“Caramel,” I say.
“Caramel popcorn,” corrects Merilyn, sniffing suspiciously as we carry on past the meats and cheeses, the chili peppers, and the apples. “It’s everywhere. They must pipe it in.”
Merilyn and I are a lot less naive than Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who visited New York in 1986. Like most outsiders, he wandered among the towers of Manhattan expecting to be overwhelmed by meaning and significance. Instead, he was overwhelmed by absurdity and fakery. His disillusionment reached its peak when he complained to the workers in a bakery that the cinnamon rolls he’d bought there the day before had lost their flavour by the time he got them home. The bakery workers laughed at him. “They explained that the heavenly cinnamon smell that made you long for the sweet rolls the moment you walked into the bakery was actually an artificial fragrance they pumped into the store.”
The “bakery,” it turned out, did not even have an oven on the premises. The rolls hadn’t lost their flavour; they hadn’t had any flavour to begin with. It was fake-’n’-bake. Like this aroma of caramel popcorn, although here there is not a kernel of popcorn to be seen. At least the bakery sold cinnamon rolls.
What astounded Pamuk was not that so much of America was fake but that everyone knew that everything was fake and they loved it anyway. It was like Dorothy finding out at the beginning of the movie that the Wizard of Oz was a little old man behind a screen and going along with the gag for the fun of it. Americans, Pamuk suspected, may even love things because they are fake. The fake Gothicism in New York’s architecture, the fake ice cream in the ads, the fake smiles on the faces of the people in the elevators and on the streets—nobody believed in any of it, but they still wanted it. Why? “Why do they keep smiling at me, why are they always apologizing, why are they so solicitous?”
Pamuk found the whole experience Orwellian. Americans behaved the way they did not because they were happy or sorry or cared about Turkish politics and customs, he said, but because they had collectively agreed to forget “the old philosophical distinction between appearance and reality.” They didn’t want buildings that were featureless and functional—the Soviets had those—or bakeries that smelled of diazinon and blocked drains. Or, apparently, vegetable stalls that smelled like vegetables and fish markets that reeked of fish. They wanted the appearance of civility, of artistry, of benevolence, solicitude, whimsy. For if they had the appearance of them, and if they didn’t make fine distinctions between appearance and reality, then they would have the reality of them, too.
Jonathan Raban found the same thing when he visited New York a year later. In the first part of his book about America, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, he spends considerable time trying to deconstruct Macy’s department store. When it was just a department store, it was going broke, like Gimbels, which finally crumbled during the Reagan years. But when Ed Finkelstein took over its management in 1974 and turned it into a glittering showcase of designer clothing and high-end consumer goods, when Macy’s started marketing fashion and home furnishings instead of clothing and pots and pans, people flocked to see its “emptily fantastic” displays, to marvel at its “elaborate cunning.” Finkelstein, Raban writes, turned Macy’s into a place where “customers were now spectators of an unrolling fantasy about the goings-on of an imaginary haute bourgeoisie.” And they believed in the fantasy. Watching Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with its giant Snoopy and Garfield balloons, Raban comments drily: “Here was America going by.”
Not that Canada is unaffected by the hype. There’s a Macy’s in downtown Seattle, and when Merilyn and I walked through it, expecting to be dazzled by the Christmas displays, what struck us most was that it was exactly like any big department store in Toronto or Vancouver. Ralph Lauren perfume and polo shirts, Jones New York dresses and suitcases, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, saleswomen made up like supermodels, looking less alive than the mannequins. Raban could have gone into any outlet of the Bay or Holt Renfrew in Canada and said with equal accuracy: “Here was America going by.” We have a prime minister, after all, who does not believe there is any such thing as Canadian culture, that there is only some amorphous, conglomerate thing he calls “North American culture.”
But Canada doesn’t seem to have embraced the fakery as thoroughly, as desperately, as the United States. We have retained an attitude of bemusement toward it. If appearance and reality are two sides of the same flipped coin, in Canada we most often call reality. I see this in our respective film industries. Canada makes documentaries—in fact, the word “documentary” was coined by a Canadian filmmaker, John Grierson, ten years before he was hired to start up the National Film Board in 1939. He was writing in the New York Sun, praising the “documentary value” of Robert Flaherty’s 1926 film Moana. Documentary, as he defined it, was the creative interpretation of reality. America had already opted for Hollywood, the Disneyland of the film world. I think the difference between documentaries and feature films goes a long way toward defining the difference between the two cultures. Recently, America has become infatuated with what it calls “reality TV,” but of course there’s nothing real about reality TV: it offers only the appearance of reality. Coke may be the Real Thing, but nobody ever asks what, exactly, is “real” about it.
America’s is essentially an entrepreneurial culture: the sizzle is the steak, because, after all, if you buy the sizzle, the steak comes with it. Canada’s, in contrast, is a primary-producing culture: we’ll buy the steak and hope to get a little sizzle with it. But we know we can’t eat sizzle.
AS MERILYN and I leave the market and walk along 1st Avenue toward our hotel, we pass six Starbucks locations, including the first one, opened thirty years ago—Ground Zero of the North American coffee explosion. I don’t think there is a spot in Seattle where you can’t see at least one Starbucks, often two or three. Even the coffee packets in our hotel room are from Starbucks. Eventually, we come to an interesting-looking restaurant; through the mullioned windows we can see dark wooden booths and mirrors and small rooms with white tablecloths, heavy silver, and art deco lamps. The kind of place that looks like an old Seattle landmark. At last, I think. The real thing.
“Let’s stop for dinner,” Merilyn says, and in we go.
When Merilyn enters a restaurant, it is never a simple matter of being shown to a table. First she asks to see the menu, which she reads with the concentration of a medieval prioress checking a handcopied manuscript for signs of satanic influences. Then she goes on an exhaustive tour of the establishment; she wants to see all the rooms, scrutinize the staff, possibly look into the kitchen, inquire about the ingredients in the sauces. Finally, she selects a table. I follow her around, and the little maîtred ’ trundles behind, holding the menus against her chest defensively. When we’re seated, Merilyn asks her about the specials of the day.
“Your server will be with you shortly,” the maître d’ says, smiling, and then vanishes.
“This is a great place,” I say, looking around. A long mahogany bar runs down one side of the room, with stools and place settings. Behind it scurry waiters in white shirts and ankle-length aprons tied at the waist, very Cafe-du-Nouveau-Monde. “I’ll bet it’s been here for years.” I can already imagine myself telling friends back home and hearing them say, Oh, you went there!
Meanwhile, Merilyn has found the brochure propped between the salt and pepper shakers. “It’s a chain,” she says despondently. “There are eighty of them, all across the States.”
“No.”
“Yup. Started in Portland in 1977.”
“Eighty? But it looks so authentic!”
“It isn’t,” Merilyn says. “It’s all fake.”
But it’s
