On the auspicious sounding date of January 1st 2000 a fairly famous book on the Walt Disney empire was published. Called Deconstructing Disney, it used the literary technique of deconstruction to look mainly at Disney films from 1937’s Snow White to 1998’s Mulan, and along the way connect the films to American culture, history, and politics. It connects to topics as disparate as the Bosnia-Herzogovina war and Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinski. One of the things I most liked about the book was the summary of it on the back cover beginning with these two sentences: “Demonising Disney is nothing new. Disney films have long been synonymous with a certain conservative, patriarchal, heterosexual ideology, occupying a centre-stage position at the heart of the evil empire.” Below is a 7-minute VIDEO of our recent foray into that empire, this year celebrating its 70th year.
But to return to the book a moment. It’s an academic exercise of the kind that gets many people mad as hell at elites. Mad as hell because conservatism, patriarchy, and heterosexuality are always taking it on the chin, always described as “ideologies”—which, of course, they are, but so at bottom is everything, I guess, including progressivism, including bread making and especially what an academic might call the objectification of bread and capitalist structures that distribute bread so unevenly. (MAGA does hate elitist rigamarole!)
So, being a kind of academic myself for many years, when we heard that one of our grandkids was performing twice at Disney—once at Disneyland and once at Disney California Adventure, the Pixar-centered theme park right next to Disneyland—and my wife said we should go, I at first hesitated for a couple minutes, though for a relatively unacademic reason. We’d have to buy our own tickets, and I heard they were expensive. Just last week I finished paying of the PayPal “Pay in Four” plan allowing me to make four $187.50 payments. $750: $325 each for the two days, $40 each day for parking, plus miscellaneous fees and taxes. Ideology was decidedly second to the monetary outlay, which had me thinking, Is All This Worth It? as we stepped on the tram from the Mickey and Friends parking structure taking us first to a security check before we entered the park.
As a professor I had talked many times myself of how entertaining things were sometimes the most dangerous things of all because they smuggled stereotypes into our minds. All the menacing Middle Eastern villains in Disney’s Aladdin, or the happy-go-lucky Blacks in Disney’s Song of the South, for example, still trigger damaging prejudices today. This, plus the Deconstructing Disney stuff, plus the expense would make it hard for me to enjoy the two days. Or so I thought. But around noon the first day, even before seeing our granddaughter march with her band, I began to think, This Might Be Worth It. After her band passed by and she gave us a delighted, knowing smile, and after her choir concert two days later at Disney California Adventure, my wife and I were totally hooked—and not just because she was in a wonderful band and choir. Everything was so well done: every building and street, every ride, every piece of music and video. And, even with the occasional stressed-out child or parent, most everyone seemed to be, well, so happy to be in the Happiest Place on Earth. I suppose it didn’t hurt, either, that we had left our home in the Chicagoland area just hours before a vast polar vortex struck, sinking the windchills down in the -30 below zero range. In Disneyland it was sunny and 76.
In his essay “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that, “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In the early 1800’s the poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability,” a related concept, which describes a person’s ability to embrace uncertainty, mystery and doubt without the “irritable reaching after fact and reason,” the operative word here being “irritable.” Sure, Disney’s doing everything so well is bought at the price of a certain degree of fascism. Our soon-to-be daughter-in-law, who is the conductor of the wonderful choir our granddaughter’s in, told us she usually speaks more at a concert, but Disney demands that if you speak you have to submit a script. A “handler” attends your every move, ready to cut the mic if you go off script too much. So she said nothing at all. In the end, though, we hold this uber-control in tension with Disney’s hap-hap-happiness. I’m reminded of what Greil Marcus wrote of a James Brown performance at the Apollo: “Every moment rehearsed, and every moment real.” Not that Disney has that kind of “reality.” In the VIDEO below the fake snow showering down on a warm California night to the sounds of “The Christmas Song” does strain credulity. But we grant Disney its function as an oft-needed escape. “We could make this an every-year thing!” my wife said. Well….
* The VIDEO below shows only one song from the choir’s concert, but it was so good, and the students so evidently happy to be singing, that any Christmas, or any time you feel like you need a little Christmas, you should watch the whole thing HERE.
Is Disneyland Worth It?
But to return to the book a moment. It’s an academic exercise of the kind that gets many people mad as hell at elites. Mad as hell because conservatism, patriarchy, and heterosexuality are always taking it on the chin, always described as “ideologies”—which, of course, they are, but so at bottom is everything, I guess, including progressivism, including bread making and especially what an academic might call the objectification of bread and capitalist structures that distribute bread so unevenly. (MAGA does hate elitist rigamarole!)
So, being a kind of academic myself for many years, when we heard that one of our grandkids was performing twice at Disney—once at Disneyland and once at Disney California Adventure, the Pixar-centered theme park right next to Disneyland—and my wife said we should go, I at first hesitated for a couple minutes, though for a relatively unacademic reason. We’d have to buy our own tickets, and I heard they were expensive. Just last week I finished paying of the PayPal “Pay in Four” plan allowing me to make four $187.50 payments. $750: $325 each for the two days, $40 each day for parking, plus miscellaneous fees and taxes. Ideology was decidedly second to the monetary outlay, which had me thinking, Is All This Worth It? as we stepped on the tram from the Mickey and Friends parking structure taking us first to a security check before we entered the park.
In his essay “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that, “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In the early 1800’s the poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability,” a related concept, which describes a person’s ability to embrace uncertainty, mystery and doubt without the “irritable reaching after fact and reason,” the operative word here being “irritable.” Sure, Disney’s doing everything so well is bought at the price of a certain degree of fascism. Our soon-to-be daughter-in-law, who is the conductor of the wonderful choir our granddaughter’s in, told us she usually speaks more at a concert, but Disney demands that if you speak you have to submit a script. A “handler” attends your every move, ready to cut the mic if you go off script too much. So she said nothing at all. In the end, though, we hold this uber-control in tension with Disney’s hap-hap-happiness. I’m reminded of what Greil Marcus wrote of a James Brown performance at the Apollo: “Every moment rehearsed, and every moment real.” Not that Disney has that kind of “reality.” In the VIDEO below the fake snow showering down on a warm California night to the sounds of “The Christmas Song” does strain credulity. But we grant Disney its function as an oft-needed escape. “We could make this an every-year thing!” my wife said. Well….
* The VIDEO below shows only one song from the choir’s concert, but it was so good, and the students so evidently happy to be singing, that any Christmas, or any time you feel like you need a little Christmas, you should watch the whole thing HERE.