Originally Published 10.16
Substantial Revision 11.20
On Wednesday, my boyfriend and I ended up at Venice Beach--I was recovering from a cold, hadn't been outside in four days, and had decided that, during the delusional period spent between coughing and hallucinating, the beach would be a nice place to look at people up close, but still manage to stay far enough away so as not to become Typhoid Elizabeth, infecting half of Southern California with my evil viral infection; a real anthropologist oughtn't disrupt the cultures she studies, and certainly shouldn't spread the germ cultures she harbors amongst them.
Venice Beach is beautiful, and strange; we were far enough away from the market part, but still close enough to see, distantly, both the vendors and the Ferris wheel at Santa Monica pier--that is, on the actual beach at the beach, complete with tide (too close to my feet), sun (too bright, too hot), breeze (too breezy) and lots and lots of sand. My particular vantage point was perfect for people watching: close enough to the tide so as not to be bothered by remote beachgoers, but far away enough from it to avoid drowning, close enough to the lifeguard station and frankly awful public restrooms to examine humans in their natural habitat without being close enough for anyone to realize that I was watching and judging everyone who passed (in my slight daze, I decided to narrate the goings-on in the manner of a wildlife documentary on public television, complete with Australian accent.)
My findings: unadulterated beauty, nature, the wild, the beach, is all government run and regulated. Immediately upon parking ($7.00, pay at the booth, the arm of the block goes up, park in a designated spot), one sees a series of signs bearing the red-lettered legend NO SWIMMING/NO NADAR, with a picture of a small red figure amidst small red waves, with a thick red X running through his middle--bilingual or not, literate or not, there is no way to mistake that there is to be NO SWIMMING/NO NADAR here--in what is, essentially, a vast public swimming pool, there is to be NO SWIMMING! The same signs litter the beach wherever there is something to post on: a bathroom stall, the leg of a lifeguard's chair, a trash can
Settling into what we came to call, in our thick and terrible accents, The Vantage Point, we immediately recognized an obvious code of conduct concerning the humans surrounding us: the unspoken rule seems to be that one can only run away to the beach on a weekday afternoon in order to engage in some romantic rendezvous, or, you know, homework assignment, whatever; everyone, save The Breaker (to be detailed later) had a partner of the opposite sex with them; most were fairly young, in their early to mid-twenties, wearing beach gear covered by beach gear--a bikini top covered by a pullover, board shorts covered by short-sleeved tees bearing advertisements for fictional surf shops and seafood restaurants; straw hats and baseball caps abounded, along with the omnipresent California Rainbow (R) flip-flop: in the uniform of the young and beach bound, no one stands out; no one disrupts the notion that this is what one wears, this is what one does because...well, there is no reason not to, right? To not listen to the signs and dress like a particularly happy yuppie couple from an L.L. Bean catalogue from last season.
The panopticon allows no room for originality because, well, what happens when you break free from absolute conformity? Bad things happen, right?
You become different; you become a threat
Until we saw THE BREAKER
Truly a man amongst men, The Breaker appeared to us, speedo-ed in lime green, grizzled and sunglass-ed, wearing an anklet and carrying a sand-filled two-liter Seven-Up Bottle, marching across the sand, bottle in hand, to the lifeguard station, where he proceeded to perform a series of stretches and awful-awkward not-quite-yoga poses, using his bottle as a weight, completely oblivious to the world around him (or, on the flipside, all too aware of it, and enjoying the attention); against the grain, he was the only human I paid attention to--alone, awkwardly dressed, old, spectacular--that was not entirely consumed by the Wednesday afternoon beachgoer prototype Even though he did pay attention to the
It's strange to consider it, but even the beach--the beach!--has been specified and regulated to the point that one cannot use/abuse it as nature intended; stranger still is the fact that, until this exact second, I, and no one I've spoken to, has ever noticed it! We're so entirely conditioned to listen to signs, to follow social cues and trends, that anything unusual, even if it is not at all unordinary (The Breaker: wearing a swimsuit, sunglasses, doing a beach workout at the beach; nothing especially strange, though the anklet was a bit weird), strikes us ("me") as weird and hilarious and wonderful; the maverick--I bet The Breaker would like to hear me call him a maverick--amongst us is gone due to regulations, formal and informal, that cause us to become like them--and consider it our idea! We listen because we are conditioned to listen, considering what we hear to be some sort of, you know, inborn idea instead of an ingrained ideology, tabula rasa to...what? Them? Through an unassuming indoctrination that just...teaches...us...to listen.
Right?
Indeed. The general public (me included) tends to obey signs because of the threat posed when one does not obey signs; the constant fear of being watched stops most people from “mis-behaving.” Rorty, of course, understood this; the panopticon works because it preys on the fears of the general public (or, more pointedly, prisoners) regarding what, exactly, happens when one does not follow the rules.
