Last week in London, Queen Elizabeth opened the new Churchill
Museum. Twelve million dollars and ten years in the making, the
spectacularly innovative showplace located in the basement of the
Treasury Building in Whitehall instantly assumes a yin/yang
relationship with its pointedly low-tech companion exhibit of the
actual World War II Cabinet War Room. In keeping with the
sensitivities of our age, the creators declared their intent to
present a complete portrait, warts and all, of the first British
civilian to have his own museum.
Because it came in at almost exactly one half the cost of
Christo’s concurrent Central Park TP party, one must think twice
before criticizing such a comprehensive and meticulous gathering of
objects — some personal, some iconic — from the man’s nine
decades. Also, one must stand back and appreciate the creativity
and technical wizardry of the room’s path-breaking multimedia
presentations. Unfortunately, this fruit of a decade’s labor and
considerable fortune is a 7200-square-foot mishmash, possessing all
the moral and historic clarity of Rudolph Hess’s ill-fated 1941
solo “peace mission” to Glasgow. Worse actually, because at least
Hess wore an enemy uniform.
“It’s a twenty-first century project about a twentieth century
giant,” enthuses the project’s historical consultant David
Reynolds. That statement alone gives the alert visitor a clue as to
how the deck will be stacked: judging a 19th century man by 20th
century standards from the perspective of the 21st is a classic
sucker’s set-up. Just ask Abe Lincoln, now fending off accusations
of homosexuality because he engaged in the practice du jour of
having male roommates.
ON ENTERING THE EXHIBIT, new arrivals immediately catch on that
this is not your grandfather’s museum. Gone are such old-fangled
concepts as hierarchal or narrative presentations. Instead, via the
magic of invisible data servers, the visitor is encouraged to make
choices on what to see and thus construct his own experience.
History has met Souplantation (a popular U.S. chain of salad
buffets), and surrendered.
The gateway corridor presents what the organizers apparently
believe is the essence of Churchill’s importance: words. Not ideas,
mind you — just words. We are confronted with collage displays of
memorable speeches, and then screen displays that playfully jumble
words and phrases and encourage the visitor to drag and drop them
in different ways. Meaning takes a holiday, as the words are
stripped of sentence, paragraph — and historic — context. Much
like vegetarians who call everyone else “carnivores” or
childless-by-choicers who label the rest of us “breeders,” the
presenters practice linguistic materialism; by examining
Churchill’s words only by their functionality, they obscure
significant appreciation of their profound moral or spiritual
overtones.
As befits a 21st century museum, the visitor is confronted with
many new modes of exhibition. On the interactive foreign policy
map, this reporter experienced his own Homer Simpson moment; nearly
disabling the experience until an adjacent spectator politely
introduced himself as the designer of said exhibit and patiently
demonstrated how to slide the five pound mouse-like object. This
kind of visual sophistication, demanding immediate intuitive
understanding of totally new user interface paradigms, should only
present difficulty to those over age 25. More troubling is the
effect on one’s brain after mastering the controls: the new
interfaces further leverage the materials’ disconnectedness from
structured reasoning.
Of course, even nonjudgementalism has its limits. Just as
Souplantation may put the less expensive vegetables in an easier to
reach position, the organizers have engineered the kiosks in such a
way that you will most probably be drawn to those that present what
they consider warts if not fatal flaws. Not surprisingly, the
disastrous Dardanelles campaign has its own shrine. In another
nook, the old man’s lifelong, rigid hatred of Communism is
pointedly presented not as Reaganesque idealism, but rather as an
off-putting tic that undermined consensus leadership.
A review of Churchill’s relationship with the women’s suffrage
movement is the most subtle dig, and maybe the most effective. A
newsreel loop begins with familiar scenes of women marching in
dresses and hats. Within a minute, the clip climaxes with the 1913
sacrifice suicide of uber-suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, as she
rushes the Epsom Derby race course and intercepts the King’s horse
Anmer. Now, for the curators to paint Winston as proxy for the
murderous jockey would have been ridiculous. To characterize him as
a misogynist would be provably inaccurate. Instead, he gets the
Wilhelm Furtwangler treatment, presented as someone who could have
done much more in the pursuit of justice but instead chose
silence.
BY FAR, THE MOST INSIDIOUS component of the exhibition is its
showpiece contraption, the interactive “lifeline” worthy of George
Orwell on a very bad day if someone had lent him Macromedia Flash.
Right at the physical center of the museum’s celebration of random
access is — you guessed it — an agenda. Embedded in a 6’-by-40’
table is a plasma touch screen, allowing the visitor to expand, day
by day, on the details of any moment in Churchill’s life. So far so
good, once you teach your fingers to suspend the “mouse click”
paradigm and shift to touch and glide.
The galling part seems to come every ten minutes or so. As
people around the timeline manipulate their particular strip of the
calendar, they unknowingly activate hidden triggers — think of
Groucho Marx and “say the secret word.” Instead of a chicken coming
down from the ceiling, all hell breaks loose. There’s a sudden loud
bass boom that rumbles around the entire museum. Then, the entire
timeline table screen goes white, akin to a nuclear holocaust
wipeout.
I have no idea what this intervention is supposed to mean. Stuff
happens? The fruits of warmongering? The futility of existence?
What I’m sure about is that it’s sneaky and it’s wrong.
The atomized environment (no pun intended) has a sinister side
effect. By presenting every aspect of Churchill’s life from his
christening gown through his last paintings as a tangentially
related jumble, the exhibit encourages the visitor — especially
the young and/or the naive — to eschew critical thinking and just
enjoy the experience. Then, having disposed of moral or historic
baggage, the presenters use a sledgehammer to somehow graft world
annihilation to the life of Winston Churchill.
Maybe Churchill — who famously described Russia as a riddle,
wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma — would enjoy the paradox
of his own museum. The presenters have succeeded in collecting a
breathtakingly broad sample of objects from the man’s life, only to
present them in a profoundly non-Churchill, non-structured Punjab
bazaar. Funny or not, the joke has an unpleasant aftertaste.
The brilliance of Churchill’s leadership was his ability to give
the present a sense of continuity and context. Memorable phrases
like “never have so many owed so much to so few…” or “last a
thousand years… this would be our finest hour” have little or no
meaning outside of a national narrative context. Without context,
the RAF are killers in the air. Without context, the deprivations
of the blitz are just that — depressing deprivations and no more.
With so little or no moral context provided by the organizers,
visitors slip into a twilight akin to that of a stroke victim just
returning home from the hospital — surrounded by the familiar but
unsure as to how it all fits together.
Ultimately, this exhibit does not deserve to stand on British
public land. By uncritically presenting nonlinear fact elements,
and then lacing the experience with anachronistic swipes at the
great man, the Churchill Museum has failed two mission-critical
responsibilities of any national exhibit: to define coherently the
moral underpinnings of the host culture and to render those events
and ideas transmittable across generations.
In their hearts, the presenters must know that an attack on
structure is ultimately an attack on causality. Ironically, both
Churchill’s writing and rhetoric — notably when he was out of
power — used a latticework of cause and effect to present his
ideas and outline his grave concerns regarding the survival of the
country. Funnily enough, moral causality operating within a time
context is Western Civilization’s great contribution to the human
experience.
JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO, as Colonel in Chief of the Queen’s Royal
Hussars, the Duke of Edinburgh visited the Crimea to commemorate
the 150th anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Past and
present Hussars visited the battlefields where, in 1854, over 200
British cavalrymen rode to their deaths, fighting bravely though
grossly mismatched in armaments. While many of us today may not be
able to find Crimea on a map, the saga has been transmitted and
re-transmitted thanks to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “Half a
league, Half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of
death Rode the six hundred…”
The comparison is painful: come the year 2039, will Churchill’s
museum, with all its bells and whistles, be able to transmit even a
whiff of the heroism of 1939? When tough times return, as they must
to every nation, will the British people find in this basement a
moral storehouse from which to draw inspiration? Will $12 million
— invested now — stir the soul then as much as Tennyson did with
mere ink and paper? And, in 2083, 150 years after the “end of the
beginning,” how will they remember the charge of Churchill (also a
Hussar) as he led a nation?
History is full of surprises. But let’s note that, up until now,
no army has ever been stirred to battle by a plasma screen.
