FILM / Disney's City of Movies / Brianna Di Monda
Image © Public Domain via Gorillas Don’t Blog
We’ve known Disneyland to be an Absolute Fake for decades. It’s a space of hyperreality, a toy city so perfectly crafted that the real world pales in comparison. To leave the park, you drive home in your car through congested streets no longer optimized for the perfect flow of traffic, and ride a grey highway home. In some ways, the dichotomy between the outside world and the park parallels the plot of Disney’s Toontown, an online children’s game launched in 2003. The world’s layout echoed the Disney parks, with themed lands, rides, and the appearance of popular Disney characters. It also had the objective of fighting the antagonistic “Cogs” who wanted to propagate business culture. Cogs would take over the colorful storefronts of Toontown and make them corporate skyrises, mirroring the banality that exists outside the boundaries of Disneyland—or as it’s called in the game, the playground. Toontown gave children a sobering lesson: the world beyond Disney is not perfectly crafted for play.
Image © The Walt Disney Company | Disney Interactive; Screenshot Provided by Author
Curating an Absolute Fake
Every detail in Disneyland has been optimized for the park-goer to experience pleasure in the Absolute Fake. (Or, as Disney coined it, the park is “the happiest place on Earth.”) You’ll never see the actors in the wrong part of the park: Princess Tiana is only ever in New Orleans Square, while Buzz Lightyear would never be caught outside Tomorrowland. The architects designed special tunnels below the park for staff and “cast members” to walk through between shifts, ensuring that the illusion of play would never be broken. Meanwhile, “Smellitizers” (artificial scents) are sprayed throughout the park to evoke smell associations with different rides and areas. Main Street gets pumped with the smell of fresh waffle cones, while the snack stands release the scent of fresh popcorn. And that wet, deep-sea smell of the Pirates ride? That’s not the water—that’s an artificial sea Smellitizer.
There are also barriers to the world outside. After parking your car, you take a tram for a quarter of a mile, and when you arrive just outside Downtown Disney, you can no longer see the outside world of Anaheim. Even inside the park, trees and fake stone walls provide barriers between the lands. You don’t glimpse Tomorrowland while in Fantasyland—you must walk under the Monorail to go between them. And if you walk to Toontown through Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, you may notice that the windows on the top floors are smaller, creating the forced perspective that the landmark appears larger than it is. The horses on Main Street have special shoes coated with polyurethane, making their hooves more audible against the pavement. Everything is curated. But don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know—we all understand the fabrication of this place. That is part of its charm. Disneyland does not exist to make us believe in its reality but to realize that it is a produced fantasy.
We buy into hyperreality because of its promise of a unique experience. It is not a regular amusement park; it is a game. You play with the limitations of reality while indulging childhood fantasies, which is why the kayfabe of the park has grown to mythical importance. We become Buzz Lightyear fighting Zurg, or a Star Wars rebel escaping to Endor with R2-D2, or Briar Rabbit getting thrown into the thorn patch in the minutes we spend on the rides. With the illusion firmly established and blending with the park’s reality as a commodity, visitors can participate in the fantasy through their authenticity as a consumer. Getting lunch at River Belle Terrace gives you a taste of the south, and by sitting at a table, you become part of the attraction to onlookers in line for Thunder Mountain. Once done with the American nostalgia of Frontierland, guests move on to Fantasyland, where they can travel internationally on It’s a Small World. The park allows you to move through time, space, and novels. We don’t mind the kayfabe of the park because it affords us a certain pleasure not found anywhere else, as no other city has achieved the status of Absolute Fake.
“Classic” American Nostalgia
Initially, most of Disneyland’s attractions capitalized on classic American nostalgia. Whether it was the park’s Main Street, styled off town sections of middle America, or the much older Wild West, which inspired Frontierland, Disneyland was heavily inspired by old school American history. But as more Americans learn revisionist history, what was once considered classic American nostalgia becomes problematic, tokenizing attractions. Take, for example, that Critter Country was originally Indian Village, where the restrooms were labeled “braves” and “squaws,” and guests set out in “Indian canoes” as a “war party.”
Disney famously opened an attraction called Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House in 1955, intended to showcase a side of America considered “old,” even for the 1950s. But Aunt Jemima was based on the mammy stereotype, whose origins represent slavery and domestic servitude even post-emancipation. During the attraction’s run, Black women dressed up as Aunt Jemima, serving food, taking photos with guests, and occasionally singing on stage. The attraction closed in 1970 following discussions about the distasteful depictions of the character, which rose in popular discourse due to the Civil Rights Movement. The restaurant quickly rebranded as River Belle Terrace, with minor changes made to the decor and menu, though the park removed all references to Aunt Jemima.
Image © Public Domain via Gorillas Don’t Blog
Disney seems to be turning away from their Americana origins in favor of delving deeply into the realm of fiction (the latest land to open, Galaxy’s Edge, is based entirely on the Star Wars franchise). Splash Mountain—infamous for its ties to the racist storytelling in Song of the South—will soon become a Princess and the Frog ride. At the same time, Jungle Cruise was recently renovated to remove racist depictions of tribespeople. This follows Disney’s effort in recent years to become more “woke.” These changes to the park are not insignificant, but the rebranding of Disney has occurred mainly in the live-action remakes of animated classics, where woke metacommentary seemingly justifies the newer films’ existence.
Take the live-action Aladdin, for example, where Jasmin wants to marry not just for love but also to become the next Sultan (the monarchy isn’t bad as long as we have a woman in power, right?). She even has an added power ballad about refusing to be silenced before being taken prisoner by Jafar. Writers removed Jim Crow from the Dumbo remake, ignoring the original film’s racist characterization. It seems that Disney’s attempts at becoming woke don’t include meaningfully addressing societal problems in the new films, as that would require Disney to meaningfully acknowledge its own complicated past. Instead, the remakes, like the updates to the park, erase the problematic history to ignore the stuff that aged poorly and pretend it never happened. By rebranding their outdated or Americana rides with their newer, less problematic movies and franchises, Disney maintains its spirit of unproblematic play.
Simulation Creating Reality
Image © The Walt Disney Company; Screenshot Provided by Author
When Disney started to base movies on their rides, they generated new nostalgia to keep guests returning to the park—now, the Pirates of the Caribbean Ride showcases iconic movie scenes reenacted with animatronics, and The Haunted Mansion puts guests inside Eddie Murphy’s home. The rides have become a shrewd commercial space for the company’s movies, yet still operate as a space of fiction. The park’s hyperreality has taken on a life of its own: Instead of the park being built as a supplement to the movies, movies now supplement the park, encouraging fans of Disneyland to experience the rides they love as movies. This started with movies as old as Haunted Mansion (2003), but even a live-action Jungle Cruise movie came out in July 2021. The city’s simulations have seeped beyond the perimeter of the Monorail.
Then Disney bought new franchises, like Pixar, Marvel, and LucasFilm, and they updated their parks to include references to these films. Now, if you go to California Adventures, California Screamin’ has been rebranded as The Incredicoaster, and The Tower of Terror houses a Guardians of the Galaxy ride, marking the first revamp for the park’s upcoming Avengers Campus-themed land. Other rides started to lose their popularity, and so were rebranded with these newer films. The most famous of these at Disneyland include Adventure Thru Inner Space becoming Star Tours, the Submarine Voyage becoming Finding Nemo, and the Swiss Family Treehouse becoming Tarzan’s Treehouse.
These rides are fakes, and not quite the movie themselves, but they allow visitors to step into the world of Disney movies, if only for a few minutes. The public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake rides, to watch in awe even in line for Star Tours as droids work behind glass walls and C-3PO readies your StarSpeeder to fly into space. The line becomes part of the entertainment, allowing the simulation to last not just the duration of the ride, but the line as well. The time of play is ever-extended.
Image © Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Disneyland blurs the line between reality and illusion to the point of hallucination. We see that the Finding Nemo fish are animatronic, that Tarzan’s treehouse is plastic, that the Star Tours ships are “just” military-grade flight simulators. By confessing certain illusions, Disneyland stimulates the desire for hyperreality all over again. We could not get the experience of Disneyland if they did not bring us into its kayfabe. Without the animatronics, the decorated restaurants, the themed rides, it would be a regular amusement park. Or, worse, a zoo. Disneyland tells us that a fake experience can curate itself more closely to our real-life demands, and can offer something to us the real world cannot. When in the twelve hours you spend behind the park’s borders, you move from Peter Pan’s Flight in Fantasyland to the Cantina in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge to the Jungle Cruise, you return home and risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where play was at its apex and you didn’t have to plug into your computer to experience a simulated reality. You moved through it, experiencing more reality than nature or our homes can give us. So, maybe, you turn on the television, open Disney+, and watch one of the movies the rides were based on—or, better yet, watch a movie based on a ride.
Sixty-five years after its opening, Disneyland remains an allegory of consumer society, an immense and continuous reflection of the world around us. It represents a space of reconstructed truth, and history rewritten. When we return home from its hyperreality, we continue to buy Disney obsessively in order to remain close to the park’s perfection, believing our role as consumers remains an art of play. Though the park—and the movies depicted by the attractions—may have only been put into production with a mind of how well they will sell tickets, and though the new attractions are part of a calculated push towards production, it remains a city more perfect than reality, precisely because of its calculated curation. The city of movies may only exist to sell us products, but it offers the unique pleasure of hypercurated play.
Brianna Di Monda is the Assistant Managing Editor at MAYDAY. Her fiction and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Worms Magazine, The Cleveland Review, and COUNTERCLOCK, among others. She was nominated for the 2021 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
