My final day at the [Disneyland] magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contradiction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at a photo of an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and I was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera directly at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the photo’s breathtakingly romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful.
[Steve Martin, Born Standing Up]
I am well familiar with this notion of nostalgia for the present, and was struck by this sweet, frank passage in Steve Martin’s memoir. It is particularly interesting to take this phrase, maybe strip it from Martin’s context, and pair it with the Arbus photograph. Disneyland is so much about a nostalgia for simple storybook ideals, but not for those in actual storybooks — instead, for the contemporary “Disneyfied” retellings. Even if eliminating a cynical view of the appropriating and commercialized Disney universe, it clearly often relies on the cultivation of a fictionalized nostalgia.
So I guess it is very striking and, well, heartbreakingly nostalgic to see that Martin is speaking of a very different twist on the concept; a Disneyland that is real and buried into his own childhood experiences, in three dimensions. I get a little uncomfortable with the very near schmaltziness of the last line there, but I do not doubt his sincerity nor disagree with his sentiment.
[Photograph by Diane Arbus via Native Intelligence]