The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium

Bruce Sterling

Given its utterly bizarre terrain, this is a very lucid book.I can only imagine the effect of these essays on, say, some bright but sheltered seventeen-year-old male Southern Baptist. It would likely cause the kid's skull to spontaneously rupture.The book is also extremely funny.Mark Dery has a hammerlock on the zeitgeist. He may be the best cultural critic alive. -- Bookforum

Greg Burkman

Dery's book of essays lives up to its title. It consists of acrimoniously delightful, carefully studied scrutinies of current extreme behaviors, running the gamut of social phenomena, from the genuinely strange to the full-tilt insane.However, instead of succumbing to the temptation of depending merely on the freak-show shock value of material like this, Dery relies on his own visceral insight to explain these seeming aberrations as symptoms of a transnational, global economy come unglued.In wry, fresh, deadly lucid prose, Dery argues that this roiling pressure is bursting the 'monolithic orthodoxies' of culture, producing a ticking time-bomb. -- Seattle Times

David Hudson

Mark Dery begins his idiosyncratic overview of contemporary American culture with a 40-page overture, an exhilarating, dissonant ride that jostles between the end of the previous century and the end of this one. Then, before going on, he pauses for a moment to offer "A User's Guide to The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium": "Readers expecting point-by-point exposition and the methodical accumulation of evidence, building to a full-throated peroration in which every loose end is tied up and every hidden truth revealed, are advised to abandon hope before entering."

Some might suspect that this caveat is little more than a handy excuse for having slipped an uneven collection between hard covers. After all, the material — which whiplashes from dissections of infomercials and daytime talk shows to meticulous examinations of our fear of clowns and freaks, excrement and corpses to tirades against the International Monetary Fund, multinational corporations and the Wired digerati — has nearly all appeared previously, in Suck, the Village Voice and a few other publications.

But there are more connections and more cohesiveness here than immediately meet the eye. Cutting and pasting together his portrait of America at the end of the millennium, Dery, one of our most astute contemporary cultural critics, has found a 19th century antagonist in critic James Huneker 1860-1921. When the lights of Coney Island fired up in the waning days of the 1800s, Huneker was horrified by the fun-house mob that thronged the amusement park to collectively let its hair down: "What a sight the poor make in the moonlight!"

What a sight, indeed. And America's greatest mistake at the end of the 20th century, Dery argues, has been to invent ever more efficient ways of looking away — not just from the disenfranchised who have been locked out of hyperclean gated communities but also from the flesh of our own all too mortal bodies. For Dery, that old standby the mind-body problem lies at the root of a vast set of dangerous dichotomies. His previous book, Escape Velocity, was also built around the trouble this ancient puzzler gives us, and he did a bang-up job there of pinpointing the folly in cyberculture's attempts to solve it by dropping the body half of the equation altogether.

But while The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is shorter by a third, it's somehow both a bigger and a lighter read. Here Dery escapes the claustrophobic confines of pure cyberculture and allows his sharp eye to wander over vaster territory — and wherever he turns, he sees signs of a rumbling revolt of the repressed. A cinematic parallel might be David Lynch's Blue Velvet, which Dery mentions more than a few times. With the exception of a short chapter on Celebration Disney's disturbingly successful experiment in corporate-sponsored community, he wastes little time strolling through white-picket-fence America and instead dives straight down to that severed ear nestled in the suburban lawn. Dery relishes his role as curator of America's bulging cabinet of horrors, carefully selecting an item at a time — a grotesque formaldehyde photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, the "cometlike white swooshes" on the Nikes worn by the Heaven's Gate cultists — turning it, poking it and then dressing it up with footnoted snippets of all the most interesting things that have ever been said about it.

The title itself is snipped from a 19th century description but not by Huneker of Coney Island, and Dery clearly revels in the carnival our culture has become. For all the fun to be had here, though, his warning of the dire consequences we face if we turn our eyes away from what's before us — if we trade in Coney Island for Disneyland — comes through loud and clear.
— Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Centering his critique of the contemporary pop cultural landscape around the title image, borrowed from a sobriquet once applied to Coney Island, Dery sees "a giddy whirl of euphoric horror where cartoon and nightmare melt into one." He can be an astute observer of trends, adept at connecting seemingly disparate phenomena. The best essays here focus on our obsessions with conspiracy and paranoia, the new grotesque aesthetic in the arts and the changing dynamics of technophilia and technophobia in the new computer age. Unfortunately, the book is padded with writing on minor topics. Dery shifts focus rather too quickly — one has the sense that he is throwing ideas at a wall ostensibly to see what sticks, but really hoping to distract attention from the results through the speed of his performance. And, too often, he filters his subject matter through suppositions plucked from high theory without examining the ideas he's borrowing, perhaps least successfully in his deployment of Georges Bataille to unravel the cultural import of Jim Carrey. Some inconsistencies stick out: at one point, he characterizes deconstruction as a "vogue," barely above the level of a conspiracy theory; at another, he concludes his analysis of freaks as culturally "other" with one of the hoariest of deconstructionist chestnuts, the condemnation of binary oppositions. Such jargon limits his writing, and makes the book feel dated, as his reliance on interpretive strategies left over from the '70s (particularly from French thought: Kristeva's abject, Baudrillard's postmodern, Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic) is stale even by the standards of academe.

Michiko Kakutani

...[A]ll of America, Mr. Dery suggests, has become a "pyrotechnic insanitarium," a madhouse reeling from technolocial change and moral disequilibrium, a hall of mirrors in which it is increasingly difficult to separate reality from virtual reality, a world in which even nature seems out of joint.
— The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

A thin collection of broadly informed but curiously uninspired millennial musings. The danger inherent in cultural criticism, especially in an era whose sprawling, polyvalent culture seems to be transmuting ever faster, is that you mistake the fad for the trend, the incidental for the monumental. And while Dery (Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century) seems to know the price of everything, he is a lot shakier on the true value. In this collection of essays, most of which have appeared previously in a variety of zines and webzines, he delves into such ephemera as Jim Carrey, the Heaven's Gate cultists, and the Home Shopping Network, seeking profundity but usually coming up short. Though he is good at sounding dull warnings about the hazards of consumerism, media culture, the World Wide Web, global capitalism, etc., he is remarkably unprescriptive. His usual style is to amass a clever bricolage of facts, figures, and relevant quotes, weave them expertly together, then wrap up with, at best, an original thought or two. Dery is most noticeable in the slightly shopworn theme that draws the essays together: "the pyrotechnic insanitarium of '90s America, a giddy whirl of euphoric horror where cartoon and nightmare melt into one." Dery does have an agenda (a rather doctrinaire blend of post-Marxism and post-New-Leftism) - if only he had an angle. He is an intelligent observer and has read and watched widely. His first essay, comparing our millennial situation to the massive social changes inaugurated and furthered by the opening of Coney Island (the century's original "pyrotechnic insanitarium"), is probably his most successful, perhaps because he is able totranscend mere clever collage. As firework shows go a few sparklers and lots of duds.