ESSAYS
I spent most of June 2004 in Europe, visiting people and places
associated with Walt Disney. I also spent a couple of days at the
animation festival at Annecy, France. I'm writing about that trip,
which took me to Switzerland, Denmark, and England as well as France,
in several installments. MB
European Journal
I. Disneyland Paris
People who knew Walt Disney say that two subjects they learned
to avoid in his presence were sex and death. How odd, then, that
two Disney theme-park rides that bear his mark—"Pirates
of the Caribbean" and "The Haunted Mansion"—are
so heavily seasoned with sex and death.
That thought occurred to me during the "Haunted Mansion"
ride at Disneyland Paris, when I noticed that one of the "Audio-Animatronic"
figures was a virtuoso display of rotting flesh that would have
done an EC comic book of the fifties proud. That ride is packed
with skeletons and many other representations of death. Sex—or
if you prefer, rape—is what "Pirates of the Caribbean"
is most about, especially in the celebrated "auction"
scene, unless maybe you believe that the pirates are enthusiastic
about the beautiful redhead because they've heard she's a good cook.
 And
yet it requires an exercise of the will to be disturbed or offended
by either ride. There are too many distractions—too many jokes,
too many intriguing details, and, above all, too many reminders
of the ride designers' sheer pleasure in their own technical ingenuity.
In other words, there's no morbid preoccupation with sex and death;
the subject matter was merely convenient, and it's no doubt for
that reason that Walt Disney himself wasn't bothered by it. He knew
that both rides were really about something else.
The Paris versions of both rides have been modified from their
American originals—for example, a Western "ghost town"
has been added at the end of the "Mansion" ride, whose
Paris version is located in the park's Frontierland—but they're
largely identical. The same is true of Disneyland Paris itself,
which looks and feels very much like the "Magic Kingdoms"
in California and Florida, only with familiar attractions rearranged
and substitutions made, including the name "Discoveryland"
for "Tomorrowland." Didier Ghez's lavish book Disneyland
Paris: From Sketch to Reality lays out in impressive detail
the careful planning that went into all the departures from the
U.S. templates.
As Phyllis and I made our way from one ride to another, I was struck—as
I had not been when I visited Walt Disney World in Florida a few
months earlier—by how few descendants "Mansion" and
"Pirates" have among the Disney parks' attractions. A
ride like "Star Tours" is fun, certainly, but the two
older rides were shaped by a kind of ambition that is lacking elsewhere
in the parks.
The parks have come to rely increasingly on "thrill rides"
whose thrills are often pretty crude. Imagination is notably lacking
in many of these rides, so that there's nothing much to distinguish
the "Indiana Jones" ride at Disneyland Paris from hundreds
of other roller coasters—except that this one goes backward.
"Space Mountain" is perhaps the most intense roller coaster
I've ever experienced, but you can make a roller coaster only so
intense without inducing nausea and concussions, and the Paris version
rushes right up to that edge.
Demographics are no doubt largely to blame for this shift. A park
conceived for an audience dominated by families with small children,
like the original Disneyland, could not rely on the same attractions
to draw young adults without children in tow. But I think the changes
in the parks involve more than a move from one kind of ride to another.
When I visited Walt Disney World, as I've written elsewhere
on the site, some of the rides seemed to me equivalent to animated
displays in department-store windows. At Paris, I realized that
Walt Disney's original Disneyland, when it opened almost fifty years
ago, was itself reminiscent of a department store of the classic
kind. Those stores provided amenities—think of the recitals
on the huge organ at Wanamaker's in Philadelphia—that didn't
contribute directly to profit but made visiting a store more enjoyable
and encouraged customers to come back, as well as spend more while
they were there. Disneyland's landscaping, its profusion of flowers
and trees, served much the same purpose, as did the exotic dress
that Disney gave to what were often very ordinary rides, like some
of those in Fantasyland.
Visiting Disneyland was supposed to be an enjoyable experience
in itself, distinct from whatever pleasure might be found in the
rides. Perhaps that was the rationale for paying separately for
admission and for each ride, the system that prevailed when Disneyland
opened in 1955 (and that was soon modified through the sale of letter-coded
ticket books, with "E" tickets reserved for the best rides,
like "Pirates").
I wonder if the shift in 1982 to a single pricey ticket, for a
theme park and all the attractions in it, has not had the perverse
effect, over time, of downgrading the importance of the park itself
and increasing the pressure to come up with hard-edged thrill rides—and,
beyond that, to use the rides as conduits into adjacent stores packed
with Disney merchandise. The feeling I've had, in my recent visits
to Disney parks, is that the people running them are preoccupied
with "profit centers" but aren't sure where they are.
The people running Disneyland Paris certainly haven't found them.
The park was busy when I was there, but not all that busy for a
sunny Sunday afternoon in June—and it closed at 8 p.m., long
before daylight was gone. The even earlier closing time at the adjacent
Walt Disney Studios park—6 p.m.—was like a white flag
of surrender. There were no lines at any of the rides, except for
"Big Thunder Railroad," the most child-friendly of Disneyland's
roller coasters. It occurred to me that many of the people at the
park might be there on annual passes, which could be bought for
little more than the price of two daily admissions.
Thanks in large part to the requirements of French law, Disneyland
Paris and Walt Disney Studios are emphatically French parks, with
only a little English in their signs and very little evidence of
other languages. Sometimes the insistence on French leads to absurd
results: at the Walt Disney Studios, Roy Disney and his uncle Walt
spoke perfect dubbed French, with English subtitles, in a filmed
introduction to a noisy how-we-do-it animation show.
Any sort of "European" flavor is otherwise lacking at
Disneyland Paris, though, apart from the ready availability of wine
and beer, an un-American tolerance for cigarette smoke, and the
cool demeanor of the park employees. (I learned later that employees
were trained initially to be as bright and cheerful as their American
counterparts but Europeans found all those smiling faces too spooky.)
The park's efforts to strike a balance—preserving Disneyland's
American character while accommodating European preferences—has
not succeeded, at least not yet. A few days after my visit, the
Walt Disney Co. and three French banks rescued Euro Disney SCA,
Disneyland Paris's owner, for the second time in a decade, saving
it from defaulting on $2.9 billion in debt.
Perhaps as a reflection of its financial strains, Disneyland Paris
was fraying around the edges—chipped paint, dirty toilets,
litter —when I saw it. Walt Disney would have tolerated none
of it. The original Disneyland was terribly important to Walt himself—it
was the best outlet he could find in the fifties and early sixties
for his enormous energies—and he was always pushing toward
an ever-receding goal of perfection at his park.
Walt Disney died almost thirty-eight years ago, but thanks to
the force of his personality, the original Disneyland and the parks
modeled on it, like the one in Paris, still make sense only when
they seem to be perfect, or at least are clearly striving to be.
All lapses from Walt's conception, whether they're dumb rides, indifferent
employees, or dirty restrooms, loom larger than they might in a
more relaxed atmosphere. My fundamental criticism of the Disney
parks is not that they're frivolous or childish, but that they're
entirely too serious. Underneath the jolly surface, they're stretched
tight as a drumhead.
I encountered a park with a much more relaxed atmosphere—a
park that Walt Disney visited often and used as a model for his
own—later in my trip, and I'll write about it in another installment
of this journal.
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[Click here to read the second
installment in this journal, about the Annecy festival, the
third
installment, on the Swiss village of Zermatt, or the fourth
installment, on Copenhagen's Tivoli
Gardens.]
[Click here to go to the official
site for Disneyland Resort Paris.]
[Posted July 17, 2004; updated December 2, 2004]
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