Page - 130 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

130 siting futurity In condensing twentieth-century Eastern Europe history into a twee narrative, Grand Budapest Hotel enacts a double disavowal of the plight Pyzik depicts, first of the fact that “economically the contemporary West has never had so much in common with the East as it does now” (ibid., 9), something that does not bode well for great swaths of both, and second of the role that Ameri- can cultural and political imperialism has played in contribut- ing to this condition. The success of The Grand Budapest Hotel should give us pause. As Geoff Dyer has observed, “[r]uins do not encourage the viewer to dwell on what they were like in their heyday. The Coliseum in Rome or the amphitheater at Leptis Magna has nev- er been anything but ruins. They are eternal ruins. […] Rather than make you think of the past, ruins direct you towards the future. The effect is almost prophetic” (Dyer, cited in Schalliol 2018, 106). In depicting a Cold War world in ruins, Anderson’s film enjoyed great success with precisely this message: “[t]his is what the future will end up like. This is what the future has always ended up looking like” (ibid., 106). With Trump in the White House doing his best to realize a Cold War vision of the world in ruins and Detroit becoming “America’s great comeback story,” one is tempted to fall into despair. Yet that would be to disregard the works of artists and schol- ars that push back against the unidirectional narratives of ruin- porn decline and phoenix-like rebirth. Just as Rebecca Kinney reminds us that the great America comeback story hinges on “the white possessive” concomitant privileging of whiteness and property (Kinney 2018, 777), Kaston Tange spells out for us how these “national narratives of an invigorated city rising from the ashes of its former self” can be just as detrimental as those of ruin porn: For the phoenix rising builds a mythology of a fully formed — though perhaps smaller, more nimble — entity emerging whole and functional from the flames. As surely as the narrative arc of inevitable decay implies that processes of decline, through their very inevitability, are beyond hu-