Disney: The Happiest Place on Earth?

The Happiest Place on Earth?

When Walt Disney was asked what his intentions were for Disneyland he stated, “I don’t want the public to see the world they live in while they’re in the park, I want them to feel like they’re in another world”(Wilson 158). This other world that Walt Disney is referring to is a type of utopia that resembles the best of the world we live in; it is an altogether different type of reality. As Alexander Wilson explains in his essay entitled, Technological Utopias, Disneyland/world “is at once every place and no place. It is on the land, but not of it” (Wilson161). We are shown only the best of what we experience in our lives, so that we may safely relate to this world, without having to experience life’s undesirable additives that so frequently bring us down.

Disney World is in Orlando Florida, the “Sunshine State.” It is an area called Reedy Creek. This community operates outside the jurisdiction of municipal and regional laws regarding traffic development, building codes, power, waste and has the authority to levy taxes. Such authoritative domination has never been given to a private corporation from the state as it has with Disney World. Reedy Creek is often referred to as “The Vatican with mouse ears”(Hiaasen 27). The government of Reedy Creek is composed of a supervisory board elected by Walt Disney Company. It is a self-contained community that relies on the outside world for nothing, and additionally is a community that welcomes no help from the outside world.

As the park is separated from Florida, so are the inner workings of the park separated from tourists. Underground corridors allow workers, supplies, laundry services, staff cafeterias, dressing rooms and garbage to remain unseen by visitors. “Pneumatic tubes ‘whisk away refuse like magic’ to compactors”(Wilson 160). The mundane machinations of utopia are not to be viewed.

Not even nature has a place within this sterilized utopia. Walt Disney often referred to Mickey as “the clean mouse,” so if we are to assume that Mickey is stripped of his innate mouse instincts, then all other animals and are either excluded or modified to be in a Disney Park. When black buzzards invaded the Orlando resort in 1988, the birds began turning up dead. They were clubbed, poisoned, shot, and starved to death. When a snake on a path took a tourist by surprise, the tourist realized, after close inspection, that it was a rubber audio-animate replica; snakes simply do not exist in Disney World. Disney’s approach to animals is a science fiction ideology, “All animal life has been exterminated, but replaced by the production of simulacra, so real in appearance that people have difficult recalling that real animals no longer exist”(Willis 124). Again, the Disney reality does not allow an outside reality to manifest itself within its walls.

The nature that is allowed in Disney is not exempt from strict revisions. The water in Florida’s heartland is usually tea-colored due to cypress bark. Disney wanted bluish water, so they drained Bay Lake, removed all of the cypresses, replaced the dirt with imported sand, and filled with water that is only seen on travel brochures. To authenticate this blue lagoon, they even added beaches (Hiassen 18).
The experience that one has at a Disney park is as controlled as the environment. As is typical with most utopias, people visit and leave. Most narrators of utopias always lament on their poor memories or inability to truly describe what they have witnessed. At Disney the memories linger with pictures that tourists/narrators treasure and integrate into their real lives. The Disney experience is visually juxtaposed with the vacationer’s real life; thus, Disney parks triumph over real life. There are a plethora of signs throughout the park that indicate where you should take your picture. The term “Kodak Picture Spot,” gives the admonishing more credos by assigning another brand name to talk you into the photo commitment. These signs are usually located in front of attractions or rides, so that you equate your good time with specific places; this kind of conditioning resembles a Pavlov’s dog experiment. When you crave happy times you automatically envision a specific place or location at Disney, and thus in wanting to recreate this feeling, you return to the point of origin. Furthermore, if you compare your spontaneous snapshots from other vacations, that sometimes contain random strangers or undesirable objects within the frame, to Disney’s planned photo spots, the Disney designed photo always looks better than an impromptu snapshot.

Disneyland is centered around Main Street USA, the four worlds that surround this small town sentiment are Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland and Tomorrowland. The idea is that even in a small town atmosphere there are no limitations to reality, space, odyssey or time. This small town construct offers us a vision of an America that never was, and the possibility of tomorrow that may never be. This vision suspends the narrator/visitor in amid very disparate times, between two worlds that do not exist in real time, so where in time does Disney occur? The Utopian representations of yesterday and tomorrow leave little reassurance for today.

Many utopias problematize the distinctions between public and private, and Disney is no exception. Disney parks are very much a public domain; a visitor’s enjoyment is usually dependent upon the people surrounding them. Rarely are people seen alone at a Disney park, it is a shared experience that is only enhanced by the number of people you are with. At a Disney park, one cannot be alone. When a tourist is spotted alone, the Disney characters are told to approach them and make them happy. One cannot even be alone with the people he is with. There are very few spots within the park that offer any type of privacy. This communal arrangement of enjoyment rejects individuality and fosters consumer camaraderie.

This utopia is aimed at middle class families. The costly admission prices exclude a large amount of the population. Visitors between the ages of 10 and 59 now pay $43, children 3 to 9 pay $33 and people over 60 pay $41. It costs a family of four over $150 to go to the park for just one day; these prices act as deterrent by Disney to exclude the population that is simply not Disney appropriate. Disney parks mold family members into a family. Family members are so consumed with assuming the roles of the family unit that they neglect their roles as individuals, thus fighting and dysfunctionality is at a minimum. The real family unit is juxtaposed with the extended Disney family, and so each familial group grows by their associations with one another. Whether or not one attends a Disney park with a conventional family, he is immersed into a family atmosphere either by the other families in attendance or by the large family of Disney characters. Characters like Mickey and Snow White are never featured together within a cartoon, but they come together within the confines of the park. This intermingling frustrates the order of imitation: are families imitating Disney or is Disney imitating family?

As in most utopias, there must be a tour guide. The Disney tour guide is of course Mickey Mouse. Mickey appears to be the all-American boy. Although he is over 50 years old, his appearance and demeanor never demonstrate any sign of aging. His voice is often described as that of a “prepubescent child”(Lawrence 66) and his uniform that is rarely modified is illustrative of Mickey’s opposition to change and a prolonged youth. Elizabeth Lawrence explains in her essay, “In The Mick of Time Reflections On Disney’s Ageless Mouse,” that Mickey is neotenized; he retains youthful characteristics while in the adult form. Therefore, Mickey is more than just a tour guide of this utopia; he escorts visitors back to a more youthful time, thus offering this neoteny ideology to the masses. This disregard for age and time demonstrates that within this utopia there is no such thing as old and young.

Mickey’s human colleagues at the parks all attend on-site Disney University where they are trained to be efficient, cleanly and always friendly. Staff member can advance within this utopia after completing lower minimum wage jobs like street sweeping and ticket taking. The staff lives within the vicinity of the park and must commute to work via automobile. Break times are strictly scheduled and broadcast over an announcement system. Staff members wear uniforms that correspond with their duties, garbage collectors wear white outfits and caps. Ironically, the white uniform sends the message that even the dirt at Disney is not dirty. Wait staff and ride attendants wear colors and fashions that match the areas they work in. By outfitting the employees in fashion related to their functions, the person is literally becoming the job.

Even within utopias, good help is hard to find. In 1998, Disney implemented background checks on all perspective job applicants after many incidences of molestation or child abuse by staff members. While Disney can be a dystopia for parents of young children, it remains a utopia for preying pedophiles that are being paid to play with children all day.

The employees act out against one another as well as the tourists. A stagehand at the Cinderella Castle bore a hole into the dressing room of the dancers and spied on them changing their costumes for months. Whoever these crimes are against, Disney does not acknowledge any of them. Disney Security is a private agency that employs 1,250 “host” and “hostesses” that oversee the park. Disney controls the 911-dispatch system; therefore, they have the liberty to choose whether or not to report crimes. The book, Disney: The Mouse Betrayed, contends that Disney parks hide most of the drunk driving, domestic battery and assault/sex crimes from the police (Druin A2). The few times that Disney was not able to hide crimes and outside authorities were notified, Disney’s cooperation has been described as deplorable and outrageous.

Even in the face of an emergency or scandal order is always maintained, since the unexpected has no place in this utopia. “Every now and then reality intrudes – a shoplifter, a flasher, a fatal heart attackâÂ?¦Such incidents are handled with astounding swiftness and discretion, the scene is usually cleared and back to normal within minutes”(Hiaasen 35).

Disney has its’ own vernacular that transforms ordinary terminology into magical thinking. A customer is a guest, an employee is usually a cast member, hiring for a job becomes casting and a uniform transforms into a costume (Giroux). Accidents are diluted to incidents and low-profile vehicles have replaced ambulances, because accidents and ambulances simply do not exist at the happiest place on earth. The term work has been deconstructed so that work as what it is usually understood to be does not mean that mean anymore. Henry Giroux describes in his book, The Mouse That Roared that the work premise at Disney parks is modeled after Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and thus the dystopian ideology of work is made obsolete. With songs like, “Whistle while you work” inextricably connects play and work.
All Utopias within literature are fictionalized; they present ideas that might complicate our natural way of thinking. However, as much as they might frustrate our concepts of society and place, they are safe, because they do not exist; they therefore pose no imminent threat on our way of life. It is the Utopias that we can reach that mimic the way our life should be that cause the most damage to our sense of reality. An endemic aspect of all Utopias, is that they offer an unattainable vision of life, sometimes it is an extreme vision with no plausibility of ever occurring. Other times it is plausible but too difficult to implement and no one would really want to live there. Then there are the Utopias like Disney that we can fly and drive too, and pay money to enter, because we realize that this is as close to a true Utopia as we will ever get.

Work Cited
Druin, Julia. “Co-authors raise ruckus in books attacking Disney.” The Washington
Times. November 4, 1998, A2.

Giroux, Henry A. “The Mouse That Roared.” Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc:
Maryland, 1999.

Griffin, Sean. “Tinker Belles and Evil Queens.” New York University Press: New York,
2000.

Hiaasen, Carl. “Team Rodent How Disney Devours the World.” Ballantine Publishing
Group: New York, 1998.

Lawrence, Elizabeth A. “In the Mick of Time Reflections on Disney’s Ageless Mouse.”
Journal of Popular Culture. Fall 1996, vol. 20, n2. 65-72.

Marin, Louis. “Utopics: Spatial Play.” Trans: Robert A. Vollrath. New Jersey: Humanties
Press, 1984.

Willis, Susan. “Disney World: Public Use/Private State.” The South Atlantic Quarterly.
Winter 1993, vol. 92, n1. 119-137.

Wilson, Alexander. “Technological Utopias.” The South Atlantic Quarterly. Winter 1993,
vol. 92, n1. 157-173.