Once, during the holiday season, I was lost in Garden City, Long Island, and found myself driving around the back regions of the gigantic Roosevelt Field Mall. So, I saw an aspect of the retail trade that customers rarely see. The back of a mall is, in effect, one big loading bay.
I was privileged to observe one step in an almost magical transformation process. Trailer trucks came rolling in every few minutes. They carried plates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and just about everywhere, and they also carried The Holidays in tens of thousands of cardboard boxes. many of which had made an even longer journey from China, the Philippines, or Vietnam. Huge ships laden with thousands of containers converge on our ports every day; the containers are unloaded and piled onto trucks or trains to be warehoused, recorded, and ripped open by workers who have very little resemblance to Santa’s elves.
Eventually, the unpacked objects will arrive on the sales floor, where the
transformation will be completed. Each item will be placed in an attractive display, carefully lit like a prima donna at the opera, and surrounded by the twinkling lights, sparkly decorations, and happy music of the season. It now bears no resemblance whatever to the object that first arrived, with ten thousand others of its kind, in a shipping container. It looks so good that even I might buy it. This is Holiday Magic indeed. A big store is like a Harry Potter movie: nothing is quite what it seems, and magic is the only thing that works.
Back in the 1960s, a distinguished Canadian sociologist called Erving Goffman made a career out of studying what he called the back regions of social life, the things we don’t see and usually prefer not to see. He argued that we live in two different worlds, which can be compared to the front stage and backstage in the theater. The front stage looks and sounds good, like the sales floor of a big store, and everyone performs his or her appropriate role more or less competently. The backstage is a mess, like the loading bay, where everyone acts casually and naturally.
Shakespeare got there four centuries before Professor Goffman when he wrote the famous lines: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” It’s really a rather charming aspect of human nature that we love to put on a show and to accept the shows that other people put on. We all collaborate in pretending not to notice even the most obvious fakery because that’s the deal: you believe in my illusions and I’ll believe in yours. I enjoy this game as much as anybody. This credulity seems to be a specific characteristic of our species. Cats, for example, don't take television seriously. They may glance at the pictures for a moment and even swipe a paw at the screen, but they quickly lose interest. They know it’s not real.
So much of the world we see around us is unreal in one way or another. We give important awards for movies that portray events that never happened and to actors pretending to be people who never existed. Virtually all advertising is pure fiction, and I won’t even mention politics. We obviously want and need our illusions, and, in a curious way, our illusions need us. Between us, we invent the world.
