“Disneyland [is] an
imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than
inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.”
–
Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulations
“There's no crying at Disneyland!”
– Parent/guardian to grizzling toddler in a Disneyland restroom,
last Wednesday
I went to Disneyland this week, and I spent the whole time thinking
about Baudrillard and marveling at the astonishing racism on display
– thoughts that coalesced into a slight obsession with the
question: Why do we go to Disneyland?
Baudrillard fingers Disneyland as the quintessential iteration of the
simulacrum and the hyperreal: the artificial representation of
reality that becomes more real than the real, to the point that
reality as such no longer exists. (I had my most dizzyingly
simulacrumtastic moment on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, when it
occurred to me that I was on a ride based on a movie BASED ON THIS
SAME RIDE.) We all know going in that Disneyland is thoroughly
artificial, and from this knowledge we (falsely) extrapolate the
converse: that what is not Disneyland is not artificial; that reality
exists. Is that why we go to Disneyland? For reassurance, however
false it may be, that reality is real? But if we know that this
reassurance is false, why do we still go there?
Maybe I read too
many dystopian
novels as a
child, but I find something profoundly creepy in the enforced
cheerfulness of Disneyland. Enforced cheerfulness is sinister enough
when it's enforced in
pursuit of explicitly spiritual aims, but when it's undertaken on
a massive scale for the sake of commodification, commercialization,
and unchecked consumerism, it's flat-out sickening. It's sickening
because it tells us to suppress our awareness of the exploitation and
oppression that undergirds the Disney-industrial complex. “Don't
think about sweatshops and pollution and racism,” it says; “you're
in the most magical place on earth!”
How one could fail to think about the racism, at least, is beyond me.
The Jungle
Cruise is one of the most astonishingly racist things I have ever
experienced (and I grew up in a more or less neo-colonialist
environment in East Africa). The official
website proudly describes it thus:
“Depart
civilization from a forgotten Victorian loading dock. Crossing
continents and oceans, you'll explore exciting rivers around the
world — including the Amazon of South America, the Nile of Africa,
the Irrawaddy of Southeast Asia and the Ganges of India.”
Cringing
yet? There's the conflation of, like, all of Asia and all of Africa
in some textbook-Orientalist mashup of ~the exotic~; there's the
framing of the West as “civilization”, in implied opposition to
the primitive/barbarian/uncultured/wild; there are some truly
horrible (neo-colonialist) stereotypical representations of ~the
natives~ (including some Unfortunate
Implications so breathtaking, I'm flabbergasted no one involved
in the design and creation of the ride noticed them). I mean, it's
not as though I was unaware of Disney's slight racism
problem; but, because most of the really blatant racism has been
whitewashed out of Disneyland (which in itself is not unproblematic),
the massive unconcealed racefail of the Jungle Cruise was
particularly appalling to me.
And
yet it's Small
World that really encapsulates the Disney ethos, in all its
(utterly clueless) obscenity. Once I'd gotten past the giggle fit
induced by noting certain
similarities, I realized that, at its core, the message of Disney
is really: “Diversity lies in the external trappings, beneath which
we are all as one [in our relentless desire to purchase Disney
products].” That, I think, is the great philosophico-cultural lie
of our time – that diversity is skin-deep, and underneath we're all
the same. It's not that we don't all share a certain fundamental
humanness – to deny that is just as bad – but to insist on (and
commodify) the sameness is to reduce the differences, to fail to
respect alterity, and ultimately to perpetuate the power
differentials of the status quo. It's nothing more than a salve for
the oppressor's conscience, a way of empathizing with others just
enough so that we can kid ourselves the world isn't in need of
radical change.
I'm
not convinced that the simulacrum always and necessarily has to
function this way, to make perpetuating oppression palatable to the
oppressor's conscience. Even if it does, I believe that it is possible to deconstruct
it and be aware of what's going on; but that involves always being on
your guard, always fighting it. And is your resistance meaningful if
it's only ideological? I gave Disney my money. I showed up. Does it
matter that I spent the whole day thinking critically about the many
awful things going on, if financially and physically I supported
them?
This
continued failure to put my money where my mouth is – is this just
the kind of acceptable compromise with the kyriarchy that we all have
to make all the time because we live here, or is it straight-up
hypocrisy? Consuming stuff critically is better than consuming it
uncritically, but either way I'm consuming, consuming, consuming. And perhaps I go to Disneyland to seek what I know to be a false reassurance that this is okay, because otherwise I couldn't live with myself.
Thought provoking...true...I was taught such a blatantly Westernized view of history, that I've tried to be the exact opposite with my students and my own kids...I still want to take my little ones to Disney though, even if those damn princesses are a bit much...
ReplyDeleteI'm scared of parents that yell things like that at their kids. Fucking fuck.
ReplyDeleteI'm in a British literature (Restoration Period - Victorian Period) class right now. Half of the works we go over tie into Orientalism. The generalizations can get quite absurd. You'll see characters associated with China and Arabs at the same time because they're both from "The Part That's Not Europe"
Anyway there's no such thing as too many dystopian novels.
Enforced cheerfulness is in general pretty terrifying. It's part of what drove me away from teaching preschool. (I did this for several years, loved the kiddies and they loved me back, but BOY HOWDY do parents go off the deep end if they see you with anything less than a smile on your face at ALL TIMES.) It was like Stepford but without the cool (if horrifying) robots.
ReplyDeleteI hate amusement parks with a screaming passion, even when I was a kid myself. Surrounded by artificial 'fun', I felt horribly alone for reasons that, to this day, I have trouble explaining. I think now, after I've read this article, that the 'artificial' part is what made me feel so unsettled.
I've never been to Disneyland--I've been to Disney World, however, and I think I can safely say that with that many kids running around, yes, there IS crying. Lots of it. Because sometimes, children do that--especially when they're off their normal schedule/not in their regular environment/etc. It never ceases to amaze me how few adults consider this point.
Disneyland has always seemed to me to be a totalitarian dream. The unification of state and corporation for the management of consumers.
ReplyDeleteRegardless if what other people says about Disney, it is still the best place for me and nothing compares the fun that I experienced in Disney Fantasy Rides.
ReplyDelete