Essay
America
Church and state
Conspiracy theory
Culture
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 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
Monsters
Race
4 min read

Sinners is standout thanks to Ryan Coogler and his ‘no stupid people’ rule

A cleverly choreographed culture clash between the living and the un-dead.

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who host's the 'God in Film’ podcast.

Two actors in 1930s clothes sit in an open car while the film director gestures towards them.
Delroy Lindo, Michael B. Jordan, and Ryan Coogler.
Warner Bros.

Coming off the back of Black Panther and Creed, Ryan Coogler fights off franchise fatigue with Sinners, a historical crime drama turned horror film that might be his most personal film yet. Set in 1932, Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers returning to their hometown in rural Mississippi to open a juke joint. But a trio of guests, both unwelcome and undead, crash their opening night. 

Any film set in the Jim Crow era South following a Black protagonist can set off warning bells for savvy audiences. The blatant racial oppression can often bring with it a fair share of trauma porn. But that’s not what Sinners is about. For a significant chunk of the run-time, the film is downright hopeful. Jordan’s dual role as the brothers Smoke and Stack presents them as dangerous and driven, but also compassionate, responsible and endlessly charismatic – the type of figures who could easily become folk heroes. There’s a scene where Jordan’s Smoke not only employs a young girl to watch his truck, but also teaches her how to negotiate, doing himself a worse deal in the process. Watching them recruit musicians, cooks and sign-painters for their juke joint from the under-appreciated and under-paid is a compelling exploration of Black enterprise. 

As night descends, and the juke joint opens for business, this peek into Black enterprise turns into a delightful celebration of Black joy. Chris Hewitt of Empire magazine referred to this film as a ‘stealth musical’ and it’s not hard to see why. Almost every main character gets a musical interlude of some sort. The standout by some distance is newcomer Miles Caton, who plays Sammie, the guitar-playing cousin of Smoke and Stack, who they recruit as the centrepiece of their entertainment for the night. Sammie is at the centre of a musical sequence that will have you leaning forward in your seat in amazement at what cinema is capable of. This film brings with it its own mythology, telling us that there are people whose music is so transcendent, they are capable of piercing the veil between the past, present and future. Sammie is one such person, and his talent attracts everyone for miles around, including ancient Irish vampire, Remmick, played by British star, Jack O’Connell.  

Perhaps what’s unusual for a vampire film is that, as an audience, we’re having such a good time at the juke joint, we can almost resent the imposition of the vampires forcing themselves into the narrative. The racial parallels of these monsters might not be as obvious as the ones you find in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but they are still there. Remmick, as the head vampire, gains the memories of each of his victims, and he wants Sammie’s abilities as a means to communicate through time with those he’s lost. (Yet another example of Ryan Coogler’s ‘no stupid people’ rule. Every character has a convincing reason for doing what they do, even the blood suckers.) The vampires here are drawn in by the music and can represent a white ruling class that wants to exploit Black music for its own purposes, in much the same way that culture vultures took music of black origin like the blues and rock, and popularised it with more palatable white artists like Elvis Presley.  

The sequence where the vampires themselves have a riotous, yet melodic dance in the dark, reminiscent of a rowdy worship session.

Perhaps another reason why vampires are such a popular monster to revisit in western culture is how they are a literalised inversion of Christianity. In the same way that Christians are promised an eternal life through the blood of Jesus Christ, vampires get immortality through drinking the blood of their victims. Even the rule where vampires can’t enter a private building without permission could be seen as warped version of the image of Jesus standing at the door of our hearts and knocking as shown in Revelation, the last book in the Bible. Vampires are a perverted vulgarisation of what it means to be a follower of Jesus and this, on an unconscious level as a society, might be why we find them so fascinating. The way the vampires use words like ‘fellowship’ to make their dark gift sound more appealing to those still inside the building suggests Coogler is conscious of this parallel. The sequence where the vampires themselves have a riotous, yet melodic dance in the dark, reminiscent of a rowdy worship session, further emphasises how music can bring people together.  

There are so many fascinating aspects to the film it’s impossible to mention them all, which might be deliberate on Coogler’s part, as he tells EBONY:  

“I wanted the movie to feel like a full meal, your appetizers, starters, entrees and desserts, I wanted all of it there.”  

While this does mean a sequel is unlikely, and some critics have complained of it being over-stuffed, it does mean that the film will richly reward repeat viewing.  

By now, Sinners will have no doubt secured its spot in many critics’ top films of the year. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners could so easily fall apart in the hands of a less skilled storyteller, but in the hands of one of the best directors of his generation, it absolutely sings.  

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief