Muffled ‘Drums’

ANAHEIM — One of the best things about living in a time when the lines between high and pop culture are blurred is that virtually any subject--treated with curiosity, intelligence and a measure of irreverence--can be the basis of an informative and stylish exhibition.

I had high hopes for “Tiki--Native Drums in the Orange Grove,” an array of tacky “Polynesian” accouterments at the Anaheim Museum through Sept. 21.

What a great idea, I thought: to reflect on what these artifacts of ‘50s America say about cultural norms and aspirations and how they bastardized indigenous beliefs and styles. And what better place to lay it all out than the city where tiki style--reduced to kitsch decades ago--still survives in places such as the Samoan Motel on Katella Avenue and the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland.

But the show offers precious little reflection. It’s simply a walk down memory lane to a time when lei-bedecked, suburban Don the Beachcombers in blindingly colorful shirts served neon-hued cocktails with goofy plastic swizzle sticks and listened to records by small-town white boys playing their idea of South Seas music.

Guest curators Kevin Kidney and Jody Daily, working with Anaheim Museum coordinator Devin Frick, have put obvious effort into enlivening cases of matchbooks, mugs, dolls, yellowing postcards, album covers and theme restaurant menus. It’s a wonder what you can do with bamboo, old patio lights and colored pebbles.

But if it weren’t for a fine British Channel 4 TV video that puts the Polynesian craze in context, the content level of the show would be close to zero.

There is no information on genuine Polynesian culture (tikis are believed to have been carved as representatives of the first man on Earth or a superhuman creator), and there are no reactions from Polynesians and Melanesians to the bastardization of their cultures.

No attempt is made to counter the racial stereotyping seen in an ill-conceived Disney poster (“Tiki talk say, Better go! Wondrous food! Wondrous show!”) and in the little brown-skinned, skimpily attired “Mr. and Mrs. Menehune” dolls with dumb expressions, which turn the menehune (tiny creatures believed to be responsible for inexplicable events) into Ugly American conceptions of childlike natives.

Even on the pop-culture level, it’s catch as catch can. There’s a copy of “Kon-Tiki”--ethnologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s popular 1950 account of his raft trip to the Pacific Islands--but no information on what he was attempting to prove (that the islanders originally came from South America).

Who was Martin Denny, creator of the “exotic sounds” on some of the LPs on display? Why don’t we get to hear any of this music in the show? And why did the tiki style fade out so completely in the ‘60s?

The video, which plays continuously in an adjoining gallery, fills in many gaps. With remarks by an interior designer, a historian and Los Angeles artist Jeffrey Vallance, the tiki mystique is revealed as a “white man’s Garden of Eden,” a leisure-time fantasy crafted entirely on the mainland for the repressed Silent Generation.

In an interview, novelist James Michener (whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “South Pacific” had second and third lives as a stage musical and then a movie) remarks that returning male veterans of the Pacific war harbored fond memories of the island women and their lifestyles.

Denny, a genial mainlander, explains in the same video that his music is fictional but based on indigenous sounds (bird calls, monkey chatter, rumbling volcanoes, crashing surf). It was supposed to evoke “what people think the islands might be like.”

For Average Joe, the peak experience was taking a date to a restaurant masquerading as a bamboo hut, with piped-in “exotic” lounge music or a miniature waterfall. One intriguing idea the video tosses out in passing is that faux Polynesiana represents a meeting between the South Pacific and the Space Age (the Utopian dream that supported legions of Southern California aerospace employees).

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Although the aerodynamic stylings associated with the late ‘50s and early ‘60s are evoked in the tapering torch designs and elongated tiki eye shapes, the real point of contact seems to be the era’s unbridled optimism and blinkered insularity.

This state of mind now seems so remote and naively fanciful that vintage lounge music has found a Gen-X niche, and cheesy fabric patterns have made a tongue-in-cheek comeback in the styles of leading designers.

By the end of the ‘60s, race had become an increasingly volatile issue, and Americans began to travel abroad more often--resulting in a gradual but growing appreciation of genuine ethnic cuisines--and the image of abandon conjured up by a fake Polynesia gave way to the cheap thrills of the sexual revolution.

As someone in the video remarked, “Why get high with Martin Denny when you had Jimi Hendrix?”

* “Tiki--Native Drums in the Orange Grove,” through Sept. 21 at the Anaheim Museum, 241 S. Anaheim Blvd. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday, noon-4 p.m. Closed holidays and holiday weekends. Free. (714) 778-3301.