Pre-Class Blog: 10/7
Reading Eco has helped me realize the structure/function of Disney that makes it so peculiar and how it has been designed for me to enjoy it so much. I have grown up going to Disney World for vacation, so I am no stranger to its illusion. However, since we are called to look at it with a critical eye in this class, it has been hard for me to separate my experiences as a child and my view on it as a CMC student. Eco’s, “The City of Robots,” has helped me understand some of the structural manifestations of Disney that are cause for concern—or at least deserving of the attention of critical theorists like Umberto Eco.
Fake cities such as Disneyland and Disney World blend the reality of trade with the play of fiction (202). This description put forth by Eco of Disney’s Main Street and the “toy houses [that] invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing” (202) helped me to realize how these immersive worlds are driven by consumerism/capitalism. They involve guests as participants in the experience, which make them more apt to spend money as a ‘good participant’ would. At Disney, you are tricked into buying for ‘play’ (The tickets have gotten super expensive!).
Furthermore, the fantasy world created simulates the desire for illusion (203). For instance, by appreciating the fake animals in the rides “the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program” (203). With the addiction to illusion, visitors (and especially repeat visitors) may be primed to believe that, “Technology can give us more reality than nature can” (203). The appreciation of technology over nature can lead guests to participate in this “place of total passivity” (205) and possibly have that extend once they leave [let’s admit, we are all slaves to capitalism—or maybe less controversially put: consumerism & materialism].
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| One of my pictures from a past Disney trip. |
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