Extravaganzas, to coin a term, are large collections of people which gather together to celebrate an entertainment or a memorialization, often on a regular basis, and that results in the event getting some historical significance. Extravaganzas include Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where a troupe of entertainers thrilling crowds with what was then the passing of the West, sharpshooters mixed up with real life Indians. Other extravaganzas include NASCAR races that at one time brought more people to their tracks than the professional leagues of baseball and football, and also open air concerts, such as Simon and Garfinkle in Central Park and the folk gathering at Woodstock, New York, and the bicentennial event in 1976 whereby people stood near the Hudson River to see ships assemble, parade and disperse. I was reminded of extravaganzas as a kind of cultural phenomenon, one so different from novels and plays and most tv programs, by watching Oscar night a few nights ago, Hollywood trying to revive the vividness of that occasion when Oscar night, from the Thirties through recently, did seem to make these memorable occasions that had measured out the cultural moments of the year, movies a sign of the collective consciousness of the nation because of what Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer wrought. “The Best Years of Our Lives”, the Best Picture in 1947, showed the Second World War had ended because the film showed how veterans fared. The best Oscar years, to my mind, were those which hosted Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis and ended when Billy Crystal finished his run, though those Oscar extravaganzas have never done very well at presenting best song nominees. Those performances were always lame, perhaps because everyone was too keyed up to transport themselves into the tones offered by a song, while, on the other hand, those who design the sets generally do a good job, as happened this year where its booth like arrangements were similar to the Oscar dinners that preceded television, which adapted the theatrical venue for many years, with stars as the audience sitting in audience seats. What counted, really, on Oscar Night, were the monologue, the dresses, actors sort of being themselves and the thank you acknowledgments, people saying from the heart what they thought should be in their hearts even if, as Jean Hagan says in “Singing In the Rain” that what actors and actors do is bring a little excitement to the otherwise drab lives of those who watch film. The Oscars don’t seem as much of an extravaganza they used to be when films are not part of the general culture or have been fragmented so that highly thought of movies are not the ones who sell the popcorn.
Another extravaganza that seems to have passed though it lasted a long time, a century or so, was the international exposition. Starting out, perhaps, with Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace, every five or ten years or so there was a city which constructed momentous buildings designed largely to be torn down after a year or two of operations, garnering people from all over the world to show off a nation’s wares and spectacles. Moreover, each of them could be characterized for how it was different. The Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 featured Bell’s telephone and the Chicago Exposition in 1893 featured thousands and thousands of lights. (Edison electrifying a section of lower Manhattan ten years before had not been art but engineering.) The overall theme of expositions was the advancement of technology and the imagination of a better future, though that seems to me to have petered out in the World’s Fair in New York in 1920 and 1940, which had an exhibition hall about Tomorrowland, though the dark days of World War II had already begun. There were no expositions on extermination camps though museums to them would be built twenty years later. Maybe what ended expositions was their expense rather than their theme having ended, and that was perhaps replaced by the Summer and Winter Olympics as places where nations could strut their stuff, though those costs have gotten so expensive that perhaps the old idea might be revived for a permanent venue, perhaps in Athens, but that would stultify Olympic nationalism.
The Oscars are like international expositions in that each one of them has its own aura that marks a new atmosphere or event. This year could be said to have marked the emergence of black stardom rather than some particular Black stars like Sidney Poitier or Denzel Washington. It wasn’t just that Will Smith won the award for best actor. It was that so many of the presenters and the stars were black as if Hollywood had become like the NBA, just as fifty years ago Hollywood was dominated by Jewish writers, producers and comedians. Marching on in the United States is a matter of expanding diversity to new ethnicities, just as a little bit has happened for Asians and, this year, the unhearing, while expositions showed, over the course of its iterations, progress in technology (and, in the 1964 reprise of Flushing Meadows in New York City, Belgian waffles). This year, for Oscar Night, Denzel Washington had become the dean of male stars, just as in previous generations Jack Nicholson and Laurence Olivier had been. And the slap held round the world was one Black man hitting another. That event would have been much more disquieting, which no public commentator will admit, if it had been interracial.
Nearly perfect as extravaganzas were the quadrennial Presidential election nights, where there is always the possibility of surprise, going back to when Dewey was thought to have won over Harry Truman, and up to the present, where Joe Biden’s election was less than a landslide, given the qualities of his opponent. There are dramas and commentators and the whole population weighing in on the outcomes which, most spectators think, are important results rather than the replacement of one puppet by another, and this determination announced by the commentators just some hours after the elections have taken place. Only the 2020 election came to be included as legitimate for some waiting for the results of various court challenges, what would have been considered only sore losers trying to interrupt the orderly succession of American power. Neither Richard Nixon or Al Gore had tried to be spoilsports even if claims of illegality were better founded than had been the case with Trump supporters who waited to see how Pennsylvania Courts would deal with election challenges. The show is over when NBC says so and only an inferior showman like Donald Trump would say otherwise. And political conventions, such as that extravaganza in Chicago in 1968, with events live and surprising inside the auditorium and demonstrators and cops outside in the midst of tear gas, the students chanting truly that the whole world was watching, ended because political candidates had by the time of the conventions had settled their differences and so those events were just infomercials for the respective party candidates. Oh, for the good old days.
The extravaganza as a thing in itself requires broadening the categories of literature beyond the standardized forms of drama, epic, lyric poetry, history and the later one of the novel, these long ago setting up a relationship between artist, work and audience, all subject to commentary and other forms of criticism, and include such a form as the extravaganza, just as there is also film and television, and there is, as my teacher moses Hadas said, letters and cook books, each works of art because they are crafted so as to convey information and emotion and more or less story so as to manage the tone which is the emotion that informs its characteristic one, like comedy and tragedy, and texture, which are all the intersecting assumptions that authors adopt to be the human condition that is present in a work. Extravaganzas do not liberate people from story, because there is a progress in expositions, and there is drama in baseball games, but they are liberated from thee proscenium arch or else the frame of a painting so as to be engulfed within an experience happening more or less live, every spectator a reporter of what has been seen rather than just a critic who judges what has been seen. New ways to think about extravaganzas are needed as there are new things to imagine about novels and television shows. The tone of the Oscars is celebration and its texture is, among other things, how to accomplish an achievement against great odds and also remain humble. The tone of Woodstock was liberation and the texture were the ways to be free: in music, in sex, in politics, in being covered with dirt..
And there is another not quite totally accomplished kind of extravaganza that is to be indeed to the list. That is many battles in wartime. The D-Day landing was an extravaganza It was an assembly of great devices, some commissioned for this battle and largely not to be done again, such as immersible tanks and air gliders and parachutists, and also using airplanes and destroyers and tanks of the vintage, to be commanded by hundreds of thousands of people to wage and die for their war so as to provide a pivotal event in a major war. It shows why war is so impressive and attractive even if so horrible: because events unfold in real time of dramatic actions where there are always surprises, such as whether the Germans will be surprised at where the Allies invaded, or whether German resources could stop the Allies from making any headway on the beaches, or whether, what seems to have ensued, that off-shore naval artillery would be decisive in the battle. That long morning decided the fate of civilizations.
But where is the audience to encompass it, which is what makes a defining characteristic for extravaganzas? There are an awful lot of participants but few spectators. As a matter of fact, there are sufficient spectators, in the coverage by correspondents and film cameramen, to record and convey readily enough to the populations at large what is happening in the battle and so memorialized for all those who read the newspapers and news reels at the time and for afterwards. We still see the Brits leaving their landing craft to storm a French beach town that I visited fifty years later. The same is true with other set pieces of war. Guadelcanal was covered by war correspondents that gave detail to the Americans and the world reported to them. The same was true of Bastogne and the liberation of Paris. It was even true of Dien Bien Phu, a French defense perimeter settled within the hills in northern Vietnam that surrounded it and that enclave was continually attacked and slowly reduced but remained long enough that film and written reports were flown out to tell the tale for as long as it lasted, including the nurse who tended to the wounded, the angel of Dien Bien Phu, who emblemized the sacrifice, as were the two nurse-angels in Bastogne, one of whom survived. Those battles were extravaganzas.
It is not to disparage the Ukrainian mi;itary response to Russian aggression to say that the war waged over the last month is not an extravaganza. There are film reports of destroyed residences and displaced persons and fleeting images of Ukraine troops carrying hand propelled missiles. But there is not enough for the world audience to see to make the war an extravaganza. Perhaps to retain military secrecy, there are no Americans or Europeans or Ukrainians embedded with the Ukraine troops so as to see the battle action, and the Russians are only haphazardly and inadvertently admitting how badly they are going, though that war for them could make a great Russian novel. It was very different in what was called “The Living Room War” when films made in Vietnam were broadcast on television forty eight hours later and recorded and were shown, among other things, a United States army platoon that refused to move forward because it didn’t trust its lieutenant to officer them properly. The Vietnam War, including the debacle at Tet and the evacuation from Saigon, were extravaganzas, great moments in war including both victories and defeats.