Modernism in the Streets. Marshall Berman
nostalgic vision of the past blinds them to the life that is unfolding abundantly in public spaces all around them right now. If they could only learn to look, they would see private and public life coming together and interfusing in fascinating and creative new ways.
To show briefly what I have in mind, I want to describe a song and an accompanying video that appeared and became a surprise hit in the winter of 1983–84. It is called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” featuring the previously unknown Cyndi Lauper, singing her own version of the song:
Some boys take a beautiful girl
and hide her away from the rest of the world.
I want to be the one to walk in the sun.
And girls just want to have fun. Yes, girls just want to have fun.2
Lauper is a singer and comedian in the mold of Fanny Brice: a flamboyant “personality” whose extravagant mannerisms often disguise the range and expressiveness of her voice; a brilliant clown who has the dramatic power to suggest underlying depth and sadness without breaking the rhythm of the clowning. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is remarkable for the power with which it incarnates a collective dream of what life in public space might be.
This song begins as a story set in a distinctive social space. It is a space that is central in twentieth-century popular culture, but (apart from the music of Bruce Springsteen) almost wholly absent from the popular culture of the 1980s: the tenement flat of the urban ethnic working class. In this space, shot in close-up to emphasize its claustral density and suffocating warmth, Lauper appears as a working girl in conflict with her family, fighting to break out of her parents’ stifling embrace and simultaneously out of the lower class she and they are in: “Oh, mommy dear, we’re not the fortunate ones, / but girls, they want to have fun.” She does this by talking on the phone (her parents vainly try to stop this), and by assembling a racially and ethnically integrated group of girls, who proceed to go dancing and singing through the streets of downtown Brooklyn.
As we follow the song and dance, we discover the distinctively public character of the fun that is at issue here. It springs from banter, flirtation, dress, theatrical display, extravagant gestures, stunning moves that are made to be seen. The heroine and her friends are not only starring in their own show, but—for a little while, at least—become their own auteurs. But it is only in public that such a show can go on. The protagonists must interact with strangers; some will rise to play along with them, or opposite them, while others crystallize into their audience. They must learn to depend on these reactions to give their actions a shared meaning, to incorporate them into public time.
As the girls dance through Brooklyn’s streets, they find themselves suddenly thrust into a gauntlet of construction workers. This is probably one of the primal scenes that the girls’ parents feared. But to our surprise and delight, the workers only smile genially and, even more surprising, some of them actually throw down their tools and join the dance. The parade descends into the underground, then emerges from the IRT in the neighborhood of Wall Street. Here they attract fellow travelers of a higher class, both aged stuffed shirts and yuppies. It appears that everybody can be accepted by this group and integrated into its dance. And now the video, which began as kitchen sink naturalism, metamorphoses into magic realism. These girls are not only transforming their lives, but transforming the life of the street itself, using its structural openness to break down barriers of race and class and age and sex, to bring radically different kinds of people together.
At the climax of the story, the heroine returns, along with her newly constituted popular front, to the tenement and the family that tried in vain to fence her in. She brings the street into the house, the public realm into her private space. Her parents find it horrifying, yet alluring: They are tempted to join their child, go public, and change their own drab lives.
Popular culture is worth paying attention to because of its power to dramatize collective dreams. The dream that gets acted out in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is a dream of bringing together our private and public lives, of uniting the rights of man and the rights of a citizen. By fulfilling the first commandment of liberal individualism—Express Yourself, Have Fun—we can create a beloved community, a community so radiant that even our parents will want to join. Karl Marx would have recognized this utopian vision: He placed it at the visionary climax of the Communist Manifesto, a society in which “the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all.”3
Let me try to approach this point from another direction. I have recently come back from Spain, where I spent several lovely afternoons in one of the world’s most magnificent public spaces, Madrid’s Plaza Mayor. This enormous late-Renaissance square can easily hold a couple of hundred thousand people, yet it feels comfortably contained. It is surrounded on all four sides by colonnaded arcades, and the arcades hold multitudes of shops; above the arcades a towered megastructure extends all the way around, containing a large assortment of municipal and national government offices. The visitor today sees the Plaza Mayor as a marvelously rich human mix, full of government workers, petitioners, buyers and sellers of everything legal and illegal, religious pilgrims, foreign tourists, street musicians, political agitators, performing artists, and ordinary people of Madrid seizing time out to see and be seen in the sun. It is impossible for an American not to be smitten with envy here. This plaza looks and feels like the Platonic idea of all that an open-minded public space should be. Why can’t we have spaces like this at home?
The Plaza Mayor is all that it appears to be. But it is also a lot more. In its splendid openness, it has become something radically different from what it was meant to be. This square, built between 1590 and 1619, was designed as an arena for public spectacles that would dramatize the power and glory of an inquisitorial church and an absolutist state. The plaza’s visual focus was a grand balcony from which the king and queen, along with the princes of the church, could look down. What this place was made for, above all, was the auto-da-fé, a ceremony for torturing and killing people, and terrorizing the populace, with all the splendor that the Spanish baroque imagination could mobilize.
One special feature of these autos sheds some light on our theme of private faces in public places. Among the hundreds of victims condemned in the Plaza Mayor from the early seventeenth through the middle eighteenth centuries, the most prominent and notorious seem to have been Marranos: descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had been forcibly converted after 1492 and who professed orthodox Catholic beliefs but secretly kept up fragments of Jewish law and lore, worship, and community. For more than two centuries, the Spanish church and state worked together obsessively to detect and destroy them.
Autos-da-fé were meant to show how effective the Inquisition could be in tearing these peoples’ masks away, stripping them naked, exposing their most secret selves, so as to annihilate private and public selves together. The Marranos who were present at those ceremonies (to stay away would have been to court instant suspicion) were forced to witness people being publicly destroyed for being what they privately knew themselves to be. In this climate of terror, reticence and insincerity had to be absolute, role-playing a desperate imperative. Even one slip, a slight trace of one’s face beneath the facade, could mean a horrible death.
This grisly scenario may be a useful antidote to the nostalgia that often overcomes Americans in the great spaces of the Old World. It can remind us that public space has a dark and checkered past. These dreadful memories should help us to see how the most expansive public space can contract into a dungeon cell and the most vibrant public life into a trial by ordeal, where people are not free to show themselves as they are. We should be able to see, too, how the liberal individualism that Walzer condemns is essential to the open-minded public space he loves. It is only when people are enjoying the rights of man that they are free to walk in the sun.
The people of Madrid are walking freely in the plaza’s sun today. The breakthrough into the sunlight wasn’t so long ago. Millions of Spaniards were forced to live like Marranos for forty years, all through the Franco regime. It was only at the very end of the regime that the city’s planners were allowed to ban vehicles from the Plaza Mayor and let people take over. After eight years of liberal democracy, the plaza today is full of people who would have been arrested