FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
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| COVER STORY In the early '90s, Douglas Coupland got a phone call from two women with the Peace Action Committee in New York. They wanted to produce a series of short films based on the disaster sequences from Generation X and Life After God to mark the anniversary of Hiroshima. Disaster sequences - images of nuclear holocaust and devastation - were a common theme in Coupland's earlier writing. But Coupland has changed, and it is evident in his latest novel, Girlfriend in a Coma. In it a young woman, Karen, slips into a coma. But here's what indicates the change in Coupland: Karen actually wakes from her coma, albeit 17 years later. Before this Coupland had never been so hopeful. The idea of Coupland changing is not so strange. He's a guy who got a diploma in sculpture from Emily Carr, and just as he was starting to make a living with sculpture, he quit to write for magazines, and left that, just as it was paying off, to write fiction. "Which is like the worst career move you can possibly ever make," he says. "But I did it. "You just do what you've got to do. And if you're always looking for an easy way or a fast way or a quick way, you're just wasting time." Coupland is sitting by the river just down from the salmon hatchery in North Vancouver, a stone's throw from where he grew up and a few miles from the Lion's Gate Bridge, where the old yellow Volkswagen Rabbit he owned in the early '80s would routinely break down. He comes from "a secular, apolitical family," an environment he describes as having been serene. But that environment may have led to Coupland's inability to believe in anything. "When I was 26 I didn't believe in anything beyond 'pick up litter and drive on the right hand side of the road,'" he recalls. So Coupland decided to change, to find something to believe in. Unfortunately, it's not always that easy. "Change is hard. It really is hard. There are so many weird pressures on you." However, he also considers it to be essential. "If you don't make decisions for yourself, other people will, and quite happily, and you end up getting stuck in their drift," he says. "If there's anything to be learned from my life, it's that you might as well do what you want to do." Coupland says he knows people who, if they changed one tiny little thing in their thinking, could change themselves overnight. "And they're going to remain marooned forever," he predicts. "But that's their own thing they've got to figure out." He adds that every person has what it takes to change themselves. "You're not locked in amber." Whatever Coupland did to change his thinking - and himself - it worked. "Now I think that there's something to believe in." Having something to believe in is important, but is not as simple as grabbing the nearest belief system. "I think most people's 'seeing' is blinded by ideology or theology or some sort of -ism," says Coupland. As an example, he talks about the 40-year-old "phenomenon" of Pop Art. "People think Pop Art is just a flash in the pan, and I just want to club them," Coupland says with frustration. "Pop Art is about food and presidents and still-lifes, as they were lived and experienced in this part of the century in this part of the world. And that's quite eternal." So, what does he believe in? "'What' is what I'm working out right now," he says. Another change: after nearly 10 years of dormancy, Coupland's need to sculpt is back. He describes the return to visual work with excitement. "It was a sudden 'I must do something,' so it was a necessary little hibernation, I think." But don't expect a show anytime soon. Coupland is just enjoying the work. "I'm just seeing if I can do something, getting it down pat, then giving it to people who will appreciate it." This visual sense is critical in understanding Coupland's perceptual filter. For him, everything is sculpture first, something else second. "Sculpture, when it works, is supposed to make you rethink your early and on-the-spot relationship with the physical world in some way." Which is why, in a recent article for Wallpaper, Coupland reflects on the '70s and talks about how the jumbo jet, the Boeing 747, shrunk the world, fostered mutual international awareness and democratized air travel. The importance of the jumbo jet is how people, and their lives, changed as a result of it. Something that hasn't changed about Coupland is that he is looked to as a futurist. It seems strange that someone who integrates pop culture from the '70s and '80s so seamlessly into his writing would be consulted as a futurist. "I think in many situations the intelligent way to look at a scenario is to pretend you're a thousand years in the future," he explains. "Given that extreme distance, what about the world as it is right now is going to be amazing or bizarre or eternal to people then?" His ability to document the past - to see particular and peculiar detail - is why he is called upon to look ahead. He's already looking at today through the lens of a time traveller. Coupland drives a Jetta these days, but loves the redesigned Beetle. He just bought one for his mother. "It's one, if not two, generations of automotive and material design ahead of anything else that's on the road right now," he insists. "It really is like a weird concrete chunk of the future that, magically, we have 10 years in advance." Some changes aren't so hard after all. |
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