When on one of his flying visits to town, I asked Bob Stern why the area of the Celebration property designated for a “Workplace” still shows up on the site plan. It is there, he explained, because Michael Eisner feels that the public has lost sight of how things that appear in stores are actually manufactured, and so the idea of showcasing these manufacturing processes in some kind of visitor attraction is still a possibility. Don Killoren had earlier described the concept to me: “The Workplace would be more or less like a Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream factory where you might see the vanilla beans being mixed … and the making and baking of the cone through glass windows, and in the end you get your ice cream. So you would have had an educational experience through watching people work.” Like most residents, I found it difficult to envisage such a building (too Disney!) in Celebration. But if it is ever built for that purpose, it is fair to assume that it will not end up featuring the wide variety of Disney merchandise that is manufactured under some of the worst labor conditions and in some of the poorest countries in the world. Ben and Jerry’s socially conscious operations are a far cry from the Lion King’s squalid sweatshops in Asia and Central America.
While I was in Florida, an executive from McDonald’s was subletting my Manhattan apartment for the year. McDonald’s was paying my rent in New York, while I was paying rent to Disney in Florida. It sounds like one of these corporate tie-ins that have become a familiar, modern business practice. More than any company, Disney has pioneered the partnership tie-in by licensing its characters, stories, and songs to other companies for a fee. Established by Walt in the 1930s, this practice has been the company’s most lucrative by far. As it happens, Disney joined with McDonald’s in a ten-year exclusive global marketing partnership in 1997. These two names—the world’s largest retail food chain and the second largest entertainment-media conglomerate—were now linked in global media advertising and trade. The result of that partnership could be viewed in places like the Keyhinge Toys factory in Da Nang City, Vietnam, where teenage women work seventy-hour weeks for as little as six cents an hour, making giveaway promotional toys—mostly Disney characters—for Happy Meals at McDonald’s. In May 1997, not long after the partnership agreement was signed, two hundred women fell ill, twenty-five collapsed, and three were hospitalized from acute exposure to acetone. Like many global sweatshops, the factory hosts appalling working conditions, and there is no health insurance coverage or compensation for these women toiling for near-starvation wages.
As a renter in Celebration, my ties to Disney/McDonald’s were, of course, entirely different from these Vietnamese workers, and yet I could not disconnect myself easily from the far-flung economic circuits that make our lives touch in the global economy. Even if you have no reason or inclination to favor their products, it is difficult to elude the worldwide reach of companies like Disney and McDonald’s. The Mouse and the Golden Arches are almost as ubiquitous on the earth’s crust as the Christian cross or the Muslim crescent. A thoroughgoing boycott of Disney products would be a keen challenge to the everyday consumer of popular entertainment. Disney-owned TV stations reach into almost every household in the United States. Disney-owned radio stations reach 123 million people each week, and one out of every four movie tickets is for a Disney or Disney-distributed film. About 86 million people worldwide pass through its theme park turnstiles, and a good portion of these tourists use its other vacation properties. That is not to mention the company’s vast empire of newspapers, magazines, and publishing companies, its educational products and sports interests, or its real estate, retail, and licensing activities, far and near.
The evening before I moved down to Celebration, I attended the Manhattan launch of a book I had edited about sweatshops in the garment industry. The Disney company comes under close scrutiny in the book, primarily for the miserable wages (less than 28 cents an hour) it paid Haitian workers to sew Lion King T-shirts, Pocahontas pajamas and 101 Dalmatians outfits, but also for its subcontractors’ abuse of factory workers in Burma, Indonesia, and China.14 For well over a year, the company had been the target of widespread condemnation by schoolchildren and clergy, in addition to labor unions and anti-sweatshop campaigners. Responding indifferently to this public criticism, the company had then been challenged internally by some of its large, socially conscious shareholders like the Presbyterian Church and the United Methodist Church. Eventually, Disney management declared that it would take steps to clean up its act: the company would reform its contract supplier system; issue a labor code of conduct, translated into local languages and posted in factories; authorize external audits and inspections at contract facilities; and clearly define the right of workers to organize. In a more telling sign, however, Disney allowed its chief subcontractor, H. H. Cutler, to pull out of Haiti in August 1997 (as it had earlier done with Burmese subcontractors) and move operations to China, where the media spotlight is less revealing. Instead of doing the right thing—staying put and improving the conditions of these workers—Disney joined the “race to the bottom” in which companies scour the globe for the very lowest wage levels.
In May, I taught a class about sweatshops to the school’s Upper 3 neighborhood. I described how the revolution in teenage fashion had changed the shape of the garment industry, encouraging the spread of sweatshops in poor countries around the world, where the counterparts of these students toiled. Of course, students wanted to know which companies were the worst offenders. One precocious boy in the front row insisted: “What about Disney?” The class froze in anticipation of my reply. Disney, I explained, was one of the many companies that did not have a great record in treating its workers well, and it was probably important for students who lived in this community to be informed about such matters. Sons and daughters of Disney executives might have more reason to care about how children of their own age suffered elsewhere to assemble the company’s product. I showed a video, Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti, produced by the members of the National Labor Committee who had helped uncover the terrible laboring and living conditions of Caribbean workers sewing Disney T-shirts. It was a harrowing film, and it ended with workers’ pleas to Disney to preserve their jobs and pay a living wage. This slight pay increase would have virtually no impact on retail prices, since the cost of their labor added a mere 11 cents to a garment sold in the United States for about $11. The workers in the film were astonished to learn the price tags of some of these garments.
The film’s closing credits noted that some of the workers may be penalized for appearing on camera. After the film ended, one boy in the front row held his hand high. “Did the workers lose their jobs, and, if so, did the film cause any of the workers to lose their jobs?” None of them lost their jobs as a result of the film, I told him, but when the subcontractor pulled out they were forced to find employment with other garment companies, no better or worse than Disney. Another boy followed the line of reasoning further. So could the film be a worthwhile educational tool even if it brought more distress to the workers? These were smart questions, and while they were partly intended to deflect attention from the poverty, they were not offered in a heartless way. They helped dissipate some of the obvious discomfort the film had generated in the room. Several students said they had heard about sweatshops, but had not imagined things could be so bad.
A few days later, I ran across Upper 3’s number-one heartthrob, Nick Riccardelli, always on the move and sporting the latest buzz cut and skate pants. Of those likely to be stirred to action by our class, Nick was the last sleek teen I would have bet on. So wrong. He told me he had enlisted some friends to hand out fliers about Disney sweatshops to visitors in the theme parks. They had been thrown out by security guards. Nick shrugged as if this was all in a day’s work and bustled off, lustrous and spry, in pursuit of those other things that make him tick.
13
LEARNING FROM CELEBRATION
“We’re not Stepford Wives, we still have problems, it’s just a nicer place to have problems.” —A
Celebration resident
In a moment of sly modesty, Walt Disney once shrugged off an inquiry about the significance of one of his films. “We just try to make a good picture. And then the professors come along and tell us what it means.” With my year in town drawing to an end, it was time to say what Celebration had meant to me, since most people agreed that Walt’s heirs had, at least, made a “good picture.” Indeed, virtually everyone who visited me in Celebration remarked that the place was like a movie set. It was a fairly obvious comment about a brand-new town, though model garden suburbs from an earlier era still exude the atmospheric quality of a theatrical set seventy years after they were built.1 These days, however, almost every encounter with the new is rendered familiar by translating it into a media reference. The landscapes of film and TV are now our common reference points, as definitively as the Bible had once been. So much of public and political life is staged for the benefit of media coverage that the artful dodges of PR, spin, backdropping, and soundbiting are widely understood among the non-expert populace. We take it for granted that there is a facade and also a behind-the-scenes. No surprise, then, that an equally common observation among visitors was that while Celebration may be Disney’s first genuinely unscripted product, there was still an unwritten script that its residents would feel some pressure to follow, as if they were unwittingly playing the role of cast members.
CELEBRATION’S OVER
I did not need to plow my way through the mountain of press clippings about Celebration to confirm that one film, above all, encapsulated the skeptical view of the town held by many outsiders. Bryan Forbes’s 1975 film adaptation of The Stepford Wives cropped up again and again in press accounts and in the prejudgments of visitors and locals. I suspect, rightly or wrongly, that some people who cite this film as a shorthand way of condemning high-end suburban life have not actually seen it. If so, I was among their number. It is a film whose significance has entered common currency, and so I assumed that I understood its meaning correctly, or at least the meaning it had acquired over time. At any rate, I decided early on not to view the film until near the end of my residence.
The Stepford Wives, as I discovered late in the day, is primarily a film about male opposition to early 1970s feminist ideas. In affluent Stepford, control over advanced biochemical and robotic technology allows men to reduce their wives to compliant, sexually acquiescent housewives, monstrously obsessed with cleaning their homes and gratifying their husband’s desires. Any career aspirations of Stepford wives, along with their efforts to organize consciousness-raising meetings, are technologically snuffed out. The film is a science-fiction variation on the genre of antisuburban satire, but its blunt commentary on male power is arguably its strongest story line. Somewhere along the road to the cliché file of public memory, the feminist angle had been pushed to the side. The film is usually cited as a morality tale about the dramatic effect that an upscale suburban environment has on the behavior of its residents. A too-perfect community runs the risk of suppressing what it is that makes us human. The “Stepford Wife” has come to represent the socially numbing, conformist mentality that is somehow automatically triggered among new residents of highly zoned suburban housing. As for the film’s particular relevance to Celebration, that was clear enough. When the nonconformist Joanna Eberhart confesses to a therapist her fears about being “changed,” she predicts: “My time is coming. There will be someone with my name, and she’ll cook and clean like crazy, but she won’t take pictures, and she won’t be me. She’ll be like one of these robots in Disneyland.”
It’s no surprise that the Stepford Wives label is bitterly resented among the women of Celebration. Not a few described encounters with tourists who asked them directly whether they felt like a Stepford Wife. It was not always easy to separate this awareness of being typecast from normal habits of self-presentation. One remarkably independent woman, who did not seem to correspond to the stereotype in any way, confessed to me that she always “tidied herself up” to pop down to the grocery store “just in case a tourist took a picture” of her. She wanted to “represent Celebration in a good light.” How did women, in general, respond to their roles in this community?
In my talks with couples, I found that women were generally less inclined to be “negative” in their opinions about Celebration, while their husbands often took pleasure in offering their own assessments of the community’s problems. I also found that men alone were likely to speak in the first person of their decision to move here or to buy a house, although this habit was more chronic among older couples. As in Stepford, Celebration had its share of wealthy, nonworking wives, with a retinue of home helpers on call, but in many more cases, the economic challenge of moving in and keeping up with monthly payments obliged female homemakers to seek outside work. If anything, when I ran into resentment relating to gender roles, it was directed by women at the spectacle of “idle” men around town, especially those who were wealthy enough to buy oodles of leisure time.
Could a town like Celebration be construed, Stepford-like, as part of a male conspiracy to rein in the womenfolk? In this well-trodden domain of male behavior, no such conjecture, however far-fetched, could be entirely dismissed. But it was less easy to make the case here. New Urban design is aimed, in part, at ensuring that suburban women are no longer compelled to serve as their children’s chauffeurs, nor are they required to be social prisoners in their own subdivision unit. With day-care, the school, and playgrounds all within walking distance, and with the prospect, eventually, of nearby work, this environment was intended to be much kinder on women’s schedules than a typical suburban setting. By contrast, the single-family dream homes of postwar suburbia had been built around the rigid gender role of domestic servitude. The supporting highway system was constructed to meet the assumed transportation needs of male breadwinner commuters. With the rise of the dual-income family, the undue pressure on women to cope with this ill-adapted environment was often linked to “social problems” like the latchkey child, the dysfunctional family, high divorce rates, and even the erosion of middle-class security. If this compact, postsuburban town was designed to reinforce the family bonds, it did so, in part, simply by making women’s lives easier. In addition, the mixed-income and intergenerational makeup of the Celebration population yielded far from uniform expectations of male and female behavior regarding work and social roles. As for the single parents, almost all women, the gruesome label of the Stepford Wife was especially difficult to stomach.
The week I rented The Stepford Wives, The Truman Show, filmed in Seaside, started its run in the downtown theater and instantly sparked discussion among residents. Celebration was being mentioned regularly in reviews of the new film, and residents were once again on the defensive. Peter Weir’s film, with its parable about the media-scripted life of an idealized small American town, promised another round of Celebration bashing. According to a New York Times review, Celebration was “where Truman Burbank would have fit in without changing a thing.” Unlike Seaside, the reviewer pointed out, Celebration really did have lawns for Trumans to sweat over and an air of predictability that the virtuoso resort town did not exude.2 Offended by such comments, many Celebrationites might still have envied the use that Seaside made of the money it received for serving as the film’s backdrop—to help build a charter school.
In the film itself, it’s the women, once again, who are causing trouble. Truman’s wife, Meryl, drops her role and his sweetheart, Karen, breaks the rules of the script, inspiring the most surveilled person in TV history to outwit Christof, the controlling, patriarch producer of the show, and free himself from the artificial confines of Seahaven. For thirty years, each detail of his daily life had been available around the clock to viewers all over the world. Truman had been a model of normality in a world where norms exist only in the form of statistics, not flesh and blood. Christof informs Truman that he was more real and truthful a person on a TV set than he will be outside of Seahaven. The TV rati
ngs confirm it. Along the way, he had to become the first child to be legally adopted by a corporation in order to smooth over any questions about his civil rights.
At the end of a century of well-earned concern about government and corporate surveillance of individuals, The Truman Show carries a ponderous message. Surveillance in the form of media entertainment may prove to be one of the most effective forms of social control. Forget Big Brother, the film tells us. The media corporations do a much more efficient job than government institutions of managing the emotions, aspirations, and disquiet of large populations. More often than not, it is their treatment of real life, not fiction, that commands the largest audiences, craving ever greater exposure of neighbors and nobodies alike. Hence the explosion of genres—talk shows, infotainment, tabloid news, home videos—that scorn any boundaries between public and private life, between raw reality and stage scenery. The Truman Show is a simple, if laborious, extension of this idea. The more chilling sequel played itself out in the impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill. There, the media’s compulsive inquiry into Bill Clinton’s overpublicized private dalliances was finally outmatched in zeal by a right-wing crusade to turn personal behavior into a litmus test of public office.
Celebration’s insider humor was often Trumanesque. Residents were all too aware of the outside perception of them as controlled actors in a movie set, and they had their own way of processing and putting to use this stereotype. One example was another punlike saying that I occasionally heard around town: “Celebration’s Over.” Depending on the speaker and the context, it had at least two different meanings. The phrase could be used, for example, as a sympathetic comment about some mishap that had changed a resident’s perceptions of the town. In other words, the good life in Celebration had simply been an elaborately staged illusion, and now the show had ended, or, as Porky Pig from the Looney Tunes put it, “That’s All Folks!” Alternately, “Celebration’s Over” could be used to urge others to act in a mature fashion. In other words, the onset of daily problems had dispelled the hoopla surrounding the town and it was time to get real. In both cases, there was an implied comment about Disney’s withdrawal from the picture. The first lamented that the pixie dust had faded, or that it would do so very soon. The second was impatient for that day to come. There were several other shades of meaning too, among which the notion that the days were over when the original Disney vision of the town had meant something special to its pioneers.
The Celebration Chronicles Page 36
