A dirge from the Lawrence Welk Show.
The Lawrence Welk Show is the favorite television program of both myself and my grandmother, but for completely different reasons. What we have here is a case of a single style, embraced by two widely divergent sensibilities. One set of elements apprehended from opposite ends.
And what is this style exactly? Well, we all know. Pastoral mid-century hyper-Protestantism, disembodied choirs, soft pastels, people singing while dressed like Little Bo Peep or while marching in place, permanent smiles, family rooms, polka and champagne pop, smoke and bubbles and clouds, perpetual Easter, perpetual Christmas, candyland on collision with the magic kingdom, white staircases and gazebos on stage— it is an imagining of an Earthly Paradise, however dated.
For my grandmother— and my great-grandmother, I’m told— it’s a pretty entertaining, reassuring, and sensible depiction. I remember watching it with her, sitting at the foot of the bed. For me, though, as much as I love it and mingle it with early memories, most of the skits and bits strike me as something completely alien and alienating. For me, Lawrence Welk represents the New Weird.
The New Weird as opposed to the Old Weird. Weird, as we normally entertain the term: the transgressive Weird, the wild, crazy, trippy Weird, which in truth we all find entirely comfortable and comprehensible. The New Weird, on the other hand, is a representation that is entirely inaccessible from the inside. I can only tune into Public Television or Christian radio and gawk and snicker or become unsettled and doubt myself. What impulses are gurgling underneath all this?
I apprehend it with irony, with intense curiosity, with a pale pleasure of its surface, but without true Understanding. When you watch these clips, do you have any idea what these people are thinking? I certainly don’t. I have no idea where these people are coming from.
How does this happen, as it so often does? That within two generations, in the same country, in the same family, a certain set of signifiers that once connoted a sure vision of perfection, can move outward, into a netherland of utmost inscrutability. It makes senses that any style— any set of signifiers— will be always signify something different to other epochs and sensibilities. It makes sense that the style does not contain the sensibility. But to this degree? From Paradise to a mild form of Horror? It seems a bit much.
Nevertheless, there are still efforts underway to parody this style of representation. Or maybe more generally, to parody The Fifties, or classic waspiness— which is crazy. It’s like trying to parody Jesuits or Jacobins. Those hazy days need no help in appearing absurd or defamiliarized to us. They already come that way… Served cold.
The real challenge with the New Weird is precisely the opposite: familiarization and understanding. How do we grasp that original impulse? Its development? That warm sensibility from which the Lawrence Welk Show once emerged as a straightforward form of Happiness, rather than as something dead and gone and aufgehoben.
As with any sensibility, we just need to find a thread. A thread in a whole mountain of material. We might find that thread by watching the Lawrence Welk Show or the Sound of Music for hours on end. By speaking with the elderly. By soaking up the polka and champagne pop. By admiring their flawless and monochromatic sense of fashion. By way of an interest in ceramics or doilies. By tuning into the Christian radio station or— deed of deeds— learning to appreciate the neighborhood Protestant Church on an aesthetic rather than doctrinal level. And doing all this until something— however small— finally clicks, finally snags. Until something gets entangled into our likes and dislikes, in a genuine way… Maybe over some brandy with your grandmother.
Just covering my ass. It stands to reason that one day, our children’s children will look upon our obvious forms of sanity and paradise with total disbelief. Our liveliest creations will come to seem dead-eyed and wholly incomprehensible. They will wonder to themselves “what in the hell were these people thinking?”
Speaking at the MCA. Photo by Rebecca Ann Rakstad
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