Jeff Mason

Where the original Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, in the summer of 1955, there was nothing but fields and windbreaks. Our first freeway, the Santa Ana, ran nearby. I was ten, living by the beach fifteen miles away. The first time I went, the only comparison to Disneyland was Knott's Berry Farm, in which the Old West of the penny westerns was reenacted and recreated in miniature.

Hollywood was 35 miles away, but its presence was felt in the building of these newfangled theme parks. It was like being on a movie set as one of the extras. I remember driving through orange groves and bean fields to get to the fantastic land. I had seen it all on the Disney television show in which “Uncle Walt” played a time-delayed film of the construction of his new lands. To the mind of a ten-year-old, the idea of Disneyland was magical from the start, springing from the fields in only one year, which you saw happening in fifteen minutes of film.

I can't remember exactly the first time I went to Disneyland after the grand opening, but I know that it made a big impression on me. From then on, I plagued my mother to drop me off with friends in the morning and to pick us up after Tinkerbell had flown down from the top of the Matterhorn and started the famous fireworks that detonate over Anaheim every evening. Autopia was my first favorite ride, little cars for little people. If you were tall enough, you could drive one yourself: a great way to market the delights of driving. After that, I could hardly wait to get my license. Disneyland played a part in this. As a teenager, you could drive your date there and hold on tight while going down the Bobsled Run.

In a world where the artificial and the real are increasingly confused, Disneyland is the epitome of an ersatz reality, more real and more true, as it were, than the so-called “Real World”. For Disney, the five lands are an exercise in city planning of the highest order, where every detail is significant. It is an ever-changing world of enchantment, of sensual delight, attention to detail, and planning for convenience. Going to Disneyland is like taking a cruise on a magical ship. The laws of time and life are briefly suspended. It is great for young kids, for oldies with Peter Pan complexes, and for those who want to collude in the fun of young children exploring the “Magic Kingdom”.

Disneyland appeals to the young, the young at heart, and, some would say, the infantile. One enters there into an ideal space of recycled stories fitted out with an externality taken from fantasy and formed from modern building materials. On the Peter Pan ride, for example, you can sail with Peter, Wendy and her brothers over the roof tops of London out to Neverland, where you see Captain Hook, Tinker Bell, Smythe, the Lost Boys, Indians, Pirates and Mermaids. It is all there in a three minute ride. It's dark. The colours are impossibly bright. Before you know it, this little timeless moment is over and you are back into the reality of Fantasyland. The French philosopher, Baudrillard, calls this a “hyper reality”, or simulation of the unreal that prevents us from realising that the real can no longer be found anywhere. For example, Sleeping Beauty's Castle is taken from models that are already fanciful, like Mad Ludwig's Castle in Bavaria.

Disneyland is riddled with narratives. The “Rivers of America” runs around Tom Sawyer's Island, past a steam boat landing and New Orleans Square, the Haunted Mansion, and Critter Country. They are meant to bring all Americans together in a narrative of the Old West, South, and Midwest that never existed in the first place. In summer, you can paddle Indian canoes with college kids dressed up as Indians acting as guides. You can go around on the Mark Twain steamship, drinking non-alcoholic Mint Juleps on a humid summer night and pretending you are on the Mississippi river. You can sometimes ride on the Columbia, an exact replica of the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe in the 1780's. One year a passenger was killed by some block and tackle and the ride was suspended for a while. Reality came to Disneyland. It came again when someone was killed on the Big Thunder Mountain ride in Frontierland. Disneyland does not make a simulacrum of real death, only of harmless fantasy death, causing but the barest frisson. In Pirates of the Caribbean there are dead pirates with swords through their middles in the act of hoarding great piles of gold and gems, but they are obviously fakes. Most of the time, Baudrillard is right, Disneyland is a simulacrum of something that has never existed, and will never exist, outside the Magic Kingdom.

Why don't you see the crowds at Disneyland wringing their hands, crying and sobbing? It is because they are naively enjoying the spectacle of the Park. Spectacle is the essence of Disneyland, and the spectacle requires and gathers a witness to itself. All the planning, imagineering, marketing, and training of the Happiest Employees on Earth go into creating a complete experience. All you get are beguiling vistas and fantasy architecture. Everyone you meet in The Happiest Place on Earth is all smiles and helpfulness. You enter an imaginary place where it is possible to believe that humans can live in peace with each other. The fact that it now costs $56 to “have fun” at Disneyland, means that everyone is working hard to have it. The whole ambiance is designed to be “wholesome” in the down-home Midwestern style that Disney idealised in his park, and especially Main Street, with its miniaturized buildings, deceiving perspectives, shops with windows gleaming. The whole place is spotless. There is even a liveried boy with a shovel following along after the horses drawing carriages down Main Street toward the bridge to Fantasyland. Significantly, no alcohol is served.

Disney had an idea about America that he wanted to push in his park, and it was mainly a celebration, not hand wringing about American injustice to Indians, African slaves and other minorities. You get the feeling that these dark episodes were part of a Providence that makes everything all right. As you sail around the other side of Tom Sawyer's Island, you come on Fort Wilderness, where you can get a coke or a coonskin cap. Past that we see a burning building. There are arrows around and we surmise that the Indians have attacked some peaceful settlers. Further along, however, we see an Indian settlement in which waxwork Indians are going about their peaceful daily occupations.

The lands of Disney are transmission lines of ideology, an ideology that celebrates free enterprise, imagination, planning, fantasy, and retailing. It tells a story of Americans who are able to live together, their fractious past forgotten in an amiable present. Over by the new-ish Toon Town is “It's a Small World After All”. Here one steps onto a boat and sails indoors past ranks of dolls from all over the world in national costume, dancing, surrounded by the symbols of their countries, all singing the same song. The overt message is that we are all one family and should get along like one. However different our colours or religions or economic statuses, we can agree on universal values of human cooperation.

It is a rosy picture of America and the world that one receives visiting Disneyland. There is no war there, though there is a Star Wars ride. There is no racial prejudice. It is like the commissary of the star ship Enterprise, where rational beings from around the galaxy relax in their time off as though it were nothing at all to have two heads or a tail. Disney characters and animals roam the park to be photographed with children. Everyone is easy at Disneyland because all young people are welcomed. There is nothing to challenge the comforting idea that one has found, for a day at least, a refuge from the nasty Real world outside the park.

Entering and leaving the Magic Kingdom, one passes through a definite threshold. One is whisked in by tram from a monstrous parking structure to a world in which enchantment still rules. It is like going back into a time when people had more robust imaginations than we, and saw emanations of the divine everywhere. Glamour hovers around Disneyland. I dare anyone to go there and maintain prosaic consciousness. I don't think that even the workers who pass through doors marked “Cast Members” or “Staff Members” can escape the feeling that something is different living in a world of permanent planned happiness.

Time enters Disneyland either as fabled history or future possibilities. The present is one of pure fantasy. Why else would visitors part with money the way they do? How often are you going to wear your Mouse Ears? Would you ordinarily pay $2.50 for a small bottle of water and $5.50 for a hot dog? It is like going to a casino and playing with chips. Somehow they just don't seem to be money anymore. For the past we have Main St., circa 1900, Frontierland, 1870, New Orleans, 1890, and Adventure land, 1930. As for Fantasyland itself, time there is fictional and all over the place. Most of the architecture comes from the Middle Ages of the imagination. With Peter Pan, Toad's Wild Ride, and Alice in Wonderland we are in some sort of strange Victorian England.

Tomorrowland was Walt Disney's projected “better future” back in 1955, an improvement over the past, but conserving the best of the past within it, within a generally pro-American ideology. Hence Tomorrowland is always having to be rebuilt. A future arrives that renders obsolete the old imagined future. Thus the future, like runes, must be thrown over and over again. All this is great fun, and the present seems to vanish into a whole day without one's noticing. The lines may be long at times, the minutes seem to be passing slowly, but when you walk out at the end of the day, it seems to have taken no time at all.

Something strange happens when one leaves Disneyland. A reality that had somehow been held at bay reveals itself to have been waiting for us all the time. The imaginary community that takes its seat on the tram evaporates when everyone exits and walks to their separate cars. The illusion is revealed. It is like that moment in Hegel's Phenomenology when the Unhappy Consciousness leaves a Church just after it has received absolution, and walks out into the street knowing that its destiny is to sin and, again, be severed from God. The unity brought about in the mystery of Church Ritual cannot be maintained in ordinary life. So as you take the escalator back to Goofy level, looking for your car at G 71 on a mathematical grid, alienation sets in. It is as though one has drunk from a charmed potion, and the day has passed in a kind of intoxication. Back in the parking structure, the potion wears off and one is left a bit gaga, tired, and even a mite depressed or hung-over.

All in all, Disneyland is quite an amazing place. Part mall, part dream, part narrative, part ambience, all things conspire to distract and entertain the paying customers. It may be, as TS Eliot suggested, that they are only distracting themselves from distraction by distraction, but they are distracted. Everything is designed for a short attention span. The rides are fairly short, but they are totally absorbing while they are going on. The imagineers have made the environment as visually interesting as possible. For the Indiana Jones ride in Adventureland, the queue snakes through the detritus of old desert adventurers, down into mysterious tunnels with audio-visual displays, and finally you get into a truck for a wild ride, walking out through the tunnels and back into the explorer's world. It is very clever. Unless you have the sensibility of a Scrooge, it hooks you. The whole place is designed to give the spectator an experience that is not available anywhere else. It calls attention to its own fakery, but as a kind of reality that exists only there, in the Magic Kingdom.

The magic of Disney, which some would say is the magic of making a great deal of money, is now spreading outside the original park. A pedestrian way with fanciful Disneyesque architecture enfolds theme-related shops and restaurants. Downtown Disney now links Disneyland with the new California Adventure that look more like an outdoor mall with rides than anything else. Downtown Disney has free parking. You can amble along in a musical and Disneyfied ambiance with lower restaurant prices than in the park. Los Angeles now sports a number of these venues for walking, eating and shopping. Disney is becoming a verb. We know what it means, now, to disney something. It means to plan construction with an aesthetic idea in mind. It means bringing a pattern of signifiers into a spatial and musical reality that transmits an ideological perspective. It does not have to be Disney's own, or even that of the Disney Corporation. Look at a McDonald's outlet. What is it, if not a little theme park with play space for kids?

Disneyland was partly a critique of the sort of urban sprawl that covered Southern California after WWII. This world lacked a definite aesthetic. Drive through LA and every architectural style in the world parades past. The car is king. There are few places for pedestrians. Disney wanted to turn this around and show how planning with an aesthetic vision can produce spaces that affect how people feel and think. In Disneyland, material reality has been sanitised, from the lavatories, to the streets, to the surfaces, to the ideas that make up the Happiest Place on Earth. Through a sleight of hand, the magic that left the world long ago is returned as fakery, but “Real” fakery.

It would be fun to run ideology tours of Disneyland, bringing out the ideological roles of the history and fantasy we find represented in the Park. For example, we could talk to some of the Happiest Employees in the World –maintenance personnel, ticket takers, parking attendants, waitresses, ride overseers, Disney Characters – and see how they feel about their pay and working conditions. It would be fun to see the manual on the cultivation of the Disney Spirit for employees. We could ask about how gender identities are projected in Disneyland, and how politics is handled in the imagery. I suspect that if we did start running such tours exposing the ideological transmission lines of Disneyland, we would have just as much fun as the kids do, though for different reasons.

Having quit UK academia, Jeff Mason now philosophises, teaches and surfs in California