Friends,
Years ago when Lindsey and I lived in Los Angeles, we had season passes to Disneyland, and most every time we went I made sure to look for what was hiding around the sightlines. An employee is going on break? I'm peaking through the door. Goofy bounding toward us? Show me the zippers. Favorite ride? Monorail: you can see the employee entrance! the construction backroads! the break rooms! It was less looking for “gotcha” moments and more of an utter fascination with how the spectacle was made. And why there was so much effort in trying to tightly manage every sensory experience in the first place.
I promise I still had fun. Can you imagine? You, lifting and falling on a carousel ostrich, me, trying to talk around your cotton candy: “You know, Disneyland is an expression of American culture writ large, and to quote Baudrillard on the nature of simulacra...” Barf. I tried to keep all these musings to myself (except for that one time I went with a fellow thirty-something man to ride rides and record podcast episodes analyzing the cultural impacts of Disney, Evan, if you're reading this please delete those files).
I'm telling you all of this not because I'm tired of the assumption that anyone pursuing culture should limit themselves to Serious Art. Which I am—just wait for my upcoming letters on Thomas Kinkade (yes). I'm telling you this to help you understand that when Splash Mountain broke down while we were riding it, I was thrilled. It was, truly, a childhood dream fulfilled.
It was after the drop, right when we were drifting past the nostalgic riverboat cruise finale. Total logjam. We stopped moving, and we were left waiting straddling each other in our vinyl seats. The song kept blaring, the barnyard animals kept dancing. With water rushing around us, the ride's breezy happy ending tightened into an endless loop—my oh my what a wonderful day, my oh my what a wonderful, my oh my my oh….Once some warehouse lights turned on, the music abruptly stopped, but the animals kept clacking and spinning their programmed dance. An employee appeared and carefully guided us onto the storybook staging, and on the way out the side door, I made sure to bop Briar Rabbit on the nose.
In the backlot, we marched single file through a beige corrugated alley, the mountain's exposed metal ribs looming above us. We walked past a stack of security monitors, past the roaring water main propelling the ride, and popped back out into Adventureland. Abruptly closed, people were turning away from the ride, but the background music was still missing and silence was seeping into the park. The spectacle glitched, and we were all just...blankly looking at each other as fumes rose off the pavement.
Why was I so excited about this? Why am I excited about it now? I think it’s because it’s all just so real despite trying so desperately to be a dream. Yes, that fake mountain is, in fact, a fake mountain. Yes, the robot dance will continue, no matter what wrecks in front of it. Yes, there is a place called “backstage.” And while it's easy to tell the difference between ourselves and the machines we make when they’re cute talking animals, things get weirder as tech improves and everything feels more realistic than ever. Buckle in at Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, and down the uncanny valley we go.
Animatronics aren't the first: we humans have long history of trompe-l'oeil, of building illusions that unsettle our sense of reality. Just take a look at the crisis caused by automata, how cycloramas shaped Civil War histories, or, to go all the way back, how Pygmalion is so taken by his sculpture of a woman that he falls in love with marble. There's delight to be had in magic, pleasure from the sleight of hand. But we can lose our way when we confuse what we make with what is real, no matter how life-like it may seem.
“It was like a record scratching,” Lindsey told me later that day at the theme park, “and we all woke up from a dream and start asking ourselves ‘what are we doing here?’” Truthfully, those were the moments I enjoyed the most at that theme park. Yes, the rides were fun, but it was all the human stuff that captured my attention: a young girl grinning in the mirror of a princess salon while her parents cried happy tears, the pin-traders who hung out in Frontierland with binders bursting at the seams, the live jazz band tucked away by Haunted Mansion, how that one time in the Tiki-Tiki Room we watched and cried as a young neurodivergent man sang along, joyously, with the animatronic birds' every clacking word.
In a mediated tech-driven world, we don’t have to buy a ticket to the spectacle. Most days, it feels like we’re living there already, inside a hall of mirrors with no illuminated exit signs. But to paraphrase E.E. Cummings, there is a difference between the “world of made” and the “world of born,” and we don’t have to wait for a wreck to get that right. Some days it’s worth turning off the music, splashing some cold water on our faces, and asking again: What are we doing here?
Take care,
Michael
“pity this busy monster, manunkind” by E.E. Cummings
pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
— electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born — pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if — listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
Considerations for an extended reality future
How to be alone: musicians confront solitude
https://blog.loa.org/2010/10/e-e-cummings-and-enormous-room-making.html between made and born- ee cummings - born yet oddly privileged?