come loose and fly out in a high and familiar arc, and in some infinite and secret place she flies away with him.” His time is up.
And over the piano playing the blues, echo the words that aren’t there — his Pa’s voice shouting, “Swim you little son of a bitch. Swim or drown.” And maybe that sums up who we are as a society. Except for one crucial irony, which is that in truth just swimming isn’t enough.
Dugout is about working-class Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans who awaken in the twilight of their youth halfway across the river, realizing that the mirage on the horizon where the trophies and the bright lights are will never get any closer. It is about people caught in the current and carried downstream with only their memories to keep them afloat.
The America of Dugout is still here in the struggles, dreams, and disappointments of the people portrayed with compassion and honesty in Allen’s stories. But they have now become fodder for the demagogues who are systematically shredding the very fabric of our democracy in the dark hours of Trump’s America. This is not the movie we want to make.
The Life and Times of Lin Hixson: The LA Years (1991)
Lin Hixson’s personal history reads like fiction, movie fiction, a montage of American dreams and nightmares, from The Magnificent Ambersons to The Deer Hunter. She spent her childhood in a fifty-room Tudor-style mansion with three-and-a-half acres and an orchard in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, where two decades later they made Ordinary People. Every 4th of July hundreds of people came to her family’s catered parties, played polo and croquet on the lawns, and watched movies in their basement screening room. Her father, Henry Haley Hixson, Jr., was a second-generation coffee importer who had a revolving oak desk and a brass spittoon in his office. Her mother was a beautiful paranoid schizophrenic who was periodically confined in a country club sanitarium. Hixson was really brought up by Mary Dean, a black woman from the South who was a nutritionist and whose husband, Dean Dean, worked at the coffee plant.
In 1961 John F. Kennedy was inaugurated and Hixson turned the corner into adolescence. Her parents divorced and her father remarried. The year of the Cuban missile crisis, an unfortunate deal involving the government, left her father bankrupt and they had to move to an eight-room house. The following year (1963), America watched as Kennedy was assassinated and his alleged killer Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot point-blank by Jack Ruby on TV. Hixson was fourteen that year, the same year her mother, who lived alone in a cabin in Lake Bluff, put a pistol in her mouth and shot herself. She succeeded in blotting out her mind, but failed to kill herself, surviving for another ten years in a state institution. Five years later, in an America torn asunder by the Vietnam War, Hixson’s adored father died of stomach cancer. In 1969, at the end of her sophomore year at Wittenberg College in Ohio, Lin Hixson, the former high school cheerleader and homecoming queen, married a recently returned Vietnam veteran.
Fugitives on the run from the past, Hixson and her husband moved twelve times during the next seven years, leaving no tracks as they went from Ohio to Colorado, Mexico, New Mexico, and Oregon, where they lived barricaded in a lighthouse for a short time. But bolted doors and drawn window shades do not keep out ghosts. Quite the opposite. They keep them close. One morning, Hixson, who had managed to graduate from the University of Oregon despite the constraints of her troubled marriage, packed a suitcase and left. (The image of someone carrying a suitcase appears over and over in her early work.) In 1977 Hixson, the political science major who once wanted to be a dancer, arrived in Los Angeles to become an artist. She left her history in the closet like old clothes, and came to LA.
People used to say that LA was a place that had no history, a place without a past, as if it had been invented by Hollywood. A fallacy, of course. What they really meant is that Los Angeles is a place with no memory. It erases itself every day. It lives in a state of perpetual present. Like TV. It’s where you come to start over, where you can invent yourself anew. This is the lure of LA. This is the myth. But beneath LA’s ever-present “newness” is a hidden, unspoken sense of loss. Hollywood’s fictions have been at the heart of Lin Hixson’s work over the past decade.
No one, except perhaps Rachel Rosenthal, has had a greater influence than Hixson on the direction LA performance art took in the 1980s. Hixson became the person around whom a new scene coalesced, not because she chose to lead but because she intuitively understood LA and its myths as the state of mind of her own generation. Born in 1949, Hixson is part of the “baby boomer” generation, the children of the Cold War, from Korea to the onset of Vietnam, the first children to be born into and grow up in the world of television and the Bomb. Most telling is this quote from a 1984 interview in which Hixson stated: “I think my work is very American in that it doesn’t feel like it has a history other than a pop history”1 What she really was saying was that white Americans of her generation and younger have no sense of a cultural history other than media culture.
Though she shares with her art-world colleagues a sensibility shaped by media culture, Hixson uses that material differently. Unlike so much of the work of the 1980s, which was based on postmodern and poststructuralist theories, Hixson’s performance pieces were neither critical analyses nor tongue-in-cheek parodies of media clichés. Hixson’s work never fit comfortably into the 1980s deconstructive cubbyhole. In the light of 1990s multiculturalism, Hixson’s approach to media culture takes on an entirely different meaning. It can best be understood as the cultural autobiography of a white American of the TV generation. Her imagery inevitably confronts the mythologies of friendship, love, and family and the deep sense of loss, absence, and yearning. Each of her increasingly more complex collaborative productions of the early 1980s struggled with the contradictions and tensions between our longing for the world we have been promised, and the unrelenting anxiety and confusion of the world we actually inhabit. While Hixson captured the same ineffable collective yearning for an idealized past that put Reagan in the White House and kept him there, her nostalgic “Americanism” was unsettling rather than sentimental. Without ironic cynicism she intentionally subverted what was longed for and lost.
Historically, Hixson’s coming of age and personal loss of innocence coincided with America’s. Yet, in a medium dominated by individual personalities and autobiographical narrative, Hixson’s personal life was never directly alluded to in her work until Hey John, Did You Take the El Camino Far, the 1984 production that was the culmination of her LA years. She chose instead to focus on the denied and unexpressed sense of betrayal, disappointment, fear, and alienation that resides in the gap between the TV world of spotless kitchens, perfect teeth, dry armpits, fast cars named after wild animals (usually an endangered species), sugar-free sex, eternal youth, beauty, romance, prosperity, satisfaction, and stardom, and our daily experience. The daily installments of sanitized violence in living color — the media spectacle of real wars, assassinations, and all manner of criminal acts — and the actual carnage became parallel subtexts.
In Sway Back (March 1982) the cast entered dressed in Edwardian whites looking like they’d all watched too much Masterpiece Theater, posed for family snapshots, and reclined as if sunning themselves at a country picnic. The effect, however, was not of well-being but of an unnamed longing for family and social stability. The image was contradicted by anxious, fragmented chatter about bomb shelters in the suburbs and seemingly random disasters such as crib death.
Intrigued and concerned with the way media transforms real events, from the trivial to the profound, into disposable fictions, Hixson became an obsessive newspaper clipper. In Birds on Pedestals with Bomber Ladies (May 1981) she began to explore various ways of telling the same story, at the same time juxtaposing seemingly unrelated stories. The result resembled switching TV channels back and forth, cutting in and out of the same story at different points in time. She expanded on this technique in Sway Back, using two newspaper articles as the structural skeleton. The first described the police arrest and subsequent drowning of three adolescent boys on an outing at Lake Mexia. The second was an interview with the Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci. According to the LA Times three black youths accused of smoking marijuana were handcuffed. The boat capsized. The officer swam to shore. The black youths drowned.