Deadwood - Part 2: Old Westworld.

June 03, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

Towns like Deadwood—which exist all over the American West—have various strata of actual historicity mixed in with organic retrofitting and remodeling, more cynical redevelopment and gentrification, as well as purely thematic (read: touristic) overlays. It's all something of a layered cake.

What is Authentic Deadwood becomes a specter, an abstraction, a mere concept. The confused (and fused, and re-fused) symbology overcomes the structural forms themselves. Uncertain meaning and the vagaries of history becomes the whole enchilada.

Westworld, 1973 film. All screen caps are from my DVD. — *Westworld*, 1973 film. All screen caps are from my DVD.

This is an abstraction which Michael Crichton explored, among other things, in his 1973 film Westworld. I hadn't thought about it in a while, but visiting a town like Deadwood brought it back for me, so I watched it again for the first time in years. The movie is enjoyable, though it runs a bit long and is rather clumsy, having been shot hastily in 30 days on a relatively tight budget. As should come as a surprise no one, Crichton became fascinated by the idea of a theme park staffed by robots after a visit to Disneyland. In an interview for American Cinematographer magazine, November 1973, he recounted:

One can go to Disneyland and see Abraham Lincoln standing up every 15 minutes to deliver the Gettysburg Address. That’s the case of a machine that has been made to look, talk and act like a person. I think it was the sort of notion that got the picture started. It was the idea of playing with a situation in which the usual distinctions between person and machine—between a car and the driver of the car—become blurred.

A fairly realistic android gunslinger (Yul Brynner) meets his end.

Elsewhere, Crichton noted he was "fascinated by the animated figures at Disneyland. The two tendencies toward making people as machine like as possible and machines as human as possible are creating a lot of confusion. That’s what suggested Westworld to me."

Again, we see the choice of the Old West to be a natural setting for exploring the intersection of fantasy, mythology, history, and artiface.

Westworld, 2016 series. All screen caps are from my DVD box set of season one. — *Westworld,* 2016 series. All screen caps are from my DVD box set of season one.

Westworld has been reimagined nearly a decade after its creator's death as a very popular series on HBO, with a second season underway as of April 22, 2018. Although this new show does hew closely to Crichton's original cinematic vision, the underlying themes have been expanded upon and all the characters and their backstories are crafted of whole cloth.

Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have taken Crichton's screenplay and development notes as a foundation for a much broader (and deeper) series of stories which examine both the mechanics and ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, as well as more probing philosophical issues like free will and the nature of consciousness. As pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman once quipped, "science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people" and Westworld is no exception—though I might (less cynically) suggest that sci-fi can be a viable platform for bringing philosophical issues to a mass audience (though the results vary).

A curious article by Jordan Zakarin from October, 2016 features an interview with Westworld's production designer Zack Grobler, who took over the role from Nathan Crowley after he designed the series pilot. Zakarin notes

The original 1973 film on which this series is based took direct inspiration from Disneyland and its faux-western Frontierland, which is filled with animatronics and musical hoedowns. Crowley and Grobler, however, saw the film, and its Happiest Place on Earth influence, more as spiritual forerunners.

The western town in the original 1973 film.

The movie Westworld was shot on an actual western movie set (the MGM backlot, and was one of the last films to be shot there) which was designed as a western movie set and the effect in the universe of the film is that guests in this sometime-in-the-near-future theme park feel like they are actors in a western movie.

The original film doesn't appear obsessed with any kind of verisimilitude—it's clear that the characters in the story realize and act like they're in a conceptual extension of a Disneyland-type environment. But it's an open world in which you can shoot the robots dead.

This is not the case in the new Westworld. And part of the reason is that unlike the film (which takes place only a few years or so after 1973), the series is set further off—according to the series co-creator Jonathan Nolan, "maybe fifty to a hundred years into the future."

Production designer Grobler explains the different in the interview cited above. "The original movie had a lot more of the ‘movie set’ feeling, and it was a bit like Disneyland. We tried to give a much higher quality and much more realistic setting. Disneyland is not bad now, but a few hundred years from now, the technology will be so much better that you will not even realize you’re in the park."

The shooting location in a making-of Featurette.

In the HBO version of Westworld, the western town has a name, Sweetwater, and is simply a central setting for what is a much larger world. Scenes in the town were shot at the famed Melody Ranch near Newhall in the Santa Clarity Valley north of Los Angeles.

The ranch is within the 30 mile "local limit" for union productions, and many classic westerns had been shot there until a devastating fire swept through the area in 1962. The ranch was rebuilt and restored in 1990 and in recent years has been host to productions such as the HBO series Deadwood and films like Django Unchained.

Simulated overview of Sweetwater in the Westworld control room.

The realism of the town's set is supported by more than just HBO's ample production budget. It also fits within the conceptual framework of the series—the thematic environments of Westworld must match the realism of the park's artificial inhabitants.

If the androids behave with true AI, then the built environment around them must meet the same level of representation. In terms of video games, the 3D modeling of both the characters and the world must be at the same screen resolution, the same fidelity.

"The guests wouldn’t just come to see these hosts," co-creator Lisa Joy explained for a featurette on the season one DVD box set. "They’re also coming for the world itself, so it would have to be similarly as impressive, perfect, and unique."

Commentary on the new Westworld series focuses on the more obvious trappings of the stories and the characters, which is to say, Klosterman's dig at "philosophy for stupid people." James Poniewozik in a New York Times review of the premiere of the second season mocked the dialog which serves as the vehicle for this CliffsNotes edition of existentialism, saying it "still sounds as if it were written as a tagline for a subway poster, like Dolores’s 'I have one last role to play: myself.' "

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with all this, except to say that I think that the Westworld series also has things to say on the nature of the virtual / built worlds around the robotic characters, and not just the characters themselves.

At the heart of it, Michael Crichton's interest was in the nature of artificiality just as much as the nature of reality (and though these two questions sound like a rephrasing of the same thing, they're actually quite different). The HBO manifestation of his concept presents a further-in-the-future vision of a specific type of augmented reality—one in which the thematic, built facets work in tandem with advanced android characters in an open world setting. I wonder, then, is this the future of thematic design?

Shooting the first season of Westworld. — Shooting the first season of *Westworld*.

In his seminal Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977), former advertising executive Jerry Mander raises an interesting question. "Once television provides an image [of a time and place] what happens to your own image? Does it give way to the TV image or do you retain it?" He then goes on to list a number of settings and characters, such as "An American family farm. Ben Franklin. The Battle of Little Bighorn. The Old South. The landing of the Pilgrims. Ancient Greece. Ancient Rome." And he concludes, tellingly, I think, with "The Old West."

Mander asks finally, "Were you able to come up with images for any or all of these? It is extremely unlikely that you have experienced more than one or two of them personally. Obviously the images were either out of your own imagination or else they were from the media. Can you identify which was which?"

The inability to manage that distinction is at the heart of towns like Deadwood, and is the soul of places like Westworld.

Continued in Part 3.

Deadwood - Part 1: The Theming of Main Street.

May 06, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

After having some Close Encounters with Devils Tower, it was on to South Dakota. Initially I had planned to drive straight to Rapid City to spend the night, and then press on to Mt. Rushmore the next day. But I remembered there was a little town on the way that I had always wanted to see—Deadwood.

Deadwood in the second half of the 19th CEntury.

Like many, many American towns of its size, Deadwood has a Main Street which over the years has been turned into a tourist district—a "Historic Main Street" as the Chamber of Commerce calls it.

In the classic text Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America (1996), historian Richard V. Francaviglia explores the illusion of the American Small Town that we have in our imagination. He suggests that there is no such thing as an authentic Main Street, because even in historically preserved, unaltered structures from the later 19th and early 20th centuries, "the image of Main Street that reaches the public is often a selected or edited version depicting what the street should look like." [emphasis mine]

Deadwood historic main street, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

Francaviglia outlines a series of axioms in his text of Main Street Development, and I'll be returning to them from time to time in later posts. Essentially, these rules describe the architectural DNA of Main Streets across the country and why they look remarkably similar. I won't list all the axioms here, but one stood out to me in the context of thematic design, especially as relevant to the "historic" Old Western town:

Main Street is essentially a stage upon which several types of human dramas are performed simultaneously, each character or actor in the drama having a designated role that is dependant on his or her relationship to the "set."

"Historic" Main Street, Northeast block.

If indeed Main Street is a set, then the genre of film being performed in Deadwood is naturally an American Western. Francaviglia emphasizes in his book that the portrayal of the Small Town Main Street in film and television (in Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, the films of Frank Capra, etc.) is true in a sense to its essential role as this stage set in actual life—and it is also at once a fusion of both the actual historical aesthetics and roles of Main Street and the televised version that lives on in our cultural subconscious.

In another one of his axioms, Francaviglia mentions what the design of a Main Street has in common with a movie set—to extend and enlarge commercial presence (i.e. the "brand image") many buildings employ some kind of false front.

The façade of the building becomes more important than any other elevation because it faces the street.

Movie sets, of course, are designed as a series of false fronts. Unless they are photographed in the round, structures are not fully complete—in order to save money only what appears before the camera is built.

The incompleteness of sets has been used before in fiction for dramatic, surrealist purposes. As is usual, necessity was the mother of this innovation. In an episode of the original Star Trek series, Captain Kirk and members of his crew are sent by aliens to die in a re-enactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Because of the show's modest budget, shooting on location or on an actual outdoor western town set was out of the question.

Star Trek, Spectre of the Gun (1968). — Star Trek, *Spectre of the Gun* (1968).

The episode was instead filmed on a soundstage, with one of the show's typical planetscape colors as background. The aliens who are punishing Kirk et al. have read their minds to concocate this fantasy of the warring Earps—so the incomplete western town façades present as the "incomplete" reconstruction of the crew's collective memories of the Old West. The device of the movie set becomes a literal representation of cultural subconscious.

Although scenes take place in the interior spaces of the saloon and other buildings, none of the rooms have walls. They have floors and are fully furnished with all the period-appropriate trimmings. But no walls, perhaps suggesting the classic fourth wall of the audience.

As Chekov is shot, a false front stage set can be seen behind him.

Given the dominance of the Western genre in American fantasy culture throughout the 20th century—a tradition that began with "Buffalo Bill" Cody's roadshow reenactments of the 1870s and 1880s—it makes sense that presenting the Western Frontier Town as a movie set has special resonance. Would this Star Trek episode read as strongly if the aliens had dumped them in a Medieval or Roman fantasy scenario, with all the structures presented surrealistically as false fronts? I don't think so. The connection between actual American Main Streets, the mythology of the Old West, and the Western Town as movie set is undeniably strong. Deadwood—as well as countless other such towns scattered west of the Rockies—capitalizes on these associations.

"The facades of the two buildings were replicated in 1997."

A plaque commemorating the"Historic Facade Replication" of the Horace Clark and Apex Buildings which burned down in 1982. This is odd, right? I've seen plaques noting restorations, but this is the first I've spotted proudly stating that these building facades were replicated—that is to say, cloned.

The phenomenon which Francaviglia alludes to is pervasive. Neal Gabler wrote an entire book about it—simply the fact that since the dawn of motion pictures, we construct our environments (sets), our relationships (characters). and our very lives (screenplays) in a cinematic mode. Gabler claims we can't not do this.

This is something my colleague Greg Turner-Rahman and I call Cinematic Subsumption, and the topic something the two of us have been working on—first for a paper presentation and then for a book prospectus. More on this later.

Continued in Part 2.

Close Encounters of the Themed Kind.

January 14, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

Devil's Tower has been on my bucket list for years and years, and luckily this trip it was on the route, dropping down through Montana on our way to South Dakota. I'm usually interested in theming from a design perspective, but occasionally I'd like to comment from a broader one.

All over the world, people are drawn to locations used in favorite movies. I've been on this quest myself many times before, from the Campo San Barnaba church in Venice that appears in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as a library to the Hook & Ladder Company 8 Firehouse in New York City which served as the Ghostbusters headquarters. There are entire websites devoted to tracking this stuff down.

My last visit to Vasquez Rocks, January 2012.

One of my favorite such locations of all time (and I've been more than once) is Vasquez Rocks, located in a county park in north Los Angeles. Because of the close proximity to Hollywood studios—it's within the 'local' day rate radius defined by the unions—Vasquez Rocks turns up in everything. Famous westerns from the 50s and 60s. Shlock from the 70s. Action from the 80s. And lots and lots and lots of Star Trek. And spoofs of Star Trek.

Vasquez Rocks on Star Trek, and Futurama doing Trek. — Vasquez Rocks on *Star Trek*, and *Futurama* doing *Trek*.

This is where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn (that green lizard monster). I personally love the location for its appearance in the pilot episode of Airwolf. My point is, what used to be a quiet backwoods park where people walked their dogs or rode horses is now something of a tourist stop. Fortunately, it's a bit out of the way, so you don't find busloads of people. But every time I've gone to Vasquez, there's at least a few other people there taking pictures, just like me. All because of what they've seen in film and on television. Which means, in an odd way, Vasquez Rocks has a theme—and that theme is whatever and whenever you remember seeing it. If it's Star Trek, that's the theme. Or Bonanza. Or The Six Million Dollar Man. Or whatever.

Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, experiencing the Tower just as we do, through media.

In Life: The Movie, author Neal Gabler posits that due to the dominance of film and television, all of us relate to 'reality' as a scripted narrative, in which we all play a character, interacting with other people and situations in a completely mediated way. He argues (writing in 1998) that at this point, we can't not do this. It's too late to go back.

I really got a sense of what he was talking about as I looked up at Devils Tower. Although certainly majestic in its own right, and as appealing as any other National Park or Monument that's also been on my bucket list, I was under no illusion as to why I really wanted to see it in person: Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

The alien mothership approaches the tower at the start of the film's finale.

For anyone who hasn't seen the film, the final act takes place at Devils Tower. This is the site where alien visitors have communicated that they wish to make contact with humanity. The government has chased everyone away with a cover story that a train wreck has released toxic nerve gas. Those who have had a 'close encounter' like Roy have been haunted by mental images of the tower, and are compelled to go there to meet the aliens. Both Roy and Jillian (her son was abducted, and she too has been called to the tower) persist despite the black helicopters trying to stop them from reaching the landing site that NASA has hastily put together. The movie ends with Jillian's son being returned to her, and Roy being personally chosen by the aliens to come aboard their ship and leave earth.

Because Devils Tower is so central to the plot (from the moment Roy starts shaping it out of mashed potatoes at the dinner table) and because the entire finale was shot there, this National Monument is sort of the icon of the movie. It's like the logo of Close Encounters.

The vantage I remember from the film, 1977.

During a trail hike around the base, I dutifully snapped a photo from a vantage that matched my mental image of the tower. It wasn't difficult to do, having watched the film the night before in my motel room. But I was still surprised how close I got to the actual shot shown in the film.

While eating lunch at a diner at the base of Devils Tower (attached to a KOA campground, across the street from a giant gift shop), I noticed this display case of toys, games, clothing, and various promotional swag. These tourist traps just outside the National Monument boundaries are not shy in the slightest about the Close Encounters connection. I admit, I bought a fridge magnet that says "I WAS THERE" in a sci-fi looking typeface with a picture of the mothership lights over the tower. 2017 was the film's 40th anniversary, and there were special t-shirts being sold in the National Parks ranger station. They were out of my size.

This was super cool though; in the same diner there was a 1970s vintage Close Encounters pinball machine in the corner, near the display case. While it wasn't plugged in, it was remarkably well preserved.

The illustrations on the pinball machine have that comic book adaptation look; resembling the film, but not quite right, with outrageous colors. Notice the prominent Devils Tower graphic.

The panoramic view after making it to the top of the free-climb limit.

What I realized while visiting Devils Tower is that the mediated themes of these film locations override any other way to experience them. I suppose if I had never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I could experience the tower with fresh eyes, and see it simply as a wonder of nature; it would be like the Grand Canyon, or Monument Valley... wait not Monument Valley, that's been in countless Westerns. The buttes of the landscape telegraph 'Old West' to even people who have never seen a single John Ford film; they've been used in television shows, commercials, advertising, and parodies.

Even if I'd never seen the movie before, Devils Tower is on the Close Encounters poster, on the VHS, on the DVD cover. I might have glimpsed it while renting another film, seen it in a store while browsing for something else. I'd have to have avoided quite a bit of popular culture—certainly a huge swath of science fiction—to not have come across it at least once, if only by accident. And if not... I might have spied it in the diner, in that display case. Or on the shirts at the ranger station.

George Lucas once quipped that one of his biggest regrets is that he's never seen Star Wars. By that he means that his perspective is unavoidably internalized as its creator; he was never able to line up like the public, see it uniquely and for the first time, like anybody else.

In that sense, I'll never see Devils Tower.

Typography As Theming in the Ol' West.

January 06, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

After leaving Great Falls, it was back on the road through Montana, into Wyoming, and on to South Dakota. How do we know we're in the Old West? In absence of covered wagons, dusty trails, and cowboys on horseback rounding up cattle...the typography.

I have a huge soft spot for nineteenth century American wood type. These garish display faces which originated in England during the 1820s and 30s have become possibly the most evocative visual expression of the Old West in the eyes of the public.

And why? Well, as with all aspects of thematic design, it's the strong connection to life in the cinematic mode.

Opening titles of two very popular and long-running television Westerns.

These "WANTED POSTER" slab serifs, fat faces, and circus type resonate so strongly because of their representation (signage, props and ephemera, even titles and credits) within the Western genre in film and television.

An authentic WANTED poster for John Wilkes Booth (1865), and one for the "Frito Bandito" (1968).

And also advertising, and many other forms of vernacular graphic design. If you want to say "Old West" as simply and boldly as possible, wood type as used on broadsides in the 1800s is the way to go.

For the first sixty years of the twentieth century, the Western was the most popular genre in American visual media. This (largely fantasy) Old West was so thematically important, both nostalgically and aspirationally, that Walt Disney included its expression—Frontierland—as one of the five core environments of his Disneyland concept.

To the trained designer, some of these forms as reproduced in a contemporary context feel visually apocryphal. Although hand lettering was set on curves during the 1800s, the execution of SALOON here smacks of the 'flag' warp effect in Adobe Illustrator. What gives it away is the distortion of the individual characters. But the average person is not likely to notice.

Something I found fascinating on some of the signage I encountered on this road trip was the collision of first generation (late 1800s) historical nods with second generation (1950s) retro-Western interpretations. Here "CACTUS CAFE LOUNGE" is rendered in a fairly authentic Tuscan, or what we might think of as circus type. Yet "Western Hospitality" is in the kind of cheesy lasso rope script you'd associate with Roy Rogers and Howdy Doody. Adobe's Giddyup typeface is one of the more recent takes on this look.

"What idiot dressed you in that outfit?"

This collision of the 'real' Old West with the mid-century retro pop version is one of the best jokes in Back to the Future Part III (1990), when Doc dresses Marty in what he thinks is the best 1955 version of what he should be wearing when he travels back in time to 1880. Marty is (of course) mocked, beaten, and nearly hanged for his outfit after he arrives.

Western type also collides with virtually any typographic style that was popular when the sign was made; in this case, it's most likely the 1940s through the 1960s. As Route 66 gave way to the interstate highway system throughout the western states, tourism (and the associated roadside attractions) soared. Here the "See" is classic mid-century, chamber of commerce boosterism. Funnily, the extraneous exclamation point on BEARS! is authentic to both nineteenth century broadside advertising and the 1950s equivalent.

Western wood typography is also employed out of context. I found this coffee roaster in Frankenmuth, Michigan, a town with a Bavarian theme. All the rest of the type I saw was heavily Germanic; the sort of blackletter, storybook fantasy-esque lettering which you would expect. But this is a Tuscan wood type style. I think the intention here—and I've seen this before with wood type—is to connote authentic, old-fashioned quality. If the sign is old and American looking, the coffee must taste more 'real' than what Starbucks offers across the street. This kind of marketing is what Andrew Potter calls the "authenticity hoax" in his book of the same name.

Although most of the lettering I found was rendered in the last fifty years, every now and then there were some great examples of authentic, antique hand lettering along the way. This sign in Deadwood, South Dakota appeared to date to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Here the typeface is correct, but the method of manufacturing is too recent. This is direct print, like the kind of sign you'd see on a storefront in any stripmall in the country.

Here a fat French Clarendon mingles with some bold grotesque type. Mixing slabs with sans serifs is actually very true to nineteenth century printing, but I'm guessing here it's serendipity rather than a desire for period authenticity; grotesque/gothic faces were back in vogue at mid-century.

I'm glad I made it too! Wall Drug in South Dakota provided a wealth of lovely lettering. This sign is mid-century but hand painted in the traditional way.

Some of these signs were in the "so bad it's good" category. This ugliness borders on grace.

When the typeface looks right, and the hand painting appears authentic, I tend to think the sample predates the mid-century Western pop revival. This is probably from the 1920s or 30s.

Again to the trained eye, this type screams computer manipulation.

Circus type in neon! Unlike above, the technological incongruence here is charming. I'm used to seeing this sort of thing in Las Vegas; here it's inside a gas station above the beer coolers.

Many styles of typography are well recognized by the public. Elegant script faces, for example, connote luxury goods because they look and feel "French" and communicate "royalty." Helvetica says "no nonsense." Cooper Black says "kids sneakers" (or perhaps, if you're old enough, Pet Sounds). But I'd venture that nineteenth century wood type lettering and the Old West it is recognized for is probably the largest, widest, deepest piece of American mental real estate that typography could possibly claim.

Because of such extensive usage throughout the past century in popular visual media, it's in the water. It's part of our DNA as American consumers. As a component of thematic design, you don't just see it roadside. Wood type will be found at any venue that calls for an Old West flair; restaurants, bars, casinos, hotels, roller coasters and other such attractions, whole Frontierlands (as at the Disney Parks), even entire theme parks (Knott's Berry Farm, Silver Dollar City, Dollywood, et al).

As such, it's self-perpetuating at this point. Even if a young person has never seen a Western film or television show, they've undoubtedly been to one of those restaurants, walked around one of those theme parks, ridden one of those rides, stayed at one of those motels.

I'll end here with some more of my favorite examples from this past summer's trip. Can you guess the vintage of each? Which ones are painted and which ones are printed? Pre-computer or post? Or do they all blend together into a singular Old West...

Perhaps all wood type that is solid melts into air.

Swimming with Mermaids.

January 02, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

After tooling around the lodges of Glacier National Park, it was time press on to Great Falls, Montana to spend the night. There were plenty of vintage roadside motels to choose from, but I wanted to have a more thematic experience. Some fun. Some kitsch. Some tiki. Some mermaids.

The O'Haire Motor Inn sign from the parking lot, which appears very late 80s / early 90s.

I had visited the O'Haire Motor Inn the summer prior in 2016. In some respects, it's quite usual and expected—a family owned motel / restaurant / bar which opened in 1962, where elements have been added and subtracted over the many decades. As is the case with so many establishments built at midcentury which still exist in some form, evaluating the aesthetics is like peeling back the thin layers of an onion.

A panoramic of the lounge from the north wall, facing south towards the bar.

The Sip 'n Dip Lounge is a tiki bar on the second floor which opened along with the motel. I'm a big fan of 'Polynesian Pop,' which was a twentieth century cultural movement that included tiki bars, tiki supper clubs; tiki hotels, motels, apartments and even tiki bowling alleys and carwashes. Fueled by World War II servicemen returning from the South Seas with memories (and dreams) of exotic beaches, native women, and powerful drinks, tiki culture was further enhanced by Hawaii's statehood in 1959. The Sip 'n Dip's opening in 1962 was roughly at the apex of all those barrels of rum, all those inches of grass skirts, miles of bamboo, and acres of waterfalls.

Here the onion skinning reveals some of the original early 60s core at the base, a general coat of tackiness applied during the 1970s, and a Jimmy Buffet flair that smells very 80s. Although I have visited a wide variety of tiki bars all over the world to admire their thematic design, the Sip 'n Dip is definitely unique, this bizarre layer cake of style (and not all of it attractive).

The pieces that remain at the bottom are sometimes stunning, however. These large artworks flanking the main bar area are full of beautiful detail and just ooze the craftsmanship of the early 1960s.

Detail, glass mural on the right side of the bar.

Blown glass kelp forms with clamshells, seahorses, and starfish. I could easily imagine similar installations at any one of Morris Lapidus' Neo-baroque Miami Modern hotels such as The Fontainebleau.

A panoramic of the lounge from the west wall, near the slot machines and video poker games.

The real draw of the Sip 'n Dip is its connection to and integration with the motel pool. Massive glass windows reveal swimmers below the waterline to bar patrons. In a 2013 interview with KULR-TV (Billings, Montana) general manager Sandra Johnson-Thares revealed the inspiration for this. "The windows and the lounge are original to the building. The gentleman who built the hotel had been to the Playboy Club in Chicago and saw the same window concept and decided he wanted to put it here in the hotel."

Tile mural of the motel pool, on the south wall above the Sip 'n Dip.

The pool itself is very cool, and we took a dip in it the next morning before departing. It's completely indoors, on the top level of the motel parking garage. The grid is large enough that the tile mural of a dancing hula girl and surfer have a charming 8-bit quality. As a result, I'm not certain of the age of this piece; something tells me it's a much later addition.

As various bits of signage around note, guests (and motel guests only) may swim for most of the day. That is, until the mermaids swim.

These mermaids only date back to 1996, when the attraction was jokingly thought up by general manager Sandra Johnson-Thares to add an extra draw to both the motel and the bar. As she told the New York Times in a piece from this past November, Sandra was having a drink with her mother. “I joked that we should hire some mermaids,” Ms. Johnson-Thares said. “The more drinks we had, the funnier it got.”

The timing was right. It's notable that the mid-1990s were a period of mid-century revival, including Rat Pack-era Vegas, swing dancing, lounge and exotica music, the 'bachelor pad' aesthetic, and also tiki cocktails and tiki bars. And let's not forget, it was only six years after Disney's The Little Mermaid was a box office smash.

During the summer, the mermaids usually only swim on the weekend, but fortunately this was 4th of July week, and hours were extended for the holiday. Unlike some Las Vegas casinos I've seen where mermaids stay in underwater aquariums for extended periods by using scuba gear, this is strictly a sip (of air) and dip (hold your breath) affair. The mermaids' elaborate (and I have to imagine, durable) costumes are handmade by general manager Sandra Johnson-Thares. Photos are encouraged, as long as you provide a tip in the giant snifter on the bar counter.

Mermaid lamp at the entry to the lounge.

There are a number of art pieces and general mermaid iconography which reinforce the theme and central attraction. Were they all added after 1995? Or do some (or all) of them predate the show, and were perhaps the inspiration for the then-current owner's bright idea? I have no idea.

"The Fishbowl" drink, about the size of a bowling ball.

While slowly tackling a somewhat vile concoction called a "Fishbowl" (limited to one per customer, with good reason), my eyes panned around the Sip 'n Dip. Here I am in 2017, and, remarkably (in the middle of Montana!) it's still here.

The sad history of the Tiki bar in the United States is that the 1970s and 80s pretty much wiped them out. The era of disco and cocaine was followed by the wine cooler (and more cocaine). Rum cocktails were was out. And whatever thematic integrity there was to the Tiki bar design tradition was horribly eroded. As Sven A. Kirsten tells the tale in his seminal Book of Tiki, starting in the 70s the Polynesian style

was watered down further through a certain "Jimmy Buffetization"—the introduction of a generic tropical island theme with no definite identity Be it the Caribbean, Mexico, or Polynesia, everywhere was Margarita-ville. The popular TV show Fantasy Island [created] a world of white wicker colonial-style decor mixed with exotic plants. The fern bar replaced the Tiki bar.

The 1980s was the decade of destruction—the abolishment of Tiki and his culture. Either completely razed or renovated beyond recognition, Polynesian palaces disappeared without ever having been acknowledged as a unique facet of American pop culture. Purely an expression of a popular fad, they had always been denounced and ignored by the culture critics in their own time; now they represented merely an embarrassing lapse of taste. Unnoticed and without mourning, a whole tradition vanished.

But the Sip 'n Dip survived. Why is that? Chiefly, I think, is the location. Great Falls, Montana is a city of less than 60,000 people in one of the country's most sparsely populated states. It's a long way from anywhere, and novelties thrive in out of the way places. Not just for tourists (like myself) but also for locals. During both of my visits (July 2016 and July 2017) the bar was packed with regulars. People who come drink at the Sip 'n Dip on a weekly (or even nightly!) basis, not just to see the mermaids swim but to also hear the musical stylings of "Piano Pat" Spoonheim who has played at the bar four nights a week for over 50 years.

So it's unique, and it doesn't have much in the way of competition. What of the thematic design elements make the Sip 'n Dip enduring? It could have been drastically remodeled, or gutted completely, in just the manner Kirsten decries above. I think the answer is that the bar was able to weather the changes in popular trends over the decades by retaining the core Tiki theme and aesthetics, yet subtly (sometimes not quite as subtly) introduce further 'onion layers.' Much of the lighting—as well as the seating and carpeting—looks like it was installed in the 1970s.

Disco ball coexists with thatch roofing.

These tacky 'disco lounge' elements allowed the Sip 'n Dip to ease into that era, and to coexist with the other clubs and bars of the times without seeming out of date. At this point, I could imagine some more "authentic" Tiki parts of the bar's original 1962 design being removed or downplayed. By the 1980s, the bar similarly absorbed the "Jimmy Buffetization" Kirsten notes; you can see the palm trees and neon flamingo beer neon signs and other signs of the era sprinkled throughout the Sip 'n Dip.

Finally to stay relevant in the 1990s when Tiki was making a comeback, the mermaids were added (and I imagine some of the excesses of the 70s and 80s were trimmed back). The bar had a new entertainment draw for the locals—who were always the core constituents—but now there is a new reason for younger Tiki revivalists to make the (admittedly, lengthy and arduous) journey to Great Falls. That's really key. As long as you can survive falling out of style in order to reemerge when a revival occurs, you've got a chance.

There is enough of the original design intact to please the tikiphiles, and also enough sitcom-level cheese to provide comfort and a sense of normalcy for boomers, seniors, and even frat boys. It's not a bar that squares would mock, it's a bar that hipsters can enjoy at an ironic distance, and it's a bar that tiki geeks can cross off their list. As one online reviewer put it:

This bar is not a polished artifice of certified Tiki aesthetics, like something designed by a Disney Imagineer. It has evolved organically over its history, accumulating encrustations from different eras. It still has tabletops of its pre-Tiki nautical theme. It has a big old organ in the middle of it. It has mermaids. It has VLTs off to the side. It's in a motel that leaves complimentary rubber duckies in the rooms. It has a regular clientele of hipster kids and weathered cowboys.

Hand-painted poster art by the restrooms.

Because it has navigated over five decades of trends and styles, the Sip 'n Dip is neither relevant nor irrelevant. Isn't that the kind of permanence which all art aspires to?