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Steeves discusses the chasm between perception and reality is constructed for a purpose at Disneyland. Always, it is necessary for the experience. Sometimes it must draw attention to itself while at other times it must go unnoticed.

Introduction: The People v. Pooh

IN 1981 THE FAMILY of a nine-year old girl took Winnie the Pooh to court, claiming that he had slapped her across the face-beating her, even, to the point of brain damage on the day that the family had visited Disneyland. Robert Hill, who was in the Pooh costume that day, testified that the allegations were false and that due to his restricted vision he at most might have accidentally bumped the girl with Pooh's ear.

Following his testimony, and after a brief recess, Hill returned to the courtroom in costume as Winnie the Pooh. Throughout direct and cross examination Pooh answered the lawyers' questions only by nodding his head or stomping his feet. When the defense attorney asked "What do you do at Disneyland?" Pooh stood and danced all around the courtroom. Everyone began cheering and laughing uncontrollably. The judge cried out "Have the record show that he's doing a two-step" (Koenig, 201). Clearly, they agreed, Winnie the Pooh was loving, harmless, and fun. In only twenty-one minutes the jury acquitted Pooh, and he left the courtroom a vindicated bear.

The scene, if not of the crime then of our investigation, our vacation: Disneyland, located on 200 acres in Anaheim, California. Half the land is used for parking; the other half houses the attraction itself, often called the Magic Kingdom.

After entering the grounds and paying a fee, one parks and abandons the family car-often in the midst of 15,000 other cars. For twice the normal fee, "preferred parking" that is closer to the main entrance of the park is available. General parking, however, is serviced by a tram system with cars that stop at various places in the lot and drop people off at the main entrance.

Successfully completing the first line of the day-the line to buy a ticket-one enters and emerges onto Main Street U.S.A., a representation of a Midwestern American main street at the turn of the century. A horse-drawn street car or one of several other vehicles glides up the street and past the various stores, or it is possible to walk to the Central Plaza at which Main Street ends, directly in front of Sleeping Beauty's Castle. At this point, the park opens up and visitors may go off in various directions into the themed lands. There are seven such lands: Adventureland (which is home to the Jungle Cruise and the Indiana Jones Adventure), Frontierland (with the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad rollercoaster and the Mark Twain Steamboat), New Orleans Square (housing the Haunted Mansion and the popular Pirates of the Caribbean), Critter Country (which includes Splash Mountain and the Country Bear Playhouse), Fantasyland (containing rides based on Disney's cartoons and It's a Small World), Mickey's Toontown (the newest land, built to resemble a town where Disney characters live), and Tomorrowland (with Star Tours, Space Mountain, Autopia, Submarine Voyage, Rocket Rods, and remodeled Astro Orbitor). The entire Magic Kingdom is also surrounded by a train track with four steam trains circling the park every twenty minutes, going-in essence-nowhere. Visiting the park and living in society with Disneyland we become the kind of people who properly inhabit such institutions. We become the kind of people who can want to sue Winnie the Pooh and let him testify in court as himself. We live the contradiction; and in consuming the Disney Magic, we are changed. The changes manifest themselves in our experience of the park and of ourselves, and it is the nature of such changes which we convene to investigate. Confronted with a chasm between experience and what we take to be reality, how do we begin to bridge the gap? How do we become-Disney as we consume the Disney product? What phenomenological traces are there of our transformations?

A Whole New World

The chasm between perception and reality is constructed for a purpose at Disneyland. Always, it is necessary for the experience. Sometimes it must draw attention to itself while at other times it must go unnoticed. An example of the former is found in the transformation of the evil queen into the ugly witch in Fantasyland's "Snow White's Scary Adventures." At one point in the ride we encounter the queen, her back to us and looking into a mirror such that we can see her face only in reflection. Suddenly she turns and we see that she has "become" an ugly witch. The transformation is shocking because we are familiar with the presentation of objects in mirrors. We experience objects as manifolds of presence and absence-as wholes that are given one side at a time. When we experience a thing, the front side is perceived, and presenced as perceived, while the back side is apperceived and presented as absent. If we can see the back side in a mirror, we can attend to it and perceive it as the back side of the object-the side we would see if we were to go around back there and take a look. When the back side is suddenly and directly perceived and it is not as we had thought, we are shocked. The shock requires that experience operates in this way. The shock comes from our experience of the being of the object, not, for instance, from a bad inference.

Something similar is probably occurring on the rollercoaster rides, the Indiana Jones Adventure, the Rocket Rods, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Here, the chasm is between beliefs and perceptions. We must believe we are relatively safe, yet perceive that we are in danger. Both are necessary for the experience of thrill. If we do not believe we are safe then we do not get on the ride. If we do not perceive any danger then the ride is not exhilarating. Rollercoaster designers are well aware that part of the sensation of fear stems from the perception of the dangerous drop or turn up ahead. Designing the coaster so that these drops and turns are in full view enhances the thrill. One might argue, in fact, that Space Mountain-a rollercoaster in the dark-is not essentially a rollercoaster thrill ride. Or perhaps the thrill comes from having ridden other visible rollercoasters and thus imagining the drop that one just went over. Though structurally different, Space Mountain is closer to Star Tours-the flight simulator-than it is to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. There are definitely thrills, though, when we encounter the falling barrels in Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. If we are not aware of the gulf between experience and reality, between perception and belief, then the ride does not "work." We are terrified or bored, but not thrilled. Of course, Disneyland exists to make a profit and thus will take the cheapest route to the thrill. This means that we need not actually be safe, rather we must merely feel safe. The truth of the matter is that sometimes the falling barrels really do fall-a point driven home to a 55-year-old woman who visited Disneyland only to have a safety cable break and send Mr. Toad's barrels "crashing down on her head" (Koenig, 200). If it costs less money to suppress the truth than to create a truly safe environment, any corporation would seem to choose the former.

The thrill, then, stems from a categorial awareness. The security and the fear are not experienced as a disjointed conjunction, but rather as a new experience altogether: their being-together ushers in a kind of phenomenological categoriality. The world "comes on to us" thrillingly. And this is accomplished, in part, by drawing subtle attention to the chasm between experience and reality.

Typically, though, we are not supposed to notice the difference, otherwise we ruin the "Disney Magic." Consider the case of Abraham Lincoln. True, the visitor to the park is often unknowingly in peril, but so, too, are the audio-animatronic people. Once, the Hall of Presidents' Lincoln robot failed, convulsed, and fell over its chair at Disney World to the shock of the onlookers. Patricia Limerick, a University of Colorado historian, remembers seeing this happen when she was very young. "My sister explained to me," relates Limerick, "that this part was where he got shot" (Wiener, 606). The crisis is marked by the Disney narrative being interrupted, and the visitor beginning a free-form re-write. Such freedom is exactly what the park is trying to eradicate. Uncle Walt's world is a world of illusion, a world of controlled misperception.

Throughout the park, for instance, distance and size are not what they appear. "Forced perspective" is commonly used to create various illusions. In Sleeping Beauty's Castle, the towers and spires decrease in scale in proportion to their height. The uppermost towers seem taller than they are because they are reduced in size. From a distance the effect is especially successful, yet even close up one does not imagine that the highest point in the castle is only seventy-seven feet above the moat. A similar effect is used on the mountain housing the Matterhorn Bobsleds:

The designers carefully studied photographs of the real Matterhorn when developing the designs, so the mountain itself is a pretty good reproduction of the real one. It even faces the proper direction. . . . Forced perspective makes the summit look much loftier than the approximately 147 feet it actually reaches. Even the trees and the shrubs help create the illusion. Those at the timberline-65 to 75 feet from the base of the mountain-are far smaller than those at the bottom. These . . . trees are planted on small cement "pockets" that purposefully retard their growth. (Birnbaum, 81)

On Main Street U.S.A. the trick is used for a different effect. In each of the buildings the first floor is seven-eighths scale, the second story is five-eighths, and the third story is half-size. The result is that the buildings appear taller than they actually are yet at the same time seem small. It is a delicate balance, resulting in a sensation of security, coziness, and empowerment. One might liken it to visiting as an adult an elementary school one attended many years ago or returning home to spend the night in one's childhood bedroom. Everything seems smaller than it used to seem; there is a sensation of superiority and comfort. The drinking fountain which used to hang high on the wall now seems so low; the comfortable bed one had while growing up now seems shrunken. Of course, the underlying experience is the realization that we have grown-we have matured and moved on even though we might long for the security of these past environments. And the same is true on Main Street U.S.A. It would have been simple for Disney visibly to shrink the houses and the settings, but then our experience would have been one of walking through a play-town. By reducing the size yet maintaining the illusion that proportions are still correct, Disney is able to create the sensation that we have matured and moved on as Americans. Although we still might long for the security of the past environment, we know that we cannot go back. The old elementary schools and Main Street U.S.A. are comforting-a nice place to visit, but we no longer belong living there. All of this, then, from the chasm between experience and reality.

Every sense is manipulated in Disneyland in order to construct the desired illusions. Along Main Street U.S.A., the clip-clop of the horses' hooves is reproduced by spraying polyurethane on their shoes, and "inconspicuous vents . . . pump out the scent of vanilla or, at Christmas time, peppermint" (Koenig, 41). In Mr. Toad's Wild Ride the narrative eventually has Mr. Toad sentenced to hell, and visitors actually feel the heat. Audio-animatronic people and animals stand in for their living counterparts throughout the park. Even time is manipulated, as the waiting times posted outside the major attractions are always padded by ten minutes. A thirty-minute wait is really only a twenty-minute wait inside the Magic Kingdom.

Living in such an environment changes people. No matter how well hidden, the gap between experience and reality is bound to show itself in some form, and the way in which we react is quite telling. One possible response is to adjust one's expectations to fit the perceived truth of the park; another is to question the nature of one's conception of truth itself. Let us consider both in turn.

Disneyland with a New Attitude

Bombarded with experiences that blur the line between fantasy and reality, one response is to erase the line completely. This is a standard problem after prolonged exposure to the Magic Kingdom. There are two phenomenological manifestations of this response. The first is akin to adopting an attitude even less critical than the Natural Attitude-leaving one in what we might call "The Unnatural Attitude." The second is similar to engaging in a systematic Cartesian doubt-a sort of reduction that can lead to "Disney Mania."

Edmund Husserl, in one of his many introductions to phenomenological philosophy, argues that "anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must `once in his life' withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the [knowledge] . . . that, up to then, he has been accepting" (2). The philosopher-literally, the lover of wisdom-must turn away from complacent acceptance of how the world is thought to be (i.e., must abandon the normal, everyday, Natural Attitude), and instead look for things that are necessarily, self-evidently certain. The Natural Attitude tells us that of course the world exists, and things really are just what and how they appear to be. The philosophical attitude, in contrast, challenges us, telling us that we need to be sure of this, we need to prove it rather than simply accept it as true. Phenomenology seeks to ground that assurance in experience, in uncovering the necessary structures of all consciousness. The point, for our purposes, is that the Natural Attitude rests on an unthoughtful naivete wherein we accept everything around us at face-value. The Natural Attitude is considered to be the ultimate anti-philosophical stance. Until we pass through the gates of the park.

Our conscious engagement with the Magic Kingdom can prove to be yet a step further away from knowledge and wisdom-a naivete that puts the Natural Attitude to shame. This Disneyland-induced Unnatural Attitude is marked by the chasm between experience and reality disappearing, the former constructing a new version of the latter. As a result, reality becomes the illusion that we experience. The perception is, for instance, that safety, security, and order exist-therefore we act as if they do exist. Parents assume that their children are safe-"After all, this is Disneyland!"-and they allow them to engage in behavior that would never be acceptable elsewhere. They go off by themselves, dangle from and climb various structures, and generally take risks that are no longer regarded as such. Karen Klugman maintains that our "critical capacities are replaced with a childlike trust" (POD, 107) at Disneyland; and park employee Larry Holmes agrees. "Guests get lost in their own world," he remarks. "I can't tell you the number of times-at least once a week-- employees routinely save someone from serious injury. . . . And sometimes it's so subtle the guest doesn't even know it happened" (Koenig, 169).

When Disney does the driving-literally and figuratively-- there is a feeling of freedom. It is a strange occurrence: the more controlled the environment, the more liberated its inhabitants feel. The sensation of "driving" on the Autopia (where it is impossible to drive off the track) is similar to staying in a hotel. Someone else is taking care of the cleaning, the laundry, the making of the bed, the "driving." Only in a culture that secretly and deeply abhors work-perhaps abhors the alienation of wage labor and industrialization that work has come to represent-could the lack of work be prized so greatly that it out-values the constraints of the controlled Disney environment. At Disneyland you don't have to drive the Indiana Jones Adventure jeep: it will drive itself. In the Haunted Mansion you don't have to choose what to look at: your car will spin and tilt to point you in just the direction you should be looking at that moment. And this is partly why people choose to purchase the Disneyland experience. As the Disney Magic begins to work, what was at first strange and disruptive-"I'm driving but I don't have to steer?!," "That can't be a real rhinoceros over there, can it?!"-becomes the familiar and the accepted, and the visitor has the sensation of freedom.

Susan Willis's analysis of Disney World makes this point in a slightly different manner. She writes:

Many visitors suspend daily perceptions and judgments altogether, and treat the wonderland environment as more real than real. . . . In fact, the entire natural world is subsumed by the primacy of the artificial. . . . The Disney environment puts visitors inside the world that Philip K. Dick depicted in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?-- where all animal life has been exterminated, but replaced by the production of simulacra, so real in appearance that people have difficulty recalling that real animals no longer exist. The marvelous effect of Science Fiction is produced out of a dislocation between two worlds, which the reader apprehends as an estrangement, but the characters inside the novel cannot grasp because they have only the one world: the world of simulacra. The effect of the marvelous cannot be achieved unless the artificial environment is perceived through the retained memory of everyday reality. Total absorption into the Disney environment cancels the possibility for the marvelous. . . . (POD, 185)

Or, we might say, when the marvelous becomes the typical it is no longer really marvelous. Even if it feels pretty good. The Unnatural Attitude that results from "total absorption" into Disneyland is thus the deeper anti-philosophical escape-not into the mundane (the realm of the Natural Attitude), but into the marvelous that has become mundane.

The second way in which the line between fantasy and reality is erased is a result of a doubting of the chasm which stands between them. Faced with the avalanche of incongruous perceptions that necessarily accompany time spent in an environment in which the fantastical is constructed as the commonplace, in which the artificial is attended to as the real, we might begin to doubt our perceptions. Once presented with the convincing lie, we begin to question all we held to be true. Like Descartes by his campfire, the Disney visitor thinks "If that really wasn't Abraham Lincoln and that castle really isn't so high, then how can I be sure anything is what it appears to be?"

Park employees have volumes of anecdotal evidence to attest to this behavior:

[Once] a woman asked if the ongoing downpour was real rain. "It's not real," explained a cast member [i.e., employee]. "Mr. Disney has arranged to have an artificial rainstorm in the park every day at 3:00." Others have questioned if that's actual water in the Submarine Lagoon. "No," employees have replied, "that's cellophane with blowers underneath." Many wonder if the swans in the castle moat and ducks on the Rivers of America are real. No, employees might explain. The birds have to be wound up every morning. Tourists regularly ask if all the plants and trees in the park are plastic. . . . A little girl pointed to the night sky and wanted to know if that was the real moon. And on stormy days, many guests have complained that Disneyland allowed it to rain. (Koenig, 119-20)

These stories are told from the perspective of the park employee for an audience outside the influence of Disneyland. To us, the Disney-doubting appears to be a form of Disney Mania. Outside the park we would lock people up for consistently asking such questions, but this is, in fact, the point. Inside the park there are different standards because it is clear that a different kind of conscious engagement with the world is at work. One cannot help but be altered by the environment-become a Disney visitor-and the repercussions are far-reaching. Driving home from the park one has the sensation that the trip is but another ride. Falling asleep in bed one's body still feels like it is moving. It is a changed way of being as well as experiencing, and the crisis is incarnate: the eyes do not see the highway as real, the body senses centrifugal accelerations when there are none. Disney's black magic can zombify us once outside the protective gates.

And the mania does not end. As well as feeling the rides and dwelling in the landscapes, we encounter the inhabitants of Disneyland when we visit the park. How peculiar and yet how commonplace it is to take the costumed actors as the characters they represent. When we meet Mickey, who, in fact, are we meeting?

Wearing a Head

Walt Disney envisioned Mickey Mouse as the "ideal citizen, neighbor, [and] friend" (Koenig, 18)-the ideal citizen of an ideal city. To this day, the official position of the Disney folks is that the Mickey Mouse you meet at the park really is Mickey Mouse and he really does live at Disneyland.

There are strict rules governing the actions of the cast members who wear the character suits, and swift actions are taken when the magic is threatened. All costumes must be transported in black bags so that no costume will ever be seen "disembodied." Under no circumstances may a character remove his or her head in public. This mandate leads to particularly frightening and disgusting stories such as the time Dumbo threw up inside his head and passed out from the fumes; and when Chip (alongside Dale), who was fastened to a pole on a parade float so that he would not accidentally fall off, passed out from the heat, his head hanging down, and was carried thus to the end of the parade route, crucified on the float's pole. If a visitor inadvertently or secretly snaps a photo of a character with some human body part exposed, the camera is confiscated by Disney employees, the film is developed, the illegal photos are removed, and the camera and photos are returned with a roll of complimentary film. The cold war CIA was never so efficient.

Jane Kuenz has done a fascinating study based on a series of interviews with employees at Disney World, some of whom "wear a head" (Disneyspeak for "performing in costume as a character"). One employee refused for the first hour to admit that there are people inside the costumes, but the ones who talked gave interesting insight into the phenomenology of the characters and visitors (POD, 134):

Ted: Let's say you were like Pluto, and you were the person in the costume. . . . [Y]ou are the cartoon. You become Pluto. You have to experience it to understand.

JK: Is the "experience" the becoming Pluto or the interaction with the kids?

Ted: The interaction with the kids.

JK: I see.

Ted: As Pluto.

Interacting with the kids as Pluto is different from interacting with the kids as one's self. In fact, as employees' comments continually re-affirm, individual selves must be checked at the main gate upon entering the park. Even actors are not asked to make such a sacrifice on stage. In the Magic Kingdom, though, there are only ideal citizens such as Mickey.

In order to interact with the public as Pluto, however, one must not only make a shift in one's engagement with the world and lose one's self, but the public, too, must take the performer to be Pluto. It is hard to believe that this happens, but Kuenz's research suggests that this is the norm.

Those who literally do "put on a face" by putting on a character head routinely claim that the park guests seem by their actions not to realize that there are people inside the costumes. . . . I find this frankly incredible, but their stories are consistent. A character lead says that "adults and children really believe what they're seeing. . . . Even adults, they believe that's Mickey."

It is incredible until one enters the park and encounters the characters for one's self. There is a pressure to take the characters at face value-not the psychological notion of peer pressure, but a more philosophical pressure to play one's role in the constructed world, to construct that world in the same way as everyone else. All around you, people are attending to the characters as if they were real. For us, this seems like madness, but within the Magic Kingdom it is quite the opposite. Attending to Mickey as Mickey is perfectly reasonable.

Such epistemological questions have been pondered in other contexts. Constructing a feminist epistemology, for instance, Lorraine Code writes:

Consider one of the most common 'S knows that p' examples: say, Sara knows that the cat is on the mat. Now suppose that Sara's claim "the cat is on the mat" is contradicted by everyone around her: by people she knows and loves, who live in the house where the mat is located; by passing strangers, and by `vision experts' summoned to check her perceptual powers. . . . How long would Sara be able to defend the veridicality of her perception? . . . Even the simplest of observational knowledge claims depend, more than people ordinarily realize, on corroboration, acknowledgment, either in word or in deed. (216)

Of course, even if everyone is saying "S is p"-"That is Mickey"-it doesn't rule out the possibility of true psychological imbalance. In the 1960s a guest became obsessed with Alice in Wonderland-stalking and harassing her until eventually holding her hostage at knife point, demanding that she go out on a date with him. The scene was resolved after the White Rabbit arrived with security, but it was too late to save the Mad Hatter from a knife wound as he tried to come to Alice's rescue. The madness here, though, comes from stalking and violent behavior, not from the guest's insistence that Alice in Wonderland be his date. In this case, there is little difference between the crazed Disney guest and the Madonna stalker or the woman who kept breaking into David Letterman's home claiming to be his wife. There are few significant differences between Madonna and Alice and Wonderland, between Letterman and Mickey Mouse, in our society. In a certain sense Mickey is more real to me than Letterman. I have met and interacted with Mickey and believe that I could again if I made another trip to Anaheim. Letterman will probably never be anything more than a miniature image on my television screen.

When the Disney magic falters, though, the results are shocking. One's experience of the world is inevitably shaken.

Once when Chip was posing for pictures in Frontierland, he put his arm around a girl and she started to giggle coyly. Her boyfriend, who "thought the character was coming on to her," began beating Chip until he fell to the ground (Koenig, 102). Then he proceeded to kick him repeatedly, only stopping after realizing that the cries coming from behind the mask belonged to a woman. Of course Disneyland characters would never come-on to visitors-this would not be ideal behavior-but the thought that one might drove the boyfriend to violence. In what world could one feel sexually threatened by, perhaps even jealous of, a six-foot chipmunk in cowboy clothes? The wonderful world of Disney. And I would suggest that there is more going on here than thinking that the person inside the costume was flirting with the girlfriend. It is true that Chip is constructed as a male figure, and to hear a female voice would be shocking, but the constructed masculinity of the character is the basis for reading his actions as a sexual advance. In the boyfriend's mind, Chip was moving in on his girl. Hearing a human female voice changed everything, and thankfully stunned the boyfriend into inaction.

The more classic case of the Disney Magic failing involves Mickey Mouse, who one day had been abused by one child too many. Most characters take a beating each shift they are in the park, but on this particular day when a little girl kicked Mickey in the shin he could take no more. Instead of exaggerating the injury so as to make the child feel guilty and thus stop; instead of just ignoring her actions and waiting for her to move on, Mickey lunged at her and attacked. Perhaps in a moment of revenge for every character who has ever been abused, Mickey ended up chasing the little girl across the park, through Main Street, and to the gates at the entrance. Here he caught up with her and attempted to drag her off, but he fell and landed on top of her. Pinned to the ground, the girl squirmed and struggled but she could not break free, and Mickey refused to move. The event was witnessed by hundreds of visitors who did nothing to help. Like the jealous boyfriend, they were stunned. Not that an employee of Disney could act that way; not that the person inside the head had lost control. Rather, the mass response was that "Mickey had gone crazy."

How can the public deal with this? How do we reconcile the actions of Mickey with the ideal of Disneyland? How do we account for the fact that Mickey has many forms? That he might appear live in multiple places at the same time? That he cannot speak when you meet him live but he talks all of the time on television? How do we account for the incongruity of Mickey's body and especially his size? He is, after all, a mouse. He appears to be mouse-sized in cartoons, or perhaps duck-sized since he is equal in size to Donald (presumably a larger animal). But at Disneyland he is much larger-as big as a human and out of proportion in a carnivalesque manner. To make matters worse, the statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse that stands in the Central Plaza shows a life-size bronze Walt holding the hand of a Mickey who seems to reach as tall as his waist-perhaps the size of a six-year-old child. How do we think about the size of Mickey Mouse? How do we handle all of these incongruities in our experiences of him?

We do. And perhaps asking how or why is not the appropriate question. Experience need not be consistent-consistency is a hobgoblin that lives in little, non-Disney Haunted Mansions. One might as well ask how Christ can be fully human and fully divine or how God pulls off that "being everywhere" trick. Within the worldview these become interesting points of discussion, but our first goal must be to describe that worldview, the conditions which have led to it and made it possible, the way it shapes our subsequent experience and being.

We are the people for whom experience is a commodity. We are the consumers of Disney magic-falling into Unnatural Attitudes or a kind of mania upon confronting the chasm between experience and reality. We are capable of knowing that there is a face behind the mask and at the same time taking the mask to be real.

I Shop (Disney), Therefore I Am (Goofy)

Disneyland is constantly enforcing the will to consume-- experience itself is the commodity in greatest demand, though the Disney corporation is not above putting its logo on a few material goods here and there as well. The point, of course, is not that Disney desires profit-this is, after its all, its sole reason for existence. Rather, it is the way in which being a consumer is presented as the only legitimate way of being human, the way in which we unwittingly become Disney as we purchase Disney. If it is true on some level that we are who we are in virtue of the narratives in which we participate, and if it is true that Disneyland's rides and even the park itself represent narratives, then to participate in those narratives is to become the people who inhabit these roles. And the unifying theme across each Disneyland story is the value of capitalism and consumption.

Birnbaum's Official Guide to Disneyland devotes nine pages to detailed descriptions of each store at Disneyland and even provides a "Shoppers' Treasure Map," cross-listing types of items and the stores in which one is likely to find them. The allusion is particularly fitting for a park so well known for its Pirates of the Caribbean ride-an attraction in which the theme of the quest for wealth is presented, according to Louis Marin, in reverse narrative form.

The first sequence of the narrative discourse is a place where skulls and skeletons are lying on heaps of gold and silver, diamonds and pearls. Next, the visitor goes through a naval battle in his little boat; then he sees off shore the attack of a town launched by the pirates. In the last sequence the spoils are piled up in the pirate ships, the visitor is cheered by pirates feasting and reveling; and his tour is concluded. . . .[I]f we introduce the story into the structural scheme of the map. . . [a] meaning appears beneath the moral signification [that crime does not pay]. . . . Main Street U.S.A. signifies to the visitor that life is an endless exchange and a constant consumption and, reciprocally, that the feudal accumulation of riches, the Spanish hoarding of treasure, the Old World conception of gold and money are not only morally criminal, but they are, economically, signs and symptoms of death. The treasure buried in the ground is a dead thing, a corpse. The commodity produced and sold is a living good because it can be consumed. (62-63)

Indeed, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride exits into New Orleans Square where, after our confrontation with death, we are invited to confirm our being and celebrate our existence by shopping in the variety of stores surrounding the exhibit. As the t-shirt says: I shop, therefore I am.

Many of the rides at Disneyland begin the narrative more temporally/appropriately by assuming from the get-go that we are consumers. The Jungle Cruise is based on the premise that we have chartered a boat and guide to take us up the river. The Indiana Jones Adventure is based on the idea that a sacred archaeological dig-The Temple of the Forbidden Eye-has been opened to tourists (and just in case we miss this, the audio-animatronic Indy firmly sets our identity by looking up at us after the ride begins, saying "Oh, great. They sent me tourists."). The Star Tours attraction could not be more obvious. The story is that we are tourists paying to take a space cruise to the Moon of Endor, but something goes wrong. Here, like with the Indiana Jones Adventure, the visitor begins participating in the narrative from the moment he or she stands in line, as the queue wraps around and through a futuristic airport/spaceport set.

Although it is Disney that we are consuming, other corporations make their presence known in the park. Kodak creates experiences by labeling certain views "Kodak picture spots." Dole sponsors the Enchanted Tiki Room and has a stand set up in the waiting area to sell pineapple spears and pineapple juice. And AT&T participates in the Indiana Jones narrative in a special way (reminding us-both with a sign at the end of the attraction and a card passed out to visitors as they enter-that AT&T is the best choice for your long distance company). Built into the Indiana Jones narrative is the notion that one must choose which of three doors to enter at the start of the ride. Of course, there is no real choice because the computer controlling the ride will decide for everyone in the jeep. We are told, though, to choose wisely, and at the conclusion of the ride, the dictum to "choose wisely" is once again encountered, however this time it is in the context of choosing AT&T as a long distance carrier. This is interesting if for no other reason than the fact that until recently the choice to use AT&T was very much like the choice of which door to enter. AT&T was a monopoly; the "choice" was already decided.

Is there a melancholy desire to return to the old days-an echo, still, from nearby Main Street U.S.A.-in the sub-text of AT&T's sponsorship of the Indiana Jones Adventure? Perhaps. But for our purposes the point is that we are once again being told who we are, not by means of pronouncements or laws, but through participation in set narratives that make us into those people. Being free comes to be equated with having choices about what to consume. Personal identity comes to be seen as thus being up to one's self: you are free to choose from any of the products that are around you; you are radically free, for instance, to construct yourself as any one of the seven dwarves you want-or even the Wicked Queen if you really want to be the rebel.

Interestingly, this identification of choice with freedom as a mode of being at Disneyland has one possibly contradictory problem to which Michael Harrington has drawn attention. IT]he Disney corporation is in favor of free enterprise everywhere," he argues,

but in its own market, the park. . . .The corporation exercises total control over everything, including what will be sold, when the trains will run and what employees will wear. All products sold and all services in the park are controlled, so that the visitor has no option but to buy only what the corporation offers . . . [and this] is a long way from the ideology of small-town free enterprise that is being promoted in the "Main Street U.S.A." exhibits. (Johnson, 161)

Anyone who has begrudgingly paid $1.50 for a miniature bottle of water at the park has experienced the crisis of this contradiction on some level. But for our purposes, the crisis has little to do with our individual identity as consumers. Shoppers in monopolistic markets and shoppers in free markets have more similarities than dissimilarities. And in the Disney park, our differences are further eroded: we are all tourists, all on the lookout for a good bargain.

Ultimately, we emerge from the park-from our experience-arms filled with shopping bags, bodies clothed in trademarked logos, hearts bursting with the warm, soon-tobe-cherished memories we have purchased (and handily recorded on the family camcorder). And we are changed.

Now, we will experience reality in a new way, affected by our having drifted to the extremes of a hyper-questioning mania or a dangerously complacent Unnatural Attitude. We will remember Mickey like a family member visited only on holidays; and like a true member of the family, we will place photos of us together with Mickey on the mantletop, we will talk of him fondly in his absence, and we won't think twice about suing his shortpants off if the opportunity arises. We will have bought into and become citizens of the Magic Kingdom.

And next summer, if you're really good, perhaps we can trace the history of our family back to The Old Country . . . and visit Disneyland Paris.