Bad ship’s decor, postmodernism and “A Night at the Museum”

  • This will be my fifth cruise, and so I’m used to the fact that you spend the first cou­ple days get­ting lost. I counted it as a vic­tory today when I found the gym. I had fol­lowed the signs but always ended up in the wrong place. Today when I finally broke down and asked, I was directed through the salon and into a hall­way cov­ered with draw­ings of Greek art — gods and god­desses in that orange line draw­ing, black back­ground style taken from ancient pottery.

    Oh, of course. We’re doing the ancient world, because we haven’t cov­ered that yet.

    I started notic­ing yes­ter­day that the decor on the ship is … well, eclec­tic would be the kind way to say it. “Busy”, “messy” or “chrono­log­i­cally insane” would be the unkind way.

    The main look is Art Nou­veau (think Paris poster art like THIS ) — lots of swirly lines, twin­ing vines and leaves carved every­where, stained glass win­dows, elastic-looking pat­terns worked busily into the car­pets and wallpaper.

    But then, the big the­ater is the Pharaoh lounge, with gigan­tic King Tut sar­cophagi star­ing blandly out at you from the walls. I was still try­ing to give the ship’s dec­o­ra­tors credit. Though Tut’s tomb wasn’t dis­cov­ered until after Art Nou­veau was over, they do sort of go together.
    But then, how to explain the Napoleon room, or the medieval cas­tle theme in the bingo par­lor, or the Shang­hai bar? How to explain the sound­track that goes from the Moon­light Sonata to the theme from the X-files to the Bea­t­les singing “Please Please Me”?

    The whole ship is like a post-modernist’s doc­tor­ate the­ory. The pomo crowd love to mix and match entire cul­tures. But shouldn’t there be a limit?

    carnival-pomo-wallpaper.jpg

    As I walk past the Impres­sion­ist land­scapes, totem poles and Renais­sance love scenes all jum­bled together, I sud­denly real­ize what it reminds me of.

    This is like “Night at the Museum”.

    Greg and I watched this movie recently. It’s a doofy Ben Stiller vehi­cle in which he plays a lov­able loser (is there any other kind?) who takes a job as a night watch­man at a nat­ural his­tory museum only to find that after dark, all the exhibits start com­ing to life. From dinosaur skele­tons to Old West dio­ra­mas to caved­wellers to Lewis and Clark, once the sun goes down, they all start mov­ing around, want­ing to fin­ish out the life that’s been frozen on dis­play all day. And of course, because it’s a Ben Stiller movie, that usu­ally means attack­ing him either phys­i­cally or ver­bally. He gets chased by the Tyran­nosaurus, teased by an Easter Island head and shot at by Romans and cow­boys. He also forges a friend­ship with Theodore Roo­sevelt, whose good advice and upbeat atti­tude help him to make progress mend­ing his rela­tion­ship with his son at the same time as Stiller is help­ing Teddy light a roman­tic flame with Sacagawea.

    Yep, the movie is that dumb.

    But the scenes where all hell breaks loose in the museum kept com­ing back to me. It’s not just that they’re the best funny parts (maybe the only funny parts). It’s also that you sud­denly feel like they’re talk­ing about a dilemma that comes from our shared experience.

    Right now, all of us are sit­ting here with however-many cen­turies of recorded his­tory behind us. We’ve picked and cho­sen our favorite bits and exam­ined them to death. We’ve rehashed empires and bat­tles and cat­a­stro­phes until they’ve become clichees to us. And they all get mixed up. After a while the cen­turies that sep­a­rated the Alexan­der the Great and Julius Cae­sar melt away, just another casu­alty of an over­load of infor­ma­tion and deficit of education.

    And maybe that’s a good thing(?) We used to be taught things in chrono­log­i­cal order, which is good, but it had a way of mak­ing the events of the past seem like they hap­pened to androids. Maybe we’re bet­ter off now that knights in armor, cave­men and pio­neers all play together in our head.

    Except they don’t play. They compete.

    It’s a bit of a cri­sis we’re work­ing out as a soci­ety. Our cul­ture — both high (art, sculp­ture) and low (TV, adver­tis­ing) — are out of ideas. We’d keep plun­der­ing the past as we have been doing for some time, but even that is get­ting old. (How many comic books and old sit­coms can they pos­si­bly find to make movies about?)

    carnival-napoleon.jpgAnd any­way, those looks and tastes from the past had ideas behind them. You can cer­tainly try to keep Napoleon out of the Napoleon room and just go for French pas­tries and empire waist­lines, but even­tu­ally he’ll start to show up (per­haps even as a gaudy and bizarre sculp­ture where he’s being crowned by a god­dess. That’s what the clever Car­ni­val peo­ple decided to put dead cen­ter in this din­ing room). And when he does, you’ll start to have to answer an inescapable ques­tion: “Who’s right and who’s wrong?” Was Napoleon right to try to recap­ture ter­ri­tory and make France into a great coun­try? Was he wrong to do bat­tle with Eng­land, Spain and Rus­sia and be a con­queror? Was his idea a good idea?

    If it was, then were Eng­land, Spain and Rus­sia wrong to defend them­selves? Just like at Stiller’s museum, the ideas will start to fight each other. It might be amus­ing for us to see the inhab­i­tants of these dif­fer­ent worlds just can­non­ing around goofily, but in truth they’d all fight each other.

    Who was right? Which one deserves a prime spot in our con­scios­ness? Do you want dinosaurs to roam the earth or Romans? Every­one? No one?

    Which way do we go from here? I don’t think any­one really knows. And like the decor on this cruise ship, try­ing to stall by just includ­ing every­one ends up look­ing dis­or­ga­nized, noisy and down­right weird.

    It’s a bad time to be an inte­rior dec­o­ra­tor for a cruise line. It’s a worse time for those of us who want sim­ple answers.


    Related posts:

    1. A splen­did exhibit at the Getty Museum
    2. Am I hav­ing a bad day or am I just repentant?
    3. The lit­tle nat­u­ral­ist who cried “Whale!”
    4. BTW, my boat’s not on fire
    5. Do you want to cruise or not?

    May 31st, 2007 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Cather­ine K. 05.31.2007

    Wow — I think the cacoph­ony of com­pet­ing decor through­out the ship would just give me a headache. You ask a very good ques­tion, and time will tell what the answer is for, as you point out, it won’t be simple.

  • Grace

    Yep, the decor has been keep­ing me hop­ping, try­ing to see if I can think of any look that they’re leav­ing out. Mace­don­ian, maybe?

    And the sur­pris­ing thing is how much of it is really badly done. Because it’s not out of cheap­ness — I have a feel­ing they paid top dol­lar for all this. But the orig­i­nal paint­ings are about at the skill level of a county fair sub­mis­sion, and the clas­sic art is so poorly repro­duced that they’re muddy and unin­tel­li­gi­ble. And, if you know the dig­i­tal image lingo, they’re often pixel­lated and badly anti-aliased.

  • Greg

    It’s your sixth cruise. Ahem. :)

  • Grace

    Well, son of a gun. It’s just hard to imag­ine that a woman of my ten­der years has man­aged to do so much!

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