Cracking Eggs in the Self-Aware Diner: Prolegomena to an Aesthetic

This essay is reprinted from AmericanNerdMag.com. It originally ran July 18, 2005.













This morning I had breakfast at Dot's Diner, just about the tastiest place a person can go for morning fixins in Boulder, Colorado. When I'm there, I order a vegan breakfast burrito. This burrito configuration doesn't appear as such on the menu; it's my own twist on their existing breakfast burrito. I've now ordered it so many times that the staff knows immediately what I'll be getting when I walk through the door. I've become a regular, and that's a comfortable position to be in. To be completely honest, I harbor a secret desire that Dot's will name the burrito after me; that some day my name will appear on their green laminated menus. And what an honor that would be! I'd have entered into the mysterious pantheon of diner namesakes, those faceless geniuses who have begotten many an omelet and sandwich across this fair nation.

There's no place I would rather eat than a diner, and Dot's is among the best. At Dot's, as with any diner worth its salt, the heaviness of a coffee mug in one's hand while leaning into a vinyl booth is uniquely satisfying. After all, the beauty of a diner isn't the food, anyway (or at least not entirely), it's the ambience; or, more accurately, the context. The diner is the quintessence of American eatery. No other variety of establishment quite matches it for the rawness of Americana found therein. But this much is obvious. Everyone involved knows that they are embedded in a time-worn tradition. And this, in itself, is a bit of a predicament. Because people who run diners know that they are serving up hot plates of American quintessence, they market their diners as such. That is to say, diners are, more often than not, explicitly marketed as diners, just in case you're apt to miss the point.

And just what do we make of such an establishment? Such a place is no longer a mere diner, but a Self-Aware Diner, which, to be sure, is a yolk of a different color. The Self-Aware Diner has discovered itself. It announces its own identity from tack-on mansard rooftops. We might think of the Self-Aware Diner as having reached maturity, no longer tolerating the indiscretions of the searching youth. But, as any diner devotee will tell you, the Self-Aware Diner isn't where we really want to be, is it? Diner self-awareness is a cause for concern. We, the coffee drinkers and omelet eaters, want to eat at a real diner, whatever that means, and a diner that loudly displays its dimerism seems, well, phony, doesn't it? Bill Griffith, author of Zippy the Pinhead, refers to the phenomenon as the meta-diner: a diner that's about being a diner. Doesn't this seem like a problem? What happened to the diner that was about breakfast? And, isn't this essentially what Plato was so worried about in writing The Republic? Plato didn't want meta-experiences, he wanted to get right to the heart of reality, or at least as close as possible. And what could be more real than a burger and fries (or more phony than a burger and fries that attempts to capture the national zeitgeist)?

The worst offenders among the self-aware bunch make themselves pretty obvious. If you've ever been to the Rock & Roll Runza in Lincoln Nebraska (and I think we can assume that we've all been there, right?), you'll know the symptoms. Upon entering the restaurant, one experiences a time-warp. But instead of being back in the 1950s as they actually were we emerge in sickeningly nostalgic bizarro 1950s, where the employees look like the cast of Grease, you can eat in the replica of a '57 Chevy, and if you're lucky, Elvis himself (or a pimply-faced sixteen year old in Elvis-guise) will croon for you. Notice, also, that it's the "Rock & Roll" Runza, not the "Rock" Runza. This is a place to go for the safe, fun-loving, good times of Bill Haley and the Comets, not the threatening near-Satanic posturing of AC/DC (for the facsimile of danger, one heads on down to the Hard Rock Café, a slightly different breed of Self-Aware Diner). Sure, the themed menu items are fun, but, to any one in search of a real diner, such a place is unsettling. Everything is phony, a mock-up – and, of course, this is precisely the appeal. For a discerning public, who wants an eatery both safe and fun, staged dinerism is precisely what's called for. If you're looking for a controlled and predictable, yet innocently fun dining experience, you'll want to be in the Self-Aware Diner. Properly speaking the Rock & Roll Runza isn't really a diner at all, but a fast-food joint masquerading as a diner. But, of course, what they ultimately offer to customers isn't authentic diner fare, but a nostalgic redressing of post WWII-innocence and optimism.

The real thing, on the other hand, is an unknown; there's just too many X-factors, and, for a lot of people, the threat of finding oneself in a dive (and not faux-dive, mind you) is too great to be risked. And, easy as it is to find a Denny's, Perkins or IHOP (Self-Aware Diners, all), why flirt with danger?

Diner self-awareness is not a fleeting phenomenon. The Self-Aware are here to stay, and they're sinking into public consciousness. The problem is what to do with these places? Vincent and Mia dance in a Self-Aware Diner in Pulp Fiction, and enjoy the parody (though, notice that the film opens and closes in a "real" diner – or at least a less-self-aware one, anyway). Ghost World's Enid expresses disgust with a Self-Aware Diner, but ultimately enjoys the kitchiness, which gives her a chance to make fun of the dupes that the diner suckers in. The patrons are dupes because they are un-aware of, or at least accepting of, the diner's self-awareness, and Enid feels superior because she's clued in. She knows that the whole thing is a sham. But, ultimately, this turns back upon itself – after all, she's a patron, too. Later in the film when Seymour watches Blueshammer, the Self-Aware Blues Band (though unaware, presumably, of how bad they are) he feels awkward – he's looking for real blues, and isn't satisfied just with being clued-in. So, how should we react? Can we make fun of Self-Aware Diners while still enjoying them? Or is it better to retreat in disgust?

Let's pause for a minute to consider self-awareness as such. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt suggested that second-order awareness was the identifying characteristic of personhood. That is to say, if you can think about yourself in abstract, you're a human. Thus, a human, as opposed to what Frankfurt called a "wanton" would not only think about eating at a diner, but would think "I'm a person who likes to eat at diners." But, failing, that you're dealing with a different kind of animal (well, okay, you're dealing with an animal). But, how should we translate this into the world of dinerdom? The Self-Aware Diner not only thinks about burgers and fries, but thinks about how such foods are emblematic of its status-as-diner. This is second-order awareness. And does this mean that Self-Aware Diners are, in fact, human? More and more, I'm reluctant to respond with a no… But, self-awareness doesn't really stop at the second level, anyway.

Both humans and diners are also capable of third-order awareness. One could guess that the Pulp Fiction diner has not only second level awareness, but third level awareness, too. It not only knows that it is a diner, but knows that it knows that it is a diner. Put another way, the Pulp Fiction diner knows that it's a diner, and also knows that you, the patron, knows it's a diner, and, further, knows that you know it's a diner that knows it's a diner – and, thus, that its appeal is its pretense toward irony. The deceived patron slurps his soda thinking, "hey, here is a diner that is really trying hard to be a diner – hilarious! I love it!". While the diner itself knows that that is why the patrons are here – and that that is precisely the point. So, the patron's ironic stance fails as long as the diner is more aware than the patron. This may be Enid's mistake in Ghost World, too. She accepts the irony of being at the diner, but it still managed to draw her in, and the experience, while initially amusing, is ultimately unsatisfying. But, of course, now that you're in the know, you can trump the third-order awareness diner with some third-order awareness of your own. It's not exactly a vicious circle, but a vicious, upwardly moving double helix.

Among humans, self-reflexivity is prized. The more aware we can be the better. But with diners, quite the opposite is true. The mythical "authentic" self-unaware diner, lurking somewhere deep in the heart of a rural no-man's land, is the holy grail of dinerdom. It'srecognizable by a few hallmarks: lifeless food, ancient décor, palpable weariness. Of course, what's most important is that the seed-cap wearing patrons have no pretense that they're doing something emblematic of the American zeitgeist (and no awareness that lunch can exist at varying levels of meta-meaning, anyway). They're just getting a bite to eat. Which makes you, the discoverer of the authentic diner, an interloper. You'll have discovered a hidden tribe in a dark continent. The diner's practices will be ultimately inscrutable, untranslatable. And to the diner's true patrons, it won't be worth asking questions about. But actually, as I've already mentioned, the authentic ur-diner is a mythical creature, and like all mythical creatures, it's a useful fiction. This is not to say that seedy rural diners don't exist – they do, but their status as authentic is merely a useful counterpoint to the Self-Aware Diner's existence as phony. Will immersing ourselves in increasingly primordial diners really solve lingering self-reflexivity questions? It's really hard to say. A friend of mine went on a quest to find the diviest diner in his vicinity, but, two diners in, he gave up. He couldn't handle their strangeness, and so went back to eating at Self-Aware Diners.

I recently visited the Happy Chef restaurant in Mankato, MN. I was attracted by the statuary. In front of the Happy Chef, greeting travelers on highway 169 is the Happy Chef, a two-story statue of a beaming chef, triumphantly holding a spoon aloft. At its base, one can push a button to hear Happy Chef's delightful jokes. Happy Chef statues used to be commonplace, though now the Mankato location is the only one still standing. (Though apparently, some derelict chefs still exist in unwitting locations). Diner statuary is a funny thing. The Happy Chef announces to all passers-by, "Hey look at me, I represent dinerdom." Thus, the Happy Chef is definitely self-aware. But, because, there's only one Happy Chef statue left, it can make a claim to a certain authenticity. The statue is a genuine relic from a Self-Aware Diner; its authentically inauthentic. And this exposes a crucial point. Self-Aware diners are still real places, at the same time that they're phony. Sure, they're mock-ups pretending to be something that they're not, but real people still eat there.

I'm a regular at Dot's Diner, which is, itself, certainly not unaware of its status-as-diner. Nevertheless, the occurrence of regularity itself speaks to its reality. The regular is the time-worn, and so, one could conclude that diner self-awareness is itself becomingquintessentially American. Thus, the Self-Aware Diners get what they were after, though in a clearly unintended way. To those diner purists looking for reality in imagined unawareness, I recommend a change in strategy. In retreating from the phony, we are apt to miss something that is itself real, and that is unreality. I'm not necessarily saying we should embrace it, either, but it is something to be aware of.