The Airport: Where We Pretend To Have Arrived
Lines. Crowds. That brief certainty you’ll be stopped at security and sent to jail or that your bag will end up in Fort Lauderdale. Even when it doesn’t, you have to watch it plop out of that diabolical chute a slightly different color than it was six hours ago. Delays, cancellations, nine-dollar bottled water, the dejected tableau of a bar in the daytime, your needle-in-a-haystack navy Sienna Uber, and finally, that leviathan distance between you and Gate 103 while the sign to your left reads Gate Negative Six. Sure, the airport is the explosive anxiety of an anthill under the imminent black shadow of a Chuck Taylor, but it’s all state-of-the-art. The human conveyor belt is our squeaking catapult into The Future. This is hyperdrive, baby. The Future is always worth it; you’ll know it when you feel it.
That’s what they promise me—the designers of the human-scale rat maze—through every digital display and bleached surface—in a frosty whisper as I open the Dunkin cold case. I am their scuttling rodent, accepting every humiliation as a necessary consequence of being alive while each meticulously designed moving part works against me. You know The Future when you feel it.
I feel it—shiny, gray, flat on all sides, devoid of texture, human culture, and all our fleshy nonsense. I feel it in the radiation blaster with my arms lifted in prayer. All hail the cold, stale inside of a sleeping MacBook Pro. The anemic columns and lateral beams evoke the underside of a giant skeleton. They draw my eyes upwards from the epoxy, its square footage too extensive to digest.
I get it—they wanted it slippery. That does make everything move faster—until it all collides. Then there’s the untangling. We’re so clumsy with all of it. I wasn’t supposed to have to talk to this lady ever again, but here she is, huddled with me over the touch-screen kiosk, frowning at the liquid-crystal error message.
It’s a bucket brigade of squished eyebrows: the TSA agent, the cashier, your mother-in-law, and now the attendant, perplexed and numb with disappointment. “Hmm, that’s weird. It does this sometimes—most of the time—the whole time—briefly—forever.” Cheeks: illuminated with The Future. Mouth: sticky and fuchsia. Her lipstick, her kitten heels, and the smell of her hairspray are the nostalgia that makes the future The Future. Without an occasional nod to the past, someone might notice the hollowness of the airport’s Space Odyssey chromescape. Employing an old definition of The Future is the only way we can pretend to have arrived.
Architect Rem Koolhaas says the airport is Junkspace. “Flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver…The product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning.” I add it is the infrastructural reflection of the Grand Rectanglification, where everything turns into a tablet, a protein bar, or a vape. The airport is austerity, it’s reminiscence, it’s globalization, it’s commercialization, it’s decision fatigue. It is sensory deprivation to stave off sensory overload that, in the end, just makes it echo.
“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” That’s the first sentence of M.T. Anderson’s dystopian novel Feed.
Six teenagers with microchips called Feeds implanted in their brainstems are on Spring Break. As their rocket approaches the Moon’s surface, their Feeds explode with ads for hotels, cafes, and moon paraphernalia gift shops. But through the windows, “there’s just the rockiness, and the suckiness, and the craters all being full of old broken shit, like domes nobody’s using anymore and wrappers and claws.”
In their future, the novelty of the Moon is no longer potent enough to smother its inherent coldness, dustiness, or lack of color. It is a cheap vacation, somewhere to get drunk, a vertical extension of every country’s Atlantic City. That night, the kids eat dinner at “J. P. Barnigan’s Family Extravaganza.”
It’s the kind of restaurant you can only find in a “non-place.”
Anthropologist Marc Augé says the airport is a non-place, like a hotel room or shopping mall. We don’t live there; we don’t commune there; we remain anonymous and abide by a behavioral contract spelled out across the abundant signage:
NO SMOKING.
In my nightmares, when our abandoned Earth becomes an alien tourist attraction, those green teenagers will stare down from their rocketship windows and see only the sprawling non-places that sucked out all our souls: the freeways, the parking lots, and the Airport Cities that promised us speed, luxury, and, most fervently, The Future. The Earth will be a junk(space) drawer full of cracked iPhones we waited in line for, smushed between obsolete cable types, plastic take-out cutlery, and upside-down insect carcasses. The digital billboards will have gone black, and the glass-box airport terminals will act as exhibits for our Museum of Nothing.
Nothing pretends to be beautiful and sexy the way airports do, and nothing fails as miserably. They season everything with the miracle of flight, and it still tastes like the back of an industrial freezer. SkyBurger? Awesome. The SkyTrack takes you to the rental car center, where everyone is wearing an itchy elastane polo and screaming. The SkyLounge is behind that door, and only the worst people at your company are allowed in.
The century-old traditions of airport architecture include “modern,” “minimalist,” and “sleek.” The 1930s was a global race to build a terminal that most sharply cut into the sky and violently blinded its patrons. The Dublin Airport was designed to resemble a cross between an ocean liner and an airplane, with a “streamlined, sleek white body and wings like a mechanical bird.” Grandiosity was and is meant to inspire, to build a bridge between the disparate scales of the human body and the vessels we invent to transport it. They hoped we might feel like we were flying before we even boarded.
But the caveat of grandiosity is that it also convinces us we will die up there. The ubiquitous fear of crashing and the subsequent force with which we grip each other during turbulence is only amplified by the insistence we are doing something huge, valiant, and exceptional. They sold the miracle of flight so hard it spun to the other side of the horseshoe.
Of course, I cherish those fleeting “awe” moments. Of course, I think glittering things are beautiful, but only because they remind me of water. Once they’re dry, they go motionless, like dead things. The itch to make everything gleaming and floating has landed us in a dried-out screen-ville but is pushing even further toward a “touchless” techtopia. The QR codes already took our menus. What do we have left to lose? How will the attendant’s eyebrows and lipstick look when the terminal is an endless sequence of biometric, voice-activated, facial-recognition checkpoints, each glitching in a distinct frequency like a forest of cicadas around her? I fear airports will become so slippery there will be nothing left to hang on to—not even each other.
K.K. Barrett won awards for his production design on the 2013 movie Her. For a story set in the future, its world is markedly pink—not that genre-typical chrome. Warm, discrete lighting fixtures illuminate Barrett’s scenes, and the LA backdrop is as wooden as it is glass. It’s still minimalist, but not because humans have grown cold and isolated from each other. Barrett says clutter makes us uncomfortable. He thinks we’ll all soon realize what we want, more than glossy, light-weight, and contactless, is a world that feels comfortable and tools that buttress rather than snip our connections. “When thinking about the future, people always think about technology and about what technology is rather than what the human experience with technology is.”
The airport designers must know they’ve created something profoundly uncomfortable because they sell comfort for extra to anyone with a Chase Sapphire card. Developments in travel tech don’t include dismantling the overt classism that demarcated the Titanic decks, but they do require you to download a separate app. Here, again, the reality of tradition grinds against the fantasy of progress.
Aesthetically, texturally, and spiritually, the airport is the apotheosis of a productivity romanticism that replaces everything before we figure out how to use it or admit how badly it makes us feel. It is like a movie filmed at a frame rate too high for the human eye to parse; it is designed past our limitations as if for some other species. The result is an ugly, clunky, disconnected, boring, though agitating experience. Every added dome, charging station, and pre-packed sushi roll makes us feel worse, so we slick the floors to make it all go by faster, then skid into the glass.
To avoid the hollowness, I meander around. I run my hand over a faux leather massage chair, get close enough to the fountain to feel the mist, and gaze longingly at the wooden features in the Starbucks. I find myself comforted solely by familiar brands in their familiar fonts. The thing about nothingness is that it can expand forever.
Now that cities are being built around airports, instead of the reverse, the airport has become a corporate headquarters. It is the downtown of the Aerotropolis, packed with boutiques, spas, clinics, movie theaters, museums, and gaming venues. They’re introducing dopamine, but it’s the frantic slot machine kind.
The Aerotropolis, once and for all, squashes my mother’s fantasy of an airport built like a library. When she told me that, I wasn’t sure if she meant there would be a whisper-only rule or that you could rent entertainment, but I immediately knew the feeling she alluded to: unrushed, looked after, fuzzy, and pastel, something more K.K. Barrett. I wouldn’t mind that nostalgia—it has nothing to sell me.
The conveyor belts push us between the exits while the stores compel us to turn off into the rest stop, stay a while, smell this. It is never satisfactorily transient or sustainable. It accelerates and decelerates us; it shoves pitchers of time at us and then rips the tablecloth out. I didn’t want karaoke; I just wanted to sit under a tree while I waited for the pilot to warm everything up. Now, I can linger under the skeleton or the Hudson fluorescents, and either way, I feel like that rat, that thermal shadow of my body on their screens.
New Mexico, the late 1950s, nighttime. A quiet road in a small town lit by the occasional streetlight. Everyone is at the high school basketball game, besides these two teenagers walking in front of us, a boy in a cardigan and a girl in a circle skirt. The camera is a few feet off the ground, angled up at their backs, only catching their faces when they turn to each other in excited conversation. We don’t need their expressions to know how they feel.
“Did you know there was actually an experiment done earlier this year in Lincoln, Nebraska, for a radio-controlled car? You press a button on the dash that says ‘E-lec-tronic Drive,’ and the car starts to drive itself. Oh! And a voice will come over the radio to give you directions.”
The girl is quoting an article from a magazine only she reads because she’s special and smart. She knows the secrets of The Future, and the boy can’t get enough. He might like her now that they’re in on this magic together.
It’s the end of the opening sequence of The Vast of Night, a low-budget science fiction film from 2019.
The scene makes us smile because those are our cars that she’s talking about! We live someone else’s fantasy; we have pushed that button. Then, we laugh at her. Sweet girl, the voice won’t come from the radio. It will come from your phone and only make your parents fight when it lags in the tunnel. Your dad will demand your brothers shut up—he missed what the robot lady said. What exit is that? What street name is she even trying to pronounce?
It’s June. School’s out. Your grandmother waits for you on her porch somewhere. You know there will be another fight at the baggage check and then again at the gate. You know how hard your mother will grip your shoulder as you make your ascent.
You’re almost at the airport; The Future waits for you. You’re hoping you won’t ever get there.