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.

Explainer

Books

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

17 October 2024

6 min read

Bled dry: some red flags for those who hope to date a vampire

A philosopher's guide to undying love.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A modern vampire stairs at the face of his girlfried.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in Twilight.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s undying passion for all things gothic. In the first of a two-part series, he asks what is so irresistible about vampires, what do we want from them, and what’s the deal with the armadillos?

Historians point to John Polidori’s The Vampyre as that vital moment in Western vampire lore when the grisly undead creature becomes instead a Casanova. London, 1819. Lord Ruthven, the suave vampire in question, seduces young women and orchestrates chaos in the lives of others—all for his own carnal pleasure. Importantly, he does this by way of persuasion, not rote coercion, which illustrates a key aspect of the modern vampires’ modus operandi. They prefer romance to compulsion, seduction to force. They prefer thrall, almost to the end, at which point the monster fully emerges and the victims fully grasp that their good senses have been compromised. But by then it is too late.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” Goethe once observed. Similarly, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe themselves to be dating vampires.

To resist, however, is easier said than done. Even Buffy the vampire slayer succumbs to thrall, so much so that she invites Dracula to bite her. And he happily obliges, if “happily” is possible in the mind of a vampire. Later, having sobered up from the ordeal, Buffy stakes the villain, but we are nonetheless left with an uneasy feeling. Despite all her experience, despite all her kung-fu knowhow, Buffy still crumbles in the wake of thrall, at least temporarily, putting herself in grave danger and eliciting from us a pressing set of questions. How could this have happened so easily? Will this happen again? Are women attracted to men in capes?

Much like kryptonite, vampire magic also affects Superman. Two vampires have so far succeeded in hypnotizing him. Crucifer, not fortunate in name, enthralls our protagonist and sends him on several errands, until the Man of Steel has a moment of clarity, as the alcoholics call it, at which point he punches the ancient vampire through the heart. Dracula, too, disguised as an aristocrat named Rominoff, charms our superhero rather easily and then bites him on the neck, only to explode—hilariously—on the premise that Superman’s blood is tinged with sunlight. A moment of dream logic used to subvert the expectation that superblood might somehow benefit the Count.

Lord Ruthven of Polidori fame also wanders into the DC Comic Book Universe and, per usual, charms his way through problems, until he inadvertently skewers himself on a war memorial. Before this happens, however, we get the strong impression that Ruthven could beguile Superman with ease, if given the chance: that pens are mightier than swords and always have been.

On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves.

Psychoanalysts observe that to empathize with sociopaths is to negate the self most dangerously. They are right, I think, and right—too—that self-erasure proves difficult to recognize at times, because it feels like love. Such is the predicament of those who hope to rendezvous with vampires. Perhaps they have a death wish, some will say, or maybe a savior syndrome, as if they are to save the brooding scoundrels. As if they can. Regardless, the monsters have another plan entirely. As an early church father once explained, those who dine with the devils should bring long spoons.

Not that vampires are particularly good at banquets. They inevitably exaggerate, like the Macbeths as they welcome King Duncan to the castle: “All our service,” the lady says, “in every point twice done and then done double.”

Or recall the embroidered hospitality of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula, caught between silent film and sound: “I bid you welcome,” he says, acting out the part as if the audience must see the motive on his face. A perfect moment when the silent cinema and talking pictures conspire to produce the quintessential vampire ethos, an overstated affectation framed for the modern age. The bow of pretended humility, the elongated gesture, the monumental gravity. The outfit.

Some speculate that if vampires were able to see themselves in mirrors, they would reconsider their wardrobes. We have reason to think otherwise. Of course, the true gothic is not the vampire aesthetic, because the true gothic always points to Heaven, as in Notre Dame Cathedral, for instance, or Westminster Abbey. On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves, incurvatus in se, which signals not grandeur but rather self-apotheosis. In essence, vampires are their own cathedrals, and with this premise proceed accordingly, candelabras in tow.

Longinus, in On the Sublime, uses the term “frigidity” to describe the emotional effect produced by such false grandeur. He means to convey both rhetorical and metaphysical coldness, as does Dante, who places the Devil in a block of ice at the Inferno’s gaudy center. As does Stanley Kubrick, too, who freezes the possessed Jack in the maze at the end of The Shining. And somewhere near the frozen middle of Hell we find the vampires, those who betrayed the strangers in their midst and preyed upon the lonely and the desperate. But now they only devour themselves. We are punished by our sins, not for them.

On a side note, and concerning the vampire’s many choristers, the opening scene of Lugosi’s Dracula features three armadillos. They wander about the castle and mind their own business, it seems, as wolves howl and spiders weave their webs. On how they got there we do not know, but the armadillos further confirm Longinus’s additional point that the ridiculous and the sublime bear a family resemblance.

What, then, are we to make of the vampires who sparkle and the vampires with souls? Or, if not in the direction of the dreamy, then in the theater of the absurd: Count Chocula, the mascot for a popular breakfast cereal, or the puppet Count von Count from the children’s program Sesame Street, who teaches viewers how to add and subtract—hitting all the numbers with his heavy Transylvanian accent. We might deem these manifestations too unserious to be taken seriously, but in fairness to the spirit of Count Chocula, perhaps something else happens here. Namely, we find more variations upon the culture-making effort to rehabilitate the demonic, and the almost demonic, as the case might be.

If the vampire could only find pleasure in chocolate, if he could laugh with children, if he could be loved like Bella loves Edward in The Twilight Saga, then maybe there is hope enough in the world for all of us. Indeed, maybe some vampires have grown tired of being vampires. That said, we do well to heed the old Transylvanian proverb, lest we over-empathize with the villains: the sane would do no good if they made themselves monsters to help the monsters.

A recent meme depicts the real Dracula in the company of Count Chocula, Count von Count, The Twilight Saga’s Edward, and several other less-than-scary princes of darkness, at which point Dracula laments that the vampires have lost their edge.

And, true, I have yet to comment on psychic vampires and flaming extroverts, which is an oversight to be sure. As a corrective, and by way of conclusion, I observe the following: for twenty-seven dollars, one can buy a beaker of psychic vampire repellent from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Store in Beverly Hills, California. The Paper Crane Apothecary makes the product, which—with an essential blend of rosemary, lavender, and juniper—protects against the fiends who corner people at parties. At present, however, shipping will be difficult: the website tells me “This item is sold out.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.