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Disneyland, or more precisely, “The Magic Kingdom” theme park, in Orlando, Florida, is not an obvious place to feel that one has had a transcendental experience. On revisiting it was obvious why – over-concreted, over-heated, over-crowded, over-priced – but, nevertheless, on a previous visit a transcendental experience had been had. The Magic Kingdom is the Disneyland, the one that we associate with this Florida place; there are a whole collection of theme parks that live around the Disney (or Universal) umbrella, but only the Magic Kingdom sets out o construct a mindset that dreams do come true. Typhoon Lagoon is also well worth a visit though. It may be a long way to go for a giant swimming pool, but the wave machine is truly awesome.
In order to facilitate this mindset construction 3 main methods are used:
a) A relentless playing of Disney theme songs, about what a magical experience you are having in The Magic Kingdom, and that dreams do come true, especially now that you are here. Suspend belief, oh ye who cross the magic portals. And, sometimes, you can.
b) The twice daily pageant on the steps of Cinderella’s castle involving the whole collection of Disney characters, freely mixed in a melange that, despite the otherwise relentless cheeriness, has a very dark heart.
c) The afternoon parade involving the whole Disney pantheon in another free bricolage, Mickey mixed with Tigger, Cinderella with Goofy.
I found myself inspired to write, there in the restaurant at Disneyland, while the rest of mon famille went to queue, for an hour or so, for the Peter Pan Experience. So, these thoughts are as immediate as that. Queuing for that length of time is part of the experience for any ride that you want to go on. And it allows people to sneak away, for a sit down, and a cup of tea; or, a cup of hot water and a tea bag, that way round.
The Kingdom is not as I imagined it, not that I really could. It is landscaped, tucked away. Served by a 6 lane highway ring road, built to get you to whichever park you want to get to. That people would pay good money to come here, from all over America and The Americas, to people like us, from all over the rest of the world. Whether you actually are in Florida or not is a moot point, apart from the drippy, droopy heat that envelops you in this high summer time. Florida is America’s lightning capital in high summer, truly awesome storms that real Floridians accept with equanimity. It is how they get their water for the rest of the year.
The whole area around is still being developed in the service of tourism and the tourist. In the midsummer heat there are a lot of Brits, and sundry Europeans; and a whole lot from different areas of Central America. Some truly exotic bugs to be circulated among the tourist groups.
The rest of the year is constantly touted as ‘pleasant’, or ‘paradise’, so it is easy to think that, if it is this packed now, it will be as packed in February, with Americans escaping the Midwinter Midwest chill. Looking at the giant weather map on the back of ‘USA Today’ though nearly all of America is hotter than Florida – 105 degrees across the Midwest!
What a place, America! I want to say it in my best Thomas Wolfe-ian voice; all the places I have to see, all the things I can potentially do; all the books in the Library that I can potentially read……When it is hot it is truly hot, when cold truly cold. And there are wild animals, in the suburbs, that might eat you; bobcats and cougars, mountain lions and alligators, coyotes and wolves, bears, poisonous snakes, mosquitoes, giant zinging bugs….and things that won’t; armadillos and other assorted varmints – what a truly still awesome place. Despite all the best efforts Americans have never managed to truly suburbanise their country, and hopefully never will.
The district around Orlando has a good go though. For a long, long way, the area is a super-collection of six lane highways, strip malls, housing developments, and gated communities laid out alongside these highways. There are no downtowns, nowhere to walk to, to get your morning paper (no morning paper to be had), or ice cream. Everywhere, anywhere, at least a 5 mile drive. Takes some getting used to.
Disney sets out to be an antidote to that. The Downtown Disney area, within the theme park aggregation, is just that; a conscious attempt to create a place for people to walk, which they do, in their droves. An area of designer shops and restaurants, set around a lake. A free boat service that takes you around that lake. A real antidote to the rest of the endless driving about.
Orlando tries this, a redeveloped area beneath the freeways, a heavily policed downtown oasis for the young urban professional on a night out but, heck, you are still kinda glad to get in your hire car, and be on your way, out, to the suburbs, where there you can still feel free.
I still wonder how you would know which shops are in which area of strip mall – you are mostly in the wrong lane to turn into it anyway, given that you can overtake in any lane, and you find yourself going back to the same strip, that you now know, over and over, among the thousands of other unknowable ones.
So, let me try to outline the elements that allow for a certain transcendental kind of behaviour, even within the place where a million dreams can come true.
You enter The Magic Kingdom by water, by ferryboat from the simply enormous car park. The towers of Cinderella’s palace, already found by her Prince therefore (so dreams have already come true), sit on the skyline as you cross that water. Separating you from the everyday world, a rite de marge, before the rite d’incorporation of stepping ashore, into the magic land; where dreams come true, or the place of a million dreams. The dreams are all inside your head, as she’d once said. There is also a monorail, but it is not possible to conjure up the same kind of magic (monorails seem kind of dated already).
A guidebook warns that you can walk from 5 to 8 miles in this place over the course of your visit, and should come shod appropriately. That is certainly true. Anyway, there is not that much to do, or maybe there is too much to do, the subtle twisting of your mindset. “All your dreams can come true”, is the mantra on Ur repeat loop, eventually beginning to alter that mindset, that breezy optimism beginning to win you over as you hear it on repeat from speaker to speaker all over the park.
You begin to love to hear it. In the end the best thing to do is to just believe. You now are somewhere that does not believe in irony, or equivocation. This Panglossian dream state is the best state, and this evocation is the best expression of an un-ironic, and un-equivocal, world.
The show put on the steps of Cinderella’s palace in the early evening subtly engages in its own discourse, to put the other half of the dialectic to itself, its own antithesis. “But people don’t believe in dreams any more”, says Snow White’s Wicked Stepmother; and Donald Duck (why he?) is the only one to lack doubts. The others, Goofy, Mickey Mouse, and all the Princesses and their beaus, and the cast of dancers, as in a film musical, or a Broadway show, all share these doubts too.
But, the simplicity of Donald’s convictions, in his baby squeaky-quacky voice, over-rides the dialectic, and the synthesis is resolved spectacularly; live fireworks and dry ice and ecstatic dancing, all in favour of the undisputed fact that dreams do come true, if you will only believe. The wicked are banished, and the faithful can enter the Magic Kingdom.
You can wander about in the humid tropical heat, grazing away, drinking loads. And eating, giant haunches of barbecued bird, indeterminate and pink, a Supersize Me flamingo wing.
The 3 O’ Clock parade at the magic Kingdom demonstrates the utter sureness of itself, as a place to be; and of its own being, an end of itself.
A large part of The Magic Kingdom Experience, especially for kids, and the young at heart, is to ride into the fantasy land of the characters, though they can seem truly secondary to the experience of The Magic Kingdom. They are just rides after all, and you have to really love that lebenswelt to see it as more than a collection of models and pictures of the theme.
Except that it is Mickey Mouse who is the central character (given a new lease of life via the Disney TV channel). Would anyone have come to him via the old films, I did wonder? But here he is, presented as American as apple pie, part of the collective American cultural memory, over-representing the idea that dreams really can come true.
For those who do not think they will believe, the sheer impossibility of focussing on anything else, soon brings you into the same lines as other queue-ers on the block, waiting to be incorporated into the magic of The Magic Kingdom. This suits the needs of the traveller, who surely would not travel here, in the high and humid summer, were it not for this magical lure.
For “magic” is what the real Disneyland sells itself upon – you cannot dare not to believe – the possibility of the relentlessly upbeat six line company song endlessly tells us of all your dreams coming true, if only you believe (I do go on about this).
The employees, dressed in 1930s “It’s A Wonderful Life” soda jerk uniforms, mixed in with the melange of characters in the 3 o’ clock parade all sing along to the song as they weave their way down towards Main Street (the postmodern pastiche bit being that, in this part of Florida, this is the only Main Street you will ever see. The recreation is of a way of life now lost to the average American – but the best one).
The employees who parade sing the song without irony, which is how it weaves itself into your consciousness as you experience the magic of the Magic Kingdom; no one is laughing, this is all for real, all a-smile. It clearly renders differently with different employees though, each takes something different from it, a 6 line polysemic field.
For some, it is an upbeat mantra, short enough and simple enough, but, too, profound enough, to illustrate that their dreams could come true by imbibing the mantra. For others it was the realisation of themselves as being in this place, this cultural, this resolutely American, space; being, in this time, this place. To be is to resolutely be.
And for some it was a comfort that they were there, taking part. A life of disappointments, ones that have been, a realisation of less to come, but an acceptance of their place in what this group can offer them. Limited possibilities, but a place to be. You only have to believe that all your dreams, even if this is what they are, can come true (maybe even already have; now that is good in this atomised life).
The Disney Corp brooks no critique of itself, and its practices, of what The Magic Kingdom offers you. Why should it, really? The melange it does offer you is of two sorts which, ultimately, are blended before you. If not a synthesis then an antizygy of sorts.
The first is a simulacrum of smalltown ‘Main Street USA’, at its highest realisation, sometime in the 1920s. The clothes, the spats, the wigs on the women, all add their contribution. A view shot through by the movies – Frank Capra perhaps – but, revolutionarily perhaps, anti – oligarchic, anti big business, for the little guy (despite it being Disney mega corp.). You have to note here too that, in the Star Trek mythos, the future is a socialist one, where our material needs are met, and we are free to develop ourselves, pace the romantic Marx, of “The German Ideology”.
Disney also built the town of Celebration (and what is in a name?) nearby, modelled on Main Street USA, with neighbourliness, and the baking of brownies for newcomers, as central virtues.
The country is melded into the small town, a time when the rural-urban continuum was not so stark, when the town served the rural hinterland rather than dominated it, taking it over for tract housing, interstates and shopping malls. Now there is no Floridian town, a vast haze of space, all that seems solid having melted into the humid air.
In that small town decisions made in China, or South Korea, or Russia, sometimes with the connivance of the Government (“…belongs to me and The Bank, and some funny talkin’ guy from Eye-ran,” as Steve Earle was wont to say), did not impact so strongly on everyday life.
Huck Finn is added in here, across the creek, fittingly. Harper’s Mill, and Tom (Sawyer’s)’s Landing. Also a time of rising American power though, and optimism, of the Great American Booster, and “Mr Smith Goes To Washington” (it must be Frank Capra – he is the guy who just keeps coming to mind).
But the darker, more European, visions underlie this simulacrum of positivity, this Disney-field version of The Brothers Grimm. The Wicked Stepmother says there are no dreams, no power in the optimism that it takes to dare envision them. Of Pirates of the Caribbean and exiled princesses, of archetypal crocodiles, Snow White, Handsome Princes, of quests to defeat evil and fabled beasts, of Cinderella, Belle, and The Beast.
You can’t entirely take the dark heart from these tales, but it surely is the effort that it takes to overcome such darkness that allows the righteous to bask in the idea that dreams do still come true.
Actually, you can see the power of these metaphors, these archetypes, for Disney. They underlie the Disney appropriation of them. They too are triumphs of optimism, and courage and heart, over very uncertain circumstances.
In the real world too you have to overcome sprites, and wicked witches, and mythical beasts (and is also very much the stuff of “Star Trek”, stripped of the technological edge), as well as ungenerous family members, where even the ones who love you can’t protect you from the badness in peoples hearts., The world is full of arbitrary forces, and those who are charged to protect you cannot.
This is the vision that Donald Duck, archetypal American, rejects though. These may be filmic Hollywood values of the 1930s and ‘40s, focussed through the Jewish émigré film makers (who found their own Promised Land in California). It takes Donald Duck to say it though – yes, why shouldn’t dreams come true?
Because, when real people say it, (or even as imaged even in films like “Mr Smith Goes to Washington”, or “It’s a Wonderful Life”, where native optimism also has to triumph over the dark heart of American capitalism and political cynicism) it just sounds corny. Donald is not too absurd for the job, not if you truly believe. It also, of course, makes it less controversial altogether, such criticism of The American Way.
And, somewhere in this continuum – Brothers Grimm —-1930s Hollywood—-Mr Smith going to Washington—-Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse – lays a test of The Great American Imagination. Of 1930s imaginings asserted and applied, in The Magic Kingdom, to make us suspend our own lack of belief. So that, here in this place and this time, we can now believe in anything, even that dreams do come true.

Ah, the family finally comes back, looking pinker than ever. Only a five minute ride, and an hour and a half’s wait, but they seem happy. Fun for those, and for such as those who would avoid this at all costs. Time seems to stand still in those queues. Now that is something Disney should bottle and sell.