What If This Were Enough? Page 3
But no matter how we try to wriggle into some virgin corner of the world free from screens or cameras or phones, unsullied by flashing ads or surveillance, devoid of jubilant ballads or beeping devices, we fail. We’re all plugged into a shiny, down-home, buoyant, authentic-seeming global simulacrum, one that not only doesn’t belong to us, but bleeds us of our sanity, our money, and our privacy and sells them off to the highest bidder. Not surprisingly, the commercialized fantasy of American life has only rendered us more ravenous and impossible to satisfy. The illusory corporate grid of fanciful characters is real; we are the imaginary ones. The Disneyfication of culture is complete.
* * *
—
When my kids started clamoring to go to Disneyland around ages six and eight (it had been three years since they first visited as very young children), their anticipation was proportionate to my dread. I dreaded Disneyland with every cell of my being. It wasn’t the crowds or the lines or the avalanche of overpriced plastic. I was anxious about the micro-horrors of Disney, those little visions that can plunge you into a state of existential despair: greasy femur-sized turkey legs being ripped off the bone by adults in Minnie Mouse ears; struggling actors dressed as Mary Poppins and Bert, improvising cheerful chatter in fake British accents; husky children in Tangled T-shirts burying their faces in giant clouds of cotton candy in the Mad Tea Party teacup ride line, then vomiting down the sides of trash cans afterward; the teal and purple eyeshadow of Ariel, which inevitably calls to mind the signature style of certain members of the mid-1990s Russian Olympic figure skating team.
Somehow, the little things—the eavesdropped-on conversations, the tense family dynamics—take on a special kind of heaviness when you’re visiting Disneyland. As Joseph Conrad put it in Heart of Darkness, “They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.” The semi-hypnotic state of helplessness you enter is central to the experience of Disney. All of your membranes become porous; the sadness can enter your bloodstream directly. You are removed from all familiar signifiers, and it makes you all the more vulnerable. You are trying to be a good parent, but there you are, defenseless, in a vast sea of human beings, huddled in their desperate gaggles, squabbling, regretful, sweating profusely, scarfing Mickey Mouse–shaped beignets and cups of frozen lemonade and hot dogs bathed in oily chili, all of them simultaneously beating back that inevitable feeling of melancholy that comes from being at The Happiest Place on Earth, and discovering that they’re deeply, inescapably unhappy.
I’d been cajoled into a return trip by my younger daughter, who barely remembered her first visit beyond an unnerving spin through a Roger Rabbit–themed nightmare. My stress was mounting, and the newly increased $99 ticket price wasn’t helping (tickets were $1 when the park opened in 1955; Disney World tickets were $3.50 when that park opened in 1971). Recognizing that there was no escape from overspending, I behaved in the paradoxical manner of a trapped animal who suddenly becomes aggressively confrontational: I leaned in—way in, beyond reason. I went from feeling queasy over the enormous cost of every single stupid thing on the Disney website to signing up for all of the things, the two-day tickets, the overpriced Disneyland Hotel, the even more overpriced Grand Californian Hotel & Spa. I made reservations at faux-fancy Disney restaurants; I noted the times of parades, fireworks, and the World of Color water show, whatever the hell that was. I projected myself and my husband and our two daughters into every gauzy photo on the site, all of us smiling and frolicking like extras in the opening credits to ABC’s Wonderful World of Disney. No driving there and back in a single day, getting up in the dark and returning in the dark and negotiating with exhausted kids all day long. “We have to go full Mickey,” I told my skeptical husband. “We can’t half-ass it this time.”
Spending more money ensures greater happiness. This is the confused thinking of the duped consumer. In my deluded state, a gargantuan price tag meant we would finally see Disney through the eyes of our California-born, Disneyland-loving friends, with their pricey yearlong passes and beloved Mickey Mouse sweatshirts. These friends, half of them childless, visit Disneyland for birthdays and anniversaries and spontaneous, no-excuse-at-all midweek day trips. One friend even got married as the nightly fireworks display lit up the sky, the strains of “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” a stand-in for Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
These friends aren’t being ironic. They unabashedly love eating Dole Whip in the Enchanted Tiki Room and riding Space Mountain and touring the Haunted Mansion for the fortieth time. They love eating cotton candy and cruising on the Mark Twain Riverboat and rumbling along on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. They know that the roller coaster derailed in 2003, and they don’t care. They view the park as something like inherited land, their beloved Uncle Walt’s antiquated but still luxurious estate. Each return trip kicks up soothingly familiar memories of the trips that came before it.
Which is exactly how Walt Disney wanted them to feel. As Neil Gabler points out in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, this escapist slant was apparent in the park’s promotional brochures. “[W]hen you enter Disneyland, you will find yourself in the land of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy,” one brochure declared. “Nothing of the present exists in Disneyland.” This sense of deliverance is echoed in the voices of the Disneyland lovers I know. “It helped me forget for a few hours that my parents were divorcing,” one friend told me, “and helped me cope with the teen angst years. I could enjoy myself like a kid and feel safe in a way that wasn’t possible outside of those walls.”
Of course, Disneyland was also intended to be an enormous and groundbreaking interactive advertisement for the Walt Disney company, just as ABC’s then-new TV show Disneyland (an anthology program that had several different titles, most memorably The Wonderful World of Disney) and the soon-to-follow Mickey Mouse Club were both advertisements for Disneyland. Indeed, Disney himself said: “The main idea of the program is to sell.” Pointing out the cross-marketing benefits of the show sounds downright quaint today, when brands are rarely judged on the quality or consistency or purity of their product so much as on their bulletproof, cross-platform international market penetration.
Somehow, this crass reality faded quickly from my mind the moment we set foot on Disneyland property. Because from the first second we arrived, we were treated not like consumers, but like the only humans alive. Considering that an average of 44,000 people visit the park every day, this is a jaw-dropping feat. My daughter was given a “Happy Birthday!” button from the valet when we reached the Disneyland Hotel, and from that point forward, every adult who interacted with us wished her a happy birthday. (As she was unaccustomed to such kindness from total strangers, this only made her suspicious. What do these needy adults in ugly blue vests want from me?)
We entered the park flanked by humans yelping “Happy birthday!” and “Have a magical day!” every few feet. We ate Dole Whip in the Enchanted Tiki Room. We spun through the Pirates of the Caribbean. (Among other updates to the ride, an animatronic pirate who once chased an unfortunate animatronic girl around a house now chased a girl carrying a cake.) We had lunch at the Blue Bayou, a chilly, dimly lit restaurant inside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I ordered a Monte Cristo sandwich (basically a ham-and-cheese doughnut) and a mint julep with a fake ice cube that glowed in rapidly shifting rainbow colors. Our lunch may have had the overcooked, oversalted quality of hotel food, but the kids were too excited about the glowing ice cubes to care.
I expected the lines to grow and the kids’ moods to deteriorate. But thanks to minimal midweek crowds, lines were no longer than fifteen minutes, and everyone stayed cheerful. Even the crowds around us seemed benevolent instead of grouchy. The children we saw all seemed to be smiling, maybe because most of them were holding some form of sugar or standing in line to meet Cinderella. We made it into Star Tours in ten minutes flat, then whipp
ed through the Mad Tea Party and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Next, we dashed through It’s a Small World. There was a woman in line for the carousel whose legs were tattooed to look like she was wearing lace-up fishnet hose. They looked less fancy than disfigured, the kind of micro-horror I’d expected to reel from, but for some reason it didn’t bother me. There was music everywhere, always surging romantically or bouncing along happily, the soundtrack to the most delightful, exciting, emotionally satisfying day you’ve had in your entire life.
I didn’t even realize I was having a great day—arguably a magical day—until later that afternoon. I was standing in the town square of what seemed like an adorable whistle-stop hamlet in Middle America, near a patch of green grass, and I had just been told a parade was about to roll by. Soon the music swelled and a chorus of voices sang, “It’s a music celebration, come on come on come on, strike up the band!” Some drummers appeared, grinning and dancing down the street, beating their drums enthusiastically. My daughters had big smiles on their faces. They’d just eaten a gigantic poof of pink and yellow cotton candy and a frozen lemonade. I was sipping a large iced coffee, which might explain why the words “Feel the beat, what a great sensation, come on come on come on, move and clap your hands!” inspired me to start clapping along. My husband, similarly caffeinated, hoisted our younger daughter over his head and started swaying in time to the music. “This is what life is all about,” I thought, marveling that I had dreaded this trip just the night before. “Enjoying being alive, together, in the moment, as a family, as a community, even, sharing something positive and celebratory and real, right here and now!”
I looked around at the people in the square—other members of my community! Part of the human family!—expecting to see them smiling and clapping the way we were, if not dancing, cheering, and weepily embracing each other. Instead, they stood motionless, or else sat in chairs or on the curb, taking in the parade as though they were watching it from home. Some were recording video of it. Others squinted at their phones, trying to read texts or emails, or maybe watching something else entirely. A few kids and adults were clapping, but most were standing still, staring at the spectacle rolling by. The drummers and the dancers and Mickey and Minnie appeared to be having some kind of peak experience, but the crowd was a sea of blank faces, as if they weren’t there at all.
And like that, the spell was broken. I began to notice the details that had until then escaped my attention. I saw the metal railing that encircled the grass. The grass is for viewing, it suggested, not for touching or playing or lounging on. According to Gabler, Disney imagined “a Main Village with a railroad station and a village green…a place for people to sit and rest; mothers and grandmothers can watch over small children at play.” This town square was not a village green, I saw now, but a stage set—a gorgeously designed sea of hot cement graced by a smattering of small trees. A few feet away, a man in a blue Disney shirt was scanning the crowd and mumbling into his walkie-talkie. This spontaneous community celebration was a carefully choreographed, rigidly scripted corporate spectacle. My family and I were manipulated into thinking we were part of something incredible. We thought we were special, but we were not.
* * *
—
At Disneyland today, participation mostly means standing or sitting and passively staring at whatever is in front of you. Participation requires nothing of the participants. You load your body into the little car or boat. You put on your seat belt. You keep your hands inside the vehicle. You sit on the curb until the parade arrives. You file into the viewing area for the massive World of Color water fountain to spring to life. (“Color, color, color!” a chorus exalts as rainbow colors shoot into the sky; Disney never had much of a taste for subtlety.) When it’s done, you clap weakly and file out. You are never asked to move or speak or sing. You are treated like a valuable person, but you’re never asked to demonstrate your value. When Ariel or Cinderella or the Mad Hatter appears in Fantasyland or Main Street, U.S.A., they ask a kid’s name and then simply hold forth for a minute or so in character before the kid is shuffled off and the next kid is led up to them. We are all here, but we’re not here. You can try to take part, speak up, get into it, but the implicit message is that you really shouldn’t. You are here to passively absorb the brand, and then buy some stuff that signifies and cements your allegiance on the way out. For all of its analog charms—animatronic birds that trade witty banter, hammy young actors in Disney Prince costumes, primitive Small World dolls shaped by outdated cultural clichés—Disneyland is a real-life, interactive experience in which you’re meant to treat everything around you like it’s appearing on an IMAX screen.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Disney’s idealistic dreams would evolve into a passive consumer experience in which the individual feels powerful but has no power at all. The same process is reflected across the corporate sphere: Our most imaginative and thoughtful entrepreneurs create something new, guided by an ideology and values that ring true. Steve Jobs had an evangelistic vision of the personal liberation that technology could bring to our lives (“If you give [people] tools they’ll do wonderful things with them”). Mark Zuckerberg was inspired by “helping people to connect” and sought to “create more empathic relationships.” Jeff Bezos wanted to “invent” and “innovate” and “put customers first.” (“We get to work in the future,” he proclaimed in one shareholder report, sounding like a true disciple of Walt Disney.) Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter, has said that the company was created, in part, to generate more understanding and empathy between citizens of the global community.
We take comfort in the belief that these ideals are guiding our business leaders and shaping our culture. We are to understand pioneering and profiteering as compatible goals. When Bezos tells Business Insider’s Henry Blodget, “I want to see millions of people living and working in [outer] space,” it encourages us to view him as a passionate visionary, not a man whose foremost concern is persuading shareholders of his company’s future growth, even if that includes not just putting small bookstores out of business but putting all other stores out of business.
The problem with the fairy tale of constant growth and constant expansion—the central drive of all publicly traded ventures—is that companies start off with modest goals and creative business plans and then, by dint of their own success, they’re cornered into following the reigning script of high-capitalist world domination, swapping out true, steady innovation for aggressive initiatives and mergers that promise the quickest route to infinity and beyond. “We’re branching into everything under the sun!” corporate CEOs announce (in sync with the pop stars and struggling entrepreneurs and freelance jacks-of-all-trades who follow in their footsteps), and the company’s original ideals are soon lost in the mix.
For all of their talk of connecting the world and putting customers first, Facebook, Amazon, and Google are effectively in the business of mining our personal data. When we learn that Google View cars were outfitted with software not just for mapping our streets but for stealing data off our personal computers via unsecured Wi-Fi networks, we should feel not just intruded upon but betrayed. In 2015, Amazon’s digital display ad revenue outstripped even Google’s (which in turn outstripped the ad revenue of all U.S. print magazines and newspapers combined), making them our international Everything Store, to the detriment of countless smaller businesses worldwide. Disney itself is far from immune: Disney World’s new MagicBands—rubber wristbands with an RFID chip and a radio inside—are capable of replacing tickets and cash, offering the ease of preordered food at restaurants. But they also track your movements through the park, dutifully surveilling and recording your preferences and desires. It’s a small world, after all.
Corporations are the new world leaders, more powerful than most nations and more entitled to willfully ignore the rights of citizens in pursuit of continued dominance by reaping profits that far outstrip the economies of most co
untries. Disney made $55.63 billion in 2016, an amount that would make it the eighty-second-biggest economy in the world, edging out Uruguay ($54.5 billion) and Lebanon ($51.9 billion). Apple’s revenue in 2016, $215.6 billion, would make it the forty-seventh-biggest economy in the world, larger than those of Iceland, Croatia, El Salvador, Jordan, Senegal, and Honduras combined.
Disney follows the reigning corporate playbook of conquistador-like growth in every direction at once. The company’s Disney Junior channel hooks kids into the brand before they hit preschool. The acquisition of Marvel and Star Wars brings into the Mouse’s vast empire two franchises with the iconic significance and feverishly devoted followings of most world religions. A proposed merger with Fox would expand Disney’s properties beyond comprehension. And Disney always seems to stay in touch with shifts in public sentiment. When feminists decried the regressive nature of the Disney Princess franchise, Disney answered with Frozen’s princesses, who prioritize their sisters over empty romantic promises from princes (but retain the sugary voices, fifteen-inch waists, and giant sparkling gowns of their predecessors, as well as their habits of forsaking unwieldy emotions like rage or ambivalence).
It helps Disney’s case that in the last fifteen years we’ve gone from lamenting our insipid cultural artifacts (action movies, misogynistic pop songs, aggressively stupid sitcoms, transparent publicity stunts) to not just exalting them but also admiring the process of their creation. Being a “great brand” or staying “on-brand” is now a high accolade. Meanwhile, being suspicious of manufactured authenticity and global branding is itself suspicious, tantamount to distinguishing between high and low culture (elitist!) or labeling the predictable, dull, or ubiquitous as “basic” (snob!). The very concept of selling out has fallen out of the modern lexicon.