This is something I wrote about Disneyworld at the time of my trip:
Kitsch...is one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks; the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere...Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliche" in discourse.
- Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929) Mass Media Culture, The Society of Consumption, 1970.
I thought I would give a more complete sense of my impression of Disneyworld. Admittedly, when I visited, I was chaperoning an exhausting trip, so I may be off base:
First, the inauthenticity of the place is oppressive, insofar as it strives to pretend so hard. Main Street looks like no Main Street in the country, even through the haze of nostalgia, but rather like a cheesy movie set. "Hollywood
and Vine" in the MGM Studios is claustrophobic, and there is no real "feel" of being in a studio further into the park.
Second, the marketing is relentless. When we first entered the Magic Kingdom, there was a parade that kept repeating the Disneyworld theme song over and over again until I wanted to scream: "We are already here, stop already". Main
Street is full of little more than a bunch of Disney merchandise and some ice cream. In Fantasyland, which I, as a Boomer, think of as "Disneyland", it turns out that it is a chintzy recreation of a Bavarian village, rather small,
with a few attractions. After all of the praise heaped on Disney for technical advances, the "Small World" ride was not appreciably better than it had been when I first went on it at the New York World's Fair, 35 years ago, and the
Lion King show was not even state of the art puppeteering.
Third, there is an indifference to quality which is astounding. The ride at MGM Studios, which was a celebration of their back catalogue, represented Busby Berkeley, the great choreographer, by a static line of chorus girl mannikins. There was little attention to particular movies, with a couple of exceptions, and a kind of perfunctory attempt to honor some genres, like the
gangster movie and the western. Anyone with an interest in film would find it absurdly deficient, even as a presentation for children. Similarly, in the ride about evolving methods of communication that goes through the fake
geodesic dome at Epcot, almost each new exhibit makes so much noise that it drowns out the narration, and renders it unintelligible, and, overall, the exhibit is meant for yokels who will go "oooooh" when they find out the Phoenicians invented the alphabet, or papyrus preceded paper.
Fourth, there were quite a few foreign nationals at Disneyworld, identifiable either by their use of their native tongue, or, in the case of Brits and Aussies, the thickness of their accents. It depressed me to think that this might be the only trip that some of them take to the States, to experience this great country as a set of theme parks.
In summing up, don't get me wrong, I like simple amusement parks and seaside boardwalks, I do not mind glitz and showmanship and popular pleasures. But there is an extravagance to this which puts me off, a manipulativeness and pretension, that feels unhealthy to me, and seems the very apotheosis of Kitsch. |
