[In November, I
finally visited DisneyWorld for the first time, accompanying my 9 and 8 year
old sons. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios in a whirlwind
three days—and as you might expect, this AmericanStudier found a great deal of
interest in all three places. So this week I’ll DisneyStudy five such details,
leading up to a special weekend post on themes parks in America!]
On an attraction
that highlights the best and worst of Disney’s visions of America.
Disneyland
opened in Anaheim, California in 1955, and by less than a decade later—the New York World’s Fair of 1964—the company had
become synonymous enough with American theme parks that Disney was commissioned
to produce four
significant attractions for the fair. Of those four, It’s a Small World
(about which I’ll write in Friday’s post) is probably the most famous, and
certainly reflects an important and evolving element of Disney’s perspective:
the company’s embrace, likely for both practical/commercial and philosophical
reasons, of a global worldview. But if Disney was already by 1964 moving toward
global domination, it was also first and foremost, then as now, a part of
America’s landscape and culture. And it is another of the World’s Fair
attractions, known initially
as Progressland and ever after as the Carousel of Progress, which to my
mind best embodies Disney’s influential contributions to American perspectives
and identities.
The Carousel,
often said to be Walt
Disney’s favorite of all the Disney attractions created in his lifetime, presents
some of the same ideas of social and technological innovation on which
Spaceship Earth (Monday’s subject) focuses. But while Spaceship Earth focused
on the broadest levels of human history and society, and on topics of equal
breadth such as the development of language and art, the Carousel brings progress
down to its most intimate level: creating, in a quartet of animatronic settings
and performances, the home and voices of an “average” American family across four
time periods (1904, the 1920s, the 1940s, and “the present,” initially 1964 but
having evolved multiple times over the half-century since). Those scenes are not
without their broader historical resonances, both of Disney’s own histories
and of the society beyond, but they nonetheless focus on the most everyday and personal
meanings of progress: the change from one type of stove to another, new methods
for young people to communicate with their friends, the different views out the
windows of urban and suburban homes. This intimate vision of progress not only
complements Spaceship Earth’s nicely, but also reflects the most communal,
shared experience of history.
Well, kind of
shared. Certainly stoves and youthful relationships and homes are significant
parts of most American (and human) lives, but there’s no doubt that the
Carousel’s portrayal of both its particular time periods and of progress
overall is in other ways quite narrow. It’s not just that this “average” family
happens to be white and (in my recollection) overtly Christian, for example,
but also that in the father’s extended monologues about each time period we get
precisely no engagements with any of the more complex histories unfolding in
those eras; while of course many of the periods’ darkest histories would seem
to be outside the concept of “progress,” others (such as Progressive labor
reforms or the women’s suffrage movement) were deeply tied to that ideal. Yet
the Carousel’s extremely rosy vision of the future (captured in the attraction’s
song, “There’s a Great
Big Beautiful Tomorrow”) is closer to the easy
form of optimism and patriotism, the kind that makes it difficult to include
the challenges and struggles on the road to shared progress. That’s a clear and
consistent downside to the Disney worldview, and one front and center in this
popular attraction.
Next
DisneyStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other aspects of Disney or theme parks you’d AmericanStudy?
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