----
![]()
' Donald Britton was born in San Angelo, Texas in 1951 and died in Los Angeles in 1994 after several years of living with AIDS. In 1975, he entered the PhD program in Literary Studies I was attending at American University in Washington, DC; he was interested in French symbolist poetry, Wallace Stevens, and Frank O'Hara and I felt pretty sure he'd been invited to the program to give me a playmate. We remained best friends until his death. In 1980, he moved to New York, where he worked for Kenward Elmslie for a while and hung out in a circle of writers that included Tim Dlugos, Brad Gooch, and Dennis Cooper, who published his chapbook Italy. After Donald moved to LA in the late eighties, he began copy-editing and writing occasonally for Art Issues, edited by Gary Kornblau, and encouraged me to write for Gary, who invited me to contribute a monthly column on popular art like movies and TV. By the time my essays for Art Issues were collected in Mythomania, Donald had died. I was very mindful of the fact that many of my friends had died before they had a chance to produce enough work for any kind of major collection, and it seemed to me that one way to respond to AIDS might be to break down the conventions of individual authorship a little, so I asked to include Donald's essay on "The Dark Side of Disneyland" in my book. It was only when I was copy-editing it in 1996 that I realized how much it had influenced my way of thinking about how to write about popular art. The American poet Reginald Shepherd has been working on preparation of an edition of Donald's collected poems.'-- BW
![]()
cel no. 1: You're standing in front of the putative "population sign" of the Old West mining town in Frontierland's Thunder Mountain Railroad. On it, you see a series of crossed-out census figures indicating that the town's inhabitants are being slowly but inexorably wiped out. The alarming implication is that they've all perished on the very runaway train you are about to board. You ask yourself: Why is it necessary for a roller-coaster ride to go to the trouble, even in this mild and indirect way, to create the impression that the experience might kill you?
![]()
cel no. 2: You're standing in the mock graveyard that you must pass through while on line for the Haunted Mansion. Here are the crypts of Trudy Departed, M.T. Tomb, U.R. Gone, I.M. Mortal, Ray N. Carnation, and others whose names punningly anticipate the ghosts and ghouls you will encounter within. You also find tombstones with creepily crude rhymed inscriptions like, "Here Lies Brother Fred; Great Big Rock Fell On His Head" and "R.I.P. Edgar R. Bender; He Rode To Glory On A Fender." As in the elaborate but decidedly unfrightening Haunted Mansion itself, you can't help wondering: Why are they going to all this effort to make human death appear as a corny, unreal joke?
![]()
cel no. 3: You're nearing the near-catastrophic final moment of Star Tours. You've just been propelled on a dizzying intergalactic joy ride. The spacecraft you've been riding in jerks to a sudden halt—narrowly avoiding a crash with a moving truck marked "fuel" that explodes into flames. You find yourself thinking: Isn't it just a little odd, at Disneyland, to find millions of dollars of engineering and special effects lavished on a state-of-the-art ride whose primary achievement is that it produces not simply an exceedingly realistic sensation of a journey through outer space, but the very palpable illusion that you are about to die—and violently and senselessly at that?
![]()
As these examples suggest, one doesn't have to look hard to see that there is a dark, even somewhat sinister side to Disneyland which is as much a part of the total experience as its well-scrubbed optimism and unrelenting good cheer. In counterpoint to its more obvious sweetness and light, throughout the park one finds evidence of a profoundly morbid preoccupation with death, violence, and human decay. Some might say that the presence of a few somber notes is a dramatic device to provide contrast, to accentuate and intensify the prevailing sunniness. But the fact is, Disneyland confronts us so frequently with images depicting death and its terrors that, though the images themselves are never really terrifying (except to small children), they are clearly crucial to what this particular Magic Kingdom is all about.
----It is important to remember that Disneyland is no more an accurate anthology of the fairy tales and cultural myths it exploits as subject matter than it is your average thrill-a-minute amusement park. It is, rather, a highly manipulative, programmed environment with a distinct vision of its own to convey. We would come closer to the truth by saying that fairy tales (and other similarly structured narratives throughout the park) are the materials Disneyland uses to express what can be called its cartoon sensibility. This is a sensibility predicated first and foremost upon the infinite elasticity of pictorial space as embodied in cartoon animation. Indeed, the generative principle at work in Disneyland is not the fairy tale at all, but the cartoon—or more precisely, the attempt to translate into three dimensions the exhilarating ductility of time and space that can be approximated in cartoon illusionism. To understand the curiously demented messages Disneyland communicates on the subject of death, you must look closely at the manifestations of this principle throughout the park. What you see is that representations of death at Disneyland express a fundamental contradiction in the park's doomed project: to bring two discrete realities—the biological, time-bound world of the human being arid the artificial, timeless world of cartoons—so close that they actually touch.
![]()
----But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, it will be helpful to narrow our focus a bit. I'd like to concentrate on the questions raised by two of Disneyland's most puzzling but telling moments. The first question involves the symbolic content of a paradigmatic Disneyland ride, and the ways it explicitly enacts and defines Disneyland's central thematic concerns: Why is the main character depicted in the Snow White ride not the pure and innocent Snow White, but the Wicked Queen who tries to kill her with a poisoned apple?
----The answer to this question will take us only to the border of understanding, not across. In the second part of this essay, we'll push farther, and probe the way Disneyland's themes fit into the implicit conceptual structure that informs Disneyland as a whole. We will ask: Why is the reverential museum-style exhibition devoted to Walt Disney on Main Street usa paired with the rather freakish audio animatronic resurrection of the most famous assassination victim in American history—Abraham, Lincoln?
----What I hope will emerge is a deepened and more complex response to Disneyland, and especially an appreciation for what makes Disneyland uniquely Disneyland: the willful and poignantly perverse effort to make life into a cartoon.
The storybook rides of Fantasyland are the emotional core of Disneyland. Updated and technologically refined over the years, these rides were among the park's earliest attractions, directly inspired by the Disney animated films whose financial success made Disneyland possible in the first place.
----While all the storybook rides are remarkably well-crafted spatial sequences—positively the ne plus ultra of what might be called kinetic, participatory sculpture—they vary significantly in their individual approaches to narrative. Some, like Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio's Daring Journey, are enchanting but awkward multimedia hybrids: three-dimensional illustrated tours of highlights from their cartoon originals, which in turn are fractured and distorted variants of their literary or fairy-tale sources, which in turn are variants themselves, etc. Other rides use characters and visual references from their movie versions only as pretexts for creating quasi-narrative environments and spectacles. They abandon linear plot altogether, fabricating instead a continuum of symbolic and highly-charged scenic tableaux formally more appropriate to a ride than to a story.
![]()
----Snow White's Scary Adventures is the most successful of the pure "ride" rides. It orchestrates fragmentary elements from its cartoon source into an entirely unique new whole, with a logic and momentum of its own. The ride thrusts you directly into the fiction: You aren't told a story, you are the story, you are Snow White. But the reason Snow White's Scary Adventures is the quintessential Disneyland ride is that its core conflict is the primary energizing drama of Disneyland itself: the threat to youth and beauty by old age and death.
----Significantly, the drama starts to unfold even before you have set foot in one of the little buggies that carry you to the cottage in the forest where Snow White lives with her Dwarfs. It begins in the little square near the main gate of Fantasyland, just outside Sleeping Beauty's Castle. Looking up at the second-floor window above and to the left of the ride's entrance, you are startled to see heavy curtains being drawn slowly, deliberately apart. Standing at the window, surveying unsuspecting tourists in the square below with an ominous gaze, is the beautiful Wicked Queen from Disney's animated version of the Snow White story. She pauses several seconds. Then, having apparently seen enough, she snaps the curtains shut; or rather, they close of their own accord, as if under the influence of a spell. The whole process is repeated a few minutes later, and at regular intervals throughout the day.
----Most visitors probably don't notice this little performance, which is all the more pleasurable for being unexpected. But it is more than a gratuitous bit of theater, or a preview of coming attractions. In a truly novel way, the Wicked Queen's surprise appearance sets the stage dramatically for our imaginative engagement with the ride. When we find ourselves coming under the scrutiny of her furtive glare, we ourselves are being cast in the role of the cartoon Snow White—secretly observed and menaced by a malevolent force. Once inside the ride, we realize even more fully that we are to identify ourselves with the Snow White character. As the ride is structured, once the character of Snow White is established, she disappears from the ensuing action as a depicted figure. In the void created, we ourselves enter the simulated cartoon created by the ride. We become the ones pursued by the Wicked Queen. Snow White's scary adventures happen to us. It is our lives that are in mortal danger.
![]()
----Considering Disneyland's sugar-coated reputation, the Snow White ride is exceptionally graphic about the Queen's murderous plans for her intended victim. It devotes a permanent installation at the entrance—replete with gargoyles, skulls, serpents, and other stock horror effects—just to illustrate the recipe for the fatal elixir the Queen will prepare for Snow White: One taste and the victim's eyes/ will dose forever / in the Sleeping Death. Now "Sleeping Death" is pretty extreme language in a ride meant primarily for small children. No wonder the strongest memory I have of my first visit to Disneyland at age 6 is the unmitigated terror I experienced in Snow White's Scary Adventures. Yet even though the ride threatens us with a lurid death, and brings us repeatedly to the brink of the ultimate moment when the threat will be carried out, we never experience the worst. Within the conventions of the storybook-ride form, the threat of death is made immediate and real in every way except one: There are no consequences. The message conveyed is one we all want to hear: Death cannot touch us; we will always be safe.
----Let's return to the Wicked Queen in the window for a moment. Though her presence there is a prelude to the dramatic interaction we will experience in the ride, in the public space of the courtyard she is simultaneously inside and outside the fictive frame—not only a character playing a defined part within the Snow White tale, but also an emblem with a more generalized meaning. The Queen represents what, in Disneyland's terms, amounts to pure evil: mortality itself, the brute fact that we grow old and die. In Disneyland, wickedness may sometimes be a matter of moral corruption or some other form of degradation, but it almost always involves a threat of annihilation directed toward things young and vital. What makes the Wicked Queen wicked is her uncontrollable jealousy of Snow White's beauty and freshness. She is jealous because, as her Magic Mirror reveals, she is really a hideous witch, old and repulsive. She possesses through illusion what Snow White possesses m fact: the beauty of her youth. Enraged by the affront of the girl's beauty—a stinging reminder that she herself is subject to decay and death, that she will never regain the bloom of youth—the Queen vows to destroy Snow White. One bite of the apple, and Snow White, like Eve, will taste the terrible knowledge of suffering and death.
----Of course, when you're in the ride, so much happens so quickly that you don't have a chance to dwell on these motivations. What you experience is the dramatic conflict reduced to its simplest terms: the Wicked Queen-witch's effort to get Snow White— i.e., you—to eat a poisoned apple. The ride is played out through a series of vivid hallucinatory scenes. In one, we enter a pestilential dungeon where the fountains flow with blood and the slain bodies of the Queen's past victims have rotted to skeletons in their futile attempts to escape. Over and over again, with the repetitive insistence of a nightmare, the figure of the witch tries to thrust the deadly apple into our hands. With each lurch of our mechanized buggies, we escape her clutches, only to encounter the hag again. The cartoon of which we're the star is a desperate attempt to elude the witch and, symbolically, thwart death—to remain beautiful and young forever.
![]()
----In the Snow White ride that's precisely what we do. The ride's wild finale has our friends the Dwarfs scrambling to prevent the witch, who is perched on a crag above our heads, from crashing a huge boulder on top of us. The rocks quiver, the music swells, the witch cackles . . . we're done for. Then boom! Suddenly we burst into the light through the final door, and everything's ok; it was all a bad dream. The ride is over. As we exit, we see a huge image of a lavishly illustrated storybook page which, in a non sequitur to end all non sequiturs, announces: And they lived happily ever after.
----Odder still, the illustration shows Snow White dancing in the arms of her handsome Prince. This makes no sense in conventional narrative terms because the Prince doesn't appear in the ride. But, as it turns out, the ride is not Snow White's story anyway, it's our story, the cartoon of how we faced up to the evil forces deployed in vast array to destroy us, to deprive us of our youth and beauty—and won.
----All of Disneyland, in fact, is a place where we become the heroes of highly structured cartoon-like fantasies about overcoming, neutralizing, or denying our own mortality. Here, we are all Snow White, shadowed by—yet protected from—death. The Wicked Queen peering down at us from her window can plot our doom all she wants, can summon a host of evil powers to inflict the mortal blow, but in the cartoon wish-fulfillment logic that reigns at Disney-land, she will never succeed. Like Pinocchio, we'll be sneezed from the belly of Monstro the whale; or like Sleeping Beauty, awakened by a kiss. Even if, like Mr. Toad, we die and go to Hell, we'll spring back to life when our buggy emerges from the darkness of a world whose wonders and demons can't harm us. For here we have escaped to a world beyond corrosion and death. Here, or so Disneyland would have us imagine, we are immortal.
True to the spirit of their fairy- and folk-tale sources, Snow White's Scary Adventures and other Fantasyland rides at Disney-land portray the perils of being a living, time-bound mortal as a conflict between adult tormentors and child victims. The rides typically cast us in the role of children pursued by grown-ups who would harm us. In fleeing from the Wicked Queen, or the carnival puppeteer Stromboli in Pinocchio, or Captain Hook in Peter Pan, or the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, we attempt to elude vicious adults who wish to murder us ("Off with her head!") or fatally ensnare us in their degenerate schemes. At Disneyland, children don't become adults; rather, adults kill children. Frightened and alone, the child's only allies are imaginary creatures like fairies and gnomes and, of course, friendly forest animals (and the occasional insect). Yet in ride after ride, the child emerges triumphant and unscathed.
----Clearly the brute facts of human temporal and biological existence are issues distressing to the presiding ethos of Disneyland. Indeed, much of the poignancy of Disneyland derives from its heroically perverse effort not merely to simulate but to actualize a kind of counter-reality, predicated on an imagined point in childhood before we developed an adult awareness of our own mortality—a world outside of time, beyond the reach of natural laws, exempt from pain and loss and dying. In short, the world of the cartoon.
![]()
----That Disneyland is a place where cartoons "come to life" is a cliché, but one worth examining. Ever since Disneyland's beginnings—and this is especially true today—not all the attractions have been directly based on the animated products of the Disney studios. Nevertheless, a cartoon sensibility—a liberating sense of the limitless malleability of pictorial space, a freedom to render anything and everything that can be imagined as if it actually existed—has been and remains the shaping principle and conceptual underpinning of Disneyland.
----As a formal category of illustration, cartoons have traditionally played fast and loose with conventional representation. Artists were fracturing and reshaping recognizable reality in cartoons for humorous or satirical effect long before technology made it possible for painted figures to move when projected on a screen. With the advent of cartoon animation, a new kind of canvas was created, no longer pictorially inert, upon which illustrated figures not only materialized but interacted within a depicted spatial environment. A single picture once created could be sustained in a succession of images over time, and the images themselves manipulated to convey figures engaged in an internally coherent dramatic action on a constantly metamorphosing visual field. Such a field and the forms it contains were and are, to all appearances, animated—literally inspirited, given breath, quickened with the seeming pulse of life.
----With virtually unlimited visual resources available to the animator, cartoons are able to create a self-contained world which, though clearly artificial, has a life all its own. This two-dimensional cartoon world is the paradigm that Disneyland aspires to create in three dimensions, as a kind of "living cartoon." But that oxymoron should give us pause. If static drawings are brought to life by cartoon animation, what is supposed to be happening when the animation itself becomes animated—when the illusion of life created in the cartoon steps out of the screen and into "real life"?
----Let's try to answer that question by considering animated cartoon characters and their world for a moment. They may have no physical being except as individual animation cels and pieces of film, but by a trick of perception we nonetheless observe them walk, talk, run (usually pursued by another character), and otherwise perform actions which are recognizable if not always realistic. But no matter how non-naturalistic or outrageous the image, we—and children in particular—tend to perceive it as an independently existing reality. What we see on a movie or tv screen could be, for all intents and purposes, actual or staged events photographed in a separate world—a peculiar and brightly lit one, inhabited by an odd assortment of creatures whom we often see from perspectives inaccessible to even the most sophisticated camera. This cartoon reality convinces us to perceive a character called Donald Duck as no more and no less a living, functioning agent in the world he inhabits than, say, Sam Spade is in his. But Sam Spade exists in a different relation to life than does Donald Duck. Sam Spade is a representation of a biological human being who could be alive in our world, or a world similar to our own, whereas Donald Duck could never be biologically alive. The world of Sam Spade is a world structured like our own, in which human death brings the individual's organic development, sensory capabilities, and personality to a permanent close. In his world, Sam Spade is at every moment susceptible to physical deterioration, suffering, disease, or violent death. But Donald Duck is, for want of a better term, immortal; having never been alive, he can never die.
![]()
----So the world of cartoon animation is a crazy place that is not just a caricature of our real world, but a wholly distinct restructuring of experience—a place where there is life but no death, forms of life but no living beings, and where things that don't materially exist can be real nonetheless. What Disneyland seeks to approximate as closely as possible is a permanent cartoon that doesn't dissolve like a phantasm when the projector is turned off. Disneyland's effort to build a self-contained "kingdom" where our spatial and temporal world can intersect and merge with the cartoon world amounts almost to a second Creation—a re-imagining, a reimaging of the world as it might be if death were impossible, if the taint of our biological existence could be cleansed and replaced by a pure, blood less, and deathless alternative life. God had clay when He molded Adam in His image and endowed him with a soul on the sixth day of Creation; Walt Disney had audioanimatronics.
----Of all the resources of stagecraft, puppetry, and engineering used at Disneyland to wrench the cartoon world off the screen and into the physical world, audioanimatronics is the most important. It was the first of many remarkable feats of state-of-the-art illusionism at Disneyland aimed at breaking down barriers between the aesthetically detached image and real phenomena—culminating in the pointlessly spectacular 3-D effects of Captain eo and the gut-wrenching simulated space ride in Star Tours. Walt Disney, who regarded audioanimatronics as one of his crowning achievements, had the inspiration for his invention one day when he became fascinated by a singing mechanical bird in a gold cage on his desk. Like a modern entrepreneurial version of Yeats' drowsy emperor from the Byzantium poems (who was kept awake by the song of an artificial bird on a golden bough), Disney set about developing a vast population of humanoid and anthropomorphic puppets electronically programmed to twitch and gesture in sync with a prerecorded vocal and musical soundtrack—as in Yeats' verse, with bodily forms not taken from "any natural thing," mouths with "no moisture and no breath," singing eternally of "what is past, passing or to come" (echoes of Disneyland's worlds of "yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy"). Disney reportedly joked that his automated performing figures were cheaper and more dependable—hence, more economically viable for Disneyland's needs—than real human actors.
----We are now in a position to tackle the question posed at the beginning of this essay: Why is the museum-like shrine to Walt Disney on Main Street usa at Disneyland paired with an audioanimatronic resurrection of the most famous assassination victim in American history—Abraham Lincoln? Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln is a seemingly innocuous display of schmaltzy Americana, which most tourists don't even bother to visit; yet in it we see perhaps the best example of the particular form of necromancy practiced at Disneyland, and what's behind all the magic of the so-called Magic Kingdom.
![]()
----An apostle of progress, Walt Disney took pride in all of the technological innovations showcased at Disneyland (and later at Epcot Center), but he obviously wished to be remembered for, and associated with, the development of audioanimatronics. One of his fondest projects was the creation of a Hall of Presidents, a patriotic necrophiliac's wet dream eventually built at Disney World in Florida, featuring audioanimatronic replicas of all the U.S. Presidents, simultaneously immortalized on stage in the ultimate collapsing of distinctions between time and space, life and death. Surprisingly, Abraham Lincoln, riot George Washington, was the first President to come in for high-tech exhumation—reanimated like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. Except Disney's Lincoln was never dead in the first place, but lovingly fabricated by Disney artisans "in glory of changeless metal" (Yeats again) and latex, using Lincoln's actual death mask as a model for sculpting the facial features.
----The choice of Lincoln as the first to be robotically recreated is no accident. Nothing at Disneyland is accidental. It is entirely consistent with Disneyland's overall effort to negate or neutralize death through immortality-granting scenarios which visitors are invited to enact, in various forms, again and again. His historical significance and greatness aside, Lincoln is the one President (apart from Washington) whom American children are taught to idolize with an almost religious reverence, and the one President (apart from J.F.K.) who is as famous for the very fact and manner of his death as for anything he did while alive. It is virtually impossible to conceive of Lincoln without revisiting the circumstances of his death. We don't think of Washington or Jefferson or Roosevelt as Presidents who are dead in the same way Lincoln is imprinted on our minds as a President who died. That's what makes it all the more eerie and startling to encounter an un-dead Lincoln as we do at Disneyland.
![]()
----As we sit respectfully in the darkened theater being lectured by a motorized mannequin, we begin to realize that what we're meant to see is not an actor impersonating Lincoln, nor even a mechanized clone purporting to represent the real Lincoln—but an altogether new and improved kind of Lincoln. This is a Lincoln who has stepped out of a cartoon of American history—the same cartoon reality of Donald Duck, where there is no life and no death, only the ceaseless repetition of gestures without motives, actions without consequences. Strictly speaking, we are not even being asked to imagine that we have been transported back in time to hear an address by Lincoln; there is no dramatic situation or fictive context whatsoever, just Lincoln himself, big as life, palpably real but not alive. Disney's Mr. Lincoln materializes in our present moment from a no-time which is at once all times and beyond the reach of time, a moment of pure imagining—an eternally existing possibility, like heaven. This Lincoln's presence brings us into contact, however briefly, with a distinct other world—not a fictional world depicting life as it might have been if Lincoln had never been killed, but a real world, a cartoon reality in which Lincoln could not, have, been killed.
----Disneyland itself clearly was conceived as an attempt to embody such a world, or at least create an appropriate milieu in which the cartoon world and ours could overlap. For Walt Disney, it was evidently not enough merely to give us glimpses of that world on a movie screen; he wanted to enter it, to experience the bloodless immortality of created images. In Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, he attempts the ultimate fulfillment of the promise of animation: to raise the dead. The placement of the Walt Disney Museum next to Mr. Lincoln strongly suggests that Disney wanted to be forever identified as chief artificer of this feat—assuring himself a kind of personal immortality as a manufacturer of marvels, a beneficent ruler-magician in whose kingdom death holds no sway. Yet at the heart of Disneyland is a wish even more impossible and sad than the defeat of death: a wish to exist in a cartoon outside of time, a wondrous artificial America in winch nothing can ever be lost, where all times, places, and cultures exist side by side, where flowers are always blooming and children can't grow old and the icons children are taught to venerate, like Lincoln, can't die. If our mortality prevents us from actually living in that world, Disneyland employs enormous ingenuity in showing us not only what it looks like, but how it feels. This is the true dark side of Disneyland: Our contact with the cartoon realm suggests that our own lives are rather paltry things, inferior to mere figments—that there is something shameful about our very biological existence.
----But there is an ennobling side to all of this as well. For Disneyland is also an enormously complex work of art that memorializes forms of thinking, feeling, and perceiving we no longer remember and can never reexperience. Here, bodied forth before our eyes, is the wish-fulfillment world in which, as children, we once believed, without knowing we believed. In striving at every turn to obliterate all distinctions between the real and the imagined, the actual and the possible, Disneyland disarms our adult responses and places us once more in the position of children, uncritically alive to any source of pleasure, excitement, and instruction, without drawing lines between fact arid fantasy. In doing so, Disneyland seeks to resurrect— to reanimate and make immortal—what time, in the non-cartoon world, destroys. The fact that Disneyland comes so close to achieving this ambition, yet fails so absolutely, is what makes it a much more profound and sadder experience than its surface merriment belies. The "happiest place on earth" is less an amusement park than a moving elegy for dead children.
May 1989
====
*
p.s. Hey. Very happy to revive this post made by d.l. and writer/brain/etc. Bernard Welt featuring the words of our late mutual friend, the poet and critic Donald Britton. Enjoy, please. Thank you again years later, Bernard. It's looking more unlikely than I'd thought about me being able to do the p.s. tomorrow, so it'll have to be a wait and see situation. I'm still working from morning to dark on the film, and so it will likely be for the next while. Hope all of you guys are doing well. I'll see you soon, and the blog will see you (with a new -- as opposed to rerun -- post) tomorrow.
' Donald Britton was born in San Angelo, Texas in 1951 and died in Los Angeles in 1994 after several years of living with AIDS. In 1975, he entered the PhD program in Literary Studies I was attending at American University in Washington, DC; he was interested in French symbolist poetry, Wallace Stevens, and Frank O'Hara and I felt pretty sure he'd been invited to the program to give me a playmate. We remained best friends until his death. In 1980, he moved to New York, where he worked for Kenward Elmslie for a while and hung out in a circle of writers that included Tim Dlugos, Brad Gooch, and Dennis Cooper, who published his chapbook Italy. After Donald moved to LA in the late eighties, he began copy-editing and writing occasonally for Art Issues, edited by Gary Kornblau, and encouraged me to write for Gary, who invited me to contribute a monthly column on popular art like movies and TV. By the time my essays for Art Issues were collected in Mythomania, Donald had died. I was very mindful of the fact that many of my friends had died before they had a chance to produce enough work for any kind of major collection, and it seemed to me that one way to respond to AIDS might be to break down the conventions of individual authorship a little, so I asked to include Donald's essay on "The Dark Side of Disneyland" in my book. It was only when I was copy-editing it in 1996 that I realized how much it had influenced my way of thinking about how to write about popular art. The American poet Reginald Shepherd has been working on preparation of an edition of Donald's collected poems.'-- BW*****
The Dark Side of Disneyland
by Donald Britton
cel no. 1: You're standing in front of the putative "population sign" of the Old West mining town in Frontierland's Thunder Mountain Railroad. On it, you see a series of crossed-out census figures indicating that the town's inhabitants are being slowly but inexorably wiped out. The alarming implication is that they've all perished on the very runaway train you are about to board. You ask yourself: Why is it necessary for a roller-coaster ride to go to the trouble, even in this mild and indirect way, to create the impression that the experience might kill you?
cel no. 2: You're standing in the mock graveyard that you must pass through while on line for the Haunted Mansion. Here are the crypts of Trudy Departed, M.T. Tomb, U.R. Gone, I.M. Mortal, Ray N. Carnation, and others whose names punningly anticipate the ghosts and ghouls you will encounter within. You also find tombstones with creepily crude rhymed inscriptions like, "Here Lies Brother Fred; Great Big Rock Fell On His Head" and "R.I.P. Edgar R. Bender; He Rode To Glory On A Fender." As in the elaborate but decidedly unfrightening Haunted Mansion itself, you can't help wondering: Why are they going to all this effort to make human death appear as a corny, unreal joke?
cel no. 3: You're nearing the near-catastrophic final moment of Star Tours. You've just been propelled on a dizzying intergalactic joy ride. The spacecraft you've been riding in jerks to a sudden halt—narrowly avoiding a crash with a moving truck marked "fuel" that explodes into flames. You find yourself thinking: Isn't it just a little odd, at Disneyland, to find millions of dollars of engineering and special effects lavished on a state-of-the-art ride whose primary achievement is that it produces not simply an exceedingly realistic sensation of a journey through outer space, but the very palpable illusion that you are about to die—and violently and senselessly at that?
As these examples suggest, one doesn't have to look hard to see that there is a dark, even somewhat sinister side to Disneyland which is as much a part of the total experience as its well-scrubbed optimism and unrelenting good cheer. In counterpoint to its more obvious sweetness and light, throughout the park one finds evidence of a profoundly morbid preoccupation with death, violence, and human decay. Some might say that the presence of a few somber notes is a dramatic device to provide contrast, to accentuate and intensify the prevailing sunniness. But the fact is, Disneyland confronts us so frequently with images depicting death and its terrors that, though the images themselves are never really terrifying (except to small children), they are clearly crucial to what this particular Magic Kingdom is all about.
----It is important to remember that Disneyland is no more an accurate anthology of the fairy tales and cultural myths it exploits as subject matter than it is your average thrill-a-minute amusement park. It is, rather, a highly manipulative, programmed environment with a distinct vision of its own to convey. We would come closer to the truth by saying that fairy tales (and other similarly structured narratives throughout the park) are the materials Disneyland uses to express what can be called its cartoon sensibility. This is a sensibility predicated first and foremost upon the infinite elasticity of pictorial space as embodied in cartoon animation. Indeed, the generative principle at work in Disneyland is not the fairy tale at all, but the cartoon—or more precisely, the attempt to translate into three dimensions the exhilarating ductility of time and space that can be approximated in cartoon illusionism. To understand the curiously demented messages Disneyland communicates on the subject of death, you must look closely at the manifestations of this principle throughout the park. What you see is that representations of death at Disneyland express a fundamental contradiction in the park's doomed project: to bring two discrete realities—the biological, time-bound world of the human being arid the artificial, timeless world of cartoons—so close that they actually touch.
----But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, it will be helpful to narrow our focus a bit. I'd like to concentrate on the questions raised by two of Disneyland's most puzzling but telling moments. The first question involves the symbolic content of a paradigmatic Disneyland ride, and the ways it explicitly enacts and defines Disneyland's central thematic concerns: Why is the main character depicted in the Snow White ride not the pure and innocent Snow White, but the Wicked Queen who tries to kill her with a poisoned apple?
----The answer to this question will take us only to the border of understanding, not across. In the second part of this essay, we'll push farther, and probe the way Disneyland's themes fit into the implicit conceptual structure that informs Disneyland as a whole. We will ask: Why is the reverential museum-style exhibition devoted to Walt Disney on Main Street usa paired with the rather freakish audio animatronic resurrection of the most famous assassination victim in American history—Abraham, Lincoln?
----What I hope will emerge is a deepened and more complex response to Disneyland, and especially an appreciation for what makes Disneyland uniquely Disneyland: the willful and poignantly perverse effort to make life into a cartoon.
I
The storybook rides of Fantasyland are the emotional core of Disneyland. Updated and technologically refined over the years, these rides were among the park's earliest attractions, directly inspired by the Disney animated films whose financial success made Disneyland possible in the first place.
----While all the storybook rides are remarkably well-crafted spatial sequences—positively the ne plus ultra of what might be called kinetic, participatory sculpture—they vary significantly in their individual approaches to narrative. Some, like Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio's Daring Journey, are enchanting but awkward multimedia hybrids: three-dimensional illustrated tours of highlights from their cartoon originals, which in turn are fractured and distorted variants of their literary or fairy-tale sources, which in turn are variants themselves, etc. Other rides use characters and visual references from their movie versions only as pretexts for creating quasi-narrative environments and spectacles. They abandon linear plot altogether, fabricating instead a continuum of symbolic and highly-charged scenic tableaux formally more appropriate to a ride than to a story.
----Snow White's Scary Adventures is the most successful of the pure "ride" rides. It orchestrates fragmentary elements from its cartoon source into an entirely unique new whole, with a logic and momentum of its own. The ride thrusts you directly into the fiction: You aren't told a story, you are the story, you are Snow White. But the reason Snow White's Scary Adventures is the quintessential Disneyland ride is that its core conflict is the primary energizing drama of Disneyland itself: the threat to youth and beauty by old age and death.
----Significantly, the drama starts to unfold even before you have set foot in one of the little buggies that carry you to the cottage in the forest where Snow White lives with her Dwarfs. It begins in the little square near the main gate of Fantasyland, just outside Sleeping Beauty's Castle. Looking up at the second-floor window above and to the left of the ride's entrance, you are startled to see heavy curtains being drawn slowly, deliberately apart. Standing at the window, surveying unsuspecting tourists in the square below with an ominous gaze, is the beautiful Wicked Queen from Disney's animated version of the Snow White story. She pauses several seconds. Then, having apparently seen enough, she snaps the curtains shut; or rather, they close of their own accord, as if under the influence of a spell. The whole process is repeated a few minutes later, and at regular intervals throughout the day.
----Most visitors probably don't notice this little performance, which is all the more pleasurable for being unexpected. But it is more than a gratuitous bit of theater, or a preview of coming attractions. In a truly novel way, the Wicked Queen's surprise appearance sets the stage dramatically for our imaginative engagement with the ride. When we find ourselves coming under the scrutiny of her furtive glare, we ourselves are being cast in the role of the cartoon Snow White—secretly observed and menaced by a malevolent force. Once inside the ride, we realize even more fully that we are to identify ourselves with the Snow White character. As the ride is structured, once the character of Snow White is established, she disappears from the ensuing action as a depicted figure. In the void created, we ourselves enter the simulated cartoon created by the ride. We become the ones pursued by the Wicked Queen. Snow White's scary adventures happen to us. It is our lives that are in mortal danger.
----Considering Disneyland's sugar-coated reputation, the Snow White ride is exceptionally graphic about the Queen's murderous plans for her intended victim. It devotes a permanent installation at the entrance—replete with gargoyles, skulls, serpents, and other stock horror effects—just to illustrate the recipe for the fatal elixir the Queen will prepare for Snow White: One taste and the victim's eyes/ will dose forever / in the Sleeping Death. Now "Sleeping Death" is pretty extreme language in a ride meant primarily for small children. No wonder the strongest memory I have of my first visit to Disneyland at age 6 is the unmitigated terror I experienced in Snow White's Scary Adventures. Yet even though the ride threatens us with a lurid death, and brings us repeatedly to the brink of the ultimate moment when the threat will be carried out, we never experience the worst. Within the conventions of the storybook-ride form, the threat of death is made immediate and real in every way except one: There are no consequences. The message conveyed is one we all want to hear: Death cannot touch us; we will always be safe.
----Let's return to the Wicked Queen in the window for a moment. Though her presence there is a prelude to the dramatic interaction we will experience in the ride, in the public space of the courtyard she is simultaneously inside and outside the fictive frame—not only a character playing a defined part within the Snow White tale, but also an emblem with a more generalized meaning. The Queen represents what, in Disneyland's terms, amounts to pure evil: mortality itself, the brute fact that we grow old and die. In Disneyland, wickedness may sometimes be a matter of moral corruption or some other form of degradation, but it almost always involves a threat of annihilation directed toward things young and vital. What makes the Wicked Queen wicked is her uncontrollable jealousy of Snow White's beauty and freshness. She is jealous because, as her Magic Mirror reveals, she is really a hideous witch, old and repulsive. She possesses through illusion what Snow White possesses m fact: the beauty of her youth. Enraged by the affront of the girl's beauty—a stinging reminder that she herself is subject to decay and death, that she will never regain the bloom of youth—the Queen vows to destroy Snow White. One bite of the apple, and Snow White, like Eve, will taste the terrible knowledge of suffering and death.
----Of course, when you're in the ride, so much happens so quickly that you don't have a chance to dwell on these motivations. What you experience is the dramatic conflict reduced to its simplest terms: the Wicked Queen-witch's effort to get Snow White— i.e., you—to eat a poisoned apple. The ride is played out through a series of vivid hallucinatory scenes. In one, we enter a pestilential dungeon where the fountains flow with blood and the slain bodies of the Queen's past victims have rotted to skeletons in their futile attempts to escape. Over and over again, with the repetitive insistence of a nightmare, the figure of the witch tries to thrust the deadly apple into our hands. With each lurch of our mechanized buggies, we escape her clutches, only to encounter the hag again. The cartoon of which we're the star is a desperate attempt to elude the witch and, symbolically, thwart death—to remain beautiful and young forever.
----In the Snow White ride that's precisely what we do. The ride's wild finale has our friends the Dwarfs scrambling to prevent the witch, who is perched on a crag above our heads, from crashing a huge boulder on top of us. The rocks quiver, the music swells, the witch cackles . . . we're done for. Then boom! Suddenly we burst into the light through the final door, and everything's ok; it was all a bad dream. The ride is over. As we exit, we see a huge image of a lavishly illustrated storybook page which, in a non sequitur to end all non sequiturs, announces: And they lived happily ever after.
----Odder still, the illustration shows Snow White dancing in the arms of her handsome Prince. This makes no sense in conventional narrative terms because the Prince doesn't appear in the ride. But, as it turns out, the ride is not Snow White's story anyway, it's our story, the cartoon of how we faced up to the evil forces deployed in vast array to destroy us, to deprive us of our youth and beauty—and won.
----All of Disneyland, in fact, is a place where we become the heroes of highly structured cartoon-like fantasies about overcoming, neutralizing, or denying our own mortality. Here, we are all Snow White, shadowed by—yet protected from—death. The Wicked Queen peering down at us from her window can plot our doom all she wants, can summon a host of evil powers to inflict the mortal blow, but in the cartoon wish-fulfillment logic that reigns at Disney-land, she will never succeed. Like Pinocchio, we'll be sneezed from the belly of Monstro the whale; or like Sleeping Beauty, awakened by a kiss. Even if, like Mr. Toad, we die and go to Hell, we'll spring back to life when our buggy emerges from the darkness of a world whose wonders and demons can't harm us. For here we have escaped to a world beyond corrosion and death. Here, or so Disneyland would have us imagine, we are immortal.
II
True to the spirit of their fairy- and folk-tale sources, Snow White's Scary Adventures and other Fantasyland rides at Disney-land portray the perils of being a living, time-bound mortal as a conflict between adult tormentors and child victims. The rides typically cast us in the role of children pursued by grown-ups who would harm us. In fleeing from the Wicked Queen, or the carnival puppeteer Stromboli in Pinocchio, or Captain Hook in Peter Pan, or the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, we attempt to elude vicious adults who wish to murder us ("Off with her head!") or fatally ensnare us in their degenerate schemes. At Disneyland, children don't become adults; rather, adults kill children. Frightened and alone, the child's only allies are imaginary creatures like fairies and gnomes and, of course, friendly forest animals (and the occasional insect). Yet in ride after ride, the child emerges triumphant and unscathed.
----Clearly the brute facts of human temporal and biological existence are issues distressing to the presiding ethos of Disneyland. Indeed, much of the poignancy of Disneyland derives from its heroically perverse effort not merely to simulate but to actualize a kind of counter-reality, predicated on an imagined point in childhood before we developed an adult awareness of our own mortality—a world outside of time, beyond the reach of natural laws, exempt from pain and loss and dying. In short, the world of the cartoon.
----That Disneyland is a place where cartoons "come to life" is a cliché, but one worth examining. Ever since Disneyland's beginnings—and this is especially true today—not all the attractions have been directly based on the animated products of the Disney studios. Nevertheless, a cartoon sensibility—a liberating sense of the limitless malleability of pictorial space, a freedom to render anything and everything that can be imagined as if it actually existed—has been and remains the shaping principle and conceptual underpinning of Disneyland.
----As a formal category of illustration, cartoons have traditionally played fast and loose with conventional representation. Artists were fracturing and reshaping recognizable reality in cartoons for humorous or satirical effect long before technology made it possible for painted figures to move when projected on a screen. With the advent of cartoon animation, a new kind of canvas was created, no longer pictorially inert, upon which illustrated figures not only materialized but interacted within a depicted spatial environment. A single picture once created could be sustained in a succession of images over time, and the images themselves manipulated to convey figures engaged in an internally coherent dramatic action on a constantly metamorphosing visual field. Such a field and the forms it contains were and are, to all appearances, animated—literally inspirited, given breath, quickened with the seeming pulse of life.
----With virtually unlimited visual resources available to the animator, cartoons are able to create a self-contained world which, though clearly artificial, has a life all its own. This two-dimensional cartoon world is the paradigm that Disneyland aspires to create in three dimensions, as a kind of "living cartoon." But that oxymoron should give us pause. If static drawings are brought to life by cartoon animation, what is supposed to be happening when the animation itself becomes animated—when the illusion of life created in the cartoon steps out of the screen and into "real life"?
----Let's try to answer that question by considering animated cartoon characters and their world for a moment. They may have no physical being except as individual animation cels and pieces of film, but by a trick of perception we nonetheless observe them walk, talk, run (usually pursued by another character), and otherwise perform actions which are recognizable if not always realistic. But no matter how non-naturalistic or outrageous the image, we—and children in particular—tend to perceive it as an independently existing reality. What we see on a movie or tv screen could be, for all intents and purposes, actual or staged events photographed in a separate world—a peculiar and brightly lit one, inhabited by an odd assortment of creatures whom we often see from perspectives inaccessible to even the most sophisticated camera. This cartoon reality convinces us to perceive a character called Donald Duck as no more and no less a living, functioning agent in the world he inhabits than, say, Sam Spade is in his. But Sam Spade exists in a different relation to life than does Donald Duck. Sam Spade is a representation of a biological human being who could be alive in our world, or a world similar to our own, whereas Donald Duck could never be biologically alive. The world of Sam Spade is a world structured like our own, in which human death brings the individual's organic development, sensory capabilities, and personality to a permanent close. In his world, Sam Spade is at every moment susceptible to physical deterioration, suffering, disease, or violent death. But Donald Duck is, for want of a better term, immortal; having never been alive, he can never die.
----So the world of cartoon animation is a crazy place that is not just a caricature of our real world, but a wholly distinct restructuring of experience—a place where there is life but no death, forms of life but no living beings, and where things that don't materially exist can be real nonetheless. What Disneyland seeks to approximate as closely as possible is a permanent cartoon that doesn't dissolve like a phantasm when the projector is turned off. Disneyland's effort to build a self-contained "kingdom" where our spatial and temporal world can intersect and merge with the cartoon world amounts almost to a second Creation—a re-imagining, a reimaging of the world as it might be if death were impossible, if the taint of our biological existence could be cleansed and replaced by a pure, blood less, and deathless alternative life. God had clay when He molded Adam in His image and endowed him with a soul on the sixth day of Creation; Walt Disney had audioanimatronics.
----Of all the resources of stagecraft, puppetry, and engineering used at Disneyland to wrench the cartoon world off the screen and into the physical world, audioanimatronics is the most important. It was the first of many remarkable feats of state-of-the-art illusionism at Disneyland aimed at breaking down barriers between the aesthetically detached image and real phenomena—culminating in the pointlessly spectacular 3-D effects of Captain eo and the gut-wrenching simulated space ride in Star Tours. Walt Disney, who regarded audioanimatronics as one of his crowning achievements, had the inspiration for his invention one day when he became fascinated by a singing mechanical bird in a gold cage on his desk. Like a modern entrepreneurial version of Yeats' drowsy emperor from the Byzantium poems (who was kept awake by the song of an artificial bird on a golden bough), Disney set about developing a vast population of humanoid and anthropomorphic puppets electronically programmed to twitch and gesture in sync with a prerecorded vocal and musical soundtrack—as in Yeats' verse, with bodily forms not taken from "any natural thing," mouths with "no moisture and no breath," singing eternally of "what is past, passing or to come" (echoes of Disneyland's worlds of "yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy"). Disney reportedly joked that his automated performing figures were cheaper and more dependable—hence, more economically viable for Disneyland's needs—than real human actors.
----We are now in a position to tackle the question posed at the beginning of this essay: Why is the museum-like shrine to Walt Disney on Main Street usa at Disneyland paired with an audioanimatronic resurrection of the most famous assassination victim in American history—Abraham Lincoln? Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln is a seemingly innocuous display of schmaltzy Americana, which most tourists don't even bother to visit; yet in it we see perhaps the best example of the particular form of necromancy practiced at Disneyland, and what's behind all the magic of the so-called Magic Kingdom.
----An apostle of progress, Walt Disney took pride in all of the technological innovations showcased at Disneyland (and later at Epcot Center), but he obviously wished to be remembered for, and associated with, the development of audioanimatronics. One of his fondest projects was the creation of a Hall of Presidents, a patriotic necrophiliac's wet dream eventually built at Disney World in Florida, featuring audioanimatronic replicas of all the U.S. Presidents, simultaneously immortalized on stage in the ultimate collapsing of distinctions between time and space, life and death. Surprisingly, Abraham Lincoln, riot George Washington, was the first President to come in for high-tech exhumation—reanimated like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. Except Disney's Lincoln was never dead in the first place, but lovingly fabricated by Disney artisans "in glory of changeless metal" (Yeats again) and latex, using Lincoln's actual death mask as a model for sculpting the facial features.
----The choice of Lincoln as the first to be robotically recreated is no accident. Nothing at Disneyland is accidental. It is entirely consistent with Disneyland's overall effort to negate or neutralize death through immortality-granting scenarios which visitors are invited to enact, in various forms, again and again. His historical significance and greatness aside, Lincoln is the one President (apart from Washington) whom American children are taught to idolize with an almost religious reverence, and the one President (apart from J.F.K.) who is as famous for the very fact and manner of his death as for anything he did while alive. It is virtually impossible to conceive of Lincoln without revisiting the circumstances of his death. We don't think of Washington or Jefferson or Roosevelt as Presidents who are dead in the same way Lincoln is imprinted on our minds as a President who died. That's what makes it all the more eerie and startling to encounter an un-dead Lincoln as we do at Disneyland.
----As we sit respectfully in the darkened theater being lectured by a motorized mannequin, we begin to realize that what we're meant to see is not an actor impersonating Lincoln, nor even a mechanized clone purporting to represent the real Lincoln—but an altogether new and improved kind of Lincoln. This is a Lincoln who has stepped out of a cartoon of American history—the same cartoon reality of Donald Duck, where there is no life and no death, only the ceaseless repetition of gestures without motives, actions without consequences. Strictly speaking, we are not even being asked to imagine that we have been transported back in time to hear an address by Lincoln; there is no dramatic situation or fictive context whatsoever, just Lincoln himself, big as life, palpably real but not alive. Disney's Mr. Lincoln materializes in our present moment from a no-time which is at once all times and beyond the reach of time, a moment of pure imagining—an eternally existing possibility, like heaven. This Lincoln's presence brings us into contact, however briefly, with a distinct other world—not a fictional world depicting life as it might have been if Lincoln had never been killed, but a real world, a cartoon reality in which Lincoln could not, have, been killed.
----Disneyland itself clearly was conceived as an attempt to embody such a world, or at least create an appropriate milieu in which the cartoon world and ours could overlap. For Walt Disney, it was evidently not enough merely to give us glimpses of that world on a movie screen; he wanted to enter it, to experience the bloodless immortality of created images. In Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, he attempts the ultimate fulfillment of the promise of animation: to raise the dead. The placement of the Walt Disney Museum next to Mr. Lincoln strongly suggests that Disney wanted to be forever identified as chief artificer of this feat—assuring himself a kind of personal immortality as a manufacturer of marvels, a beneficent ruler-magician in whose kingdom death holds no sway. Yet at the heart of Disneyland is a wish even more impossible and sad than the defeat of death: a wish to exist in a cartoon outside of time, a wondrous artificial America in winch nothing can ever be lost, where all times, places, and cultures exist side by side, where flowers are always blooming and children can't grow old and the icons children are taught to venerate, like Lincoln, can't die. If our mortality prevents us from actually living in that world, Disneyland employs enormous ingenuity in showing us not only what it looks like, but how it feels. This is the true dark side of Disneyland: Our contact with the cartoon realm suggests that our own lives are rather paltry things, inferior to mere figments—that there is something shameful about our very biological existence.
----But there is an ennobling side to all of this as well. For Disneyland is also an enormously complex work of art that memorializes forms of thinking, feeling, and perceiving we no longer remember and can never reexperience. Here, bodied forth before our eyes, is the wish-fulfillment world in which, as children, we once believed, without knowing we believed. In striving at every turn to obliterate all distinctions between the real and the imagined, the actual and the possible, Disneyland disarms our adult responses and places us once more in the position of children, uncritically alive to any source of pleasure, excitement, and instruction, without drawing lines between fact arid fantasy. In doing so, Disneyland seeks to resurrect— to reanimate and make immortal—what time, in the non-cartoon world, destroys. The fact that Disneyland comes so close to achieving this ambition, yet fails so absolutely, is what makes it a much more profound and sadder experience than its surface merriment belies. The "happiest place on earth" is less an amusement park than a moving elegy for dead children.
May 1989
====
*
p.s. Hey. Very happy to revive this post made by d.l. and writer/brain/etc. Bernard Welt featuring the words of our late mutual friend, the poet and critic Donald Britton. Enjoy, please. Thank you again years later, Bernard. It's looking more unlikely than I'd thought about me being able to do the p.s. tomorrow, so it'll have to be a wait and see situation. I'm still working from morning to dark on the film, and so it will likely be for the next while. Hope all of you guys are doing well. I'll see you soon, and the blog will see you (with a new -- as opposed to rerun -- post) tomorrow.