Michael Sorkin
on New Year’s Eve in Times Square, 1999
originally published on December 26, 1999 in The New York Times:
We’ve been hearing for years that Times Square is becoming a theme park, and so it is. But the million and a half revelers who gather there on New Year’s Eve may have some difficulty, as I have, discerning exactly the theme. When a million and a half cameras flash at midnight, what will they be photographing beyond a million and a half other flashes?
A few weeks ago, I was walking by the building where J.F.K. Jr. used to live — 50-plus blocks south of Times Square — when I noticed that a tourist in the usual knot photographing the place was carrying an ”NBC Experience” plastic bag. As coincidence had it, I had actually experienced the ”Experience” (which is the NBC store, not far from Times Square) the previous day, and it had perplexed me. Why, I wondered, surveying the knickknacks, would someone want to buy an MSNBC baseball cap? Out of solidarity with the giant corporation? As a gesture of affection toward the cute Brian Williams?
Seeing the tourist completed some circuit. I realized that she was having a TV news moment. Caught up in the NBC loop, she was performing a tiny re-enactment of the big media routine, authorized by the logo to intrude on the scenes of celebrity and grief like a real reporter. The Experience, I realized, was no mere souvenir store but the setup for this. Dominating the shop, monitors endlessly showed a clip of the Zapruder film segueing over and over into the ”I have a dream” speech. It was all an advertisement for ”news,” newszak. The news was the word from our sponsor, NBC, and that repeated image of the presidential assassination gave value to those stacks of ”Today Show” mugs and vice versa. This was the purpose of the place: branding everything, including experience.
For this to work best, both the site of experience and the experiencer must carry the brand. Think of the teenager in the Tommy T-shirt or the tourist in the MSNBC baseball cap. A deal has been cut here. By agreeing to bear the brand, we express our willingness to surrender our identities and be seen as . . . advertising. This provides a thrill, of sorts. It is the closest we get to being like real celebrities, who are recognizable enough to be their own brands, logos for themselves. Real celebrity implies even more generous license to stare, to admire something beyond purchase. And it’s irresitible, reflexive. Last week, I had a Gwyneth moment. Before I knew what I was doing, I turned in my tracks to gawk, trapped.
Times Square has become the epicenter, a universal photo-op, pure celebrity. Celebrity thrives on branding, and branding is the theme of the new Times Square. In our media age, brands are no longer static, optic things, but are transmitted by all available means — flashing lights, skyscrapers, coffee mugs, T-shirts, TV shows, magazines, postcards, ashtrays, margarita glasses, plastic bags, you name it. Times Square — one of the few places in America where the zoning laws oblige every building to advertise as intensely as possible — has become Brandland, U.S.A.
No coincidence that among the sprouting skyscrapers of the new Times Square, media headquarters dominate, from Reuters to Bertelsmann to Conde Nast to the eponymic ex-HQ of The Times itself. (Note to out-of-towners: the skinny building at the south end of the square, on which the balls drops, was originally the home of The Times, though it has been long gutted of inhabitants, flayed of its skin and reclad as pure pixel-ated advertising space.) And now throughout the area, all the networks (and MTV) have fishbowl-style broadcast environments — stationary Popemobiles — for their morning shows, the lead disassemblers of the news-entertainment distinction. Hungry crowds form fascinated backdrops. Standing with homemade signs, they become little billboards among the big, craning to be viewed (like those football fans with their crudely logoed network banners the cameras always find in the stands).
Still, there’s a whiff of the old Times Square: those studios are a lot like traditional peep shows. The object is still to be safely part of something unattainable, whether it’s a naked woman’s attentions or a chat with Diane Sawyer and Bill Bradley. The electronic entertainment offered in Times Square is much the same. Visiting the ESPN Zone (not a sporting-goods store but a sports-themed experience), playing solipsistic soccer (kick the tethered ball; miss to the taunts of the animated goalie on the screen), I felt like just another lonely guy peeping through the glass. Of course, it has been ”cleaned up” for a G rating: the louche quality of the banished sex industry has been replaced by less controversial forms of pornography and voyeurism: 100 yards of Kate Moss in her Calvins, the porno violence of video games, the chance to glimpse Anna Wintour heading out for her daily bunless burger at lunch.
The apotheosis will come at midnight on New Year’s Eve, when 1.5 million press their noses against the glass of the Y2K. They will be watching television, all eyes focused on the state-of-the-art, 24-ton Astrovision screen that has been glued to the north face of the Times Tower (and which is currently blasting NBC product 18 hours a day). As the man from the manufacturer puts it, ”It’s an opportunity for Panasonic to have our brand name in the middle of the crossroads of the world at one of the biggest moments in history.” No hyperbole, this. Fifteen cameras placed around the square will feed the screen images of the crowd, enabling it to watch itself watching itself along with another billion or so souls around the globe watching it watching itself and watching themselves watching it, unpaid extras in the spectacle of their own amusement, hoping simply to be seen.