Essay

America

Church and state

Conspiracy theory

Culture

16 October 2023

6 min read

Disney at 100: The Magic Kingdom's simulation of modern life

Disney is more than a mouse and entertainment. Theologian Jared Stacy dissects how the Liturgy of Disney reflects modern America in all its contradictions.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A statue of Walt Disney holding hands with Mickey Mouse in front of Cinderella's Castle

The Magic Kingdom of Disney.

Walt Disney once said, “remember, it all started with a Mouse.” An incredible fact considering that after a century of Disney, it is impossible to describe and interpret our modern world without mentioning Disney, the Christian church included. Once, Disney came up during an interview I took for a pastoral role at an American megachurch. Those with experience in low church American contexts won’t be surprised at what comes next.

During the interview, the church’s creative director casually mentioned taking his entire creative team to Disney World. It hadn’t been a pleasure trip; church employees toured Disney’s backstage creative department for inspiration they could bring back to the church. For this church, the Disney company – its vision and practices – was an index for its own.

Now, my hunch is this little anecdote will offend the sensibilities of readers who are practicing Christians in high church traditions. I might also guess it will equally offend secular readers who see Disney as the archetype of corporate greed, pushing glib, crass sentimentalism as art. Christian readers might share some of these criticisms as well. Together this is what, back in 2001, sociologist Alan Bryman recognized as the ‘Disneyization’ of society.

Disney... is not a purveyor of morality, but of product that must (like any good neoliberal agent) sail with the prevailing winds of market-based morality.

Disney In the crosshairs

Bryman’s work demonstrates how most criticism of Disney tends to expand into criticism of modern life itself. . Walt Disney himself dedicated Disneyland at its opening in 1955 with the words:

“this park is dedicated to the hard facts that made America.”

To talk about Disney and the modern world is ironically enough to talk Walt at his word. It means reflecting on modern America and globalization, and the economics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics which characterize it.

I have more to say about this. But first, we need to tackle just where Disney sits today in the social and political moment.

Disney today finds itself in a familiar position: fixed in the crosshairs of US conservatives waging the culture war. (Ironically, both culture war and Disney are some of America’s prime exports.) But Disney today is as wise to the market as it’s ever been. It is not a purveyor of morality, but of products that must (like any good neoliberal agent) sail with the prevailing winds of market-based morality.

Disney promotes prevailing values domestically and does the same for values of the Chinese Communist Party internationally. For example, in its Stateside parks, Disney recently decolonized or altered some of its attractions. It re-themed Splash Mountain attraction, a water ride based on Walt Disney’s Song of the South film. The 1949 film is banned on Disney’s streaming platform. It traded in racist tropes and revisionist historical propaganda (often called the 'Lost Cause') which originated in the American South after the Civil War. Disney also altered a scene from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride which depicted women as victims of sex trafficking.

These are surely good changes. But conservatives tend to categorize these changes, together with LGBTQ inclusivity efforts, under the appropriated phrase ‘woke’. Armed with a weaponized slogan, vapid reactionaries continue to influence popular sentiment on Disney. Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger met with the US Government’s House select committee on China. To discuss Disney’s censorship practices and production in the Chinese market.

To talk about Disney in the present, immediate sense is to (among other things) grapple with the political power of corporations, the moralities that sustain market practices, and the formative power of binge-watching on human beings. But what about Disney in the broader sense? The Disney that is a window into the (failed) promises of modernity? These are promises and possibilities that continue to haunt us as well as shape us.

I can find no better word to describe Disney’s parks. Liturgy, both in the Greek and Christian sense, speaks to how the parks provide a public service and fuel a religious experience.

The “Liturgy” of Walt Disney

At the end of his life, Walt Disney had more in common with Elon Musk than JK Rowling. He was more obsessed with harnessing technology in service of “progress”. His ultimate dream (called EPCOT or Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) was envisioned as the sum total expression of his theme parks. Disney wanted to take all the lessons of Disneyland and redirect them towards the construction of a permanent, liveable World’s Fair expo in the backwater of Florida’s swamps.

But EPCOT today is something of a simulacrum. It houses a World Showcase where you can stroll the streets of Paris, Piazza San Marco, or a Mayan pyramid that houses a water ride. Disney even hosts student worker programs to ensure that if you order fish and chips in its England, you will be served by someone from York, Surrey, or Manchester. But this is not what EPCOT was supposed to be. Walt envisioned it as a real time, fully functioning “city of tomorrow” where all the best and brightest of American Post-War technological might and efficiency would make the human society something called “better”. In short, EPCOT was Disney’s public works project.

The ancient Greeks had a word for projects like this: “liturgy”. The English word comes to us from combining the Greek noun for “people” leitos or laos with the Greek verb for “working” ergos. Nowadays, we tend to associate liturgy with Christian tradition, particularly the external rites and forms of worship for the church. But the idea of Christian liturgy emerged from this Ancient Greek practice of private financing of public projects. George Tridimas shows how these “works for the people” were originally a Greek form of politics. To the Athenians, liturgies were a symbiotic practice: the wealthy elite competing for the honor and power associated with a project, while each project served everyday citizens of Athens.

I can find no better word to describe Disney’s parks. Liturgy, both in the Greek and Christian sense, speaks to how the parks provide a public service and fuel a religious experience. They are a public works project that continue to shape the American consciousness, directing its worship, which is inevitably exported too, through the medium of culture. If you doubt the religious factor of the parks, ask again why a church might find itself believing a tour of Disney serves its task of Christian proclamation and formation. This isn’t just crass entertainment, but a profound (yet often uninterrogated) influence.

The parks exist as an inhabitable space that suspends the contradictions of modern life and actually resolves them in a simulated fashion.

This is why I think Disney biography Neal Gabler puts his finger on the essence of Disney’s parks. He argued that the parks aren’t successful because they provide an 'escape' from reality, but because they provide a ‘better' reality than the one outside. In this sense, the Disney imagineers don’t just tell good stories, they master physical space. The parks continue to attract guests the world over not because of popular franchises, but because,as a public works project, the entire parks experience is a high-control, surveiled effort to provide public efficiency, thematic immersion, crowd control, transportation—all of it.

The parks exist as an inhabitable space that suspends the contradictions of modern life and actually resolves them in a simulated fashion. To treat the parks as a tasteless venture into plastic sentimentalism obscures how the parks attempt to satisfy, at nearly every turn, the modern contradictions that shape our human experience. To say this experience is a religious one would not be far from the truth, the Athenian liturgy and Christian liturgy converging into one.

This is one reason why, however tragic it may be, churches in America continue to emulate Imagineers. The architecure of churches constructed within and without Christendom have communicated transcendence. And in spite of America’s embrace of Protestantism, we should not be surprised that American Christian traditions continue to emulate Disney’s mastery of physical space in the key of modernity. I understand criticisms of all things Disney, from parks and art to economics and adult Disney fans. But the parks are a liturgical experience, both in a religious sense and in a public sense. To understanding the staying power and influence of Disney means grappling, at a human level, with the park experience as a simulated resolution of modern life, rather than an escape.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Language

Music

14 November 2025

6 min read

The Phoenician Scheme - opening the mind to wider horizons

Wes Anderson's new film widens our vision to a bigger world

Oliver Wright

Oliver is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, writing and speaking about theology and AI.

Characters from a Wes Anderson film sit in a stylish plane interior.

Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton star.

Wes Anderson’s latest film – The Phoenician Scheme – has caused as much confusion amongst critics and viewers as it has the usual delight. It tells the story of Anatole – Zsa-Zsa – Korda, his mad-cap business scheme across an imagined near-Eastern world, and his growing relationship with his daughter (apparently), Liesl, a novitiate nun. There are the usual Anderson-ian tropes and characters, with superb cameos by Tom Hanks, Richard Ayoade, and Benedict Cumberbatch (worth watching in itself), and a real star turn for the young Liesl, Mia Threapleton.

I first watched it on a transatlantic flight (viewer advisory: there are several scenes in rickety planes). I was hooked from the first moment. Why? Not just the usual Anderson style and panache and dead-pan weird story and acting. It was the music. Anderson himself first trained as a musician. It shouldn’t be a surprise that amidst the rest of Anderson’s meticulously designed and curated world the music should carry so much meaning.

The opening scene (no spoiler, it’s in the trailer), involves the burning wreckage of a plane (viewer advisory). There are birds – crows, hovering. And from the wreckage, bloodied but unbowed, emerges Korda. We hear from a voiceover that this is by no means the first assassination attempt he has survived. It won’t be his last. But the music at this precise point? It is a dark and brooding short melodic fragment. Does this portray a dark and brooding – evil, even – presence in the main character? Indeed, this dark melodic fragment follows Korda around the whole film, a leitmotif.

But far from it. And this is what delighted me and hooked me. Because this isn’t just any old dark and brooding melodic fragment. It is the opening notes of Stravinsky’s magnificent ballet score, his first hit for the Russian impresario in Paris, Diaghilev and his ‘Ballets Russes’, The Firebird. Now here’s the fun thing. If you know the ballet, you know that it is the magic of the firebird’s feather which brings new life out of death in the ballet’s wonderful conclusion. And that is because the Firebird story itself is based on another mythical bird-creature – the phoenix (remember the title of the movie). The mythical phoenix is a bird which cyclically dies in flames, only to be reborn from the ashes to new life. So immediately, even though all we can see is the burnt-out wreckage of a plane, what we might think to ourselves if we know our Stravinsky, is that perhaps what this melodic fragment signifies, far from a brooding menacing presence, is someone who is constantly going to reemerge from the ashes to new life. In fact, I immediately felt I would be surprised if that wouldn’t happen. Korda himself says at a certain point ‘I won’t die, I never do’. Just from a musical fragment, the whole story can be seen in one glimpse.

There are two other Stravinsky ballets which Anderson skilfully deploys (although less intrusively than the Firebird theme): the joyous whirligig of the opening of Petrushka, and the searing epilogue of the ballet Apollo. Now the Petrushka music does seem to be associated with another character, just like Firebird is associated with Korda. In the movie, Petrushka appears in two moments of significance for Liesl, (apparently) Korda’s daughter, the novitiate nun (and therefore herself already intimately associated with music – The Sound of Music). But the telling thing here is that, unlike Firebird, Petrushka (the ballet) doesn’t end well for its eponymous puppet-hero. Petrushka is killed by another puppet, with only a fleeting appearance at the end as a ghost. So the music of the ballet of Petrushka, despite the excerpt we hear being full of joyousness and innocent youthful energy, and its association with Liesl, suggests that her journey in the film is going to go in a very different direction to the convent of her initial intentions. Once again, knowing the music and the whole pattern of it can foretell an entire history that will unfold, even just from a mere fragment.

Now the next thing that is so fascinating here is the combination of Stravinsky and Wes Anderson. Stravinsky wrote several ballet scores for the ‘Ballet Russes’ and Diaghilev in the glamour of Paris of the 1920s and 1930s (amongst other famous ones are The Rite of Spring (which caused a riot), Orpheus, and Pulcinella). They are highly stylised pieces, often returning to Classical ideas and tropes (musically, as well as in theme), presenting stylised and formal dances, tableaux. And whilst all these descriptions could be applied to Anderson’s films, The Phoenician Scheme itself presents a series of quirkily introduced tableaux, with their own distinctive characters and settings. And, in the concluding scene, set in a theatre, all the characters are present all at once. A miniature mechanical device representing all of Korda’s business interests appears on a stage. And the music at that point? The opening movement of Pictures at an Exhibition (by Mussorgsky, a Russian composer from the generation before Stravinsky), music which presents its own series of musical tableaux. Artistic tableau, musical tableau, ballet, and now film presented as a series of tableaux all coming together in Anderson’s fertile imagination.

But there is one last thing that is fascinating for us in this presentation of music and art and film and plot. There is a much earlier precursor for the technique I referred to above, of one musical fragment potentially carrying with it the implication and meaning of the whole work. That earlier precursor for this technique is found in the New Testament. The authors of the New Testament, especially Paul, were saturated in the texts which we now call the Old Testament, or what they thought of as their Scriptures (just as, we might say, Anderson is clearly saturated in Stravinsky). Scholars think the New Testament writers assumed a familiarity with those Scriptures in the hearers and readers of their new writings, or, alternatively, they were helping their hearers and readers newly think and imagine along the lines set out in the Scriptures. Time and again, as Richard Hays masterfully showed (in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels), the authors resort to a technique called metalepsis. That is, in quoting or near quoting a few words or a phrase from their Scriptures, not only are the hearers/readers meant to understand that it is a quotation, but to import the sense of the entire passage or even book from which that miniature quotation emerges. It was Richard Hays’s groundbreaking work on this literary hermeneutical aspect which caused a sensation in New Testament studies in the 1980s and 1990s when it first emerged, because it opened up whole new lines of interpretation, without any question remaining about their veracity. What it means is that, as we read the New Testament, we have constantly to be aware of what Scriptures the writer had in mind, either consciously or semi-consciously, in order to allow that thought-world to permeate our reading. It is a reminder, whatever we are reading or watching or listening to, never to be too reductive about our own cultural horizons when we approach such a text, but to be listening and open and willing to be enlarged by the life-world of the text before us, as the great philosopher Paul Ricoeur used to say.

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