Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World

Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995)
By The Project on Disney

Synopsis: This book seeks to interrogate pleasure and to analyze the Disney World phenomenon, and is a collaboration between four different academics who all give their take on separate Disney-World-related topics, including nostalgia, heteronormativity, simulacra, etc. There is not necessarily one overarching argument, but instead many, including the idea that our culture "condemns carnival: the bawdy and rude revel of the appetites and its consequent waste and dissipation" (3). Disney World arises as the anti-carnival (though the huge heads of its characters are a form of the grotesque - but kind of the baby grotesque). Though the book is highly critical of Disney, threads of utopianism run throughout the book, especially as utopian impulses are often embedded within consumer products, and the way various views of the future are seen as new beginnings and perhaps calls for radical change. Disney World really is all about consumption, and channels our desire for a utopian sense of community into mere consumerism. Disney World also is completely about heteronormativity and the exaltation of the family. All of the fun there is highly contained and structured, and there is no sense of spontaneity or of subversiveness (hence the "anti-carnival" thing). The pleasure of D.W. is thus, "identifying with a dominant ideology and the role it assigns us" (74). Disneyfication is "the application of simplified aesthetic, intellectual, or moral standards to a thing that has the potential for more complex and though-provoking expression" (103). Hmm, that's sad. Basically, book is saying that people today have limited options.

Interesting Specifics:

Antimodernist and utopian impulses are at cross purposes (224).

Says our culture clearly "condemns carnival: the bawdy and rude revel of the appetites and its consequent waste and dissipation" (3).

Says maybe obesity is partly an "active resistance to a perceived bourgeois norm" (3). [This is an interesting line of thought - that eating fast food and getting fat could be seen as an active move of rebellion. Also creepy though, because could you then say that our craving for revelry has been channeled into a love of fast food? How pointless and non-cathartic.].

Kids love to stay in motels and hotels - Great chapter!! Says that staying in a motel is exciting for kids because it represents independence and "an unconscious social yearning for security and community" (8). Also good because it takes them away from normal school day, which is really an "indoctrination" into the "adult" work world.

"Embedded in the notion that tomorrow initiates a new beginning is a utopian desire for radical change" (39).

Tourism represents a "quest for experience" (45).

One author seeks to discover "how the pleasure we feel at Walt Disney World is negotiated through an ongoing process of identification with and - at least in part, one hopes - evasion of the ideal subject constructed by Disney's tireless 'Imagineers'" (57).

Whereas t.o.c Coney Island was full of subversive games like smashing up fake fancy china and crystal, Disney World "rather than providing opportunities to violate social proprieties, everything in the park is designed to confirm them and make doing so fun" (61). DW keeps people isolated, while Coney Island was all about jostling and mixing it up.

"Human adults do not exist in Disney World except as parents" (69). [Is this just encouraging childhood solipsism?]

The pleasure of DW is "identifying with a dominant ideology and the role it assigns us" (74).

"All expressions of mass culture include contradictory utopian impulses, which may be buried or depicted in distorted form, but nevertheless generate much of the satisfaction of mass cultural commodities (whether the consumer recognizes them as utopian or not)" (190).

Has a cool chapter on the design of DW hotels.

Interacts With:

Goss article, "The World in a Shopping Mall" (I think that's the title - idea that "stuff" kind of represents utopian longings - though Goss article is way more positive)

Foucault (in belief that all mass culture phenomena contain elements of utopianism)

Was it Barthes or Hall who talked about the two different kinds of pleasure - the pleasure of following social conventions and the pleasure of dodging them? Whoever it was, this book kind of relates to that idea - the D.W. is all about pleasure of following conventions. That's actually kind of an interesting concept - I wonder which style ultimately gives more pleasure - following or subverting the norm? Prob subverting, but you never now. Do you get some kind of group/communal feeling out of following it? Or is that group too massive to result in a group feeling??
Amusing the Million (contrast between t.o.c. carnivals and Disney-esque stuff today)