If you’re going to Disney World in Orlando for the first time -- or going again -- I’d suggest beginning with the Disney-MGM theme park. It’s a cute, gaudy shrine to the American entertainment machine in all its forms, from so-called Golden Era Hollywood (represented by Spanish-inflected art deco architecture, faux studio backlots and employees affecting hardboiled, “Hey, Mac!” accents) to the Muppets, arena rock, Rod Serling and big-budget action pictures (the Lights! Motors! Action! Extreme Stunt Show). The ideal gateway would be “Fantasmic!”, a sound-and-light show that also serves as a metaphor for the theme parks and for the world of Disney in general.
The show unfolds at a semi-circular outdoor theater that surrounds an island/mountain set ringed with a moat-like river. It’s a psychodramatic blowout in which Mickey Mouse, clad in his sorcerer’s apprentice garb from “Fantasia,” struggles to control and direct his own dreaming mind. The sweet side of Mickey’s imagination – represented by princes, princesses and forest creatures, fairy dust and bubbles – clashes with images of treachery and evil, including Disney villains who invade Mickey’s dreams and try to control them. The show’s twin high points are guest appearances by Jafar, the bad guy from “Aladdin,” and Maleficent, the witch from “Sleeping Beauty,” who transform respectively into a serpent and a dragon. It is literally an elemental spectacle: high-intensity projectors cast moving images on sheets of water; a gust of dragon's breath sets the moat ablaze, and Mickey himself chases away the forces of darkness with a eye-scalding, eardrum-rattling bombardment of fireworks.
The show grants theatrical shape to the Disney brand’s schizoid quality, its longstanding habit of juxtaposing sugar-cookie goodness against unsettling images of wickedness and destruction. "Fantasmic!" dramatizes the forces that always collided within Walter Elias Disney’s subconscious and the dreams he implanted in generations of moviegoers. He was the American Prospero, an artist, inventor, tycoon and social engineer whose creations have outlived him. 
Of course the theme parks are mainly consumerist havens and vacationer’s destination points, places where you forget to watch the clock and just eat and frolic and spend money; basically Las Vegas without the gambling and lasciviousness. Yet the creative/ autobiographical/visionary aspect is still front-and-center, where anyone can engage with it, and somehow the parks’ increasingly corporate ownership has not destroyed, or even seriously degraded, the odd, old magic, which emanated from the bland yet fevered brain of Disney himself.
The buildings, characters and rides don’t feel like pre-fab products shat out of a factory somewhere. They seem to have been sketched in pencil or charcoal and then willed into existence. The floor of every ride should be covered in pink eraser dust.
The parks are also shrines to Disney’s personality and imagination, an autobiographical spectacular. To walk through the parks is to stroll through Disney’s conscious and subconscious mind, his childhood and adulthood. The experience is like of those Charlie Kaufman setpieces wherein characters scamper through theatrically exaggerated rooms representing significant locales and formative moments in the hero’s life.
You enter the Magic Kingdom through Main Street, USA circa 100 years ago, a distilled, sanitized façade of the rural Midwestern environment that sired not just Disney, but Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles and Ray Bradbury, a setting that's now so far removed from early 21st century life that it might as well be Rome in the age of Caesar. Frontierland doesn’t represent any actual location in the history of America’s westward expansion; it’s a childish mental space, The West as represented in silent era western pictures. There are no overt references to specific state territories, and nary an Injun, missionary or prostitute in sight, just tall tales and showdowns and hitchin’ posts and locomotives. Tomorrowland never really pretended to be a credible vision of
humanity's future, just a playground for kids who grew up on H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and their descendants, as represented in magazines like Amazing Stories; and after Disney’s death, it became even more of a literary/cinematic construct, a place where Buzz Lightyear and Stitch could feel at home. With the exception of the still forward-thinking, outer-directed Epcot Center – which I’ll deal with in a separate post – every Disney theme park, including the ones designed and built long after Disney’s death, tell us more about Walt Disney’s inner space, and the inner space of most Americans, than whatever their mission statement promised they’d be about. Because Disney World expresses a personality, you can connect with it as you would a person. This rare quality has made successive generations feel protective toward the parks and toward Walt Disney, man and symbol. Their protective feelings serve as levees holding back a rising tide of soulless, focus-grouped, shareholder-pandering idiocy that has destroyed other great pop culture institutions. Disney the publically held megacorporation knows that if it messes too much with Disney the man, Disney the artistic/ entrepreneurial ideal, it will incur the wrath of Disneyphiles, who would sooner stop going to the parks than pay hard-earned money to experience a taxidermist’s facsmile of the place they grew up loving. (A side note, and a warning. Anyone from Disney corporate who’s reading this should know that a lot of old-time Disneyphiles consider the post-Walt corporation to be a hulking shadow of its former self, and feel that the parks just aren’t as attentive and surprising as they used to be. For now, they keep coming back, but there are no guarantees; as soon as they feel that the suits have tipped the park toward cynical exploitation, they’ll mourn the death of their great love, then promptly find something else to be obsessed with.) The intense, affectionate scrutiny of Disneyphiles has forced the parks to retain their idiosyncratic, defiantly personal flavor, despite the creator's death and longtime CEO Michael Eisner's attempts to make them a bit more slick and contemporary.
To walk through the parks is to peruse a living, breathing museum of American cultural fads and theme park affectations, from the post World War II craze for African safaris, space exploration and Polynesian culture to the 1960s and ‘70s interest in animatronic puppetry and monorails and psychedelia (see the Electrical Parade on Main Street in the Magic Kingdom). These are fascinations, enthusiasms, obsessions made physical, and presented so seductively that we want to revisit and re-experience them again and again. Their blunt naivete, their dreaminess, their disconnection from anything “real,” makes them entrancing, and instills visitors with the wish to see the creator's essence preserved. The company's desire to protect its bottom line by continuing in some semblance of Disney's spirit ironically makes Disney's theme parks, perhaps the most ahistorical places on earth, deeply conscious of their own history, and unfashionably inclined to protect it.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Prospero's parks
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
21 comments:
MZS: and Maleficant, the witch from “Cinderella,”
BAAAANNNT!! WRONG ANSWER! "OOH! I'm sorry," says Alex Trebek.
Maleficent is from Sleeping Beauty! There are no witches in Cinderella. Just those cute mice, a fairy godmother, and the stepsisters with ba-dunka-dunk asses.
I didn't do that Fantasia sound and light show when I was at Disney. I was afraid to. I envisioned I'd be watching it, and my Mom would be in one of Mickey's nightmares. She'd reach out of the light show and beat my ass, just like she did when she took me to see Fantasia back in 1973.
I always loved the MGM theme park too, but my favorite place is the "boring park," Epcot. In fact, Epcot was the ONLY way I could get two of my friends to go to Disney World with me. They would go to Epcot, because it wasn't "for kids." Never mind that I had over half a decade in age on these people and wanted to go ride Space Mountain.
Disney is one of the two places where I feel like I'm 4 years old. Unfortunately, that other place is my parents' house!
I live a helluva lot closer to Six Flags, but I've been to Disney World more times than Great Adventure. At least there are things you can do at Disney without waiting on line, and you can feel a sense of the fantasy world just by standing around. At Six Flags, you do a lot of standing around too, but all you see is the big ass 3-hour line you're on.
I liked what you said to the Disney folks about cynical exploitation. Notice that Disney has been making these canned sequels to classics? Now they have Bambi II, which, when I heard the title, I immediately conjured up images of Bambi with a gun. "They killed his mother. This time it's personal! Sylvester Stallone is Bambi!"
Whoops! Good catch. I must have Disney fatigue. It's already been corrected.
I love Epcot, too, even now that it's been Disneyfied with gaudy "magic" bric-a-brac on the Spaceship Earth dome.
Interesting take on Disney's cultural legacy and personality. But I'm not sure it quite justifies spending one's hard earned money on theme parks. You say Disney is ahistorical and it reflects the American mind not necessarily in a good way. If so, why keep going back? Why not go to a real place with a long real history? No direspect meant but now that you've identified the problem why not do something about it? It's clear you got somethign meaningful from the experience. But why isn't once enough?
Uncleej: Geez, I don't know if there's a way to answer that to your satisfaction. Why do people obsessively watch certain movies over and over? Why do they become fascinated by golf or model railroads?
I don't think I'm justifying a love of kitsch on grounds that it's actually a form of cultural anthropology, though I concede that this scenario is not beyond the realm of the possible. But I do feel that when I go to Disney World, I connect with my own chiildhood, my imagination, my influences and my countrymen in a very basic, profound, essentially benevolent way. And I always come away feeling that I understand myself and my country a little better. If that's simply a justification for sinking money into Disney's coffers in exchange for the chance to ride Space Mountain one more time, well, as justifications go, it's not a bad one, is it?
And why does it have to be either/or? Either a straightforward, uncomplicated love of pop culture and showmanship and junk of all types, or an academic pursuit? Why can't it be both?
Aint no either/or about it. It's both/and. I'm sure I would love Norway if I ever went, and I like EPCOT's Norway just fine. I like real rocks, and I like fake rocks too.
And since your on the MGM park today, I remember being kind of depressed a few years back when I went into one of those movie memorabilia shops there, and everything they had (posters and stuff) was late 70's and 80's pre-Touchstone. We're talking Trenchcoat, Devil & Max Devlin, Last Flight of Noah's Ark, Condorman. Has there ever been a more dismal period at any studio? Ouch! I wonder if the store ever moved any of that stuff.
Dave: Trenchcoat, Devil & Max Devlin, Last Flight of Noah's Ark, Condorman
Woah, you've just spun me out on some Proustian flashback here to HBO in the early 80's. (I don't care to guess how many times I sat through all those films... just because they were on.)
I'd like to say I hadn't even so much as thought about about a single one of those titles in at least twenty years... except there was this girl I dated in college who had a "vintage" TRENCHCOAT poster proudly displayed in her apartment.
She's a lesbian now... how much that has to do with Robert Hays and Margot Kiddier, I dare not ask.
Funny that you guys would be intrigued by the idea of Disney theme parks as resting places for justly forgotten bits of pop detritus, because I'm working on a post about that very subject. The circle of influence between the theme parks and the rest of Disney (and the rest of pop culture) is a fun subject all its own. I wonder, there's Muppet 3-D adventure in the Disney-MGM park, and the "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" 3-D ride and accompanying playground in that same theme park; both sets of attractions are probably visited by hundreds of thousands of parents and kids each year. The theme parks surely play a huge part in keeping the Muppet franchise alive (the movies sure ain't doing it) and I'd wager to say that if not for the continued theme park exposure, the "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" franchise would have been all but forgotten by now. The Fantasmic show, which I write about in this post, has at its center a recreation of a big number from "Pocahantas," which hit theaters shortly before the show debuted and has since been tagged as minor Disney. Yet its presence in Fantasmic! means hundreds of thousands of people will be reminded of it every year. I don't think the theme parks were willing or able to do anything with the El Crappo movies you mention, but I'm sure that any placement in the theme parks is better than none. The theme parks are like those electrocardial paddles, a way of jolting a nearly dead property back to life.
Mr. Burns: What are you doing to these women, man?! I don't recall sitting through all of those movies back in the 80's on HBO, but I do remember sitting through them at the theater. I remember that hideous song from The Devil and Max Devlin, something about roses and rainbows...that might be more lesbian-inducing than Robert Hays' trenchcoat, methinks.
My 80's HBO experience was always 8 million reruns of Poltergeist, The Beastmaster, Dragonslayer, and Personal Best, coincidentally my first run in with, you guessed it, lesbians. There was also this weird Larry Cohen movie, where the alien looked like Jesus and was telling people to kill each other. I guess we had different HBO's! All you got was roses and rainbows!
As for Disney's dark days, I was always kinda partial to The Great Mouse Detective.
Disney knows what it's doing. It will toss these things at you until their kitsch factor comes back into vogue. Look at us: we're talking about them here!
Off to get me a Condorman costume for Halloween.
Matt, I'm going to be pedantic before someone else does-- the "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" movie is in Epcot but the playground is in MGM. Which you know, but I think comments can't be corrected!
You're right though... the funniest example is the "Great Movie Ride" whch ends with a montage of what I guess are supposed to be comtemporary classics... including a lot of early 90s Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures crap like "Sister Act 2."
It's odd to think that placement in a Disney theme park guarantees a character, movie or performer immortality as long as the park deigns to include the attraction. At the "Beauty and the Beast" stage show, I was moved to hear the late Jerry Orbach providing the voice of Lumiere the candlestick.
The weird Larry Cohen movie is "God Told Me To".
Odie: My favorite two movies from Disney's dark days were THE BLACK CAULDRON (a LORD OF THE RINGS knockoff, but with some nice imagery) and THE BLACK HOLE (a STAR WARS knockoff, but again, some nice imagery; of course I was 11 when I saw it, a period when anything with spaceships in it seemed great to me, so my fond memories are probably skewed).
The consensus here seems to be that Disney's dark days were the pre-LITTLE MERMAID 1980s, but I think it actually stretches from Walt's death through THE LITTLE MERMAID, with occasional bright spots sprinkled in between. Though I have to wonder, can the halfway decent stuff aimed at adults -- DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS for example -- truly be considered Disney?
I think the Muppet Show is my favorite 3D of the bunch, with Bug's Life at the Tree of Life a close second (maybe I just like having bugs crawl under my rump.) Disney still has it over the competition, the Shrek 3D I saw at SeaWorld last year was bombastic and terrible.
I almost got stuck going thru Honey, I Shrunk the playground on my hands and knees.
Speaking of preservation, tell me they didn't change Country Bear Jamboree to match that godawful movie that even my kid wouldn't sit thru. For a show that's been in the can for decades, I thought it was cleverly put together. At least I have it preserved on vinyl.
Has anyone ever noticed that when Sam Elliot shaves his cookie-duster it increases his expressive range by 30 percent, and it also reveals he has a Country Bear lip?
And maybe I shouldn't do this to Sean Burns, but here's a couple more, though not Disney: Six Pack, and Heart Like a Wheel. I hesitate to lump the great 9 to 5 in with same company.
Anyway, I don't know how you guys have time to read and post this stuff. I'm at work, but you guys are at Disneyworld, dammit.
Dave: I'm finally back from Disney World as of yesterday, so I am writing this from my office. But I did blog while I was on vacation in Orlando. Does that make me a freak?
Your comment about Sam Elliott's Country Bear lip nearly made me spit out my moonshine. You will be reassured to know Splash Mountain hasn't changed -- it's still the same psychedelic "Pink Elephants on Parade" thing you remember, complete with oddly posed animal tableaus that seem vaguely inappropriate, and whole sections that consist mainly of freaky looking creatures squealing, pleading and laughing maniacally.
I am told, however, that the "Pirates of the Carribean" ride will be changed to bring it in line with the Johnny Depp movie. That's sort of sad, I guess, from a history standpoint, but then, the ride as it stands was prone to breakdowns and rather lame except from a design standpoint. My wife observed that it's pretty much the same ride as "It's a Small World." She once called it, "'It's a Small World' with thieving flesh traders."
Can't speak to Country Bear Jamboree, though, as I have always been too unnerved by those characters to actually see the show.
Jeff: When the movie was on HBO, they called it Demon. When I worked in the video store back in the 80's, it was also on video as Demon. Looking at the imdb, it does call it God Told Me To as you state. No matter. It creeped me out as a teenager!
MZS: I have never sat through The Country Bears Jamboree at Disney, but Uncle Odell had to sit through the movie. All I could think about was Deliverance Meets Bart the Bear. The science geek in me (and my friends) had huge problems with The Black Hole, though the effects were interesting.
Speaking of bad Disney movies I'm ashamed to admit I loved, after I saw TRON, I took my first programming language class. You know how that turned out. I owe Jeff Bridges money for my career.
Odie: The Country Bears film was a formative experience for my daughter, who was about five when she saw it. Up until that point she loved every movie she saw so much that it automatically became her favorite movie. But this one was so awful that when I asked her what she thought, she said, "I wasn't as good as some of the other movies you've taken me to." I said, "Which one?" She said, "All of them."
Sounds like you've got a future film critic of America there.
I'd put in a kind word for an early '80s Disney live actioner: Jack Clayton's "Something Wicked This Way Comes." (Coincidentally, this film was brought up in another forum I read earlier this afternoon.) I love this film, and its beautiful depiction of not-quite-turn-of-the-century Midwestern life connects with Matt's comments about Main Street USA. Of course, it is astonishing to me that more of Bradbury's novels weren't made by Disney. But "Something Wicked," for my money, is superior even to "Fahrenheit 451" by Truffaut.
I haven't been to Disney World since I was 9 years old, but reading this post makes me want to do so soon.
Peter: You're right. Bradbury's sensibility is very similar to Disney's, by turns wondrous and cruel, dark and sunny. I need to see SOMETHING WICKED again.
Apropos of nothing, Clayton's THE INNOCENTS is one of the great ghost stories every put on film, genuinely scary but also richly atmospheric and psychologically astute. It's also one of the most beautiful widescreen films ever made, just a pleasure to look at. Shot by the great Freddie Francis, who also shot Clayton's ROOM AT THE TOP, it's one of the reasons black and white photography was invented.
Matt, I LOVE "The Innocents," and Freddie Francis enhances any film he works on. I had the pleasure of interviewing him about his two, late-career collaborations with Robert Mulligan ("Clara's Heart" and "The Man in the Moon.") But Clayton is a neglected master. I recommend Neil Sinyard's critical study of Clayton published by Manchester University Press. It reveals, among other things, that Clayton very much wanted to direct "The Tenant," but the project fell apart after "The Great Gatsby" (a hugely underrated movie, IMO), and then Polanski did it. It would make a nice companion piece to the supernatural pictures in the Clayton filmography.
Anyway, a very nice-looking DVD of "Something Wicked" came out a few years ago from Buena Vista. (Alas, for reasons known only to them, the documentary made at the time of the film's production isn't included! It would be fun to see Bradbury wandering around the wonderful set they built.)
Post a Comment