Dispatch from Disneyland

A few days ago, I went to Disneyland. I had been invited to Anaheim to give a speech about my books, and my wife and I decided to use the opportunity to take our boys on an early summer visit to the supposed happiest place on earth.

As long-time listeners of my podcast know, I spent the pandemic years, for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, binge-reading books about Disney (the man, the company, and the theme parks), so I knew, in some sense, what to expect. And yet, the experience still caught me by surprise.

When you enter a ride like Pirates of the Caribbean, you enter a world that’s both unnervingly real and defiantly fake, what Jean Baudrillard dubbed “hyperreality.” There’s a moment of awe when you leave the simulated pirate caverns and enter a vast space in which a pirate ship engages in a cannon battle with a nearby fort. Men yell. Cannonballs splash. A captain waves his sword. It’s impossibly massive and novel.

But there is something uncanny about it all; the movements of the animatronics are jerky, and the lighting is too movie-set-perfect. When you stare more carefully into the night sky, you notice black-painted acoustical panels, speckled with industrial air vents. The wonderment of the scene is hard-shelled by a numbing layer of mundanity. 

This is the point of these Disney darkroom rides: to deliver a safe, purified form of the chemical reaction we typically associate with adventure and astonishment. Severed from actual fear or uncertainty, the reaction is diluted, delivering more of a pleasant buzzing sensation than a life-altering encounter; just enough to leave you craving the next hit, willing to wait another hour in a sun-baked queue.

Here’s the thought that’s tickled my mind in the days that have since passed: Disneyland provides a useful physical analogy to the digital encounter with our phones.

What is an envy-inducing Instagram story, or outrage-stoking Tweet, or bizarrely compelling TikTok, if not a delivery mechanism for a purified and diluted form of the reaction we’d otherwise generate by actually traveling somewhere stimulating, or engaging in real principled protest, or giving ourselves over to undeniably skilled entertainers?

The phone offers a pleasant chemical buzz just strong enough to leave us wanting another hit. It’s Pirates of the Caribbean delivered through a handheld screen.

I really liked Disneyland, but I was done after a couple of days. I also enjoy the occasional trip through the easy distractions of my phone, but I am unwilling to live semi-permanently amid its artificialities. The former is considered common sense, while the latter, for some reason, is still deemed radical.

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