"Our Airports, Ourselves"

Sunday, July 11, 2004

UNCHECKED BAGGAGE 
Our Airports, Ourselves
By JOHN LELAND
The New York (NY) Times


IN the recent movie "The Terminal," the character played by Tom Hanks
gets stuck in Kennedy International Airport for nine months, and
discovers what many travelers are increasingly sensing: that airports
have become their own worlds, laboratories for the latest forms of
nourishment, commerce, entertainment, information, romance and fear.

As airport amenities and food courts have expanded, and security
concerns have increased the time people spend in them, terminals have
become more than places for departures, arrivals and lost luggage, yet
remain less than destinations - without local history, tradition,
religion or dialect, but borrowing bits of each of these from the people
coursing through them.

"The Terminal" is just one of several recent byproducts of a culture
that is slowly absorbing the sense that in a post-9/11 world, airports
are neither what they once were, nor fully evolved into a singular
something else. Where airplanes once served as a dramatic or comic
vehicle (the "Airplane" movies; the Harrison Ford thriller "Air Force
One"), the airport itself has become the star. Besides "The Terminal,"
there is the reality television series "Airline," which follows the
strange experiences of Southwest Airlines personnel at Los Angeles
International Airport and Midway Airport in Chicago. A surprise hit on
the A&E channel earlier this year, it began its second season last week.
And Heather Locklear and Blair Underwood will headline a fall NBC series
called "LAX," set in Los Angeles International. It is only fitting that
Ms. Locklear, who once reigned voluptuously over the site-specific
Melrose Place, now governs the nonplace of LAX.

This new interest in the airport as dramatic stage reflects the
convergence of two changes in airports themselves. Since 2001, the
extended security lines, random searches, armed soldiers and
bomb-sniffing dogs have pushed the airport from the anonymous background
of modern travel into the anxious foreground, where we are all both
suspects and potential victims. 

More than that, the airport now sits at the center of a tangle of
American values that have been called into question by the terrorist
attacks and unending war on terror: mobility, anonymity, rootedness,
nationalism, diversity, homogeneity and globalism. 

"I would say we're in an era where there is a distinct airport culture,"
said Pico Iyer, who has written extensively about life inside terminals,
particularly at Los Angeles International. "They represent an image of
the way more and more cities are going. It's a culture of nonculture.
They're places where people from hundreds of countries congregate, not
communicating, thrown together in generic space. I think they're the
postmodern metropolis."

That is to say, functionally points of transition, they have become so
culturally as well. "There's an odd sense of being nowhere," said Mark
C. Taylor, author of "Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World
Without Redemption" and a professor of humanities, religion and
architecture at Williams College and Columbia University. "It's almost
as if they're designed to transport you without a sense of movement." 

You leave one airport, Professor Taylor said, and the one you land in
looks exactly the same, with the same stores, fast food and cable news
on television. He suggested that airports are not separate locations but
nodes in a network of similar terminals, which collectively are crossed
by currents of information, commerce, disease and risk. 

Airports sacrifice a sense of place for a sense of occasion, said Karal
Ann Marling, a professor of popular culture at the University of
Minnesota. "Spielberg did something very smart in 'The Terminal' to
emphasize that the airport is one giant shopping mall," Professor
Marling said. "It's a dodge game we play with ourselves to pretend
airports aren't airports. In that shopping world, it's obvious that the
management is going to take great care of you and nothing evil can
happen to you. It distracts travelers from the possibility that they
will meet bin Laden on the next flight. How can you be afraid when
there's a Gap next to you?"

The sameness of amenities from one airport to the next, which can make
airport space feel so generic, also provides a sense of comfort,
Professor Marling said. "We've all learned to be lulled by name brands
and the familiarity of the mall. It's luxurious and normative all at the
same time."

The current fixation on airports in popular film and television marks a
twist in one of America's central continuing narratives: the romance of
the open road. In a nation of immigrants, without great cathedrals or
local mythologies, the road has been a founding metaphor, a stand-in for
reinvention and discovery. Slaves in the antebellum South built one of
early America's greatest institutions, the black church, around the
Biblical stories of exodus. Emerson began American letters with the
belief that man is great "not in his goals but in his transitions"- a
literary analog to the road. 

The country's first popular culture, the minstrel show, and first
homegrown art form, the blues, both celebrated the footloose traveler.
Mark Twain and Herman Melville invented American literature on the open
waterway, a wet version of the road, and Jack Kerouac and Vladimir
Nabokov continued the tradition a century later. 

Like the road, the airport is a nonplace, something encountered on the
way to going somewhere else, better measured in time - always too long -
than in square feet. Now that it is unsafe to hitchhike, and affordable
to fly, the terminal makes a better canvas for transition or
self-discovery. As such, it is the setting du jour for our narratives of
romance, longing, adventure and intrigue. 

"It's unlegislated territory," Mr. Iyer said. "It's a psychological
limbo that becomes a meeting place of the human and posthuman - people
are meeting loved ones, sending them off to war, meeting for funerals,
all in the midst of a network of Body Shops, Sharper Images and other
stores whose names even speak of displacement."

In a 2001 article titled "Consumer Cities," the Harvard economist Edward
Glaeser wrote that since cities are no longer centers for manufacturing,
their main role is as stages for shopping and entertainment, conflating
the categories of tourists and locals. By this measure, some of the
thriving metropolises of the 21st century are not cities at all: they
are airports. 

Welcome to Mr. Iyer's postmodern metropolis. Your bags - the things that
tie you to your home and your past - will be arriving at the baggage
carousel. Or not at all. 

After all, in the biosphere of the terminal, you don't really need
anything - not even the connections that make you human. For those you
have your carry-on laptop and cellphone: placeless terminals within a
placeless terminal, allowing you to travel the world without leaving the
familiar touch of plastic. 

Attached Photo:

In its vast network of air terminals, America has found a new locale for
tales of romance, intrigue, adventure and woe.

airports_ourselves.jpg