There is a performative contradiction at the very heart of the American psyche. It functions best when not examined. If it’s ever brought to consciousness, it’s usually because it’s either not working or suddenly stops working for you. Once seen, the contradiction can drive you insane.
Here’s a common example. A star athlete of a high school has unconsciously absorbed, through his classmates and American media, the need for him to be casual and cool about his status. He wears the letterman jacket, because it was given to him, but otherwise he’s James Dean. He doesn’t care.
When he goes to college, though, he continues to wear the letterman jacket, assuming, unconsciously, that it’ll confer the same status on him as it did in high school. Here, though, he’s bullied for wearing the jacket. With that, he’s given an impossible choice: Keep wearing the jacket, demonstrating that he still doesn’t care what people think of him and yet still hoping this will make them think well of him. People will continue to think badly of him. Or take the jacket off because he cares what people think of him, thus losing his ability to not care what people think of him, making him effectively uncool. People will continue to think badly of him. Either way now, he can’t escape. Whatever he does, he is consciously doing it because of what people think of him.
That, in essence, is what it means to be an American, summed up in this one paradoxical sentence: be cool, and don’t worry what people think of you, and people will think highly of you. Built into the sentiment is both the notion that it matters what people think of you, and also that it does not matter what people think of you.
Once you’re aware of this contradiction, you will start to see it everywhere.
Historically, it began with unnatural abruptness. It’s easy to see this abruptness visually, if you go looking for it. Type in “common menswear in the 1940s” and you’ll see someone that looks like Jimmy Stewart. Same goes for the 30s, 20s, and 10s. Then type in “common menswear in the 1950s” onward, and you’ll suddenly see guys looking like James Dean, undershirts and cigarettes in the sleeve. The ragtag and rebellious Americans won the war. Now our idea of coolness, for the most part, has become the ideal of the entire world.
Before that, the ideal was more something you could probably describe as elegance. It was a given that we owed something to the public sphere. Instead of denying that we cared what people thought of us, caring what people thought of us was the central thing about life. You weren’t allowed to dress or act certain ways in church, home, with mixed company. To not know these delicate mores was to be considered a brute, low class, inelegant.
In fact, you can feel the stitching of this seam, nearly the exact moment of the transition, in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, where the depiction of Stanley Kowalski’s brutishness and inelegance is frightening and violent, but sexually charged, extremely attractive, especially because it was played by Marlon Brando, and the emerging ideal of cool. Blanche, on the other hand, was an avatar of the collapsing aristocracy of elegance.
As an aside, the reason Southern literature had such an international moment around the times of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy is because Southerners had been feeling this collapse of their aristocratic class a hundred years before it was codified into the world consciousness after World War II.
Blanche is a member of this crumbling Southern aristocracy. Her phoniness, costume elegance, and concern for her untoward behavior is to keep the whole charade afloat. She secretly becomes a prostitute to pay upkeep for her family’s dynasty plantation for a little longer. It literally drives her insane.
These days, there’s a subset of people who are extremely nostalgic for the age of elegance. There is some good reason for this, most notably because elegance at its core doesn’t contain the same performative contradiction. It’s honest with itself that it certainly does care what people think of it. However, it’s very easy to be nostalgic for something that you no longer have to live with day to day. The great difficulty with elegance culture was the pressure to keep up appearances, even when things were going very wrong. It was so great that people were prone to phoniness, lying, fits of hysteria. In fact, this is what was so well depicted in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s novels: what happens to people who fall from grace and try to keep up appearances until they are deemed insane and forcibly removed from the elegant classes.
If I’m being completely honest with myself, being an American to my core, I would instantly fold under the pressure of keeping up appearances. In practice, I much prefer the performative contradiction of coolness, even though I have, like almost every American, struggled with it many times in my life.
As a person whose habit is to bring unconscious things to consciousness, coolness was always very difficult for me to figure out. When a new trend would hit, and all the seemingly and supposedly blase cool guys and gals would immediately participate in that trend, I was always confused by that, wondering, sometimes aloud, hey, aren’t you guys supposed to be the ones who don’t care? So why do you care about trends? Of course, as I said in the beginning, making this contradiction conscious makes it painful, and so people, especially cool people, hate to be made aware of it. If you’re, say, in high school, you’ll get bullied for trying.
Only now do I realize that there’s no solving it. I don’t have a better answer. You can’t think your way into coolness. You have to somehow trick yourself into sinking below the level of awareness of it.
Now, some people, I can feel, will say, no, the trick is that you just don’t need to care about what people think of you. This is the most common piece of American advice, and a total delusion. You can’t not care about what people think of you. In fact, saying “you shouldn’t care what people think of you” is an unconscious bid for the person listening to you to think that you are the sort of person that doesn’t care what people think of them, and is therefore cool. Which is why it’s bad advice: it’s not really about the person you’re giving advice to. It’s about the coolness of the advice giver.
