#260: Disney Adults

Down the corporate rabbit hole

There was some debate about how to smuggle the mushrooms into Disneyland. We’d chopped and stirred the contraband into melted chocolate and froze the mixture in an ice cube tray, but the resulting brown hunks knocking around a Ziploc still looked distinctly illegal. On our walk into the park, we joked about how we’d justify their entry—homemade “cookies” we used to bring to Disneyland as kids, etc—until our scheming became irrelevant because we were in without a peep.

Avi’s mushrooms hit on It’s a Small World and he appeared temporarily rattled before launching into a theory about the ride as post-war propaganda for America as global peacemaker¹—ironic, he noted, as Walt Disney was a documented Nazi-sympathizer. My brother came up shortly after on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, care of the smiling, three-foot-tall fiberglass statue that greeted us, and I came up an hour later in Frontierland, where I suddenly noticed the “wooden stakes” surrounding our enclosure were actually made of metal that had been carefully painted to resemble woodgrain.

The following three hours were some of the most frightening and fascinating I’ve ever spent on psychedelic drugs. As it turns out, the upside of tripping at Disneyland is identical to the downside: Disneyland is the weirdest place on Earth.

The first subject of our collective fixation were the trees—how some of them were real while others were fake. This threw the authenticity of everything else into question. Were the flowers real? The birds? When we discovered a wooden fixture painted to look like metal, further questions abounded: Why swap wood for metal and metal for wood? Why was every material painted to look like another? Our heads were on swivels. Nothing was as it seemed.

None of us had been to Disney in years, or went much as kids. We repeated details we’d read on the drive in about how the park was meticulously maintained: hitching posts repainted nightly to appear like new, chewing gum scraped off of pavement by custodians every day after closing, chipped handrails constantly being sanded and repainted. “The primary goal of the after-hours crew is to pursue Disney’s vision of an immaculate land free of the litter and grime of the outside world,” one blog read. On mushrooms, this work took on a sinister edge. Disney Magic was, by Disney’s own admission, produced only by sanding away all the friction of real life.

All three of us on Space Mountain, silent and petrified

We’d also read that these days every visitor to Disney parks was extensively surveilled and tracked “through a mix of MagicBands, biometric scans, and app-based location services” to “enhance your visit.” Soon we got to witness the phenomenon up close: Around the Indiana Jones ride, while walking through an artificial fog, my brother took a surreptitious hit of a vape. A few minutes later, while winding through the rails to get in line, a stiff, grinning parks employee held her hand out and looked directly at my brother. He handed her the vape and we walked on. Not a single word was exchanged.

Things came to a head around Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, when our running commentary about Disneyland as a fascist utopia gave way to an actual theatrical performance of fascism: The gun-wielding Stormtroopers stomped ominously through the area, occasionally led by Kylo Ren, who swept in to grill a girl in Minnie Mouse ears about the location of the Resistance. She giggled. We loitered near the painted concrete wall, reshaped to look like a five-story-tall rock face, and watched as children whooped and cheered at the display of militaristic musical theater. The Galactic Empire was heavily inspired by Nazi Germany, Avi reminded us, pointing at the giant red banner flag with a round, geometric insignia. Here Disney’s willingness to wield totalitarianism in the name of cheery entertainment was made literal.

Our mushroom trips melted away, appropriately, with a jumble of frozen Dibs in a red tub, which we passed around like a joint while sitting at a white metal table in California Adventure. Behind us loomed a massive “forced-perspective” mural of a Hollywood street. When it didn’t send us into a tailspin, we laughed with relief. We rode rollercoasters and finally screamed. We bought beers and a hot salty pretzel shaped like Mickey Mouse and FaceTimed our sister to make her jealous. We got soaked on the Grizzly River Run and squelched joyfully in our sneakers.

A few days before, I’d gotten my period, my first since Avi and I had started trying for a baby—this was 2022. As the sun set and the park was bathed in colorful luminescents, I watched kids’ eyes light up in delight and thought to myself, Having a kid will be fun. Suddenly my fear felt far away, buried next to our cynical political analysis. It felt better to see it all differently.

Disney’s duality

I’ve thought a fair bit about that trip to Disneyland in the years since. In particular, I’ve meditated on the way it was split into two acts: the first a haunted spectacle of American propaganda and the second a joyride through American kitsch. Both seem to capture something true about the modern Disney experience—or the modern American experience. Often caught between that which entertains and that which exploits and manipulates, I suspect many of us are “Disney adults” of another kind, if you swap out the context. But Disney, as an institution, remains our most scintillant display of American duplicity.

Now, as a mother of a two-year-old who occasionally watches Disney movies, I regularly confront this tension. Zootopia, our airplane movie of choice, is one of my favorite examples. Although we never bring headphones and thus only view it on mute, you don’t need to hear the movie to understand it as both extremely charming and heavily propagandized.

Zootopia is set in a modern capitalist city populated by animals and stars a plucky young rabbit who dreams of becoming a cop. Although she discovers the system is corrupt, she eventually redeems it by exemplifying a good cop capable of saving the day. There’s plenty to laugh at—the sloths working the DMV, the assembly line of rodents eating popsicles, the visual gag of a tiny bunny in a parking enforcement scooter. The overall absurdity of the animal kingdom behaving like Americans. Zootopia displays the trappings of Western modernity with glee: markets, advertising, finding purpose through work, managing one’s emotions “productively.” This is not just nefarious, it’s also what makes the movie fun.

This tension is present in almost every modern Disney movie. Pixar, Disney’s beloved and respected subsidiary, is one of the most effective pushers of American ideology through quirky storytelling. The heartwarming tale of toys existing within a consumer-product ecosystem; the energy-extracting monster corporation that’s redeemed through a better extraction method; purgatory and the afterlife reimagined as corporate bureaucracy; emotions cast as coworkers learning to cooperate efficiently. The underlying structure of Pixar movies is almost always the working levers of modern capitalistic America rendered silly and optimistic. The neoliberal curriculum is subtle but foundational.²

I’m using the term “propaganda” loosely here. It’s probably more accurate to think of modern Disney animators as both victims and mass reproducers of what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: our collective inability to imagine life outside of capitalism. It suffuses everything, even our fantasies. No doubt, and it should be noted, that Disney has employed and employs incredible artists. Avi and I rewatch Disney classics sometimes just to revel in the artwork, and the modern films are creative achievements in their own right. Still, we have a running joke that the premise of almost every Pixar movie is: “What if x were capitalists?”

Old Disney classics were obsessed with different political structures, especially monarchy, but were similarly embroiled in American ideology. Matt Roth’s 1996 social analysis of The Lion King, Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin for Jump Cut Magazine, entitled “A short history of Disney-fascism,” is an iconic contribution to the Disney-critical canon. He analyzes the queer-coding of villains like Usrula, Scar, and Jafar; the much-discussed paternalism; the covert racial allegories and winking references to the welfare state. Disney “presents a vision of adult society,” he writes. “The full contours of this vision are difficult to see. We have to look past the sheer brilliance of Disney animation—with its dramatic thunderstorms and kaleidoscopic musical numbers.” The same could be said of the parks.

The Parks

Disneyland visitors enter the park through “Main Street, U.S.A,” a shopping corridor modeled after the small towns of the early 1900s, like those of Walt Disney’s youth. Its surreal perfection—facades and hitching posts repainted nightly according to precise humidity levels—combined with its provincial charms create an idealized simulation of American history. The rest of the park aims for a similar flattening. As Dave Schneider wrote in TruthOut. “Disney World is an immense patchwork of medieval castles, colonial history, future technologies, dinosaurs, movies, animals and exotic destinations. Each of these elements is presented out of its context, and thus loses a large part of its original meaning. This is decontextualization.”

There’s something comforting about this glossy oversimplification—not just to children, but to adults. As one adult visitor notes on a popular Disney blog: “[Main Street] was a Victorian, turn-of-the-century setting better than anything that could have ever really existed. It was like being on the greatest movie set in the world except it was real! I was hooked!” This is the power of Disneyland, where the simulation is so totalizing it’s perceived as reality. As Jean Baudrillard famously wrote of the park in Simulation and Simulacra: “All [America’s] values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified.” The visitors are pacified, too.

Collage made using an illustration from The Art of Walt Disney by Christopher Finch

In several personal accounts of self-described “Disney Adults,” I found that they all mentioned this enrapturing quality of Disney parks. “I am not, and never have been, a person for whom joy really comes in consistent supply. But at Disney, it’s nothing less than an IV in my arm,” wrote EJ Dickson for Rolling Stone. For NBCNews, Jodi Eichler-Levine compared Adult-Disney fandom to religion: “For some people—both those who have another ‘traditional’ religion and those who don’t—the promise of magic at Disney and the feelings they get there are powerful. I’ve seen people cry at the fireworks. Many times.” Yes, Disney is “capitalism on steroids” with a shoddy corporate track record, she notes, “But it is also a storytelling company, which is why people invest so much in its worlds.”

The “magic” of Disneyland, it must be noted, is a heavily-regulated and draconianly-orchestrated corporate experience. Park employees, known fittingly as “cast members,” are beholden to strict dress and grooming codes, otherwise known as “the Disney Look”: no piercings other than ears, no long nails, no big tattoos, no sunglasses, no part of their uniforms (“costumes”) concealed, wrinkled, ill-fitting, or out of place. They must stand up straight (no leaning), never say no, appear happy and helpful at all times. Even the dirty business of mortality can’t touch this sanitized paradise: Disney prefers that no one is declared dead at their theme parks. It’s been reported that the park goes to great lengths to avoid the presence of emergency vehicles on the premises and prefers for declarations to be made after parties have quietly exited the property.

While Jodi Eichler-Levine presented Disney’s hyper-immersive storytelling as a benevolent counterpoint to its less-benevolent “capitalism on steroids,” I would argue these are intimately connected. Disney is as alluring as its ability to tell us stories about ourselves that effortlessly refashion human friction and dissonance into harmony or amusement. As Vicky Osterwieil writes in “The Daddiest Place on Earth,” for The New Inquiry, “Disney World [makes] sense as the symbolic center of America only as long as America’s ideological projection of itself as ‘the good totality’ successfully [hides] its massive economic inequality, its inexorable transformation into a police state, and its function as a global military empire.”

As it becomes increasingly difficult to hide these American realities, the cynics in my life and on my feeds have less and less patience for adults who revere Disney’s authoritarian approach to unity. “Disney Adults,” they say, are suffering arrested development, willfully ignorant, incurious, politically illiterate. They want to inoculate themselves with childish fantasies, refusing to grow up instead of living in the real world.

There’s likely some truth to these accusations, but I also wonder if this antipathy is at least partly fueled by self-recognition: Our widespread willingness to blind ourselves with entertainment, whatever form it may take. To me, the most frustrating aspect of Disney isn’t its glaring childishness or overt attempts to overstimulate us, but its far more subtle way of purveying American dogma. Perhaps we sense our openness to this duplicity in other areas of our lives and resent it.

The problem, as ever, is the fun to be had. As Dave Schneider wrote in the intro of his takedown of the “fascist political economy” of Disney, “Before I go any further, I just want to say we had a delightful day of riding rides, seeing shows, and buying grossly overpriced food and drinks. When criticizing Disney in general, most people react by questioning all but your very humanity with the indignant question, ‘But did you have fun?’ Let the record show, I had a lot of fun.”

The fun

There’s a more interesting question than whether Disney parks or Disney movies are a good time, or “magical,” as they’re masterfully engineered to be. It’s whether the sinister aspects of Disney, evident as they may be even to fans, can ever meaningfully compete with that. When I was on mushrooms, the seams were particularly visible: the hollow simulacra, the cheery choreography of control. It was eerie and impossible to ignore. But when I came down and stopped being such a “cynic,” joy easily took over.

Our joking spirits suggested we were enjoying Disneyland from an ironic remove. But were we?

“[I]n a world that feels increasingly inhospitable to the human psyche, people gravitate specifically toward the kind of saccharine, empty pleasures,” wrote P.E. Moskowitz on their newsletter, Mental Hellth, in which they announced “We Are All Disney Adults.” But what do we do with compromised pleasures that don’t feel empty? In the online defenses I read by adult Disney fans, several referenced the genuine sense of community it gave them. I see this justification all over the place—fans of Disney, fans of beauty and cosmetics, fans of complicated pop stars.

Last week while reading the viral gambling feature by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, one of his interviewees, a “blackjack obsessive” named Tom Nichols, made a similar defense: “Tom loves Las Vegas—the kitsch, the unsavory history—and seems almost protective of it. Too many people think of casinos as depressing, predatory places, he said, filled with dead-eyed senior citizens sucking on oxygen tanks as they pump their Social Security checks into slot machines. But what he loves about casinos is not so much the gambling per se as the sense of community it generates.”

We could of course ask whether these institutions provide the conditions for quality communities—whether they invite healthy conflict, interdependence, and meaningful friction, whether they challenge us to grow and change and transcend earthly pleasures. We could ask who and what’s exploited in the name of the magic, and who’s profiting. But in a time when, as Moskowitz put it, the world feels “increasingly inhospitable to the human psyche,” we shouldn’t be surprised when these questions feel like too much of a buzzkill to broach.

We find ourselves in a historical moment when pleasure and community shouldn’t be the end of the conversation, and yet they often are. Disney, of course, understands this. It doesn’t need to win an argument against a leftist about its societal value. The ideology that animates its films—the belief that broken systems can be redeemed through good actors, that harmony is always achievable within the existing structure, that dissatisfaction is an attitude problem—has already won the public over. In this sense, calling the “magic” of Disney an escape from reality undersells it. What Disney’s magic actually does is augment reality until the constraints of modern capitalist life feel cozy, hopeful, and familiar. The question, now, is whether we’re capable of stepping outside the entertainment kingdom to imagine anything else.

Here’s last week’s 15 things including five articles worth your time and my favorite household product maybe ever. Rec of the week was a 150+ comment free-for-all. Last week’s Dear Danny episode featuring a friend who keeps crying about the news, a dramatic roommate conundrum, a stinky coworker, a boyfriend who’s (maybe) drinking too much, a vibrator proposition, and parents who became snobbish after a windfall. As always thank you for the Qs!

Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley

1. Footnote: As Dave Schneider notes in Truthout, echoing this sentiment: “The metanarrative of both It’s A Small World and World Showcase is that whatever our clothes, traditions and languages, we all share the same fundamental values.”

2. As explored in this Lacanian analysis of Frozen, even where Disney appears to “challenge the status quo” in its storytelling, it inadvertently reinforces it: “The film seems to challenge the traditional image of the Disney princess by presenting assertive, self-determined female protagonists, yet it does so by incorporating these changes into a narrative that ultimately reaffirms the ideological status quo. Elsa’s declaration to ‘let it go’ echoes the neoliberal mantra of self-optimization and inner detachment, much like Nike’s slogan ‘Just do it.’ This ideology, as Žižek argues, offers a sense of freedom and empowerment that encourages individuals to let go of inhibitions and embrace a fluid, adaptable self, all while remaining within the framework of the capitalist system.”