I’M JUST BACK FROM MY THIRD TRIP TO DISNEYLAND. I visited for the first time at thirteen, courtesy of a grandmother. From that weekend I remember little more than descending into Monsanto’s Adventure Thru Inner Space ride, and glancing up to find a giant eye staring at me through a telescope. I rode that ride again and again. Inner Space was subsumed into the new and recurring futures of Tomorrowland, and I vanished into adolescence. Except for a single day twelve years ago, I never returned, yet Disneyland always has a familiar, avuncular feel. Disneyland seems obvious, yes, but more than that, inevitable.
Recently I had a windfall, and I looked at my nine-year-old daughter who has a poster of Mickey Mouse on her bedroom door, and I made secret plans. I told her only a few days before we left, a few days to pack and anticipate the details and call Grandma to exclaim about it with a certain wild silliness. Then we flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, drove across town to the hotel, and took the hotel shuttle to Disneyland all in a few hours on a hot Friday in August. The hotel, which I’d picked out of a Column A-B-or-C list at the travel agent, was nearly new, one of many look-alike mountains of rooms thrown up by investors in the crowded, noisy blocks around Disneyland. The wallpaper was beginning to peel, rugs bunched up in the corners. The shower was broken, a light bulb burned out, the door to the balcony stuck shut. Room service plates lay outside a half-dozen doors in the long, empty corridor, the sticky yellow cheese of leftover nachos drying to a rubbery sheen. But from our big corner windows we could see the rumpled gray Matterhorn, and the shuttle waited below.
Every day, beginning around seven o’clock in the morning, cars trickle into the Disneyland parking lot, which is bigger than Disneyland itself. Only in the United States of America is there ever a parking lot as big as Disneyland’s under a sky as bright and dirty as the sky in Los Angeles. (Excuse me, Anaheim, as my friends in Los Angeles are quick to remind me.) The streams of cars give way to parking lot shuttles for people who don’t want to walk from their cars to the gates, pass the hotel shuttles, and become streams of people, on foot, in strollers, in wheelchairs, small creeks of people converging into rivulets and then rivers, all heading toward the spillway of the narrow gates, where they pile up like a torrent of white water and shove themselves through. We left the shuttle, entered the stream, squeezed through the gates. Coming and going, the signs call Disneyland “The Happiest Place on Earth.” And there, right there, right inside, is Winnie the Pooh larger than life, bending clumsily down to pat a child, his Pooh grin never wavering. The thing that works about Disneyland is that it works. We submit. We’re glad to be here.
I HAD BOUGHT the trip as a Disney Package, airfare and rental car and hotel and Disney Passports all rolled into one big credit-card charge. Part of the package is something called the Magic Morning, an outdoor breakfast in Disneyland early in the morning, before the park officially opens, attended by a half-dozen characters. The characters appear without warning, all over the park, cartoon characters come to life, who dash or pad or stomp or dance around depending on their species, and never speak lest the illusion be shattered. Whenever they appear, they draw families with strollers and diaper bags and camcorders, happy kids, and sometimes shy, tearful, frightened kids pressed forward by eager parents. Captain Hook, who stands several inches taller than me and whose hat casts long shadows around him, is greeted by a respectful distance wherever he goes. Snow White, petite, slender, smiling, is happily stroked by toddlers. My nine-year-old, cheerfully growing up as slowly as she can, still believes in Santa Claus and only this summer learned about the Tooth Fairy. She is frightened by clowns. Does she know? I wondered, each time she held her autograph book up to a silent mask. Should I tell her? That morning, at the breakfast, we saw Aladdin, the Genie, Snow White, Eeyore, Pluto, and Tigger. “Tigger!” she screamed, and raced for a hug, smiled for the camera, asked for an autograph. Late that day, she said, “I bet they get hot in those costumes.”
As far as I was concerned, the point of Magic Morning wasn’t the characters or the sticky, sweet breakfast, but the park’s emptiness. Perhaps a few hundred people shared Tomorrowland and the Matterhorn with us at 7:30 on a crystalline, rosy morning, and they all but disappeared in the silent open spaces. The bustling, noisy herd of the day before was gone as though it had never been. But the emptiness was strange, more dreamy than the rides themselves, and disconcerting.
There is a fine psychology built into Disneyland’s long lines, which are well hidden and bend continually back upon themselves and around corners and through doorways. You have no idea, really, how long a line is until you are unavoidably part of it; the gasp of understanding when you finally see what a forty-five-minute wait with a child means is held back until you can’t change your mind. “If you aren’t the sort of person willing to invest an hour of agony for two minutes of joy,” says my Disneyland guide, “you probably shouldn’t have had children in the first place.”
More importantly, the waiting draws you slowly down into each ride’s particular shifting world, working bit by bit on one’s natural disbelief. Each major ride and each “land” has its own employee costumes and myriad other cues transcribing the borders of the imagined world; each creates, with varying degrees of success, a conditioned response to sights barely seen and sounds barely heard, subtly and casually dropped into the background as though they had no importance, no effect. There is first the willingness to accede to fantasy, and then, without warning, the body’s own unwilled and astonishing ability to suspend its own knowledge of reality. So the foyer of Star Tours, an intergalactic travel agency, is rather dull and as bland as a Greyhound bus depot, and the slow descent into Space Mountain takes you into a coolly decorated, impersonal space station designed for maximum bureaucratic efficiency on a cosmic scale. The Matterhorn has a buoyant alpine bouquet, and you are handled by strapping young Nordic men in lederhosen, and Thunder Mountain, a Wild West roller coaster, feels hot, arid, and lawless. Splash Mountain is all Brer Rabbit and Zippity-Doo-Dah, and its lines curl slowly along with the tranquil repose of Valium.
On Magic Morning, there were no lines anywhere. We climbed over the fence to leap on the Matterhorn, jogged gleefully up into Star Tours without pausing to listen to C-3PO’s complaints, and sat in an empty shuttle for our trip. The assembly-line shiver, the sense of being part of some enormous piece of carefully timed machinery, was gone. My daughter talked me into Space Mountain. One enters first by climbing, up moving sidewalks and then ramps, and then far down a switchback walkway. The ride slowly pulls you up into darkness and then throws you brutally into space like a slingshot. One feels obligated to scream. We screamed with vigor, alone in our car, and after two minutes slid into the space station, where no one was waiting. We had only to stay seated a moment to ride again, and again.
When Magic Morning ended and the entire park was about to open for real at eight o’clock, we stood with about fifty other Disney Package customers at the edge between Tomorrowland and Main Street, waiting for the security guard’s signal. When he looked at his watch and waved us on it was like a Mother’s Day stroller dash, the beginning, for many families, of a long day force-feeding high-stimulation fun to small children who preferred to linger at the fountains and watch pigeons, but would not be allowed to do so. Their parents were too willing to be rude on behalf of them, too hungry to see and do, photograph and experience, to fill up, to fill out.
By the afternoon I couldn’t stand the place any longer. The crowds are amazing, enormous, they’re Hong Kong at rush hour, Tokyo subways, a pan-Manhattan Labor Day sale. Families and camp groups come dressed the same way, moving like schools of fish through the churning rivers of people; Junior and Grandpa and all the cousins dressed in bright green t-shirts and red shorts for easy spotting in the throng. On a busy day, when more than fifteen thousand cars fill the parking lot and one hotel shuttle after the other disgorges its passengers every half hour, and the monorail fills up at the enormous Disneyland Hotel with more guests for the park again and
again, there may be fifty or sixty thousand people inside at the same time. And they’re all in line, or rushing to the end of one.
Then, near the 60-MINUTE WAIT FROM HERE sign, I watched a Space Mountain employee patiently try to explain to a large family why the ride has a height requirement, why the very tiny girl with bows in her hair, holding Daddy’s hand and standing mutely near the moving sidewalk, could not be allowed to go on the scariest ride in the park. They wanted to argue. I wanted to go. So we tramped back to Main Street, through the gates to get our invisible, indelible hand stamps, back through the parking lot to wait for the shuttle, back to the empty hotel hallways, the water stained wallpaper, the silent view of the shadeless parking lot crawling with cars.
My friend Harry, who lives in Beverly Hills, refused to come see me in Anaheim. He never goes to Anaheim, he tells me, loftily. And I won’t go to him. I’m exhausted, beaten into submission, dozing by the pool, gathering strength for another onslaught. My daughter seems as happy to bob in the pale blue water as she was to ride Space Mountain. “No one ever comes here to go to Disneyland and does anything else,” he tells me, but he’s wrong. Our package included One Other Attraction, we could have gone to Knott’s Berry Farm or Universal Studios, and lots of people are doing that around us, packing up the kids into the rental car and driving all over hell and back for another parking lot, more long lines, big crowds, more sensation. We used ours for a third day in Disneyland.
WHEN DISNEYLAND OPENED in 1955 a complicated intellectual debate began—about Disneyland as a work of art, as a cultural artifact, a piece of architecture, a symbol of capitalism. It was, above all, taken seriously. The debate seemed to end, without conclusion, decades ago, and now Disneyland is treated as a lark. (Except, that is, as a market force, where Disneyland is taken very seriously indeed.) Most people I know treat a trip to Disneyland as an indulgence just for the kids, a kind of mental slumming. Disneyland is low-class fun, lower-class no matter what it costs. Disneyland is common. One definition of common, of course, is whatever satisfies the masses. But in fact Disneyland is uncommon to a fault, it’s unique, unrepeatable. The park and everything in it is well made, never tawdry or thin in any way; its textures are always complex and layered. And Disneyland is awfully good at what it does.
Everywhere, an incredible attention to detail. Everything unsightly, disturbing, or mindful of ordinary life is hidden from sight. Thirty tons of trash are collected every day in Disneyland, twelve million pounds a year, the detritus of four million hamburgers and more than a million gallons of soda pop, and rarely is there a single straw wrapper on the ground, never does a trash can overflow or a distant glimpse of a garbage truck mar the view. It has always been thus, always a miracle of anal-retentive inspection, compulsive control, unceasing surveillance. The park was built on the bones of orange groves in a year and a day by workers using only hand tools, workers who are always smiling in the photographs. In fact, they went on strike several times during that year, the park wasn’t actually finished when it opened, and the opening day was an unmitigated disaster. But in the Disney tradition, people have forgotten all that now.
The intense orderliness of Disneyland, its extremes of cleanliness and unflagging courtesy, its Teutonic precision and appalling vision, and especially the way it deliberately shuts out the niggling problems of reality and gives us an illusion of goodness are all deliberate. Walt Disney was a hard-drinking, pill-popping, anti-union, Communist-baiting, bad-tempered man, an obsessive, depressive, control freak. He gave names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and proudly informed for the FBI. Disney was stingy, mildly anti-Semitic, and feared death so badly he investigated cryonics. But Disney was never cynical. He was amazingly uncynical, in fact. Disneyland is the world he wanted to live in, and as soon as he could build it, he did.
Disney’s world is one of impulse without risk, childish spontaneity devoid of danger. All is cued and manipulated, telegraphed and choreographed, manufactured, manicured. Disneyland offers freedom from decision in the guise of endless choice, freedom from confusion, from having to do anything we don’t want to do. (Except wait in line, which makes the fun more virtuous.) Even the grand fireworks are introduced over the park-wide public-address system by an unseen Big Brother with a primetime commercial voice, soothing and boosterish, their explosions accompanied by patriotic music to be sure we all understand the point. Disneyland is an exceptionally smart place, a conception of wide-ranging intelligence that allows visitors to be as stupid as they could possibly be and still breathe.
And more. Disneyland is a dream that flitters with genius and then turns into the repeating shrieks of nightmare without warning. (One friend of mine compares it to a particularly bad episode of The Prisoner.) In every Disney film there’s a moment when the cheerful music turns sour or threatening, when the Sorcerer’s Apprentice realizes he can’t stop the water coming, when Dumbo’s mother screams in grief, chained in the dark. In every film the giggles of psilocybin eventually give way to the mania of speed. Disneyland is Pleasure Island from Pinocchio, the island of endless fun that ruins you if you stay a moment too long. As Richard Shickel wrote, it’s a dream without any of the dark, dangerous elements that are the essential characteristics of real dreams. There is no incongruity, no unpredictability. No sex, no violence, except the childish sex of an animatronic pirate and the bloodless violence of cartoons. As a dream, Disneyland isn’t much good for therapy. It’s more a daydream than anything else, closer to Marie Antoinette than Carl Jung.
I can’t imagine working here, spending every day in this amalgam of the excruciating and the sublime. After we watched the 3-D Michael Jackson movie, Captain EO, the young man in charge said to the crowd, “Thank you for coming,” and “Have a nice day,” and then murmured into the microphone. “I’m going to stay and see the show again. And again and again and again.” I listened to “It’s a Small World” for fifteen minutes while waiting in line and tried to imagine listening to it on tinkly speakers all day long. We were caught in the Electrical Parade mob and literally couldn’t get out, at one point I couldn’t even stand up from where I’d sat down, there was no room and no one would give an inch, and I was underneath one of the enormous speakers hanging discretely from a tree, blaring the tinny parade music over and over, and I tried to imagine being Mickey Mouse on the lead float, dancing and smiling and dancing to that music until one day I just snapped and pulled an automatic weapon out of Mickey’s pocket and went boom. Bye-bye, Donald Duck. Bye-bye, Pooh.
I’M SEDUCED AGAIN. I buy iced tea on a sunny morning and sit on an ironwork bench in the Main Street Square, and the sudden, intense pleasure I feel isn’t just because Main Street is, literally, a scale model; it’s not just that the bricks and lamps and shingles are all five-eighths normal size and the second story doors and windows are deliberately foreshortened that gives me a powerful sense of peace. There is something curiously, fundamentally, safe here. There is a woman on the bench opposite me, slowly rocking a stroller with her foot. Here comes the little fire engine, right on time. Here is the ice cream parlor, the magic shop, the candy store. There is Goofy in the distance, nodding and smiling and nodding and smiling. That night, at twilight, as we swung slowly in the tram above the park, a great splash of crows swooped into the tall eucalyptus trees around us, across a clear, abalone sky, and I couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else.
I’m seduced, too, by the genuine pleasure around me, the cheerful diversity of all I see. I explain how to use the pay-token lockers to a Mexican family who speak only Spanish. We ride the lovely whirling teacups with a Japanese nuclear family and a trio of green-haired tattooed teenagers all having the same wonderful time spinning in the morning light. I see time and again how many pubescent girls ride the Storybrook Land boats without a shred of wistfulness. I see a woman in a Christian Fellowship t-shirt standing next to a handsome young man in a “Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian” t-shirt. I see two little old ladies flying into the Peter Pan ri
de alone; that night two little old men elbow me out of the way for seats at the parade. Time and again, I hear conversations around me in the long lines—reminiscences of Disneyland ten, twenty, thirty years ago, sparkling images carried on into adulthood and cherished always, to be passed to one’s own children later, today, now.
Over the years, a tradition of private graduation and prom night parties has developed at Disneyland. What could be safer for teenagers wanting a good time? Now, I’m told, any group can rent the park in its off-hours. “Any group?” I ask, disbelieving, still digesting Walt Disney’s peculiar political beliefs. “I can’t think who we’d turn away,” I’m told, and I don’t press the matter with suggestions. So Disneyland hosts Scout troop celebrations and church parties and business outings. Twenty years ago my friend Nancy got herself kicked out of Disneyland for dancing with a girl, but now there’s an unofficial Gay and Lesbian Night in the park every year.
Disneyland is separate-but-equal opportunity, it’s parallelism, a globe along which the lines of latitude never meet. Disneyland is a just world, an evenhanded declaration that we are all the same, except that we’re different, and isn’t difference wonderful? Wonderful in this democratic utopia of happy segregation. While Mickey Mouse’s House is filled with books and games and machinery, Minnie Mouse’s House next door is filled only with the paraphernalia of beauty and her lists of things to do for Mickey Mouse. In the Main Street Electrical Parade, which happens two times every evening, all the women are blondes, all of them, dozens of them, with the unavoidable exception of Snow White and the perhaps not conscious redheadedness of Cinderella’s Wicked Stepsisters.
It’s a Small World, supposedly the quintessential celebration of diversity, has virtually no Indians, only a cheerful little maiden next to a cheerful little cowboy. So we went to the ride’s own official toy store next door, and found that it has no It’s a Small World dolls. The store, like the ride, is “sponsored” by Mattel, as though Disneyland were some church-run charity largesse, and sells only Disney character dolls, a few other action figures, and Barbies. Lots of Barbies, Jamaican Barbie and Eskimo Barbie and Japanese Barbie, lined up on the shelf next to Army Barbie and Army Ken.
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