Disney and the American Dream

Watts (1997) contends that “in the Cold War era," Disney became “a kind of screen for the projection of national self-definition.” (p. 348). Disney was in his own words “a spokesman for the American way of life” (p. 163), what Watts refers to as “Americanism” as opposed to communism. With Disneyland, Walt helped us define, affirm, express, and celebrate ourselves to ourselves, giving concrete form to the nature of the American people, their history, character, and values. Watts (1997) argues that Walt Disney created and captured the values of Twentieth Century America as he saw them, including a sentimental view of a homogenous American people, a nondenominational religious sensibility, faith in technological expertise, a belief in individual fulfillment, creativity, abundance and prosperity, a promise of triumph over communism. K. M. Jackson (1993) adds that the four realms of Disneyland capture “patriotism, pride in a national history, the spirit of adventure, optimism in the future, the importance of hard work, and the magic of childhood and dreams” (p. 97).

Disney’s films had celebrated leisure, freedom, choice, self-determination and flexibility (Rojek, 1993), and now the park did the same thing. Watts (1997) notes that as he had in the Depression, Disney helped smooth over the anxieties of this new decade, honoring the American past while encouraging us to embrace the future. Disney mediated:

a host of jarring impulses: individualism and conformity, corporate institutions and small town values, science and fantasy, consumerism and producerism…his expansive, optimistic outlook utilized ideas, words, and sentiments to which ordinary people were drawn, and the subtle power of this politics helped millions of Americans face a frightening external threat. (p. 289)

We will return to the notion of mediating later.

Findlay (1993) notes that Disney was unashamedly American; in a promotional film in 1956, Disney remarked: “Disneyland could happen only in a country where freedom is a heritage and the pursuit of happiness a basic human right” (p. 92). Bill Walsh’s written description of the park, created for the New York financing trip in September of 1953 stated in part that:

Disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and hard facts that have created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world. (Thomas, 1976, pp. 246-247)

On Disneyland’s opening day, the national anthem was played, fighter jets flew overhead, the Marines led a parade down Main Street USA, and the governor of California underscored all of this reminding us that Disneyland was: “all built by American labor and American capital, under the belief that this is a God-fearing and God-loving country.” (Findlay, 1993, p. 92).

Wakefield (1990) says that when asked about his dream, Disney used to “quote Archibald Macleish, claiming that ‘there are those, I know who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and the mind, is nothing but a dream… they are right, it is an American dream’” (p. 109). In this way, Disney’s dream was indeed utopian, because it had a distinctly political flavor. [The "Looking- -Back Looking-Forward" excursion, located in Tomorrowland has much more to say about utopia.]

While some critics consider Disneyland as the lapdog of middle-class American capitalism, others such as Brode (2004), in his book From Walt to Woodstock, sees the Disney films as sowing the seeds of the counterculture. J. C. Wolf (1979), although decrying Disneyland as an American utopia that is really an anti-utopia, essentially attests to Brode’s point: “the exaggerated disdain of Mickey Mouse and his cohorts for social conventions and for authority has a great appeal for a nation growing more and more permissive and irresponsible and serves to reinforce the egotistical approach to living” (p. 76). So Disneyland, Disney’s most impressive creation, or “child” is perhaps the most influential Baby Boomer ever.

Baby Boomer

Brode (2004) and Watts (1995, 1997) see Disney’s work differently, as rebelliously subverting outworn hierarchical structures and celebrating the little guy and hero of the stories who often overcomes many travails and obstacles. Brode (2004) argues that Walt was very influential in creating the counterculture and Brode's latest book Multiculturalism and the Mouse (2006) contends that Disney also shaped our current attitudes toward multiculturalism. Watts (1995) says that Disney used the culture industry to send his “magical messages,” using the system to essentially undermine the authority of the system, because his works sought:

to magically reanimate a modern society grown increasingly ‘disenchanted’ to use Max Weber’s word, under the influence of rationalization. Disney’s cinematized fantasies, although occasionally nightmarish, sought to keep alive playful, magical, childlike instincts pushed to the margins of a bureaucratic, scientific, industrial society. (p. 109)

Wakefield (1990) contends that Disneyland embodies and epitomizes Disney’s continuing passion for “the creation, simulation and reanimation of life, though on a scale quite unprecedented within the cartoon world . . . . It was thus presented as the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] of contemporary American culture, combining history, imagination and of course fun” (p. 106). We will see how Disney used the system to his advantage, in service to the imagination, when we look at Disneyland’s sibling, the Disneyland television show, later in this excursion. [Explore more about Disney as a Rebel with a Cause in the "Antistructure" excursion located in New Orleans Square / Adventureland]

Disney first envisioned a park, possibly back in the 1920s or 1930s, but it remained a dream at the time. In 1948 Disney began to seriously consider the park, which was proposed, at that time, to be adjacent to the studio in Burbank. As Walt began to plan, the park began to proliferate and the ideas soon outgrew the space, causing him to look elsewhere. Memos from 1948 and 1952 show the genesis and development of the park conceptually. Disneyland finally got the green light when Walt obtained financing from his deal with ABC in the spring of 1954, with the groundbreaking occurring on July 21, 1954—less than a year before the park opened on July 17, 1955. Disneyland celebrated its 50^th birthday in 2005. Indeed Disney considered the park to be alive:

The park means a lot to me. Its something that will never be finished, something I can keep developing, keep "plussing" and adding to. It’s alive. It will be a live, breathing thing that will need changes. When you wrap up a picture and turn it over to Technicolor, you’re through. Snow White is a dead issue with me. I just finished a live-action picture, wrapped it up a few weeks ago. It’s gone. I can’t touch it. There are things in it I don’t like, but I can’t do anything about it. I want something live, something that would grow. The park is that. Not only can I add things, but even the trees will keep growing. The thing will get more beautiful year after year. And it will get better as I find out what the public likes. I can’t do that with a picture; it’s finished and unchangeable before I find out whether the public likes it or not. (Thomas, 1976, p. 244)

Shickel (1997) says that Disney was “constantly fussing” over the park, much as a parent fusses over a child. When Walt dedicated the park, he promised that "Disneyland will never be completed” (Findlay, 1993, p. 61), and this constant state of becoming is a characteristic of neoteny, being always in a state of development. So not only does Disneyland give us access to neoteny, but itself also demonstrates neoteny. [The "Cherishing of Childhood" excursion, located at the hub, explores neoteny in detail.]

In Inside Disneyland, Bright (1987) describes opening day at Disneyland, "Black Sunday" as it was known, in a section entitled “Birth Pains.” First of all, there were too many people, because many uninvited guests used counterfeit tickets, or scaled the fence, thanks to an enterprising man with a ladder. Then, melting asphalt played havoc with ladies’ high heel shoes and there were not enough drinking fountains due to a plumbers strike, where Disney was forced to choose between bathrooms and drinking fountains. To add insult to injury, there was a gas leak in Fantasyland and the Mark Twain riverboat near capsized, because no capacity limits had been established. Opening day was a day of “operational chaos, and seemingly endless miscues” (p. 107). Thankfully, Disneyland made it through the birth process successfully, and within seven weeks had hosted a million guests (Thomas, 1976). Disney was obviously onto something with Disneyland.

I Think He’s Got It!—Magical Mediators

Sergei Eisenstein, Russian filmmaker believed that “Disney’s artistic power lay in an almost frightening capacity for boring into secret recesses of the human psyche and uncovering its most basic urges.” He felt that Disney appealed to “the latent primitivism in modern consciousness”:

He creates somewhere in the realm of the very purest and most primal depths. There, where we are all children of nature. He creates on the conceptual level of man not yet shackled by logic, reason, or experience . . . for through his whole system of devices, themes, and subjects, Disney constantly gives us prescriptions for folkloric, mythological, prelogical thought—but always rejecting, pushing, aside logic . . . [O]rdinary lifeless objects, plants, beasts, all are animated and humanized. (Watts, 1995, p. 90)

Disney’s popularity throughout the years and the immense appeal of the theme parks, suggest that he did speak to something common in us. Perhaps the appeal is the mediating function that Disney's works embodies—their ability to hold the tension of opposites: the past and the future, the real and the illusory, the sentimental and modernist, the populist subversion of hierarchy that simultaneously celebrates tradition. Watts (1995) writes that maybe Disney's work “strove to reunite what modernizing society had separated: innocent childhood and cynical adulthood, dreams and reason, artistic visions and ideological desires, work and play” (p. 109).

Disneyland’s Neptunian nature can be seen in what I call “disappearing the slash” or its mediating function between opposites. Main Street serves this function in the park, as does the overall carnivalesque nature of the place. Disney himself did this in many areas of his life, because he was constantly bringing opposing points of view together and forming his own mix. This sounds a bit like bricolage, and in fact the two are related. First we will explore a bit about binaries, and then see how mediation, bricolage, and play are related. After that, we will see how Disney mediated things, and then how dreams fit into the picture.

A Bit of Background on Binaries

Lévi-Strauss, a structural anthropologist, saw that to paraphrase Lara Croft again, “Nature is about balance. All the world comes in pairs—yin/yang, right/wrong, man/woman, what’s pleasure without pain” (de Bont, 2003). These pairs are known as binary opposites and are pairs of ideas that give each other value because of their difference. Binaries are supposed to be opposites, its either one thing or the other, with the famous slash in between to keep them that way, that is “always absolutely separate” (Klages, 2001, online). Binaries are supposed to stay on their side of the slash, but they do not always do this. Lévi-Strauss noted binaries are intrinsically unstable and require mediation (Douglass, 1997, online) That is where myth, bricolage, carnival, and play come in; they all mediate between opposites, and in this world that is becoming increasingly polarized, this mediating function is very important.

According to Lévi-Strauss “myths are derived ultimately from the structure of the mind” which is binary— “the mind is constantly dealing with pairs of contradictions or opposites.” Myths function to mediate between opposing extremes such as nature/culture, life/ death, raw/cooked, etcetera. and are a mode by and through which societies communicate and find resolution between conflicting opposites:

Mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions towards their resolution.” The logical structure of a myth provides a means by which the human mind can avoid unpleasant contradictions and thus through mediation, reconcile conflicts that would be intolerable if unreconciled. (Magrath, 2001, online) http://www.bsu.edu/classes/magrath/205s01/mlintro.html

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