Bruce Bégout, Los Angeles, capitale du XXe siècle (2019)
Can the European mind comprehend Southern California's vast "non-entité urbanoïde"?
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, one genre of occasionally viral post involves images or videos of American phenomena that “the European mind cannot comprehend.” Recent examples turned up in a search include a morbidly obese old-west cosplayer winning some kind of contest at a shooting range; a man using a flamethrower to clear snow off his driveway; an alligator attempting to climb into a boat only to be slapped off by its pilot, and photographs of the interior of a Buc-ee’s, a chain of enormous just-off-the-freeway convenience stores now spreading outward from Texas. Despite being American myself, I’ve never seen any of those sights in person, though I do hope my next visit to the U.S. includes a stop at a Buc-ee’s. My interest was piqued in part by an enthusiastic post about it on Lost in the USA, a blog by a French couple who’ve traveled my native land much more extensively than I ever will.
Though Americans are notorious for their unwillingness to learn to learn foreign languages, even the most travel-resistant could benefit from doing so in order to attain a fuller view of their homeland. That view would encompass not just criticisms made from afar, but also praise for the qualities of life in the U.S. that they take for granted, or at least find difficult to perceive due to their sheer normality. Some Texans may seize any excuse to pull into a Buc-ee’s, but how often do they stop to consider what its existence says about the nature of American civilization? That line of thinking, I admit, probably occurs much more readily to the European mind in general, and the French mind in particular. It certainly does to that of the philosopher Bruce Bégout, a specialist in phenomenology who’s also written books on airports, the American motel, the hyperrealist sculptor of the lumpenproletariat Duane Hanson, and Las Vegas. When I came across his most recent book on a specifically American subject Los Angeles, capitale du XXe siècle at the Centre Pompidou bookstore, its appeal to my sense of incongruity proved too strong to resist.