Celebrate! (Or Pay the Consequences)

As mentioned in the Giroux article, Disney has created a master-planned community known as Celebration that it hopes will serve as a model for future communities.

Two summers ago, I stayed with my friend at her house in this Celebration community, and couldn't decide if the forced pleasantness, from compulsory grooming of one's front lawn (you receive a letter from the community if your grass is too long, your flowers are wilting, or your lawn just isn't looking quite as splendid as is required) to a nearly identical model for each house (with a front porch on every estate calling upon back-in-the-day-when-we-all-just-sat-on-the-deck-and-talked-like-a-real-family nostalgia,) was endearing or nauseating.

On one hand, like many of those who disagreed with the Disney article, I felt a lovable charm about the community, with its freshly cut grass and "downtown" area, which featured everything from great restaurants to a movie theater to an antique-looking Bank of America. Eventually, however, the scene felt a little too forced. I felt like I was in the movie Pleasantville, in which all members of the community agree on an implicit pact to be happy and exhibit continual well-being. There was even a slight scent of communism in the air, as it appeared that "the community" decided on everything from the color of one's house to the chairs on the front stoop.

Soon, I felt myself questioning the very magic of Disney, the meticulously constructed allure of the Magic Kingdom. For while the corporation works wonders in perpetuating its untouchably angelic image, Disney is, at the end of the day, a business that benefits financially from its purity. Not only does its reputation attract families, its very character suggests that, in buying Disney products, visiting Disney parks, or taking part in the Disney megaworld in some way, shape, or form, the individual is spreading the magic that IS Disney. To buy a Mickey Mouse shirt, the company implies, is to spread the (Protestant?) purity of the empire. To visit Epcot is to merge with this innocence and, in doing so, become a better person. Indeed, to commingle with Disney on any cultural level, it appears, is to benefit oneself and the world at large.

There seems to be more riding on Donald Duck than we may have thought.