Disney's Lands: Is the Shyster in the Back Room of Illusion?

Disneyland has always represented something more than a conventional amusement park. The intricacy of the animation of the robots, the college of Disney versions of basic American folklore, the reduction and recreation of American mythology in a world designed basically for preadolescents are all disturbing indications that Disneyland is too real to ignore, but too fanciful to take seriously. Disneyland often gives the impression of the good old American, fraud masked as something respectable. Its newest offspring is an amusement park in Orland, Florida ("Disney World") which has the tax status of a city, and is soon to receive its own city government. Employees are not simply trained, they attend Disney World University, where a new, optimistic outlook on life is part and parcel of the training. The real and the fantastic mix even more bizarrely in the famous Disney Matterhorn bobsled ride which takes place in a replica of the mighty Matterhorn. The ride was recently closed following a wave of decapitations of sled occupants in the midst of their escapism. The sophisticated technology of Disneyland's attractions, combined with the all-encompassing concept of the park, covering all the realms of experience, adventure, fantasy, Tomorrow, Mainstreet USA (with more coming) has given birth to nothing less than our first global village. In this village, you can go around the world, into the future or past, and enter a variety of mildly hysteric psychological states. In short, all parts of this world are instantly in touch with all others through the medium of electrotechnology. The only element of this global village that McLuhan didn't prepare us for was the fact that it is non-functional, it serves as amusement, it is a scale model of reality, moving ever closer to reality. But it is still based on the fascination inherent in an imitation and occasionally imaginative recreation of nature rather than a substitute for it. The imitation of nature ranges from the exquisite blink in an automaton pirate's eye, with lifelike eyelashes and wrinkles on his skin, or the marvel of transparent ghosts dancing around a huge hall, to the vulgar ride through darkest Africa, with your guide shooting at rhinos, hippos, and elephants. One can agree with John Ciardi's estimation of the place is seeing the "shyster in the bacroom of illusion, diluting his witches brew with tapwater, while all his gnomes worked frantically to design gaudier and gaudier designs for the mess." Or one an simply realize that all this does cost to great deal, 128 million roughly, pay the fee, and allow images and emotions lying dormant since childhood to make their presence felt once again.

Walt Disney was something of an artist, also a sideshow barker, a Truly Great American, and eternal-youth tonic salesman. Richard Schickel, in his nasty biography of Disney. The Disney Version, casts the entire history of Disneyland in a pseudo-leftist critique of consumer oriented art. He sees Disney's fraudulent, regressive amusement-park kingdom as a typically American phenomenon, attributes Disney's right-wing politics to a sexual assault in his growth, and all in all is thoroughly at war with his subject matter. What distinguiuhes Disney from other "artists" is that he also was a businessman, and combined his personal vision (something art critics are accustomed to analyze) with the impersonal team of cartoonists, accountants, technicians, electricians who not only gave his vision concrete expression, but made the public want to participate in it. In fact Disney himself inhabited his fantasy world to an extreme degree, maintaining an apartment in one of the scale model buildings on Mainstreet USA. Disney was an impersonal artist, if you will, for Disneyland is a matrix of imaginative achievement as well as American business and technology.

This institutionalization of imagination has its roots in most unpromising soil. Publicity releases quote Disney as saying, or rather getting the concept across, "I don't want the public to see the real world they live in while they're in the Park. I want them to feel they're in another world." But this other world is always informed by Disney's background, brought to life in the view of Mainstreet USA as you enter the park. Here the basic unit of small town nineteenth-century America seems to epitomize for Disney all that is happy. Interestingly, these are false buildings with real stores. This idealized version of Disney's hometown. Marceline, Kansas, was wrenched out of years of struggle in Disney's life. Disney was brought up on a farm, beaten by his father, and had a younger brother Roy, who continued to take care of Disneyland's financial side until his recent death. The family moved to Kansas City. Missouri, and Walt left home to try his hand at cartooning, in which he met little success, and then journalism. He worked for several of the same newspapers as Hemingway, but went West to Hollywood rather than East to Spain. After more failures with small Vaudeville routines, Disney began to produce cartoons and eventually came up with his first star, Mickey Mouse, designed not by Disney, but by his head cartoonist, Ub Iwerks. The development of more sophisticated cameras allowed Disney to create full length animated features: Fantasia, the Sill Symphonies, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which all had their roots in the primitive silent animation which Disney had seen when younger. There is no amazing story surrounding the creation of Mickey Mouse, or any other of the menagerie. With typical matter of factness, Disney explained, "We had to push out 700 feet of film every two weeks, so we couldn't have a character who was tough to draw. We didn't want him to have mouse hands, because he was supposed to be more human. So we gave him gloves. Five fingers looked like too much on such a little creature, so we took one away. That was just one less finger to animate...There was no mouse hair or any other frills that would slow down animation." Disney never worked in a feverish creative state never even drew his own characters. He functioned much as a theatrical producer, assembling talent, picking a vehicle, laying down certain moral principles, and acting as the figurehead for the public. Above all, Disney was interested in the concept, but he himself had relatively little ability to achieve it. Nietzche once speculated on how pathetic a man Shakespeare must have been in order to create so much. It would seem the same theory of compensation might apply to Disney. His own failure at first-hand creation led him to assemble everyone he could to do the work for him while he did the thinking. Not even his distinctive signature was his own design.

The Disney creations gradually gained a more substantial reality in 1955 when Walt Disney founded Disneyland. Since that time, his animated figures have been gaining increasing reality through technological improvements, and Disneyland itself has become too real to be an amusement park. In conceiving of Disneyland. Disney again played a merely conceptual role in terms of actual design, although he personally designed Tom Sawyer's Island. This, taken with Main Street USA, indicates that Disney was primarily interested in pristine nostalgia for a lost boyhood mythology of the nineteenth century Disney must have felt exiled from this world when his father suffered financial reverses and the Disney family had to seek its fortune in the city, and in the twentieth century. One can see the influence of Disney's lost boyhood in the myths recreated for children, and the harsh reality of the city in the commercial nature of the set up. It was extremely important to Disney that the public buy the dreams he was selling if they were to be truly successful. Finally, Disney settled into comfortable maturity, ever maintaining his right wing politics, so much so that when Lyndon Johnson decorated the Great American, he wore a Goldwater button on his lapel where the President was supposed to affix an award.

Disneyland represents a total defeat of the anxiety that is Los Angles. It is a repository of American myths in their well-scrubbed korm, spotless and inert. It is also California's version of Bertolt Brecht's Mahagonny, the City of Nets. In this city, anyone can do anything he likes, all sensual pleasures are available, and there is no crime, except for one: the inability to pay, which is a capital offense. And Disneyland is also a global village: one entire world, with scaled-down continents (Disneyland, like the outside world has seven major bodies of water), all psychological states can be experienced in the space of a day, but a day is not a day in Disneyland, since time stops. And Disneyland also gives expression to Mircea Eliade's concept of illo tempore, a timeless realm in which the primary acts of reality are acted out continuously. And finally, the five dollar ticket entitles the decent citizen to enter the realms of American Jungian archetypes--the Mark Twain, Mainstreet USA, Tomorrowland, Pluto, Goofy, Abraham Lincoln--all implanted in the unconscious of all the wonderful public willing to pay to see that archetype over there.

But Disneyland is not staying still, no sir. In 1955, the park opened with 22 attractions, and it now has fifty three, scattered over its 73 acres, 3.8 million people visited the park in its first year, and now it attracts 9.4 million people annually, 105 million visitors altogether, which should mean that half the US has seen its idealized reflection, not counting repeaters, of course. While the numbers grow, Disneyland is also adding a broad new "land," which should be extremely exciting. This one is called Bear Country and pushes the American mythologizing ever further, since it concentrates on an imaginative recreation of the grand old frontier, featuring life-like animatronic grizzly bears. Furthermore, two new major attractions have recently opened up. One, "It's a Small World," has extraordinary power to awaken certain childhood stereotypes of foreign lands, like Siam, Persia, or China. But even better is the Haunted House. In this house, foot-high three-dimensional translucent women wail for demon lovers, tombstones topple over revealing their gruesome contents--the entire effect alternates between mild hysteria and wondering how those full size three dimensional ghosts are done. But Disney's "imagineers" aren't telling.

And Disneyland has also reproduced itself, and is indirectly related to an accredited University. These two developments came about through the money made by the original. The new Disneyland, that is, Disneyworld, is even more all-inclusive than its mate. For the onslaught of fantasy into reality has continued since this new park has the status of a real-life city in the state of Florida. Soon it will have its own government and pay taxes like a city (although a totally non-functional one.) One can imagine a series of non-functional cities appearing across the nation, offering fake hotels, fake schools, with robots in attendance. Even worse, one can imagine Andy Warhol constructing his version of Disneyland in the East Village.

Disneyland's search for validity may have led it beyond the normal distinctions of real and unreal by donating money and trustees several years ago to an institution devoted to exploring all the arts--California Institute of the Arts. C.I.A. reduces anyone's current conception of college arts programs to mere child's play. A prominent faculty is grafted onto the furthest reaches of California artistic explorations which are aimed at smashing the barrier between the artistic object, the artificer, and his lifestyle, C.I.A. is its own global village, teaching music from India, Africa and China along with conventional Western music, combining art and technology in its electronic music labs. Labs like these in the East are progressing in the same direction it is true, but C.I.A. has managed to hook up synthesizers with laser beams and visual generators with a wit and sophistication worthy of Audio-animaltronics. Indeed many of the courses have the playfulness of a Disneyland attraction not to mention the awesomeness. The art school for example, offers the House Of Dust course. The class works with a House Of Dust sculpture, which is made from five tons of fiberglass. Allan Kaprou, originator of the Happening, gives a course on happenings, which is a happening. Several others give Multi-Media Laboratory II, which utilizes cinema, synthesizers, strobe lights, and projectors in combination with theater. Yet another course concentrates on music of the sublime, especially music that induces trancelike states. The mild hysteria underlying each of these courses seems born and bred at Disneyland. In the new Academic environment, the experience is given a new theoretical and often satirical thrust, but there still remains the intrinsic fascination of the possibility of technology to alter states of consciousness, or in the words of Walt Disney, "to make people feel they're in another world." The imagineers of Disneyland, of course, never say what they mean to do with all their rides, gimmicks, and audio-animatronical robots, but C.I.A. knows.

Of course, Disneyland and C.I.A. are at war. Most students at C.I.A. are not presentable enough in the eyes of Disneyland employees to be admitted to their spiritual father, and the board of trustees of C.I.A.--the Disney people--are greatly removed in sensibility from the people who actually teach. They had hoped for a nice art school, a Western Julliard perhaps; instead, what appears to be the most advanced art school anywhere in the US grew out of the ferment, and some of the side effects are frightening to those who had been looking at all this Disney business as a money-making proposition. Nonetheless, both places are attempting feverishly to regain innocence through technology. It has already liberated their hands from labor, and the question now is can technology liberate minds