Christmas Day, 2014
This
is the second part of my impressions of a recent trip to Disneyland,
the original park, for the first time in many years. You can read
the first part here.
It
has been speculated that Disneyland has a function in our
civilization beyond merely being an entertaining vacation
destination. From Tinkerbell, to the ancient myths, to the promise
of tomorrow, these concepts manifested in Disneyland but originated
in our unspoken hopes and beliefs for the future. At least they
were our beliefs in the future back when we were naive enough to
believe in a future.
When
I approached Disneyland on this occasion, I was moving fast to meet my friends who were
waiting for me in Frontierland. I was late. I was also
disoriented because the traditional parking lot was missing and the
entire entrance now reconfigured into the space between two gates and
a transit center. My pass worked and I sprinted to my rendezvous.
With
my friends, I paused to catch my breathe. There was something wrong. I felt a sense of disquiet as I walked around New Orleans Square, past the
river, across from Tom Sawyer's Island. It was something to do with
scale. It was smaller somehow. Jungleland,
Frontierland, the River it all seemed smaller than I had
remembered.
Of
course my first memories of Disneyland were from the mid-60s and I
was much smaller and the park was much bigger, relatively speaking.
Is it possible that the memories from visiting Disneyland all those
times when I was young remained in ways beyond what we normally think
of as memory, but as a sense memory of the rightness of things, of its
basic size and dimensions? Could this unconscious dissonance be the
cause of the unease that I felt?
Familiar
and yet unfamiliar some of the dissonance was probably a reaction to
the crass repurposing of classic attractions for more current popular
product placement, the Swiss Family Treehouse was appropriated by
Tarzan for example, but the feeling of a scale difference was
persistent.
As
evening approached this sensation finally went away. I had
chosen to walk around the Matterhorn to New Orleans Square to meet my
friends for dinner, and the dark of evening restored the sense of
mystery and of scale that had been missing during the day. Night
made it less apparent how the pieces all fit together, night allowed
the park to expand in my imagination.
It
was in this darkness that I was able to pass through Fantasyland and it was at night that I was finally able to get to Tomorrowland.
The old TWA rocket still remains, unlabeled, but defiant
Lets review for a moment the Tomorrowland of 1967 or so. On one side of the entrance is the AT&T Bell System Circlevision film with a working Picturephone to their headquarters in New York City. On the other side was the Monsanto exhibit “Adventure Thru Inner Space” which talked of the promise of microscopy and the quantum world through a journey into a snowflake. Dare I go any further into the center of the nucleus itself?
Further on was a recreation of our nuclear submarine force which had
just recently gone under the polar ice cap for the first time.
There was an external and beautifully plastic House of the Future.
The GE pavilion's Carousel of Progress swept you away in a narrative
of white suburban American's singing about their home appliances.
Trans World Airlines took you on a trip to Mars. The future of
transportation opened in July 67 with the PeopleMover to
augment the Monorail, the overhead tram, and the Disneyland Railroad.
And even that 60s vision of world peace: There's so much that we
share that its time we're aware: its a small world, after all.
We
would go to the moon. We would explore the ocean floor. We would
create new and unlimited sources of energy. We would look at the
night sky and explore its mysteries. We would heal the sick. We would live in a world of
peace, freedom and harmony. We would save the world.
We
jump to the present and we find the promise betrayed. AT&T and TWA no longer in business. GE a shadow of its former self threatening to just go bankrupt rather than take responsibility for the gross environmental destruction of the Hudson river which they did with deliberate malignancy and for a fast buck. A NASA without the capability of going to space without assistance from the Russians. The people betrayed and unemployed. A cluttered
monstrosity of a “rocket jets” attraction destroys the symmetry
of the entrance to tomorrow. The rotting hulk of decaying urban
transportation infrastructure lies abandoned and rusting in the
center of everything, attached to the former location of the “rocket
jets”, now a transit hub to nowhere. Silent it stands abandoned
at night. The Circlevision film about our country has been turned
into some sort of video game arcade to promote a Pixar film. The Mighty Microscope
(Monsanto Exhibit) becomes a redo of the original Star Tours
continuing the theme of idle tourism for the wealthy The Carousel of Progress is
now a house of tomorrow that is more like a house of today, but for
the very rich. You see, it seemed to be saying, this is how you could live today if you had a lot of money. The Submarine Ride which formerly presented the sense
of adventure of those heady days of the submarine pioneers, now
advertises a fish movie.
Abandoned rocket jets and Peoplemover turnabout
No
transportation, the transport was all gone. Only the rotting
infrastructure remained. The promise of how we would live in the
future became the betrayal that said only the rich would live well.
Advances in science were turned into cheap movie promotions.
Symmetry became clutter. It was all outsourced to China, perhaps to Shanghai Disneyland, by our government. I guess if you wanted to see the future you would have to go there, if you could afford it.
But
if you look, you will find remnants of the former greatness. With
the help of some docents at the Illuminations pavilion we were able to find elements of the Carousel of Progress hidden in plain sight on the outskirts of the exhibits. In urban archaeology, you find the old doors, you walk to the end of the hallway and check to see if there is space beyond. And there on the floor was the
track of the former Carousel of Progress, now stopped with no promise
for the future. But still there, nevertheless.
Look on the floor to see the seam that separated the unmoving stage from the rotating audience platform.
So what does the future hold for Tomorrowland? We know that the Brad Bird movie of the same name and shot in part in Tomorrowland is coming out in a year. I have no doubts that many plans are in the works for the rehabilitation of the future. Will it convey an articulate and inspirational vision ?
Vision of Tomorroland from the first trailer for the movie
Trailer for Tomorrowland (2015)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11fgwFAk3fk
PeopleMover on Wikipedia:
