DISNEYFICATION
or Nostalgia ain't what it used to be
DISNEY IS ONE of the world's biggest and most influential corporations. In this article we focus on the movies and theme parks, which they specialise in, and look at the effect of Disneyfication - the process of turning the real, physical world into a sanitised, safe, 'entertaining', predictable but profitable 'hyper-real' replica.
The introductory plaque at the entrance to Disneyland, written by Walt Disney himself, reads 'Here age relives fond memories of the past…youth may savour the challenge and promise of the future'.
Nostalgia is fundamental in understanding the appeal of Disney products for many people. It was an explicit part of Disney's original vision of Disneyland as 'an extremely sentimental and nostalgic place'; later he declared that it would be a place where the older generation would reminisce about the nostalgia of earlier years. It is, however, nostalgia for a mythical past.
'The whole idea is escape from reality into a place where you can simply have fun. Life is full of problems, but it is our job to stop harsh reality intruding….Euro-Disney has a turn of the century feel…research shows that it is an era that most nationalities feel most comfortable with…we're trying to design what people think they remember about what existed'(Fred Beckenstein, senior vice-president of Euro-Disneyland Imagineering). Nostalgia is a key element also in the tendency to disregard conflict - there is no politics, tragedy or poverty. Nostalgia is deployed to create a feeling of childhood innocence and naiveté, which legitimises ignoring the historical (and current) realities for many Americans - including children- those of class conflict, exploitation, racism, poverty and abuse. It is a white, conventional, middle class view of childhood that disempowers and exploits children. Visitors participate in the park as passive spectators, reduced to the 'ideal' child-like condition of being acted upon rather than acting. The sense of a return to childhood is the basic appeal of many Disney products, the essence of this nostalgia. A deep nostalgia for one's personal past is engendered because it is hard, even for children, to fully enter the pretence - ' I wish I were still a baby! I wish I were younger!' was the response of a six year old girl to Disneyland. It is probable however, that even if her wish were granted, that she would still not have experienced it as totally real. This is a created longing for a past that never existed. For adults there is probably also often an additional layer of nostalgia in the parks, the longing for a return to the nation's (mythical) childhood innocence. In spite of the fact that artefacts are frequently dislocated from their historical contexts, there is a sense of historical progression from an exciting and misty past to an even more exciting, but still misty, future. There is an ambiguous sense of the present as deficient in the Disney parks; the essentially optimistic pictures of the past and future act to reconcile people to the barely outlined present. This sense of deficiency is a fundamental part of the consumerist impulse: it can only be addressed (within capitalism) by buying a product or service, though satisfaction is only temporary and fleeting. The deletion by the Imagineers of the negative features of reality is an admission that something is not right with the status quo. Many park visitors view them as places of safety in a world of danger; they may also fear the future. The combination of these two feelings results in a celebration of the certainties of the past. This nostalgia allows the present to be cast in a more favourable light, and the future, since it is represented in the Disney parks by unremarkable features that people have some familiarity with, so that they can feel nostalgia forwards too!. Nostalgia here is also about people accepting their present position; the way in which past, present and future are dissolved into one another helps to render the present more agreeable. The growth of deliberate, synthetic nostalgia is closely linked with consumption; capitalism, which must constantly change and expand or die, destroys the past at an ever faster rate, then strives to sell back a version of it. Disney's fabricated nostalgia such as Main Street (which was not a clean, commercially prosperous strip) is also a mask for the commercial realities behind it.
History?
The past is often displayed as zany/humorous. Household gadgets of previous times are made to look unfeasibly quaint and inefficient; in the Carousel of Progress Mum marvels that her new washing machine takes only five hours to do a wash. Bicycles are shown to be inefficient because their riders are vulnerable to attacks from dogs or falling off into mud, the first traffic jam is depicted by a horse upending a cart. Thus the problems of the past were either insignificant, or can easily be overcome by current knowledge and expertise. Another strategy is to leave out all elements of history (and the present) that would detract from the intended upbeat message/white middle class worldview. So, no mention of depressions, strikes, labour wars, factory or mine workers, mass protests; none of the squalour in which immigrants lived, lynchings, ghettos and apartheid for the black population, the treatment of Native American Indians; nothing of crime, wars, acid rain, the arms race. Tokyo Disneyland omits Japan's wars with China and Russia, Nanking, Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The problems caused by corporations are mostly ignored or glossed over: ecological horrors, dehumanising work, weapons production, 'third world' exploitation. Another 'experience' in Disney World, EPCOT's (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) Future World is more realistic, acknowledging that there are problems. The horse overturning the cart locates traffic jams safely and humorously (sic) in the past however; the film Symbiosis shows dust bowls, pollution, and despoiling of forests, but then veers off into fantasy to show corporate solutions to these mistakes as fish return to cleaner rivers etc. Difficulties are turned into opportunities, Jo Consumer can relax in the knowledge that the Corporations have the present and future safely in hand.
Family Favourites
For Disney , 'the important thing… is the family…that's been the backbone of our whole business, catering to families'. The family was (and is) an important theme of many of the studios most important films such as Bambi and Snow White. The characters in the various rides in Sleeping Beauty Castle (in Disneyland) are subject to frightening adventures when they are separated from their traditional family situations. When they are punished it is for naughtiness rather than sin. Happy endings are achieved by the fantasy figures with their safe return to their families (Alice, Pinocchio, or Wendy), or when family life is about to be romantically established (Snow White or Sleeping Beauty with their Princes). Everything is OK within the protective embrace of the patriarchal family freed from enemies within such as stepmothers (the evil older woman) or outside like Fire-Eater the Showman. Disneyland was founded on the premise of an amusement park for adults and children i.e. families. Disney attractions are full of happy couples and families: in EPCOT's Horizons ride guests are taken on a ride looking at how the future was conceived in the past, then transported to the future in the form of Future Port, meeting a family and their home. The future is seen through the experiences of a gradually ageing father and mother who have children, who in turn have children. In the Carousel of Progress the family is the focus for seeing changes in material circumstances over time. While waiting for the S.F. rock fantasy, Captain EO, the crowd see a sickly series of Kodak sponsored photos showing the cycle of the couple, babies, growing up, courtship, marriage, and back to babies. The conventional nuclear family is secure and will survive; in many attractions adults only appear as parents. What of 'unconventional' families such as single parent or gay, and divorce, separation and death which are also part of many childrens' experiences?. The crucial point here however, a continuous theme in park attractions, is that family is the context where consumption takes place: the family buys the electrical gadgets in Horizons and Carousel of Progress, and the cameras and film outside Captain EO. The association of the family unit with consumption provides a powerful image which connects the purchase of the sponsors products with the family, the context in which most people visit Disney parks. It is also the context in which products at the theme park will be consumed in the merchandise shops, restaurants etc., reinforcing the consumerist goals of the parks. It is debatable whether the parks are for children; the ratio of adults to children is 4:1. Adverts for Disneyland are often aimed at adults, arguably the construction of parks so that the "outside world" of work and humdrum existence is invisible, is more likely to appeal to adults. They are the ones who pay, and the parks' nostalgia is far more likely to appeal to them. Disney books and films similarly use symbols from the adult world, such as heroes looking like Cary Grant, and heroines like Hollywood starlets. The appeal of the parks to adults has been crucial to their success. In the middle of despair at the losses of Euro Disney in 1994 (nearly £500 million in the year to September 1993), the company targeted the older generation of over-55s, after finding that the park had a significant appeal to them (nostalgia). Adults enjoy the memory of discovering the new, such as Peter Pan, Swiss Family Robinson, Cinderella etc., and the nostalgic recollections of (mythical) place such as Maine Street. EPCOT is cloaked in emphases about corporations and the future; in World Showcase children are almost totally displaced, as most of the attractions are models of buildings (Eiffel Tower, St Mark's Square) and landscapes. Similarly the British pub, German Beer Hall and waitress service restaurants, the demystification of the Animation Tour and nostalgia of the Great Movie Ride are adult oriented. Engaged parents are more likely to revisit, and to consume - merchandise, drinks, and food. One of the main appeals of the parks is that they are safe havens in a world of fear and threat (real and imagined). They are successfully targeted at a white, middle class audience through close association with bourgeois values and interests through cleanliness, safety, concern for the customer and the relatively high entrance fee.
Reel Nature
As the world becomes increasingly urbanised, many people's main or only experience and understanding of the rest of nature is via films, television and packaged tourism. The Disney corporation has been - and remains- one of the main mediators. For Disney the main value of the natural world is as a source of exploitation for profit. In the early days this took the form of praising the virtues of logging, mining and urban development, now it is the right to define nature that Disney (& other corporate capital) covets. In the earliest Disney productions nature appeared as deadly threat, or in the anthropomorphic form of humanoid animals. Bambi (1942) saw the beginning of the current form of portrayal, the animals no longer lived human lives, but had nevertheless transformed into people; the killing of Bambi's mother by the Hunter becomes murder. Bambi was the forerunner of Disney's later wildlife films, particularly the pseudo-documentaries such as True Life Adventures.These used captive animals which were coached to follow human scripts. These distortions can be seen as part of a North American artistic tradition. Writers such as Ernest Seton Thompson had a huge readership for their exciting, detailed fictions about the lives of wild animals. By 1910 they were exposed and discredited as the 'nature fakers'; naturalist John Burroughs suggested that Seton's masterwork should have been called 'Wild Animals I (Alone) Have Known'. Disney admitted the ruse from the start saying the intention was entertainment rather than education; but was still blasted by critics. Animals were labelled 'courageous', 'jolly', 'lonely', 'treacherous' etc. Animal mothers were praised or condemned using the ideal WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) human family as a yardstick. The film Bear Country showed the never-in-nature feature of a bear family consisting of 'den-wife' mum, and breadwinning hunter dad: in fact, fathers quite often eat the cubs if mothers
aren't careful - an inconvenient fact that does not fit Disneyfication. In White Wilderness(1958) the filmmakers put a handful of lemmings on top of a large snow-covered turntable, and filmed their movements from different angles; later they were herded over a precipice above a river. In the film the lemmings actions were depicted as a suicidal migration to the sea (in landlocked Alberta). Consequently, although this behaviour is unknown in nature, many people now 'know' that lemmings commit mass hari kiri, and their name has become synomonous with thoughtless mass self-destruction. In the 1960s, work moved from 'mockumentary' to Seton-style animal story. The formula was the adoption of a young male animal by a soft-hearted human; the animal grows up in the household until the destruction caused by its wild energy and instincts forces its release. The now adult animal finds a wife, cue credits. Resource extraction is depicted as part of nature, though wild animals need to be managed and kept out of the way in sanctuaries so as not to interfere. Another film type (e.g. The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit) depicted very anthropomorphised animals; in the 'Incredible Journey' three marooned pets made their way home across the 'threatening' wilderness. Millions saw these films, through cinemas, television serialisation, and in school, making their messages very influential. The 'wilderness' parts of the Disney theme parks reinforce these messages for example Jungle Cruise and Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland. Disney World is a huge park in the Everglades of Florida, basically a major city in a fragile ecosystem. It has caused great damage for example 'Wilderness Lodge' a pseudo National Park Lodge without the dirt and insects, and with 725 rooms and 4 restaurants. In the newly opened 500 acre Animal Kingdom in Orlando, everything is way over the top, which must be why David 'corporations are alright' Bellamy endorses it. The centrepiece is a massive synthetic baobab Tree of Life, 14 stories high, made from steel and painted rockwork. The 8000 branches sway in the wind generated by giant expansion units; the 103,000 leaves have all been sewn on by hand. The roots house a zoo, the tree a tiny 430 seat 3D cinema. There is a torrent of detail - even the details have details, and the incidentals have incidentals pasted on. The 'authenticity' is based on miracles of effort and expense: the landscape artist travelled through 37 states and 28 countries to find the right greenery, collecting over 600 species of tree, 350 different grasses and 1800 shrubs, vines, mosses, epiphytes and perennials. The flat, featureless sea level landscape was supplied with mountains, gullies, savannah and jungle with the import of a million cubic yards of rock, and the shovelling of 4.4 million cubic yards of earth; 1000 animals were imported. Predators such as the lions appear to be able to prey on giraffes and antelope, they are in fact separated by an invisible moat (and returned to pens at night).
The Washington Connection
The nature attractions of the theme parks borrow the films' pacing as well as their themes. The endless hours of silence, slow changes in sky and light, heavy progress up gradients of true wilderness experience are banished as boring. Seasons cycle before you finish your popcorn. The consequence of this 'industrial nature' (a form of hyper-reality that is more 'realistic' than what it represents) is that when people encounter a natural unenhanced environment, it seems flaccid and lifeless. The resident wildlife is uninteresting (and won't appear to order) and devoid of musical accompaniment. In 1995, Disney reached an agreement with most of the US federal land management agencies to supply interpretative services for visitors to public lands. It has since provided tour guide training to federal land managers. As part of the corporate sponsored American Recreation Coalition Disney is pressuring Washington to actively promote commercial recreation on public lands. The majority of park visitors favour industrially-oriented tourism, so this could foreshadow an avalanche of heli-skiing sightseers, snowmobilers, powerboaters and camper vans heading for the newest Disney Wilderness Lodge and Visitor Centre, with the accompanying despoliation and destruction.
All Power to the Imagination
Disney's influence derives from its association with playfulness based on animation, films, parks as films, and its promise of making childhood dreams come true- for both children and adults.
This playfulness consists of predictable, controlled experiences- the negation of play which is unpredictable, spontaneous and controlled by the participants. The corporation's misty nostalgia serves to disguise consumption, obscure the inadequacies of the present and bridge the gap into a higher future care of technological progress managed by General Electric, General Motors, Coca Cola and their corporate mates.
The myths of childhood, family and progress are a powerful drug. we need to wake up to the smell coming from these maggot-eaten corpses and collectively seize and create the present and future.