... that's made for you and me?

Susan Willis’ essay “Disney World: Public Use/Private State” is a critical evaluation of the Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida. Specifically, it examines her personal experience of touring the park; the behavior of her fellow visitors; how Disney World orchestrates every activity and rigorously controls every aspect of its public image; and finally, it attempts to decipher what these things might signify in terms of our society and culture.

Willis argues that to experience Disney World is to confront an almost pure expression of industrial capitalism: every aspect of life seems to be a commodity, which is to be administered as efficiently as possible to the customers. The customers, for their part, are passive participants: everything they do at the park has been anticipated and scripted. Yet she describes how the Disney corporation also makes every effort to present the image of Disney World as a place of freedom, a place where the customer has no cares or fears, a place where impossible fictions are made real. It is a place that is nowhere on Earth.

Willis refers repeatedly to an “utopian impulse,” which I understand to mean “a desire for a better, more ideal world.” She suggests that by billing Disney World as an ideal place, they have successfully sold an otherwise creepy, de-individualizing experience to millions. Willis then draws an analogy to mass culture as a whole.

As I have said, Willis’ essay looks at several aspects of Disney World, from the experience of queuing for the attractions to the environmental impact of the park’s garbage. Each element is introduced through her own observations. The theme is then developed into a broader pronouncement about how this aspect is related to tendencies in the broader culture of industrial America, whereupon she turns her attention to a different but related aspect. What emerges is a foreboding portrait of a society dominated by corporations that, though informed by good intentions, is essentially inhuman.

An interesting aspect of Willis’ arguments is that although her evidence is primarily anecdotal, it hardly needs corroboration. As one of the most massive bastions of the common American culture, any American reader, at least, already knows nearly everything about what Disney sells. Anyone who had also attended any theme park would likely find that their own experiences were similar to hers -though they probably did not have quite the same attitude that she did.

One thing Willis does not mention, which I have wondered about, is the contrast between amusement parks and old-fashioned carnivals and fairs. On the surface they look similar, except that the parks lack the best things about the fair: the exhibits of all the interesting stuff everyone’s been up to for the last year. Willis would probably say that those are precisely the sort of thing that corporations are incapable of caring about.