The Case of California

Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast through such varied social and cultural artifacts as bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, Marilyn Monroe, milk-carton images of missing children, orgies, Mickey Mouse, zombies, teenage slang, shock therapy, and surf music, The Case of California offers a dizzying psycho-history of the twentieth century as crystallized in the symbolic configuration and “case” of California, which case is articulated in relation to German modernism, National Socialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis. As Laurence Rickels writes, “on the personalizable level or label, California is a death cult; on the social, outward, happy-face level, it distributes pleasure via sadomasochism,…