(9 November 1995)
Neo-Paganism, whether practised by Wiccans, Druids, Occultists or New Agers, is frequently characterised by a tendency to personify nature as an Earth Mother that is valued as a source of life. This kind Neo-Paganism certainly does not represent the dominant ideology of industrialised countries, but it nonetheless may be seen as an historical precursor to a scientifically-based, ecological ethos in industrialised cultures, in which individuals have increasingly perceived themselves as part of, and dependent on an, encompassing ecosystem, and have some awareness of - and occasionally act in response to - their responsibility for this ecology. From the perspective of cultural theory, a key explanatory basis of this shift is a critique of post-industrial capitalist enterprise, inasmuch as it is predicated on anthropocentric understandings of nature as a resource to fuel the “Progress” of a typified Western, male, American, capitalist nation-state. This paper engages with this critique by analysingDisney as metonymic of this specifically American ideology. The following argues that Disney's theme parks, especially EPCOT, try to incorporate the world's geography and history and subordinate it to the West, while Disney's films and cartoons - which keep the Disney “imagination” alive in the spaces outside Disney's parks - naturalize this ideology and, by their construction of “children,” “women” and “nature,” maintain Disney's so-called political innocence.
EPCOT was finished as an extension of Disney World in 1982. Disney had initially planned:
a city that caters to the people as a service function. It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities. In EPCOT there will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. No slum areas because we will not let the develop. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees. Everyone must be employed. (Zukin 224)
But, as Zukin observes, the Disney company decided that EPCOT as Disney envisioned it would involve too much legal responsibility. So instead of an ideal, residential community, Disney World became a temporary community, a resort colony, with EPCOT made up of World Showcase, which provides carefully selected and reworked landscapes, and Future World, a body of pavilions sponsored by corporations which advertise their new technologies and utopian blueprints for the future. Many of the pavilions' exhibits attempt to foreground the interactive side of technology. For example at the Electronic Forum people are herded into an auditorium, told to vote - by pressing buttons on their chairs - for or against the nuclear freeze, whether to increase or decrease social security benefits, whether they would prefer an American or Japanese car next year, and so forth; the results are tabulated, the people are told these opinions will “help shape the future,” and ushered out. Keyboards attached to voice synthesizers speak what we type in, as long as they aren't words like “fuck.” Some video terminals ask where we are from, then tell us about the place. Others ask what themes of the future we're interested in, then tell us what to visit next (Smoodin 120-1).
Supposedly, these and the other “technologies allow you to participate more fully in the world around you” (Smoodin 121). But this participation, which represents the utopian liberation technology supposedly provides, is coerced and controlled. Indeed through all of Disney's theme parks, the visitor is rarely beyond the sights or sounds of explicit narratives: gaze and movement are restricted by the highly differentiated landscape. Like the industrialized world's cities, this creates so much of a distraction that the viewer does not have time to interpret the information, and so is carried along by it. We do not “see” the city's, or Disney's, landscape, so much as “experience” it. However the city of the future is never explicitly represented at Disney World, except in “cityscapes” which invoke both the harmonious image of the country town and/or the planned utopias of the beginning of the century. These “cityscapes” are really just urban landscapes; they do not have an image of centrality, rather a flat skyline which weakens the division between city and wilderness. Consequently, Disney World offers as the the possibility of “participating in” the experience of the city of the future, but the city is not directly represented. As Wilson notes, the road is the mediator here, with the car expressing a utopian sense of democracy, individuality and freedom between city and wilderness ( Wilson 159). But the road really testifies to the absence of both the city and wilderness; city and rural life are excised, leaving not a habitation but an urban shopping mall, a world of bill-board-laden drive-through consumption.
History is one object of consumption in this drive-through tour: many eras and figures exist in Disney's landscape. But the symmetry between Future World and World Showcase is biased towards “host” country because of the position of the park's exit, and the geography of World Showcase itself focuses on The American Adventure pavilion. Flanking America are its trading partners: West Germany , Japan , Italy , France , China , Great Britain , Canada , Mexico and North Africa , each sponsored by “local” transnational corporations. (Smoodin 123). EPCOT here offers a collage of landscapes which can be viewed simultaneously, but the landscapes are stripped to their barest essentials; for example, North Africa is represented by the “exotic” Morocco , and Paris by the stereotyped Eiffel Tower . All non-exotic elements of these landscapes are excluded. And, as with Disneyland's Main Street USA, and the country town image often evoked, The American Pavilion functions as a spatial mediator between America and all other cultures as an emblem of social harmony, as if it reconciles all cultural differences. But as Wilson argues, even America is exoticized. Resistant or revolutionary figures in American history are represented as though they encouraged the project they were fighting; any historical expression of the development and deployment of technology, and of the underlying ideological project of restoring free enterprise and attacking democratic power through technocratic authority, is evaded ( Wilson 124).
So EPCOT provides a geographical juxtaposition of an ideal past embodied in Other cultures with an ideal American present amd future, with the landscape progressing through the former to the latter. All non-modern pasts are reduced into a history of America 's pre-modern past, the details of which are instantly available as if existing merely in some Information Highway in the database of American knowledge. But this idealized history, or simulacra of history, also produces attractions of US capital. All other pasts create differences not as real possibilities, but to multiply the sense of Otherness - a greater totality of objects to “sell” - and to create relief to the boring prescribed urban forms Disney offers as representing the present. Indeed Disney uses history in general to signify class and luxury, collapsing high and low culture not to liberate the majority from the power of the few, but so that the corporate bodies can sell the idea of liberation accompanied with the collapse; the corporate bodies assume the dominant position of power that elitist high culture used to, but under the mask of representing low culture. In a literal sense we are shopping for this “past” so we can see the “present”: all city or folk forms of street-life are either removed and/or replaced by cliches - theatre troupes and musicians which reinscribe that life nostalgically as “past” - leaving only window shopping for the best “past” spectacle or “future” technology. EPCOT is thus dedicated to “dreams for better tomorrows” only by invoking American utopian thought which sees technology as an agent of history driven teleologically towards a democratic society of boundless leisure; here mass-consumption is an expression of equality, but amid signifiers of choice, plenitude and possibility, all that can be consumed is one prescribed experience. Louis Marin argues:
Disneyland is an extraordinary dystopia. It displaces the spatial habitability . . . into its spectacular representation; it reduces the dynamic organization of the places, the aleatory unity of a possible tour to a univocal scheme allowing only the same redundant behaviour. (Smoodin 122)
Ironically Disney's selection and exclusion of these heterogeneous voices beneath the loud voice of Progress is at one level self-consciously achieved: “What we create is ‘Disney realism,' sort of Utopian in nature, where we carefully program out all the negative, unwanted elements and program in the positive elements” (Zukin 222). The Jungle Cruise, for example:
compacts into ten minutes the highlights, mystique, fun and excitement of an adventure that could only be duplicated through weeks on safari. Best of all, it has none of the mosquitoes, monsoons, and other misadventures of the “not always so great” outdoors . . . This brand of “spruced up reality” is integral to the Disney Theme Show. ( Wilson 161-2)
Disney's selection is, as this passage makes obvious, justified on the basis of entertainment. Certainly Disney's political “innocence” is proved in the popular argument because his stress is on “fun,” not “work” and “politics.” The role of the child, intimately associated with play, is here paramount to Disney's construction of “innocence.” Much is made of Disney's morality: his products are seen as fitting “true” and “proper” children, as representing “good” “wholesome” family values. So it is not worried over that - using the same electronic communications which enables capital to be consolidated in his parks - the images of his characters, like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, can be marketed to children across the globe. But deCordova argues that the relation between animals and children was central to the deployment of the Disney empire. “What does it mean for a child to ‘be' . . . to ‘have' a mouse?” (Smoodin 211). First, in an increasingly Romanticized America , animals help to link children to nature; Second, they establish the innocence of children, their distance from the corrupting influences of social life. G. Stanley Hall's work provides a sense of the context of this romanticized association. For Hall, child development recapitulated, through a genetically prescribed memory, the history of the race. Childhood recapitulates the Age of Savagery, adolescence the Age of Chivalry, and so forth; guidance through, and proper exercise of, each stage of our race's past is necessary if the present is to be coped with. If the savage impulse isn't lived out, children will be scarred for life, unable to function as adults in a modern world. Animals here represent a very early stage of human development, and humanizing animals is a means to establish this ancestral link. Since childhood is constructed in relation to the past, it would seem that the more modern the form or content of leisure - Disney's themes of the “future,” for example - the less suitable it is for children. But Mickey's animality, by linking children to a primitive past, counterbalances his modernity, making sacred Disney's address to both children and adults (Smoodin 213).
Disney's moral is that we can still live in the city, in the modern world, while a refuge of the “past” remains. But the child must always become an adult, so play is necessarily preparation for adult work, and children like Huey, Dewey and Louie are
stripped of the true qualities of children: their unbounded, open (and therefore manipulable) trustfulness, their creative spontaneity . . . their incredible capacity for unreserved, unconditional love, and their imagination . . . the law of the jungle [drives them]: envy, ruthlessness, cruelty, terror, blackmail, exploitation of the weak. Lacking vehicles for their natural affection, children learn through Disney fear and hatred. (Dorfman and Mattelhart 35)
Disney constructs children, in a Hobbesian sense, as the possessive individual which the social contract of capitalist adulthood ends; they are the adult's self-image. Consequently, a more permanent, unchanging reserve of innocence is necessary. Since this cannot be the wilderness - for reasons I will make clear in a moment - innocence lies in the pre-modern past.
But Disney's innocence also rests on his claims of democracy, as if Western capitalism is good and all other cultural forms - reduced to fascism and communism - are evil. The irony is that the pre-modern and children are marginalized as innocent in the same way Kate Ellis argues women are - because they are positioned outside of the sphere of production. So the West simulteneously purifies itself on the basis of its democratic and innocent capitalism, and through its “past,” children and women who are constructed as innocent because they are outside of capitalist production. The appeal of Disney's theme parks is built on this contradiction: adults seeing children as living a continual holiday - leisure - desire a spatial equivalent (Dorfman and Mattelhart 43). This is, for Disney, not the Romantic wilderness, but his market landscape. We are given play money; we smile and clap in awe at the exhibits of the scientists; in short, the visitor is constructed as a child at play, and the scientists as the adults at work, with the Disney theme park experience reduced to us “playing” at being adults. Colonization of land and native cultures here appears like a game, and as nostalgic as the adults dreams of childhood: “In Disneyland (the happiest place on earth),” says Public Relations, “you can encounter ‘wild' animals and native ‘savages' who often display their hostility to your invasion of their privacy . . . From stockades in Adventureland, you can actually shoot at Indians” (21).
It is obvious, when we swap Disney's toy guns for real ones, and see the real violence of colonization, that what Disney selects to entertain us with are images abstracted from their material context. This is especially revealing in the ways Disney treats nature. The area called “Wilderness” is an RV campground; there is no country, only “countryscapes.” Nature doesn't exist on its own terms, it is separated from Man, then reworked and reabsorbed as a pure resource. A powerful image here is Wilson 's description of hedges clipped into topiary of Disney cartoon characters ( Wilson 181). The Disney publicists call this work “whimsification,” but ruptures in Disney's landscape reveal that the use the land's resource is not always just for entertainment. The pavilion called The Land, for example, is billed as “a journey to a place most of us have forgotten about: the place where food is grown” ( Wilson 184). The pavilion takes us through models of plants, and rural settings, then ends up in a laboratory: this, so the narrative tells us, is where food is grown, in a laboratory by scientists. “Nature by itself is not always productive,” says the exhibit, so the funding of industrial agriculture is promoted as essential. Here, while Disney evokes the rural myth, he decimates the community which constituted it: he judges it on its efficiency, not its character, and replaces it with industrial agriculture which is counter-productive productive, highly wasteful, and whose only efficiency is the the profits it gives its corporate sponsors (186).
Disney's repression of the land beneath scientific management is directly related to his repressive representation of women and sex. The elimination of true parents, especially the mother, is significant in Disney's mythology, especially the films and comics; mothers are often not only dead, but non-existent as a concept. Whether or not this coding is a result of Disney's personal family experiences is irrelevant, for he represents a larger cultural pathology. Disney's empire is, like American capitalist culture, a male one, and when women are present, they are typed either as a Wicked Witch, or a Snow White. The latter category includes characters like Daisy Duck and Minnie Mouse, who are perpetual housekeepers or dates, constantly attempting to gain male affection but are always trapped on the “threshold of satisfaction” (Dorfman and Mattelhart 39). The moment they exert power on their partners, they are presented as monstrous, uncontrollable forces of desire and inspire fear and/or comedy. Thus they are not suitable parents for Huey, Dewey and Louie; their uncle Donald Duck is, however, just as Uncle Scrooge is seen as a suitable parent for Donald Duck. Biological links between parent and child are thus excised in Disney, and Dorfman and Mattelhart argue that since Donald is an uncle over Huey, Dewey and Louie, and Uncle Scrooge an uncle over Donald, there is no way for the nephews or Donald to argue: “You are a bad father” when they are forced into enormous, unpaid journeys; the control is seen as de facto, an idealistic inheritance which cannot be refuted on biological terms (34-5). Except when women portray desire, in monstrous form, all interpersonal relations fall into an economic category, one of monetary dependence and control.
Economic production thus takes precedence over biological production; but economic production is, like the past, selectively represented. To begin with, Disney World is on a scale “large enough land to hold all the ideas we imagine” (Wilson 176); but it is the “imagineers” who do the imagining, not the visitor, and Disney signs all his individual artists' work to his company, making it seem as if he alone is giving birth to the national imagination. To reinforce this, all the other production which goes into producing the Disney experience is hidden much as the productive forces are hidden in the image of the commodity (176). The service sector is accented to foreground the positive, interactive and human side of a highly specialized, hierarchized and alienated workforce; and gay, simple uniforms invoke myths of contented, honest rural workers and deny the fact that the service sector provides a very superficial and poorly paid form of human engagement in a strict Disney hierarchy. Underground corridors, or “utilidors,” are provided for “workers, supplies, utilities, and telecommunications” to cross the site unseen; all storage and employment services are likewise underground; service roads and power generators are behind the facades (176). Yet Disney said his genius “sprouted from the earth,” and “Dollars are like fertilizer - they make things grow.” His genius and wealth is thus constructed as natural; like the bourgeois in general, he legitimates his power on the basis of his “ideas,” as if it is the “ideas” - or “innovations” - for “new technology” made him rich. This idealistic production idealism is signified in the comics and films by a light bulb flashing over character's heads: each idea leads to some new situation, usually an inventive comical one, for example Mickey's tricky gadgetry, with which he outwits his foes, and Uncle Scrooge's endless money-making schemes. This is, for Disney, the immaculate conception, or bachelor birth, of wealth (Dorfman and Mattelhart 63). Biological reproduction of humans and the physical production of commodities is subordinated by an idealistic (re-)production of the bourgeois social system. This idealism naturally functions best in a non-environmental abstraction or black hole: Disney World is outside of zoning, building, traffic, development, power, waste and flood jurisdictions, allowing Disney to work the land as hard as he wants on the assumption that it doesn't exist. And since he is abstracted from, or above it - like Donald or Uncle Scrooge over their nephews - his power seems at once Natural and unchangeable, an ahistorical Truth.
Disney wants us to believe that a better future lies in “creative thinking” and “futuristic technologies.” But who will have access to the new technologies? Will we be able to determine how it will be introduced, at what pace, with what effects? What genuinely democratic uses will it have? ( Wilson 121). These questions are repressed by the belief that problems are best resolved by corporate research and development decisions that benefit consumers, that we can control technology and history if we submit to corporate power. The “future” here represses all alternative social forms as “past,” as the “play” of technologies' “present work”; but play is only leisure, and in capitalism leisure necessitates work. The two are part of the same continuum, and though technology is celebrated as democratically minimizing work, in the corporate-controlled reality the greater the leisure, the more intensive the work to produce it. We can't forget, either, that the “fun” Disney company is itself a part of production; it has promoted roads, sewage and housing to allow access to his parks, and hotel and urban development are following some of his “utopian” models. It forces the visitor to discard or treat as “play” genuinely utopian narratives and experience, such as sustainable agricultural projects and urban restoration work; it spreads the belief that increased productive capacity and industrial innovations plus resource management will raise standards of living and lead to international co-operation and peace.
Ironically, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto argues that Disney . . . like America itself, is “a brand name . . . only part of the system of differences which needs to be reproduced perpetually for the survival of the . . . economy” (Smoodin 15). A tension underlying Disney's ideological project is that while Disney's landscape is metonymic of both American colonial practice, it is also metonymic of the colonizing force of global capital on America as well as the countries America places claims to supremacy over; America's democracy is subverted not merely because of capitalist inequality in America, but because the global system is subject more to the random power drifts of corporate companies and oil prices than to any individual voter or company. Disney's own company has been struck by take-overs, affected by local, national and international market fluxes, but he still forces us to surrender local, relevant power over our environment to the ravaging flux of capital. Thus his vision of the future is really no future at all, certainly not for nature. While environmental groups perpetuate myths of a Great Earth Mother or Goddess, Disney perpetuates myths of a Terrible Mother relegated to the past, or no mother at all, with all things produced by bachelor-birth through him. His rhetoric sees conservation purely in terms of rationalization of resources, and takes as Natural the concomitant exploitation by corporate bodies of huge sectors of the world, especially women and other marginalized groups, as well as other nations and Third World Countries. Consequently, any promise of a world in which industrial corporations don't rule, enforcing scarcity over a brutalized earth, lies beyond the reach of Disney's supposedly Natural (re-)production.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelhart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic . New York : International General, 1984.
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Wilson, Alexander. “Technological Utopias.” T he Culture of Nature . USA : Blackwell Publishers, 1993.
Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power . Berkeley and Los Angeles , California : University of California Press, 1991.
