Dismaland: the Tragic Kingdom
by Brittanie Johnson
If you have ever been to Disneyland during the holiday season, then you can automatically see the immediate parallel between it and Dante's Inferno. During the rest of the year, it is more comparable to Purgatorio, but it hasn't been by any stretch a Paradiso as the Disney ad-wizards would like you to imagine. It is the ultimate mall: anything you could ever want or need in one location. The inscription above the entrance arch shouldn't read "The Happiest Place on Earth" as it currently does, but "ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE."
Most would consider this a pretty grim view of a place that billions flock to every year. In fact, in 2000, the park revenues were $6,803,000,000, and the Disneyland resort in Anaheim boasts the largest parking structure in the world with 10,244 spaces. And of course there are buses full of people, resort and hotel shuttles, and the like pulling up almost every hour. People go in droves. But I have always considered myself to have more of a "right" to Disneyland than anyone. My father used to work there as a singer in the Main Street group "The Dapper Dans." They would sing barber shop, jazz standards, and some sock-hop type music. One of the perks of working at the park is that you get unlimited access to it when you're not working and a nice 30% discount. So I spent most of my childhood in this place. I learned at a very early age performance technique and vocal styles and I'd often sing with the group when I was there. Between the time that I was born to the time I moved to San Francisco in 1990, I had been to Disneyland roughly 300 times. Since then, I've passed the 500 mark, and by the time I die, that number will probably be somewhere more near 1,000. I've been with friends family, performance groups, professional groups, non-profit organizations, and even alone. My friends used to play a game with me and ask me the quickest way to get from one point in the park to another, testing my knowledge. Invariably, I would always win. This is the only place I can call a hometown having moved 8 times by the age of 16. Disneyland was a constant. I blame my childhood on Disney.
You can even blame Disney for "The Sixth Sense," their highest grossing live-action film of all time. Many people are unaware of the Disney empire, something that Disney refers to in their investor fact book as the "premier family entertainment company." In addition to the Disney company and all of its trademarks, including Walt Disney Picturs, Disney also owns ABC television and radio networks, ESPN and all of its affiliates, SoapNet, Lifetime, A&E, the History Channel, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax, Dimension Films, most of the rights to Star Wars and some of LucasFilms, Buena Vista Entertainment (which is inclusive of the Buena Vista Music Group consisting of Walt Disney Records, Walt Disney Music Publishing, Hollywood Records, Mommoth Records, and Lyric Street Records), several theatrical products (including but not limited to "The Lion King," "Aida," "Beauty and the Beast," and "The Producers," all multi-Tony winners), the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, the Anaheim Angels, Go.com, NASCAR Store Online, as well a another couple of dozen internet commerce and entertainment sites.
My awakened tour of this Wonderland began on Saturday November 24th, two days after I had surgery instead of Thanksgiving. My mother likes to make a tradition of going there around Thanksgiving so she doesn't feel guilty about never being around for my birthday (November 29th). Her favorite things in the park are the stores. All of the stores. When we got into the park, she headed straight for the $20 buffet breakfast (the justification of which is that you dine surrounded by giant felt reproductions of classic Disney characters). Afterwards, my grandmother wanted to go ride something, her favourite being "The Pirates of the Carribean." This bored my mother, though, having nothing to buy. After the ride, she actually walked from "The Pirates of the Carribean" all the way around "The Haunted Mansion" and "Splash Mountain" just to get to the Winnie-the-Pooh store at the end of the road. As we puroused the store, she was showing my grandmother things she had already purchased at this very location. Genuine fear crept over me. After her little buyfest, we walked back to "Indiana Jones" (which, for those unexperienced with the layout of Disneyland, is on the way to "The Pirates of the Carribean," so we were only displaced, in essense, 20 yards after walking nearly three quaters of a mile).
Normally I am not much of a shopper. My favorite stores (in general) are those where sales means jeans for $2. I detest regular shopping, probably due to how much I detest normalcy. Chuck Palanuik said in Fight Club, "A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things." I never wanted to be like "a lot of young people." In the brilliant words of Tyler Durden, "Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't." But there's something about Disneyland that makes me want to gladly pay $42 for an Indiana Jones authentic fedora. Two extra yuppie food coupons for a hat I wouldn't wear as much as the $2 jeans.
Of course, nothing inside Disneyland is necessary in the traditional sense of the word. Small children screaming how much they need fin-action super princess Ariel don't really grasp that concept as well as the convenient child-friendly edges of the box. If you want to talk about survival "in the traditional hunter-gatherer sense of the word," then you have to look to the food choices, none of which would provide you with any amount of nutritional value that would actually promote survival. However, seeing the limited choices for sustaining our health, we, of course, immediately stake out the best thing we can find: a basket full of greasy French fries smothered in ketchup with giant sugary sodas. Again, in any normal situation, I would have forgone the grease bucket and revolted with a salad an a bottle of water or orange juice. But this being Disneyland, I somehow forgot my normal state of constant dieting and dove in.
As a child I was always wanting stuffed animals, as most children do. I had quite a collection which has long since been donated to various charity thrift and consignment stores. I watched the children throughout the day remembering my old routines on how to milk my parent and grandparents for all they were worth. It was all an act on both of our parts, but it made us feel better about our roles as child and relative. I can't say it was entirely my fault for wanting the stuffed toys, for what is a plush animal but a representation of a perfect friend against a cold adult world? For me, they helped combat my fears of growing up, helped me to stay young. Even adults collect them; my grandmother actually made one in a store called Build-a-Bear, where you actually help to stuff your bear. You even get to put in a heart and do a ceremony for it. And all of this feels perfectly necessary to a child, because their fears are real, their desire for companionship and love is very real. Isn't this what we really need, anyways?
On the slightly more necessary side is clothing, and there is certainly a decent amount of that. My roomate has a particular affinity for Winnie-the-Pooh, and in order to further promote a sense of well-being (we don't get along as well as I'd like), I thought a tee shirt would be the quickest (and less pricey) path. Since it is winter, tee shirts and other apparel generally associated with warmer temperatures are in short supply. The only shirt I found was plain, and somewhat boring, and ran $24 in a children's size. It's a good thing she's the size of a toothpick. As I exited the small store, I was face-to-face with a massively large Jiminey Cricket.
My mother (who never misses an oppurtunity to make me do something which I am almost always certain will haunt me in the future), spun me around and before I ever knew what was happening, she snapped a picture. He then grabbed me and gave me a bear hug, and kissed me on the head. I looked inside the empty eyes of the oversized bug and I could see the face of the man inside. I heard him whisper, "I'm sorry." Me, too, Jiminey. Me too. I gave him one last hug for the camera, and started to go along my merry way. From behind me I could hear a little girl asking, "Mommy, what character is that?"
I wanted to slap her. Perhaps slapping would be too harsh. But I would have tied her to a chair and forced her to watch "Pinnochio" given the oppurtunity. My shock and dismay was all too new; I found a child who could not recognize one of the single most popular characters of Disney film. True, this simply could have been a moronic child, but the experience left me chilled. Then it hit me: I had been genuinely upset about something with absolutely no consequence. Here was this small child who had never known Geppetto and Monstro, and I was prepared to yell any number of things at her as though she were that poor child in Jurassic Park getting chewed out by Dr. Grant.
Disney has this kind of effect on people, the desire to defend and justify what they have no right to. We may not all be archaeologists digging up six-foot turkeys, but most of us grew up with a pretty good grasp of Disney trivia. (No one seems to know that the castle is actually Sleeping Beauty's and not Cinderella's.) I was reminded of the Handmaids in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, blindly assuming it was their duty to defend what didn't even want them. It is this feeling of not just an individual but a global community of Disney love. One of the most recognized symbols in the world is the simple image of the Mickey Mouse head that adorns every Disney product. And in the parks, the actors, characters, and musicians are all friendly like a warm and inviting perfect family, with no troubles (save their costumes).
In New Orlean's Square, there's always jazz, and having recently become acclimated to the genre, I decided to pay a visit. My mom took the time to duck into another shop. Outside an a cappella group, the , was beginning one of its impromptu concerts. It was astounding; I was fascinated by the vocalists' professionalism and musicality. The UA Vocal Jazz Ensemble (of which I'm a member) has nothing on these guys. Within two point five seconds of beginning, they already had a crowd. They sang away, handing out Mardi Gras beads (which no one had to be flashed for) and encouraged the crowd to sing along. That's when it happened: the game. Jazz musicians (and most musicians in general) love to show off how much better they are than the layman. The lead started to do some simple scat rythms, and have the crowd sing them back. They were really simple, until he laid one on us that most people (even a lot of professionals) couldn't begin to sing back, and I sang every note. And it wasn't really hard to hear me over the crowds muffled jibberish and giggles from people comfortable with their inadequacies. One of the singers grabbed me from the crowd and asked me to keep singing with them. I think I mumbled something in approval and soon I was helping ornament "In the Still of the Night." Then as the lead finished his verse, he leaned over to me and said, "Do you scat?" I nodded, and he pushed me forward. So I scatted. And scatted. And the crowd grew quiet, and soon the singers grew quiet. I felt ridiculous and I wanted to run away and hide in the cave on Tom Sawyer's Island. The lead, not quite ready to give up his scat master title, decided to challenge me to a dual, which I really wasn't up for. Duelling scatters is like a condensed version of the religious war in Northern Ireland. But I went through with it anyways. He changed the song to something more up tempo (if I recall correctly it was "Sweet Georgia Brown"), and we began. I could't wait for it to be over. It's not that I don't enjoy the crowds and the limelight, but I have the total absense of an ego. If scientists dissected my brain, they would find a vacuum where my ego neurons should be. But what kept me from going insane was that all of the vocalists made me genuinely feel like I was a part of the group, acknowledging one another, helping me with things that I may not know specific to the group, and then helping to rile up the crowd, get them involved just as I had been. Promoting the community of Disneyland. The good spirits, the magical feel, it was all there just as it always has been and will be. I just couldn't help but feel apart of it, no matter how dour my mood.
Before leaving, we shopped more, as was to be expected. At eleven o'clock at night, people are rushing in and out to grab the day's last few souvenirs, those not as fortunate to come as often as I. I actually found myself locked in a debate between peppermint fudge and marble fudge, and I thought, I'll be back in December; I can get the other one then. How terrible. I come to Disneyland enough to be able to say something like that. (I ended up with peppermint.)
The things we bought and are buying at a place like Disneyland are things to remind us of something passed, something perhaps we've seen and never had or something we want again. Sometimes we buy to remember people, like a favourite album of an old sweetheart, or a teddy like you had as a child. Disneyland drudges up all of those memories for me, buying things I wanted as a child but couldn't afford, trying to correct something that really wasn't broken in the first place. My friend Trisha, during a meditation excercise once, was asked to go on a picnic with her inner child. When she was discribing her, she said that the girl was in a corner reading a book and shaking, clutching a small bear. When she asked her inner child why she wouldn't come to the picnic, she said: "How could you have lost Mr. Snuffles like that?" Mr. Snuffles was a bear she had until the age of four, when she accidentally lost him in a park. She said that she hadn't even thought of that for years. She now has a massive teddy bear collection, and owns several bear of apparently great value. When I saw my grandmother, showing off the bear she had made, I remembered this, and wondered if perhaps this was the reason she wanted so desperately to make one, to perhaps fix something she had broken in the past.
By the end of the day, we walked out of the park with four bags of stuff my mom had purchased, mostly for Christmas gifts, but not entirely. I managed to escape with just my Indiana Jones fedora and a Star Wars tee shirt, but the memories were enough to haunt me for awhile. I was reminded, upon passing underneath the archway to exit, of Offred from The Handmaid's Tale. "Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I still want?"
"Now it's time to say good-bye
To all our family,
M-I-C......"
-The Mickey Mouse Club closing theme
