Marilyn. Viva Woman. Viva Flesh.
Excuse me. Surf's up.
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