A great big beautiful tomorrow

A ride on the Carousel of Progress

In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Jean Baudrillard makes some famous observations about Disneyland, which he describes as “a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.” More specifically, he claims that “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” That is, Disneyland functions as an alibi, or a mechanism of disavowal for the simulation it simulates: “It is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere.” Its fake Main Street — a concentrated collection of signs and signifers that convey “Main Street” as a concept — works to regenerate the “realness” of the Main Streets everywhere else, as though they were still something other than signs and signfiers themselves.

I had this sort of thing in mind when I recently had occasion to go to Disney World, itself a kind of a re-creation and expanded elaboration of Disneyland on a broader scale, on a huge tract of previously undeveloped land in central Florida, far from any ostensible anchor in the entertainment industry. Yet it adopts the fundamental principle of the entertainment industry — that fun can be commoditized and enjoyed on demand, in a kind of nonspontaneous simulation of spontaneity, a protracted suspension of disbelief — and turns it into a destination unto itself, the arbitrarity of the location becoming a testament to its achievement of pure, abstracted fun-ness.

Baudrillard seems accurate in his assessment that theme parks contain a “sufficiently excessive number of gadgets” to “specifically maintain the multitudinous affect” — the ambience of benign crowding, of a plenitude of focal points all receiving enough attention to pique others’ interest — and “magnetize the crowd into direct flows,” the endless queuing that is the park’s main attraction. Unlike with other, more unpredictable destinations, like cities or natural habitats, visitors are never confused about what they should be doing in the Magic Kingdom: standing in line for the rides, which deliver a more or less uniform experience to everyone who waits.

The lines themselves absorb most of the time spent in the park, providing something inescapable to talk about, like the weather. They offer a durational, palpable experience of conformity and the reassurance that goes along with doing with everyone else is doing. The line winnows down all your responsibilities and worries: Inevitably you will make progress toward the goal just by being there. They also allow park “guests” to experience an orderly society with explicit rules for the equitable distribution of pleasure, such as it is — 90 seconds or so of being ushered past robotic dioramas that require no special cultural knowledge to understand. You can pay extra to skip some of the lines, but no amount of money spent will make the rides any better.

Maybe this pseudo-populist experience is part of what Baudrillard had in mind when he points to the “religious reveling in real America” that Disneyland in his view evokes and which “draws the crowds.” It offers a “digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values,” but only to conceal how all of America is only simulating itself. The park copies a copy without an original. The American way of life is to simulate a “way of life”; it has no essential content of its own, no organic holistic expression somewhere out there in “reality.” Instead the jumble of commodified consumer experiences available in the park distill the experience of life in the consumer society beyond it, in which all experience is basically a matter of extracting the appropriate messages from images and assemblages of consumer goods.

That’s the theory anyway. And in the Hollywood Studios section, I really felt that: Waiting in line for a Star Wars–themed ride, I was awed at the effort to simulate a spaceship repair depot, complete with piles of tools and elaborate wiring and duct work and crates of spare parts and so forth. A full-scale model of an X-wing fighter was perched on a pile of rocks, and it was fully outfitted with all sorts of control panels and knobs and levers that of course had absolutely no connection to any kind of functionality. The ship was just a 3D image; the wiring hanging down from the rafters was purely ornamental; the “tools” and “crates” were just blocks of solid plastic extruded into different shapes drawn from film scenes. Maybe it was supposed to feel like being on a movie set, but it made me think of passing through into a AI-generated image, where no underlying logic compelled the way things appeared. The world had become nothing but surfaces. No one seemed particularly troubled by this, but for the first time I had a sense of what “reality hunger” is supposed to mean.

But the Magic Kingdom portion of Disney World felt to me a lot less like a pastiche-saturated society of the spectacle and more like the imaginatively straitened world of Soviet Realism — lots of contrived celebration of official emotions of joy (“the happiest place on earth!”) and togetherness and order, as in the nutty statue of the benevolent leader holding hands with his own fictional creation, embossed with the slogan “Partners” (pictured above). Perhaps this quasi-heroic register is part of its alibi function, to make spectacles seem legible and univocal, a realm free of irony or subtlety.

Much of Disney World now comes across not as some disorienting postmodernist environment of screens and logos and bric-a-brac and waning, inscrutable affect but as the last gasp of modernism before all that took over, a late 1960s attempt to build a total environment in the style of Le Corbusier or Oscar Niemeyer, with austere overtones of Empire Plaza in Albany and the United Nations Building in New York City mixed in. This is especially true of Disney World’s anachronistically named Contemporary Resort, completed in 1971, with a monorail track running right through the side of the building into its atrium lobby. It evokes a distinctly outdated imagination of the future, of space-station-like infrastructure projects on a colossal scale shuttling hordes through concourses and other mammoth nonplaces that indicate humans’ final triumph over the natural world. It’s visible too in the 1970s Disney World branding that had a distinctly corporate-conglomerate feel, as though it had become the IBM of “imagineering.”

While I was in Disney World, I wondered whether these remnants of modernism struck the families at the park as nostalgic or simply as moribund. People still waited nearly an hour to ride the “It’s a Small World” ride, a quintessential relic of mid-century-modern kitsch. (I went on it twice.) But was this merely from a sense of duty, of completism? It felt as deliberately and cryogenically preserved as Walt Disney himself, frozen in time, with a twisted optimistic faith in an ecumenical future, one where people of all races and nations can be imagined as happy robots singing the same tedious jingle — a future so stagnant that you could anticipate being defrosted after centuries and still fitting right in.

The Disney resorts’ modernist flourishes still have the power to evoke an enduring lost future, an almost pre-consumerist utopia at odds with the endless futureless now the park otherwise confronts us with in its slapdash recycling of the past and its saturation with different activations of units of intellectual property. Disney even hired Postmodernist architects like Michael Graves to build some Disney World hotels in the 1990s. Its budget resorts, which were built in1999 and feature three-story statues of Coke cans, cowboy boots, cartoon characters, and the like festooned on conventional motels, dramatize the “ducks” giving way to the “decorated sheds,” as described in Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour’s Learning From Las Vegas. I read a certain amount of cynicism into these buildings, but maybe the people staying in them don’t see them that way. Perhaps they seem just come across as whimsical if you haven’t hardened your heart into a general skepticism about all forms of prepackaged fun.

Still, there is a creeping ambivalence to Disney World that’s reflected in its uncertain, oscillating position between modernism and postmodernism. How is one supposed to understand the PeopleMover ride, which is supposed to simulate the transit system of “tomorrow” but very pointedly moves you back to where you started from? This pretend commute to nowhere functions as a kind of advertisement for the other rides it passes by, as if it were understood that it would take some external prodding to get visitors excited for them.

The Carousel of Progress, too, takes its viewers in a circle, as though progress is ultimately cyclical, and nothing can ever really change. The premise of this bizarre “attraction” is to watch the same crotchety father, played by a stationary animatronic robot deep in the uncanny valley, talk about how new technologies have altered his family’s life in a series of scenes set in the 1900s, the 1920s, the 1940s, and then some unspecified period from the future. The emphasis is on how new technologies of the day make life more convenient and how at any given point in time, further progress seems both unimaginable and unnecessary.

Naturally, “progress” is presented as just happening inevitably — “thanks to progress” is a phrase spoken several times — and there is no deliberate attempt to explain where it comes from or what drives it. There is a sort of “gee whiz, what will they think of next?” tone to the scenarios, but that tone is continually undercut both by the teasing implications that all the conveniences are relative and therefore don’t really do anything to change life for the better in absolute terms, and by the father’s low-grade impatience with (if not contempt for) for the other members of his family. The first scene concludes with this line of dialogue, which is fairly characteristic:

Well, with all this talking, I've worked up quite a thirst. I think I'll take one of those newfangled trolleys down to the drug store soda fountain and meet the boys for a cold sarsaparilla. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot — we're drinking root beer now! Same kind of thing, different name. Well, that's progress for you.

I guess the robot dad is supposed to seem risibly old-timey and clueless to the children that all the Disney rides are designed for, but the exasperation here is also the first inkling of a dawning sense that all technological change can really deliver for ordinary people is trivial novelties, conveniences that make life less meaningful, that intensify feelings of alienation and the distance between family members. Progress is just the “same kind of thing” with a new name, a random walk along the endless chain of signifiers. The second scene concludes with “I'd say that we're really on easy street these days. It just can't get any better!” Even in context, at the most corny and earnest place imaginable, it’s hard to calculate how much irony is in that.

The next scene touts a new round of kitchen appliances and media technologies, but no one’s lives have improved; they remain trapped in a vision of life that can aspire to nothing more than lounging on Easy Street. By the third scene, the father is grousing about commuting and “the rat race,” as the life-style accelerations demanded by new technologies begin to wear him out. He complains about the lousiness of TV shows — “Ah yes, a new age of electronic civilization is upon us” — and an automatic paint mixer goes awry, sorcerer’s apprentice style, splashing all over his wife in the basement.

In the last scene, a mishap with a voice-activated oven destorys their Christmas dinner. The voice-command system was supposed to give them control over technology — “Now all our household items will do anything we tell them to do” — but instead it revealed how more intensive interfaces just create more confusion. This doesn’t bode well for grandma, who is playing some kind of murder game with a VR helmet on: “I feel like I’m really there!” Grandpa helplessly laments the increasing incursion of automation into their lives as the oven heats itself to a thousand degrees and then explodes, intoning “Overload, overload.” The family unfairly blames the father, who is reduced to hoping that sometime in the next century, “maybe ovens will read our minds.”

Not to make the Carousel of Progress sound like Dialectic of Enlightenment, but it does paint a pretty bleak picture of technological encroachment into our lives, driven by forces that ideology shrouds from us and forbids us to name. It didn’t inspire too much hope for “Tomorrowland.” It’s like the park’s animatronics were tattling on themselves, or trying to issue a warning that we would become no better than them if we submitted to the Disney World’s overall ethos. Should I want an oven to be reading my mind? What might it do with that information? What does it mean to be understood by an oven? Will we become “Partners”? Should we be obliged to think in terms the oven can understand? What will talking to machines and seeking their understanding do to our relations to each other, to ourselves?

At the end of each vignette, the robots sing the same refrain: “There's a great big beautiful tomorrow, just a dream away.” Meanwhile, the succession of todays appear set to become ever more disorienting, as we come to lack the wherewithal to question where they have come from and are presented with no other option than to submit.