First of all, I want to say that this book was a ‘real eye-opener.’ I did not realize what an influential decade the 1950s was, and every chapter taught me something new about the historical context of my life as it is now. With that said my first question might be: Was the 1950s the most influential decade of the century? In my opinion, it may well be because it set our society up for the technology followed refrigerators, washer-dryers, and black-and-white televisions. Society and the American home were prepared to receive the bundles of new technology that followed the ‘50s – color TV, laser disk (I grew up watching movies from the laser disk at my grandparents house, and it still works and sits beneath the VCR and DVD player) VCR/VHS, DVDs, microwaves, video games, computers, and many, many more. Obviously, technology progresses in such a way that it would have been impossible to introduce the computer before the TV, but I don’t think it would have been as readily accepted into American homes had the black-and-white TV not paved the way and influenced culture so deeply in the 1950s.
Continuing in the same light, the Betty Crocker chapter revealed a lot about the eating habits of my family. Basically, we eat A LOT of casseroles and every family get together and holiday, and my dad made every birthday cake I have ever had from a box. Although my dad was born in 1959, his mother already had six children (five more followed my dad) she was feeding daily. She made a lot of casseroles, and we continue that method of feeding today – green bean, broccoli, chicken, potato, and squash are the Keane family specialties that are all brought to life from a can of soup. I guess the point about my dad making cake seems strange and unrelated, but throughout this chapter, Marling stressed the idea that the cake mix was targeted at females because baking wonderful dessert embodied femininity. For my grandmother, this may have been true, but she taught my dad to bake, breaking down the gender-specific barrier around baking. I know that my grandmother was not attempting to fight a baking battle by teaching my dad because she taught all of her children that wanted to learn how to bake, but my dad is known for his cakes in my family because he was the only one of the 12 to master the home-made frosting element. I apologize for this lengthy (boring) family history about cooking, but I appreciated this book for the personal parallels I was able to draw and was wondering if anyone else had similar connections to the culture of the 50s.
My last point is not a question but a connection that this book helped me make and understand. Throughout the book, reality is discussed as present – in TV, the art of Grandma Moses, pictures of families in supermarkets, displaying American culture in Moscow, but Marling claims that in Disneyland, “reality rarely intruded” (105). Baudrillard also recognized this lack of reality in Disneyland and suggested that it “is a perfect model of all the entangled order of simulacra” and “is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms” (460). Reading about Disneyland in the context of the 1950s helps me make sense of this simulation, this lack of reality. Reality now visually intruded the home daily through the television – television introduced everyone to Disney but it also set the stage for a wish for escape. The oddity to me is that the escape was to a world that was influenced by TV. I hate to admit it, but I am having fleeting light bulbs go off and think I am beginning to understand Baudrillard. In an attempt to escape reality, people walked into a simulation of it.
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