Disneyland: Rumble in the Magic Kingdom

[…] Disney World long ago turned the art of crowd control into a science. But the putative Happiest Place on Earth has decided it must figure out how to quicken the pace even more. A cultural shift toward impatience — fed by video games and smartphones — is demanding it, park managers say. To stay relevant to the entertain-me-right-this-second generation, Disney must evolve.

That quote was setting up a New York Times feature on the Disney Operational Command Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando. It’s a Michael Crichton world where computers, software and digital maps monitor crowds and deploy extra boats/cars on rides to cut waiting times; Disney characters are told when and where they are needed, according to crowd restlessness; restaurants are watched, and staff are told if any tables have been missed. Parades can even be arranged so as to encourage the crowds towards emptier parts of the park.

All of this got me thinking about my last trip to Disneyland Paris - one of the smaller, younger cousins to the original. The Times’ observation that the Disney parks are “primarily built around nostalgia for an America gone by” rang true. Most obviously they play on popular awareness of the Old West, of Victorian America, and of various periods up to 1950s America. But beyond the History class past, Disneyland really gets you pining for Back to the Future, with all of the cultural baggage of that title. Whatever the country, or version of the parks, Disneyland is the American 1980s. The parks are built around, and encourage, a particular way of imagining how the ‘80s felt.

By the 1980s I don’t really mean the ten years with the right numbers. All decades bleed into each other, the 1980s interacting with the ‘70s and ‘90s. The particular start and finish years depend on what lens you are using to view them (developments in car design, music videos, politics…). It’s seemingly easier for us to comprehend the past if it’s divided into colour charts of ten-year fashions, trends and events. So, by the 1980s we mean the selected examples of cultural production, technology, news-making events and people that we currently associate with that time period.

Opening in April 1992, Euro Disney was planned and built at the close of the 1980s, and it shows. But the refusal to update is not stinginess; the most noticeable 1980s shrine is the Walt Disney Studios Park, which didn’t open until 2002.

Back to the Renaissance

Disneyland Paris, 2008: Arrived Disney. Prima donna kids everywhere with huge Disney Store bags. Parents with high-end cameras trample the innocent as they film their children dancing to the piped music. Hundreds of Americans looking for a little piece of home. Tanned little kids with perfect hair - mini male models with the right clothes and almost the right attitude.

That look the parents give you. The distain and horror as they see that their little princess has to share their overpriced fantasyland with thousands upon thousands of other people’s princesses. Little children fighting over the goods, pushing adult strangers aside as they continue their parade.

The music and people go on and on. Pouting, tubby children in black clima-duped vests and shorts shouting where they want and what they want. Running for the biggest rides, the rock and roll. But it’s all so old.

No imagineers here, just slowly following suit with America’s Walt Disney World. Newly opened Tower of Terror, big deal! When it opened it was the third copy of a 14-year-old original - an original imagineered back in those years when America could name a disaster-in-a-skyscraper ride with ‘tower’ and ‘terror’ in close proximity unselfconsciously. Aerosmith, Armageddon, Michael Jackson, Star Wars…Disneyland Paris is a time machine to America 20 or so years ago. A time that has retrospectively come to be imagined as having been one of pre terror. The time of Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, of funny Simpsons episodes, of American confidence fuelled by the world’s (selective usage) awe and admiration for its cultural production and projection of itself. That’s why all these people come; they still feel it. It is Michael Jackson town.

Disneyland’s America is specifically that of the earlier 1990s, when the 1980s were still fresh on the cultural tongue. You want to see bum bags, HI-TEC trainers and fashions aping the high school clique-wear you saw in everything from the Breakfast Club and The Lost Boys to Saved by the Bell. McCauley Culkin is stuck as a child here, and Jackson at the height of his powers, with no complications. Back when I first went to Euro Disney, about a month before those first Chandler allegations were made, I sat and watched Jackson in the Captain EO short movie they used to show in the Disney parks - all 3D, lasers and smoke (and now shown again, in tribute). It was all in context then, in 1993, when the 1980s references weren’t that old and Jackson was still in orbit (he gave his Superbowl performance that year).

Disneyland Paris today shares something with Michael Jackson (the person, the brand and the legend). Both attempt to get you back to the 1980s, whether you were 30, 20, 10, or not yet a twinkle back then. It doesn’t matter how or even if you experienced those years, it makes you think about them and imagine/invent them all over again. Despite their subsequent output and existence, Disneyland and Jackson play off the cultural position they held in the very early 1990s, and encourage your nostalgia. Jackson stays in a time warp where his later releases and erratic behaviour somehow seem more distant than his huge, bombastically marketed successes of the 1980s – nearly thirty-year-old successes. If the Disney parks are backward looking then it’s for a different reason.

From the mid-1990s onwards, the MJ marketing machine had no alternative but to encourage us to look back, but the Disney parks actively choose to make their Finding Nemo, WALL·E and Toy Story 3 successes play second fiddle to Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio – the old standards. Somehow, for Disney, the context of the 1980s and early 1990s movie industry/culture industry seems a better one for selling their movies. It was the period that gave birth to the Disney renaissance – Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King…and Disneyland Paris has tried to create that time/place physically, as an environment where you and your family walk around their films. You walk down the faux boulevard as the 1994-invented Tower of Terror rattles through its ride programme, and the music for Beverly Hills Cop blasts through the speakers. The odd thing is the four-year-old lapping it all up.

Why not? The ‘80s were fun, perhaps more fun than now. They were the age of children as adults as children. Who tried to live that concept, if not Michael Jackson? The early 1990s were when (despite a recession in real life) daydreams and Hollywood sustained the idealistic wave of the 1980s - everybody living in Father of the Bride/Beethoven/Home Alone capacious dolls houses with huge, regularly-visiting extended families to fill the rooms, and a collection of toys to rival Tom Hanks’s in Big (apt for our 1980s Disneyland reading, along with Vice Versa, 18 Again! and Like Father, Like Son. Late ‘80s movies really embraced kids as grown ups/grown ups as kids). Those years, or their movies, brought a sense that, no matter how much you jerked off or fooled around in your classic American youth, health, wealth and happiness would be yours in adulthood (like Marty McFly, you’d get the girl and the truck).

The jury’s out on the truck, and on anything else the ‘80s-to-‘90s seemed to promise with their cultural statements. It is concerning that those statements are now viewed, with nostalgia, as being traditional - as displays of traditional values, of traditional moviemaking, of a traditional childhood and family life… That perspective is not just Disney’s; the annual selection of 1980s movie remakes attests to that. Kick back, let yourself blur nostalgia, tradition and conservatism for a while, but remind yourself that you’re revisiting this stuff with some self-awareness, or sense of irony. Your past is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.

Republican Sense

Russia has agreed to return to the war in Afghanistan at the request of the Western states which helped the mujahedin to drive its forces out of the country 21 years ago.

That tongue twister that the Independent came up with will be a future aside for historians to put in books about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the 2001 plus war in Afghanistan. Alongside the statistics and contexts of the two conflicts, they will note how the opposing forces and allies all later swapped about, with opposing forces of the first conflict becoming allies and previous allies coming to oppose each other. The players have changed though, and even if we allow the USSR and contemporary Russia to stand as similar entities, and America’s involvement in the 1980s to compare with the US forces in Afghanistan now, there are a lot of problems with declaring these to be old enemies turned allies.

Since 2009 Russia has provided US forces with a route into Afghanistan (airspace wise), supplied aircraft to Poland and could well provide NATO with helicopters, training and a route for arms. If Russia is going to aid NATO then the Obama administration is not necessarily happy with all of this as an ally. America is said to be concerned that Europe is dealing with Russia on its own, discussing foreign policy and security matters away from America and NATO. The New York Times has a senior US official saying: “Since when, I wonder, is European security no longer an issue of American concern, but something for Europe and Russia to resolve? After being at the center of European security for 70 years, it’s strange to hear that it’s no longer a matter of U.S. concern.”

Since when? According to the New York Times it’s since President Obama has been perceived as being disinterested in Europe [1]. All of this, and the airspace dependency on Russia, adds to the narrative of failure Barack Obama is currently presented in. After he appeared on the Daily Show on Wednesday night to discuss things in a comedy news way, everybody jumped on the ‘yes we can…but’ laughter. Certainly the British media are touchingly concerned, or revelling, in the liberal disappointment of his presidency suddenly revealed by those four words.

There is some idea that the people who raved about Obama were duped. Unfortunately for Obama the media raved about him (eventually), and when the media feels duped they feel stupid, resent it, and then bury their embarrassing previous take on a story with aggressive coverage of another angle. So, folks, Barack Obama’s America is now a limp liberal disaster. The recession and downturn turned out to be impervious to his inspiring new politics, healthcare reform was timid and brought no public option, his dislike of the war on drugs has had a few inconsistencies, and while America might be able to elect a black president, it still opens its newspapers to see teenagers and an 11-year-old committing suicide in the face of bullying and homophobic abuse.

On top of this state of affairs, or perceived state of affairs, America has its mid term elections on Tuesday. President Obama’s approval rating is around 43%, about the same as Bill Clinton’s when the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate in the mid terms of 1994. While this can’t tell pundits much about Obama’s chances in 2012, it does mean that the Republicans are commonly expected to become the majority in the House and to equal the Democrats in the Senate [2]. Supposedly this is because voters are either responding to Obama’s failure to bring change, or because he has brought too much change - in economics ($750 billion in stimulating the economy) or healthcare for example. Obama has done, and failed to do, many worrying things, and Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson offers a good list of both (Though Dickson actually offsets this list with the more general, and positive, ‘sweep’ of the presidency). The supposed ‘liberal lion’:

has surged 50,000 troops into Afghanistan — not to take the battle to Al Qaeda, but to prop up the corrupt and incompetent regime of Hamid Karzai. The prison at Guantánamo? Still open for business nearly a year after it was to have been shuttered. Uglier still: Obama has asserted the authority to assassinate American terror suspects abroad and has tried to block court challenges of that authority by invoking "state secrets."

On the economic front, Obama has surrounded himself with the same free marketeers who led Bill Clinton's calamitous deregulation of big banks, restoring Wall Street to obscene profits even as one American in seven has been engulfed by a rising tide of poverty.

These things are genuinely troubling of course, but then I seem to remember the guy before doing a few worrying things. We’ve yet to get the full spectrum of Barack Obama’s presidency (or George Bush Jr’s for that matter – give it a few more years, and books). While there are other things from the last two years to be considered when viewing President Obama’s record, people from both the right and left are focusing on the items from the FAIL list, ostensibly agreeing with each other. This is only a cosmetic agreement – more of that shortly – but one that is very damaging for Obama and the Democrats, and perhaps unfairly so. It’s led, in places, to a vocabulary of disenchantment, of repairs being needed, as well as a necessary return to sanity. CNN’s William Bennett points out, for example, that ‘hardened liberalism has been unleashed in power and in office from the White House to the U.S. Senate to the House of Representatives’ And now? ‘The common sense antibodies of the American people are kicking back in.’ Common sense, Republican sense - just to offer a healthy check to the liberals of course. The hippy’s popular, more reliable older brother comes to clean up the mess. Either that or the brothers will fight like siblings.

As for the critique offered from the political left, Dickinson’s article quotes Jane Hamsher, the film producer and writer who established the progressive blog Firedoglake. In September she tweeted: ‘Fortunately, liberals and conservatives hate the health care bill for the same reason […]: it sucks.’ What Twitter word counts don’t allow for is the important caveat that liberals and conservatives have polar opposite reasons for thinking the bill sucks. For liberals the bill sucks because it didn’t go far enough, and showed the Obama administration to be timid. For conservatives it went far too far – no suggestion of timidity there. If the two sides were to listen to each others’ criticisms of Obama they might start to appreciate the bravery (that’s for the liberals to see) and conciliatory skill (that’s for the conservatives to see) of the legislation his presidency has produced so far – not to drop to their knees in awe, but to see it in context.

Mind you, if the left and right (both supporters and parties) listened to each other more anyway then politics would be more interesting/inspiring. Viewing everything a party or government does through vague and exaggerated notions of socialist liberals or ‘fuck you, neighbour’ conservatives doesn’t offer us very much. It may be better to pay attention to either side, and then understand what a party is specifically trying to achieve in its individual policies and legislation. Then voters, citizens and politicians could criticise their opponent party (or indeed their ‘own’ party) by attacking the flaws in the party’s method, or its erroneous choice of political goals. The most resonant, lasting attacks are those that call a party or politicians up on such in context failings – failings by their own (or at least hitherto) standards.

Such criticisms would be better than attacking parties with those easy accusations - attacks that deny that parties and political figures often have to make difficult, pragmatic and - forgive me - ‘off message’ choices. Coming back to the UK for a final moment, Labour’s Harriet Harman calling Lib Dem Danny Alexander a ginger rodent certainly isn’t helping, for instance.

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[1] John Vinocur, ‘Will the U.S. Lose Europe to Russia?,’ New York Times, 25 October 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/world/europe/26iht-politicus.html?scp=1&sq=afghanistan%20russia&st=cse>

[2] Rupert Cornwell ‘Yes we can, Obama said. But can he?’ The Independent, 29 October 2010 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/yes-we-can-obama-said-but-can-he-2119585.html>