Playful Pilgrimage Center

Fjellman (1992), Moore (1980), Bryman (1995) and Hunt and Frankenberg (1990) all discuss the Disney theme parks as pilgrimage centers. Fjellman and Moore, specifically were discussing Walt Disney World but their comments apply equally to Disneyland.

Pilgrimage centers are the “sacred precincts” that are the destination of the pilgrim’s journey. They are liminal, bounded, ritual centers, realms of betwixt and between. The structure of the pilgrimage is the same as a rite of passage, and is the same as the birth process—separation —liminality(transition)— return(incorporation).

Bryman (1995) relates that the sacred nature of a pilgrimage center is confirmed by its liminal nature as well as the presence of cultic objects and symbols. Disneyland’s liminal nature will be discussed next, and Bryman lists Disneyland’s cultic objects as "The Walt Disney Story" and "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln," and notes Disneyland’s most notable cultic symbols are Mickey Mouse and Sleeping Beauty Castle.

Fjellman (1992) explicates the liminal nature of the park, saying that “antistructure is the attraction”: people are dressed as animals and animals are portrayed as people, children are in charge of making decisions (role reversal), people are portrayed by robots, and ghosts dance (p. 222). For A. Moore (1980), as a pilgrimage center, Disney World (and hence Disneyland, too) is a center of “grand play” not so much a religious center. Disneyland is also a gigantic liminal space with many mini-pilgrimages (the different attractions) involved within it, having the same structure of separation, transition, and incorporation.

A. Moore (1980) points out that the pilgrim leaves a familiar place, journeys to a remote area and comes back to the familiar again. The separation from one’s ordinary life occurs when one leaves home. Sometimes there are ceremonial rituals associated with the process, known as separation rites. While on their journey, pilgrims are in the liminal or liminoid state, and are outside of normal conventions, free from routine responsibilities, duties, and status and so they are able to bond with others in a state of communitas—perfect equality or oneness. Once at the sacred site, often a miniature version of the same process occurs when entering the sacred site, one is separated from the outside world and enters through the threshold of the site. After the visit to the sacred site, the pilgrim returns home to his ordinary life.

At Disneyland, you leave home, journey to Disneyland and the miniature version of the process occurs when you leave your car in the parking lot. A. Moore (1980) points out that cars are often a representation of one’s identity (this is especially true in Southern California). Marin (1984) sees leaving one’s car as “tantamount to a shipwreck or a loss of consciousness” (p. 242), and Wakefield (1990), as previously noted, sees leaving one's car as leaving “something of one’s American humanity and in an act of abandonment to consign oneself to another power” (p. 106). Any way you slice it, once you leave your vehicle behind, you are entering liminality. After taking the parking lot tram to the entrance, you pay the fee or show your passport and gain admittance through the turnstyles, and go through the tunnel under the Disneyland Railroad to Main Street USA where the plaque reads: “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” The plaque might as well read "You are now entering liminal space!" Like carnival, at this pilgrimage center, everyone participates, as King (1981a) notes:

Like the Greek cities which were dedicated to and under the guardianship of a deity, Disney Land and World are directed and unified by the guiding spirit of Disney and his corporation; holy cities for the entire US, visited by pilgrims, in a constant festival state in which all participate; unlike “dead” shrines—religious and historical—which people now consider curiosities and subjects of sight-seeing, there are no spectators at the Disney rite, only participants. (p. 121)

A. Moore (1980) notes that pilgrimage centers are bounded spaces, set apart from ordinary life, and Disneyland certainly qualifies here. Disneyland is a bounded space, “inside the berm” while the rest of the world lies “outside the berm.” Disney wanted people to feel that they were in a different world when they were at Disneyland. Disney even obtained height restrictions on neighboring properties from the city of Anaheim, so that the outside world would not impinge on visitors when they were in the park. Disney also spent $14,000 on removing telephone poles and burying the wires so as not to spoil the view and the illusion from inside the park (Schickel, 1997).

Pilgrimage centers are places of congregation where symbols are used that are familiar to the congregants and where pilgrims engage in common activities, often en masse. The mythology of the place is evoked by these symbols and activities, since the pilgrims are familiar with the mythic stories.

This is certainly true of Disneyland where characters and places from Disney’s film library serve as the major symbols at the park. We all remember the Disney movies, having seen them in childhood, and many of them are based on classic children’s literature—stories we heard again and again. The Disney version has come to replace the more classic versions which is a topic of contention for many critics, who feel that Disney has sanitized and essentially emasculated them (Bryman, 1995, Schickel, 1997). In order to give both sides equal time, Ward Kimball, longtime animator and Disney associate, addressed this criticism head-on:

You know there’s been so much unfair criticism about the Disney product. The critics say we created an unreal world, that the fairy tales we adapted were emasculated and changed and sugarcoated . . . . Well hell if the Nixon administration could sugarcoat and twist and lie, if the westerns could distort the West like they have, why couldn’t we distort, too. See, Walt realized a lot of these fairy tales were pretty grim. He realized you had to have a balance. You had to have gags and laughs to offset the pathos, the heavy stuff. He took the same license everybody takes with a story. What movie hasn’t done that? (K. M. Jackson, 1993, p. 145)

These same criticisms have been made of Disneyland, and Disney created Disneyland for the same reason, and in the same spirit as his films: to balance out the grimness of the real world. Disneyland is carnivalesque; all about fantasy, not reality; and like carnival and pilgrimage, Disneyland is a place of play and renewal.

Bryman (1995) feels that when pilgrims come back from pilgrimages, they are usually changed and have a new sense of reality, whereas Disneyland, because it presents an essentially conservative view of the world, just reaffirms the conventional and normal. Yet A. Moore (1980) notes that due to the size of the crowds at some pilgrimage centers, license and abandon are not always present, and that some pilgrimages are normative, routine, organized, and supervised. This is true of Disneyland, which has a controlled carnivalesque atmosphere.

A. Moore (1980) contends that the Disneyland pilgrimage is more like a rite of intensification than of a rite of passage. Rites of intensification are different from rites of passage, where one’s identity is changed in some way. Rites of intensification, as their name suggests, “intensify links among widely scattered persons who share a common mytho-historical and cultural orientation,” (p. 210) strengthening the ordinary social structure of the individual participants. In rites of intensification, no new status is conferred, but the current status is renewed and affirmed, and in the instance of healing shrines, one may even be cured.

Our current culture is extremely fragmented and scattered. Disneyland intensifies our feeling of wholeness, unity, etcetera. Disneyland, and things Disney, have become not only a uniting part of American culture but indeed globally. Mickey Mouse is the most recognizable icon on the planet. Disney’s creations have been warmly received all over the world, precisely because of the feelings of carnival and communitas they personify:

Disney selected certain parts of the American experience, manipulated these parts in special ways, and disseminated them widely in easy-to-understand ways. What has happened, then, is that these Disney creations are themselves becoming symbols and experiences that Americans can hold in common; they serve as a great shared experience for a people who are in many other respects moving farther apart though their pluralistic search for ethnic roots and emphasis on unique group heritages. (D. M. Johnson, 1981, p. 163)

The Role of Rebellion

A. Moore (1980) mentions the view of earlier times in Midwestern America where children were seen as animals that must be tamed or civilized, and Moore sees in Disney’s oeuvre, a rebellion against this view. Moore sees the possibility of rebellion present as a subtle idea in the antistructure of Disneyland where animals rule this liminal land—to paraphrase Disney—"Let's not forget this whole thing began with a mouse!" As V. Turner (1988) notes:

Yet it may happen that a light, play-begotten pattern for living or social structuring, once thought whimsical, under conditions of extreme social change may prove an adaptive, “indicative mood” design for living. Here early theories that play arises from excess energy have renewed relevance. Part of that surplus fabricates ludic critiques of presentness, of the status quo, undermining it by parody, satire, irony, slapstick; part of it subverts past legitimacies and structures; part of it is mortgaged to the future in the form of a store of possible cultural and social structures, ranging from the bizarre and ludicrous to the utopian and idealistic, one of which may root in a future reality, allowing the serious dialectic of left- and right-hemispherical functions to propel individuals and groups of individuals from earth to heaven and heaven to earth within a new indicative mood frame. But it was the slippery Trickster who enabled them to do it, and he/she modestly, in Jacques Derrida’s ludic words, “erases the trace." (p. 170)

In various Disney movies, there is a subversive quality where the established order, aristocracy, and hierarchy do not always fare as well as they might wish. For example, in Pollyanna (Swift, 1960), she charms the unfriendly town elders while standing up to authority, and in Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964), Mary's magical influences upsets the established order of both her employer George Banks, and his employer, the bank—ultimately leading to changes in both of them.

This is indeed an American theme, America was a nation formed through rebellion against the established order. In the American spirit itself, there lies a rebellious part, which when we become part of the established order, we conveniently forget and rather wish would go away. A. Moore (1980) points out that there is a dynamic tension between social intensification and individual exultation present in these rites and these powerful energies can have transformative, and even revolutionary effects as well as intensifying one’s ordinary social structure. He notes that rituals can transform or destroy, and that reincorporation is never simple, as the fellowship experienced with other pilgrims may lead to many things including changes in attitudes and even one’s world view, and this might not sit well with the folks at home. As an example, A. Moore gives Malcolm X, who was powerfully changed by his pilgrimage to Mecca.

Play, like ritual, is liminal and can have these transformative effects, too, which is why Turner (1988) cautioned that play is dangerous. These aspects are explored more fully in the "Mary Poppins" chapter. As we will see in that chapter, the transformative, rebellious, revolutionary aspects of ply reflect the Uranus-Pluto planetary archetypal complex, present both during the 1960s and at the turn of the century when Walt Disney was born. So, if play is tricky and potentially dangerous to the status quo, and if pilgrimage can be transformative, could this playful pilgrimage center be the work of a . . .

Rebel With a Cause

Brode (2004) in From Walt To Woodstock, examines various Disney movies and shows different themes that Brode feels sowed the seeds of the counterculture of the 1960s. Brode makes a convincing argument for how Walt's oevre helped to create the counterculture and he discusses several different areas, from the radicalization of youth and rebel heroes to the environmental movement to name a few. Brode’s thesis piggybacks Bloom’s contentions about Shakespeare who:

“presented, in the guise of entertainment, ideas that literally created the modern consciousness, establishing the way we think, feel, relate.” . . . During the Twentieth Century, Disney accomplished much the same thing liberating us from a restrictive worldview that no longer functioned. (Brode, 2004, p. xxxi)

Disney himself was born at the turn of the Twentieth Century when revolutions of science and art were occurring, and Brode (2004) notes that Disney used science and the arts for his own revolutionary purposes.

King (1981a), in discussing the stunning magnitude of Disneyland’s influence, noted that Disneyland was the largest single visitor attraction in U.S, and “almost instantly recognized as ‘one of the wonders of the modern world’ by 1965, a quarter of the US population and many foreign dignitaries and tourists had been there” (pp. 116-117).

Although Brode (2004) did not consider Disneyland itself in this book, his arguments apply to the park as well, because the park is based on many of Disney’s films and Disneyland embodies many of these filmic notions, in being an actual place where these countercultural ideas became concrete (sometimes literally using concrete)! I contend that perhaps Disneyland’s very existence and the fact that many Baby Boomers who would come of age in the 1960s had actually visited there as children, heightened Disney's countercultural effect: Since the fantasies were made real at Disneyland, perhaps the underlying ideas could become real, too. Combined with the carnival spirit, where communitas was experienced and not merely an abstract idea, the reality of this "land of dreams," may have led Baby Boomers in the 1960s to try to realize other dreams.

Brode’s (2006) latest book, Multiculturalism and the Mouse, in addition to examining different Disney films, discusses the Disneyland attraction, "It’s a Small World." Brode notes that in 1964 Disney was at the forefront of notions of diversity, and that this ride in particular has positively shaped current notions of multiculturalism. "It’s a Small World," shows communitas in action, and shows the idea of unity in diversity; the different nations are represented during the ride by little children figures in colorful national costumes with representative props, animals, and backgrounds. Although the little children figures all have very similar features, they are racially distinct in color and hair. At the end of the ride, these child figures all appear again, but this time, they are merged together in one big room, perhaps the global village, and they are all wearing white. The familiar song "It's a Small World," repeats playfully over and over. Anyone who has ever gone on the ride, knows its utopian lyrics by heart.

It must also be noted that critics of Disneyland argue that Disneyland was anything but the seedbed of multiculturalism, and that it instead stressed conformity and conservatism. To paraphrase Milton Erickson, father of Ericksonian hypnosis, who we will learn more about in the "Mary Poppins" chapter, "maybe it's both at the same time."

Walt Disney was a true player and trickster, and true to play’s tricksterish form, which erases without a trace, as Brode (2004) notes: “Disney’s films challenged the impressionable audience's acceptance of the status quo, puckishly doing so in the sheep’s clothing of soothing conventional family films” (p. xxvii). Could Disneyland, this carnivalesque place of grand play, hold similar transformative possibilities, like play and ritual? Perhaps!

End of excursion, continue to "Art of the Show" excursion