Burning Down the Mouse
By: Heather Havrilesky
Tags: Big Stories Matter, Disney, Parenting

No matter how your heart is grieving over the absurd cost, you must take your kids to Disneyland. The theme park has become a compulsory routine of modern American parenting. But even after you navigate the labyrinthine parking structure and slog amid impossible crowds pushing double-wide strollers across miles of hot concrete, even after you stand in the last of a dozen endless lines, all the while fielding existential riddles from your kids like “Why are we still standing here?” and “What are we doing?,” even after you endure a series of lackluster rides that amount to interactive advertisements for undead franchises, no sense of calm and well-being descends. You don’t feel proud of yourself for delivering the dream of Disney to your offspring. Instead, you feel like you’ve yanked your impressionable kids straight into the white-hot center of the tyrannically cheerful consumerist farce we call American culture. As George Clooney’s character tells a young optimist at the start of Disney’s Tomorrowland, “You’ve been manipulated into thinking you were part of something incredible. You thought you were special, but you’re not.”

Naturally, such skepticism is just a setup for that climactic moment when old-fashioned, Disney-style hope wins out. Nearly religious positivity in the face of doom lies at the heart of the Disney brand, after all — which may be why Banksy’s Dismaland, a theme-park homage to dystopian despair operating in the British seaside town of Weston-super-Mare until the end of September, incites such a powerful feeling of vertigo. The mysterious street artist couldn’t have better timing: Somehow a company built around a cartoon mouse has miraculously evolved and expanded and weathered countless storms of widespread skepticism, not to mention jacked-up ticket prices, overcrowding, and a measles outbreak last year that didn’t conjure fantasy or frontier or future so much as the perils of life in South Sudan. Along with the huge chunk of cultural mindshare in its pocket (ESPN, ABC, the Disney Channel, Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel), Disney has amassed thousands of sprawling acres of immaculate, branded property worldwide, from Disneyland Paris to Tokyo Disneyland to Hong Kong Disneyland, every foot of it haunted by the triumphant strains of “Once Upon a Dream” or “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo” emitting from omnipresent speakers, every sight and sound and sensation a carefully honed feat of interactive advertising that continues to draw toddlers and teenagers and singles and couples and victorious athletes and dying children alike.

This is exactly the fairy tale that Dismaland aims to disrupt with its filthy, crumbling concrete spaces, its depressed park attendants clad in mouse ears, its orca emerging from a toilet, its boats full of immigrants circling ghost-faced through a polluted pond. Such images may be simple, but they’re meant to hit us at the same simple level that Disneyland itself does. While Cinderella’s corpse hanging from a toppled carriage as paparazzi cameras flash might strike some onlookers as overly obvious, it’s obvious by design. The catastrophes unfolding around us aren’t hard to miss, after all, but we continue to avert our eyes. As our public spaces worldwide are transformed into matching, carefully designed corporate realms dominated by shiny, flashing screens, the filth of Dismaland feels undeniably jarring. We don’t pay money to enter filthy spaces. This grit confuses us. This grit is the sad truth of modern times that we mostly manage to avoid.

Watch the trailer for Banksy’s Dismaland

Banksy couldn’t aim for a worthier target if he tried. Walt Disney wanted Disneyland to offer a comforting, clean, and harmonious escape from reality, to provide a nostalgic passage to small-town America in a time of anxiety. But Disneyland was also meant to embody the adventurous, can-do spirit of America, the America that still believed in its Gilded Age destiny as a city upon a hill, a shining example of liberty and prosperity for the rest of the world to emulate. That notion has long since expired, of course. As J. G. Ballard put it in 1983, the American dream “no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies… It supplies the world with its nightmares now.”

In Disneyland, then, we recognize the outlines of modern thought, the ways we protect ourselves from harsh reality, the ways we’ve come to prefer these protections, this fakeness, to reality itself. Where once we decried mass-produced entertainment and the stultifying sameness of corporate-owned spaces, most of us are now humming anthems from Frozen and forsaking relatively lackluster public parks for the much more engrossing modern playground of the Apple Store. Even the quirkiest corners of the internet are crowded with full-color, interactive ads for the last corporate commodity we searched for on Amazon or mentioned in passing on Facebook, and now those random searches will result in phone calls from telemarketers who seem to know more about us than we know about ourselves. No matter how we try to wriggle into some virgin corner of the world free from screens or cameras or phones, unsullied by flashing ads or surveillance, devoid of jubilant ballads or beeping devices, we fail. We’re all plugged into a shiny, down-home, buoyant, authentic-seeming global simulacrum, one that not only doesn’t belong to us, but bleeds us of our sanity, our money, and our privacy and sells it off to the highest bidder. We are ravenous and impossible to satisfy. The illusory corporate grid of fantastical characters is real; we are the imaginary ones. The Disneyfication of culture is complete.