(Thumbnail photograph from the collection of the Brooklyn Public Library as first published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.)
In the present era, it has ceased to become widely known just how controversial the game of pinball was in the time of its ubiquity. Once it came about that one just doesn’t often find these machines around out in public anymore, the furor surrounding them became so incomprehensible as to vanish from collective memory in America. The basic history is understood and well-documented. In the court of King Louis XIV of France, billiard tables with pins and skittles came into vogue as an aristocratic game of amusem*nt. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, these tables became steadily more mechanized and refined with innovations like a spring-launcher for balls and the insertion of bells to make the game more stimulating and exciting. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Americans desperately craved inexpensive entertainments to escape from economic hardship, the advent of coin-operated machines brought pinball mania to the masses.
As more and more manufacturers competed to cash in on this craze, the stimulation they offered become more intense. Electric lights and bells and bumpers. Erotically charged pinup paintings that lent a sexual charge to the experience suggestive from the rather vagin*l placement of the muscular flippers and the gap between on up of the great biological “pinball” of the fertilization of the egg by sperm in the fallopian tubes for the conception of new life. Haruki Murakami’s novel Pinball, 1973 aptly ends its quest for a lost pinball machine analogous to the lost tragic women of his fiction with the gothic scene of a private pinball museum on the frigid site of a former industrial meat-packing warehouse still pervaded by the stench of slaughtered chickens. In this hauntological place, the user’s desire to reunite with particularly special mechanical brides saved from the scrapyard, nostalgic desire is pitted against the imperative to leave before catching pneumonia, hypothermia, or the other nasty risks of cold and a compromised immune system. For Murakami, this was an exotic encounter with the 20th century American Dream:
Superheroes, monsters, college girls, football players, rockets, women—so many dreams left to fade and rot in darkened game arcades. Now they were smiling at me from their boards. And the women… Blondes, platinum blondes, brunettes, redheads, Mexican girls with raven hair, ponytailed girls, Hawaiian girls with hair to their waists, Ann-Margaret, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe… each thrusting out her glorious breasts from beneath diaphanous blouses unbuttoned to the waist, or one-piece bathing suits, or pointy bras… Their colors would fade, but their breasts would retain their eternal beauty. The lights flashed on and off as if in time with the beating of my heart. The seventy-eight pinball machines were a graveyard of old dreams, old beyond recall. I walked slowly past those dream women. The three-flipper Spaceship was waiting for me at the end of the line. She stood there, a picture of serenity, sandwiched between her gaudy sisters. (Haruki Murakami, Wind/Pinball translated by Ted Goossen p. 219)
The scene is like a fusion of the sirens of The Odyssey luring sailors to shipwreck and the vampire brides of Dracula that Bram Stoker described as possessing heightened beauty in their undeath when witnessed sleeping in their caskets, giving the reader an uneasy shudder and thrill of necrophilia. In this literary allegory, the temptation to nostalgia is lethal if overindulged in, and despite the appearance of Americans with warm and impressive breasts, the cold and hard bodies of the pinball tables cannot counter the chill of this environment. Herein should stand a warning to “retro” gamers that the consequences of full immersion in the values of the past are fatal in implication, metaphorically or even literally.
Earlier in the novel, Murakami suggests a parallel: the same conjunctions of “Technology, Capital Investment, and Human Desire” that enabled the pinball phenomenon of the 1930s also enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler at the same time. (Ibid. 122) The Hitler of the 1930s still appeared to many Germans and even Americans in the flash and glamour of a völkisch Nuremberg Rally promising to restore all their “blood and soil” nostalgic values, rather than the agent of cold steel blitzkrieg mass carnage pinballing around Europe and leaving a ruined continent in his wake as he revealed himself to be in the 1940s. “With terrifying speed, people seized on the crude clay doll Moloney had created and added a whole string of innovations. ‘Let there be light!’ ‘Let there be electricity!’ ‘Let there be flippers!’ they cried, one after another.” (Ibid.)
Capital investment ramped up the pinball spectacle like Hitler’s ultra-wealthy financiers that left him technologically well-equipped for his seizure of power as a mass media spectacle in 1932-1934. With power consolidated, he commissioned Leni Riefenstahl as director to stage the propaganda image he wanted to present, first descending from the clouds in his private plane like a German Christ into a city that still looked medieval to stage the Nuremberg Rally of 1935 in Triumph of the Will. Then following this up with a second commission for documenting that unmistakable moment for normalizing Nazi Germany before the nations, the ill-advised hosting of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, in her two-part film Olympia transformed the ritual that was to promote international peace into an international eugenic struggle to define the fittest and most skilled athletes, latently manifesting as a metaphor for the coming of World War II. The thematic element of nostalgia with Hitler facilitating a restoration of the ways of the past – whether they look more like German gothic architecture or an ominously völkisch occult spin on ancient Greek civilization while Riefenstahl herself danced nude with the hoop of fertility for the triumphant athlete – is unmistakable in the introductions to both films. Let’s make no mistake, the same impulse is represented in the fashwave/tradwave “Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition” memes that have taken a life of their own in online gaming communities.
Like Orpheus before Euridice down in Hades, there is only time for Murakami’s narrator to reunite with his pinball dream woman and gain some insight through the memory of escaping with her into space-age fantasy of a new and better era before returning to the Tokyo of the late Showa period where the massive construction industry mercilessly destroys any vestige of the past that stands in the way of a quick profit. Certainly, the writer-narrator cannot end up like Derek Hartfield, imaginary author of “The Martian Wells” so overcome with nostalgic dives he took his own life on “a sunny Sunday morning” in June 1938 by jumping off the Empire State Building “clutching a portrait of Adolf Hitler in his right hand and an open umbrella in his left.” (Ibid. 4-5, cf. 78-81, 99-101)
In his 1974 Cahiers du Cinema interview “‘Anti-Retro’: Michel Foucault in Interview,” Foucault sought to challenge the foundations of an emerging “retro” sensibility in France under Charles de Gaulle that witnessed a historical revisionism that French people were basically heroic under Nazi German occupation or the collaborationist Vichy regime as nostalgic modes of fashion and cinema prevailed. It would not do, however, to watch The Sorrow and the Pity and conclude there was no Resistance, nor even any Struggle in that period as the powers that be now sought to erase those cultural memories. Against both tendencies, Foucault proposed the necessity of maintaining a historical consciousness and an archive of the popular memory of struggles.
Although Foucault’s primary concern was with political and economic struggle like trade unionism and its songs, the oral histories of protest and activism, and that sort of thing, his writing on the history of sexuality would underscore that the technologies of pleasure and its suppression in the making of the self are themselves powerful sites of historical struggle. By extension, in Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World, Matt Alt writes a history of the material culture of “fantasy-delivery devices” (p. 11) like video games, karaoke, and Walkmans, and the struggles that ensued in Japan and around the world over the ways they redefined the post-modern self. Such an approach is immensely useful in approaching the lost worlds of the body of mechanical games like pinball and video games without succumbing to the fallacy that any era that produced compelling media experiences must have been a golden age.
While coin-op pinball was a very novel phenomenon in the 1930s, the struggles over their ubiquity and the rights and privileges to play such games in public were pronounced indeed. In those days, the dual flippers now standard in pinball had not yet been invented, and would not be invented until 1947 as the needs of wartime manufacturing gave way to the new technologies of leisure after World War II. Accordingly, the only way for the player to have some control over the pinball game was through the plunger that launched the ball, and by tilting the table. (Notably, later tables inserted a tilt bob sensor to penalize the player for nudging the table and shifting the direction of the ball beyond its set limits.) To critics of pinball, it was blatantly a form of gambling, a randomized game of chance like slot machines. It was viewed as dubiously tied to organized crime as mafia groups branched out from bootlegging liquor, a source of delinquency and crime in its own right. Fiorello La Guardia, the three-term Italian American Republican mayor of New York who served from 1933-1945, became concerned by letters alleging pinball was harming vulnerable populations like immigrants and youths, driving them into a spiral of gambling, poverty, alcoholism, and abuse of families.
Ever trying to maintain a tough-on-crime reputation, and no less concerned that a coin-up industry generating funds to rival Hollywood could bolster the power of Tammany Hall Democratic party bosses, La Guardia waged a fierce moralistic crusade against pinball. While banned books and works of “degenerate” modern art burned in Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s, La Guardia eagerly staged photo ops for newspapers like the The New York Times smashing up large assemblages of confiscated pinball tables with a sledgehammer, much as he had also done to confiscated slot machines. He was, however, no friend of Hitler, and Nazi propagandists denounced him as a “dirty Talmud Jew” etc. for proposing a “temple of tolerance” for the upcoming 1939 World’s Fair in New York with “a chamber of horrors” prominently featuring “that brown-shirted fanatic who is now menacing the peace of the world” according to a March 15, 1937 Time Magazine article “NEW YORK: LaGuardia v. Hitler.” For all their political opposition to one another, both Hitler and La Guardia shared a standpoint of the suppression of popular memory surrounding media forms they slandered as sources of all ills in modernity.
When war with Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan finally came in the 1940s, La Guardia saw opportunity to escalate to a full-fledged pinball ban in New York city with the argument the metals and materials would be better used as munitions for the war effort, and clubs for police to beat down the citizenry as he assigned 2,000 former pinball legs to the City Patrol Corps. Smacking two such clubs together, he declared “You see how nice these ring? I’d like to hear them ring on the heads of these tin-horns!” (as he often referred to “pinball distributors and manufacturers” in the press according to Ryan Banfi). Pinball bans spread throughout major U.S. cities like New York, Miwaukee, Chicago, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. The end result, observes Ryan Banfi in his lecture “Pinball and Gambling: Illegalities and Controversies” at Pintastic Pinball & Game Room Expo, was that “La Guardia…and other politicians certainly damaged the game’s reputation as it was largely confined to adult bookstores” until the 1970s.
Such a state of affairs tacitly identified pinball (and by extension other mechanical and video games) with other technologies of pleasure like sex toys that had long been subject to seizure and criminal prosecution under the Comstock Laws. That the game of juggling around a metal ball with flippers was lumped in with the purveyors of p*rnography, lingerie, and other amenities of adult sexuality only decriminalized as recently as 1960s Supreme Court decisions speaks volumes about American antipathy about pleasure in general. In like manner, the struggle for sexual freedom in America is always bound up with the struggle for leisure time, and for ways to make use of it. In an interview with Pinball Magazine, Roger Sharpe describes how he would play a pinball machine at “this adult bookstore” “every day after work on my way home,” and his bafflement when the police came in and overturned the machines before confiscating them. “The odd thing was: behind the curtain there were peepshows, but it was the pinball machines that were the object of the police enforcement.” Given Sharpe’s later efforts to rehabilitate pinball’s reputation as an innocent pastime, he tactically allowed cultural connections to sellers of p*rnography to go unstated in print while they were coming under fire politically by anti-p*rnography feminists and the New Right in the 1970s and 80s, this account is important.
If the 1950s and 60s presented a subgenre of courtroom films like 12 Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Inherit the Wind in which the biases of the audience are put on trial, Anatomy of a Murder creates one such scenario surrounding pinball. In the murder trial of US Army Lieutenant Frederick “Manny” Manion, the viability of a temporary insanity defense for killing Bernard “Barney” Quill as an irresistible impulse after learning he had raped his wife Laura Manion is challenged by the prosecution in terms that she had allegedly solicited sex at a bar by the way she moved her backside playing pinball, and by wearing lacy panties under her clothes. The disgrace of watching her functionally being put on trial for her own victimization in the bad ol’ days without rape shield laws, when a woman could be subject to lines of questioning in court about her manner of dress or sexual history for the purpose of insinuating she was far too slu*tty to credibly be a victim of sexual violence, is really hard to watch.
The 1950s viewer was expected to find plausible the scenario that being female in public while playing pinball sufficiently impugned her honor that she could be threatened by the nasty underbelly of sexual violence like normalized date rape in post-War America. “Strange men say bad girls die young” in the words of “We Lose the Night” by the goth rock band Then Comes Silence. Which is to say the masculinized violence represented by the footage 1950s white suburban boy pulling the trigger on a pistol in a recurring loop in the music video rationalizes that bad things only happen to bad people. Which is to further suggest that only conforming to the 1950s idea of a “good wife” subject to Cold War ideologies of domestic confinement of sexuality as described by Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era by Elaine Tyler May could expect to be protected from such violence. Indeed, Mr. Manion’s acquittal on the murder charges owe much to the thought he was only acting as the culture stipulated for a married man to respond to violence against his family.
In the surprise ending, Mrs. Manion abruptly leaves her husband (who may or may not have directed the violent temper he displayed following his return from World War II against her) as Duke Ellington’s jazz band performing the score intone their astonishment. I prefer to interpret this in terms that her terrible experiences that ensued after trying to take up social space and leisure time by playing pinball in public have radicalized her against the terms of life offered and demanded by men around her. Which is to say, it appears in retrospect as another premonition of the themes taken up by Betty Friedan in 1963 with the publication of The Feminine Mystique. The 1960s and 1970s proved decades for the reevaluation of all manner of cultural assumptions inherited from the first half of the 20th century, or even earlier. Ryan Banfi’s lecture regards the 1968 termination of the Hays Code of 1934 for the self-censorship of Hollywood movies and the ensuing New Hollywood era of more experimental and counter-cultural films as a major impetus for changing attitudes toward the game of pinball and legal challenges to bans on playing it publicly.
In this regard, let’s consider the hard-rock concept album Tommy by the English rock band The Who. With somewhat autobiographical lyrics by guitarist Pete Townshend, the album tells of a ordinary boy named Tommy who becomes ensnared in the cultural imperative to “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” regarding the violence of the post-War patriarchal family. Upon witnessing his father British Army Captain Walker murdering his mother’s lover, the boy psychosomatically becomes blind, deaf, and mute. His silence and difficulties in communication are subsequently exploited as he is sad*stically tortured by his cousin Kevin and sexually abused by his uncle Ernie. Around Christmas, Tommy’s parents wistfully regret he seems unable to read, hear, or make confession to Jesus’ message of eternal salvation (though their own testimony to it is decidedly ruined).
But Tommy becomes a counter-cultural hero with a devoted following in terms of his enigmatic mastery of pinball using only his sense of smell. In time, he becomes a mystical guru figure modelled after the life and teachings of Meher Baba, a similarly silent Indian spiritual teacher for whom Pete Townshend wrote glowingly of his own devotion for Rolling Stone in 1970. In this rock opera fable, the “disciples” of this “Pinball Wizard” will lead the culture in a direction guided more by the spiritual teachings of the South Asians who had gained independence from British colonialism as recently as 1947 rather than the ideology of the British Empire and its violent consequences for patriarchal family life. Ronald Kelts’ interview with The Who’s guitarist titled “Pete Townshend’s War” published in The New Yorker in 2012 sees the musician dwell on themes of how “Trauma is passed from generation to generation,” and how the children of the World War II generation like himself came to feel “deeply confused” in their “terrible trauma,” full of “shame” and “secrecy” and “alienation.”
In the eyes of many commentators, the real pinball hero of the 1970s was Roger Sharpe. Sharpe was the managing editor of GQ Magazine, a men’s lifestyle magazine known for photographs of fashionably attractive men frolicking in swimsuits or otherwise engaging in leisurely activities that indeed attracted a considerable gay readership. Wanting a pinball table for his own home, Sharpe talked GQ into greenlighting a series of articles on a game and its ban in the magazine’s home of New York City. As Sharpe recounts in an interview in The Dallas Observer:
“I was being incredibly selfish and wanted my own game,” Sharpe says with a laugh. “When I started doing research for an article, I was dumbfounded because when I went to the public library, there were no books on the subject. I was beside myself. How am I going to now approach this subject? I made a comment to the editor that it's going to take a little more time to pull this idea together and they said, ‘Why don't you write a book?’”
Alas, all too often the disdain to which mechanical and video games are held translates to inadequate archival practices of the knowledge pertaining to them, and inadequate preservation of the games themselves for posterity. In this sense, Roger Sharpe’s struggle was not only for legalization and cultural recognition of pinball, but for the historical memory of its origins and development. On December 28, 1975 he fired off a missive with his article in The New York Times titled “Ping! Boing! Buzz! Tilt!” Therein Sharpe described pinball as sensational fun with enthusiasts as renowned as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist J. Anthony Lukas. He gave an abbreviated history of pinball here tracing the game back to Victorian pastimes with a game of bagatelle appearing in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, and gave detailed information about pinball manufacturers and how to purchase a pinball table complete with company addresses with which to direct business correspondence.
Following this publication of the kind of article sure to make La Guardia roll in his grave, and given that Roger Sharpe had no small renown for his own pinball skills, the Music & Amusem*nt Association hired him as a star witness to appear in court regarding a sole city council member’s bill to lift the ban on pinball in New York City. The other council members were decidedly opposed to this measure, still sharing something of the distrust and cultural stereotypes about the game and its players. The core issue was to be decided was whether pinball constituted a game of chance like a slot machine, or a game of skill that undermined the anti-gambling rationale of the ban. Sharpe set forth his verbal testimony from his own research and experience his reasons why the ban should be lifted, but his most valuable testimony would be performative in nature.
Two pinball machines were brought before the court, and one council member Matt Blitz’s article describes as “grumpy” in his skepticism suspected the primary machine Sharpe was better-practiced on was somehow rigged, and had him switch to the alternate from the outset. Sharpe played with the theatrical flair with which he and others describe his style, but such a dazzling approach to keeping the ball out of the gutter was not satisfying the councilmen. So he took a gambit, and like Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees baseball team, he called his shot, telling the council exactly which lane he would send the pinball with his flapper. In the end, the council voted to lift the ban in a “vote of 30 to 6, with one abstention” over objections in “a heated one-hour debate” that racketeering and vice would return with the pinball machines.
Roger Sharpe insists in many interviews this performance gives him the right to be a “footnote in history” rather than some kind of savior of the game. His own book points out bans were steadily being lifted in other towns and cities in “the late 1960s” prior to his own intervention in the Big Apple (p. 63). In a distinct sense, the publication of Sharpe’s book Pinball! was his greatest triumph, constructing a history of the game that would have been consigned to oblivion by its detractors, and documenting the culture surrounding it in America and Europe supported by the photography of James Hamilton. It is a remarkable window into the triumphant arcade culture that emerged in the 1970s. With legalization, Sharpe recognized that within arcades pinball and other mechanical games would face increasing competition from video games, which could boast of increasingly sophisticated technology and faster rates of coin intake. The centrality of pinball faded, even as arcades continued to keep some tables around because they continued to be in demand. The advent of video games also witnessed the genre of virtual pinball games as well as ball-and-paddle puzzle game variants like Breakout and Arkanoid.
Alas, the years after Roger Sharpe embarked on his pinball project with the encouragement of GQ Magazine proved disastrous. “The sad truth is that theGQmasthead of the late-’70s era is something of a memorial wall: Many of the people whose names are on it were claimed by AIDS. Among them, the people at the very top: Haber, Coulianos, and the person to whom Weber was most devoted, Sterzin.” They had become casualties of the struggle for health against the callous negligence of the Ronald Reagan administration to make a public health response to, or even verbally acknowledge, the clear and present danger of the AIDS pandemic spread by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). In the same GQ article, Roger Sharpe reminisces of Harry Coulianos that he was “just delightful, with a friendly warm, round, swarthy face; that, or he was just tan all the time because he was always on trips shooting swimsuits.”
For Sharpe’s part, he had gone on to become editor of Video Games Magazine, and was ultimately interviewed by The New York Times regarding the future of video games following the market collapse of the Atari Shock of 1983. To paraphrase, with such an oversaturated market without new consoles (“razors”) to sell, the question would be getting the “right” games (“blades”) for the interests of “the user.” For all that, the catastrophe and the corporate reaction to it was absolutely devastating to the arcade business and the markets for pinball and video games. Today it might be said that the AIDS crisis and the Atari Shock are two very good reasons to caution against getting so into the eighties “retro” mentality that we cop out in our 21st century despair into regarding the era of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Japanese economic bubble as some bygone golden age like the people in Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Cline himself knew better in his sequel novel Ready Player Two, using the lyrics to “Eighties” by Killing Joke from the album Night Time to illustrate how people “living in the eighties” regarded the decade as a time of serious “struggle.”
Roger Sharpe has worked in the pinball industry in various capacities, notably in designing at least eight pinball tables documented by Pinside, and according to Pinball Magazine as “head of marketing at Williams, where he licensed many themes that subsequently featured on pinball machines (or slot machines.)” He was also a founder of the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, a league dedicated to competitive pinball tournaments. In 2016, Andrea Cooper published “Meet the Sharpes, Pinball’s Royal Jewish Family” in Tablet Magazine. In this article, we read of how Roger Sharpe sought to instill a “pure love of the game” of pinball in his sons Josh and Zack, prohibiting them from competitive play to keep things leisurely amidst his extensive home collection of tables. Upon finally giving in once after “I don’t know how many years of begging” in the words of Zach once they were in their early teens, the brothers proved very formidable contenders and have remained so for decades hence.
With Josh himself a father of young children at the time of publication, he himself seeks to raise Roger Sharpe’s grandkids in the pinball tradition. In the homes of Roger and his sons is a copy of the Cyclopses pinball machine he had designed, though the fantasy machine of the grandfather proves “kind of embarrassing” to Zach (perhaps speaking for others as well) when “Grandma Ellen is half naked in the drawing.” This I take to mean the swimsuit-clad pinup art by Seamus McLaughlin multiplied into damsels in distress imperiled by the giant one-eyed monsters of Greek mythology. If his book Pinball! praised the erotic pinball art tradition of Roy Parker and David Christensen, Roger Sharpe’s own design in turn became a part of that tradition. Now decades after the fact, the preservation of this relic of younger days in the ménage à trois of Roger, his wife Ellen, and the pinball engine of fantasy and desire would inevitably give rise to intergenerational conversations about sex. But better this than the rampant outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections in retirement communities and the dire consequences of the sustained political push to keep youth both sexually uninformed and unprotected from the cancer-causing and truly ubiquitous Human Papillomavirus (HPV) because getting the vaccine means admitting they could become sexually active. Who knows, a more frankly honest approach might save mommies and daddies too from the grim fate of sexless marriages while desperately maintaining this farce.
The present state of pinball is ambiguous, insofar as in most contexts coin-operated amusem*nt machines have lost their ubiquity in society as thoroughly as if they were facing a legislative ban. Where are the pinball tables? By some accounts, pinball has in fact been undergoing a Renaissance in popularity in terms of a thriving market for new tables in private homes, fiercely competitive tournaments and international score boards, and of course the arcade bars serving up nostalgia, booze, and maybe hot wings and onion rings. It remains uncertain if 21st century generations largely still underage for such adult venues will take up pinball for themselves like they are increasingly taking up the half-century of video games hitherto. In considering the disparate historical struggles surrounding pinball in the 20th century, we encounter two major themes.
In fiction, we find characters who play pinball en route to achieving some other form of consciousness not readily available in mainstream society. The unnamed narrator of Pinball, 1973 seeks out the lost pinball machine and maintains his friendship with a guy from his Student Protest Movement days in college (circa. 1968) nicknamed “The Rat” to refuse to capitulate to the attitude of hyper-capitalist inevitability in the Japanese economic bubble period of the 1980s. In his science fiction pinball encounter, he will remember feeling that another world is possible while the powers that be insisted with Margaret Thatcher that “There is no alternative.” His quest for the Spaceship pinball machine reminds me of the Internet meme that declares “I love old science fiction. They have stories that begin ‘IT’S THE DISTANT YEAR 2003 AND HUMANS ARE EXPLORING THE DEEP CORNERS OF THE UNIVERSE.’ God bless you old sci-fi. You had such high hopes for us.” If anything strikes me about sober-minded futurist prognostication of the 21st century, it’s that they overestimated the extent to which ordinary people would lead dignified lives, have time for leisure, and enjoy the affluence of automation. In his own way, Murakami’s narrator realizes the future isn’t what it once was when the game center is torn down in favor of a cheap joint serving bad coffee. (The better to keep the workforce of Japan, Inc. wired without rest or leisure time until they drop dead from karoshi.) So he hauntologically seeks out the lost Spaceship pinball table, like so many vanished tragic heroines in Murakami’s fiction, to play with her and psychically discourse with her, and remember those feelings of hope the late Showa period in Japan did it's utmost to render dead, buried, and forgotten.
Mrs. Laura Manion of the film Anatomy of a Murder is made to suffer for playing pinball, and refuses to abide by the imposition of 1950s parochial attitudes toward women and their sexuality by the men around her. She vanishes from the narrative with her sudden unannounced departure, refusing to grant the kind of narrative closure customary in Hollywood cinema. In her own way, she reminds me of Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis in Bridget Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome from her existentialist feminist perspective of how the breakout star of And God Created Woman was a harbinger of youth and gender revolt to come.
When revolt did indeed come in the 1960s and 1970s, Tommy by The Who allowed Pete Townshend to express his anguish as a survivor of physical and sexual abuse and his alienation with post-War family dynamics so often nostalgically regarded as a bygone golden age. He reversed the dynamic of “White Man’s Burden” with the British Empire acting as a stern schoolmaster over colonized subjects, drawing his own lessons from the recently decolonized state of India. In Tommy’s mastery of pinball, he could attract people who would really see and listen to him rather than torment or otherwise try to imprint upon him amidst his communicative disabilities. Such influence spread into our own history, as Roger Sharpe’s Pinball! observes:
The movie Tommy probably did more than anything else to promote the current increased awareness of pinball. Bally was quick to capitalize on this instant fame. In the summer of 1975 every arcade and pinball location in the country wanted a Wizard machine; and when they got them they usually put them near the entrance. In the summer of 1976 the game of the hour was Capt. Fantastic, Bally’s tribute to Elton John, which caused even more commotion than Wizard. (p. 151)
Sharpe mentions Elton John in this context insofar as he performed “Pinball Wizard” Ken Russell’s 1975 film adaptation of the Tommy musical. The scene is staged with Elton John as a very campy pinball preacher/ringmaster in a hall like a charismatic evangelical revival meeting by Jesus freaks. The term “Jesus freaks” at that time meant less people “Handing tickets out for God” like self-appointed religious police as used in Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” than something like “acid freaks”; a rather Christian flavor of hippie mystics for the era of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. Just five years after Time Magazine’s controversial 1966 issue querying “Is God Dead?”, the same publication heralded “The Jesus Revolution” on the cover in 1971 for the article “The Alternative Jesus: Psychedelic Christ.” Suffice to say, musicals like Tommy, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, etc. formed a complex of plays and films addressing the relation of religion and spirituality to the controversial themes of the counter-culture. Pinball too could be mystical or meditative pastime; even a miraculous sign and wonder to onlookers in the narrative construction of Tommy.
Certainly, the history of pinball hitherto made it rife for the reinterpretation of the game as a counter-cultural pastime. At the very point it vaulted to incredible popularity in the 1930s, Fiorello La Guardia emerged with the sledgehammer of his political crusade to suppress public accessibility of pinball tables. This campaign largely succeeded in the 1940s after the Empire of Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, as it was felt every pinball table should be converted into munitions and weapons for use abroad and at home without even waiting for Foucault’s boomerang to take effect. In the decades to follow, the pinball player would have to risk the social branding of being regarded as a delinquent, a slu*t, a punk, a sex pervert, and much else.
The rebellion of the counter-culture however enabled, and was enabled by an extensive revaluation of values from the prejudices given force over American society in the decades between the two World Wars, leading to the abandonment of archaic pinball bans around the country. By the 1980s and the Atari Shock with the ensuing mass closures of arcades, pinball found something as destructive as the sledgehammer of La Guardia in free market capitalist inertia. Without specific textual basis, I will here indulge in the extrapolation of Pinball, 1973 that Haruki Murakami implicitly suggests we culturally need better modes of cultural preservation of mechanical and video games than the frigid pinball graveyard he imagines saving the most precious machines from the scrapyard. In the failure to accomplish this before a neo-liberal economic system that consigns much to vaporware and abandonware, or else renders everything to private collections without a social space like an arcade, the leading struggle for pinball into the 21st century is for preservation and accessibility. The hauntological gamer of today who would take to heart Foucault’s emphasis on the popular memory of struggles should consider both aspects of struggle explored hitherto; the use of pinball in the struggle for consciousness beyond what is immediately given in one’s social environment, and the ongoing historical struggle to be able to play pinball within one’s social environment.
