This is — and isn’t — the Happy Place
The Happy Place bills itself as a refuge from this ghastly world. It’s a tour of rooms and hallways, most of them centred on some kind of great big thing. In the first room, the great big thing is a pair of great big shoes, bedazzled by tiny yellow candies, so wide and tall an overgrown man can make himself comfortable in the heels.
“We believe that our world today can use a lot more happiness,” say the organizers, led by Hollywood talent agent and event producer Jared Paul. Their plan to inject this happiness is to charge $32.50 on weekdays and $39.50 on weekends to walk through the “larger-than-life” installations and “multi-sensory” experiences at the exhibit running at Toronto’s Harbourfront until Jan. 6.
The Happy Place includes a glass dome with swirling confetti; a room that smells of cookies though none are being baked; a yellow bathtub surrounded by rubber ducks; a garden of 40,000 fake flowers; a pot of gold-coloured balls at the base of a faux rainbow.
It’s part of a surge in temporary pop-up exhibits that have grown in popularity in the last year or two, all of them somehow transforming the traditional spectator into a participant. They have done this with varying levels of success and acclaim, but the byproduct of each is the same: A flood of photos to Instagram. Infinity Mirrors, Yayoi Kusama’s art installation that drew swarms to Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario earlier this year, gave people 45-second opportunities to take photos in mirrored rooms that reflected images of themselves infinitely. And New York City’s Museum of Pizza immersive art experience delivered a “multi-sensory, psychedelic pizza joy” when it ran in the autumn.
At the Happy Place, visitors are given this instruction: “Capture your happy.”
You can take it as an invitation to spiritually grasp the happiness that’s apparently floating about this maze. Or you can take it as an invitation to take photos. And people take a lot of photos. Since the Happy Place opened at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre Nov. 1, after runs in Chicago and Los Angeles, its patrons have posted thousands of photos to Instagram.
They all look utterly happy — posing in shoes and in front of cookie wallpaper and lying in the bathtub and jumping in the ball pit and throwing confetti in the confetti dome and popping up like rodents in the fake flower bed.
At the end of my tour, I felt like I do when I’ve stayed too long in a mall. It’s the kind of mood liable to make you say something you don’t mean. But still, I can’t condemn the Happy Place, or begrudge the happy people happily paying to wait in lines to pose for a picture.
It just seems too ordinary to get worked up about. And really, it is ordinary, said Paolo Granata, an assistant professor in media studies at the University of Toronto.
It’s another example of society’s slide away from reality, and real emotions, in favour of simulated versions that look, well, better, he said. Photos of food and vacations usually look better than the real version. In that sense, the Happy Place is not much different than a restaurant, according to Granata.
So you can’t really condemn the Happy Place, or feel at all superior to its patrons, because the Happy Place isn’t locked in the Harbourfront Centre. It can be anywhere. We are all in the Happy Place.
We’re now living in a world where everything, even emotion, can be simulated — just as a decades-old prophecy predicted, said the academic Granata, whose research specializes in visual culture and public engagement.
Since the 1960s, philosophers — primarily French ones — have been charting a gradual societal rejection of reality in favour of something even more real.
“The prophecy was we are going to create a hyperreality,” Granata said. “That prophecy is coming true.”
The prophecy, he said, starts with the human obsession with representations of reality, rather than reality itself. With television and advertising shaping a new kind of public sphere in the mid20th century, the fear was that the authentic life would be replaced by a hyperreal one, Granata said.
“In real life, we are no longer just people. We are always an audience,” he said. “We are always part of this spectacle.”
Things that are hyperreal are spectacular by nature. They are copies without originals, what the late Paris-based philosopher Jean Baudrillard called simulacra, Granata said. Take a pair of great big yellow shoes. Or, take this example about Jurassic Park: “You would be disappointed if you saw a real Tyrannosaurus rex after the movie. It wouldn’t be as noisy or as scary or as frightening,” the late American academic Rick Roderick said. That T-Rex, like the shark in Jaws, was hyperreal, he said.
Roderick was lecturing in the early 1990s, talking about Xerox and fax machines pushing society along toward its prophesied break from reality. Now, U of T’s Granata sees sites like Instagram as far more capable of surrounding us with digital simulations of reality — not just simulations of dinosaurs, but simulated emotions.
“We are the content,” Granata said. “Social media are not just tools. They are a world. They are an environment.
“This is an environment we are in.”
If you take a photo at the Happy Place, lying in the yellow bathtub with all those rubber ducks, are you happy? Or, are you simulating happiness? That photo — with good lighting and bright colours — looks wonderful, Granata said. It’s a copy far better than the original emotion. And if happiness can be copied, it’s a commodity.
“It’s an experience that can be simulated, that can be built artificially in a laboratory,” he said. “Happiness is not just a kind of emotion, a mindset. Essentially, happiness can be conceived as a product, as a business.”
It’s not new. Ads commodify emotions. Film and television is more real than reality. So is Instagram, with its photo filters and influencers who have made a business of posting photos of themselves with products.
“Social media provides us with a 24-hour stage where we must show the best part of ourselves,” Granata said.
So the Happy Place is just another factory pumping simulations of happiness into a market already saturated with them. It’s a make-your-own-pizza place in a world where everyone eats pizza.
“I strongly agree, the Happy Place is everywhere,” Granata said, “because everywhere, generally speaking, people search for … the opportunity of turning that ordinary experience into an extraordinary experience — into something with more beauty than the normality, more beauty than the ordinary way of living.”