DVDizzy Forum

In the summer of 1994, the Disney Corporation considered building an American history theme park in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb close to the nation's capital. Many American historians opposed the plan, citing the inability or a theme park to capture the reality of American history and the inappropriateness of a Disney park as a location for the racial violence and oppression in that history. In August 1994, the Op-Ed pages of the Washington Post became a forum for a debate on the propriety of housing a slavery exhibit in the proposed park. William Styron, author of the controversial Confessions of Nat Turner, wrote:

-Visitors to any Dinsey extravaganza do not go seeking emotional upheaval; they go chiefly for fun and entertainment and they want quick jolts of these things. I don't believe for a moment that they want a vicarious experience of slavery that will be "painfull and agonizing," which is what the Disney people promised.... Amid Disney's high-tech honky-tonk diversions, such gruesome displays would utterly falsify the complex tragedy of the slave experience.-

For the Disney corporation and and everything seems available for thematizing.

The controversy nonetheless ignored an increasingly commonplace idea, coming largely from Eurpoean cultural critics of the 1970's and 1980's: Disney worlds are, in fact, paradigms for America, the American sense of history and, to some degree, the "postmodern condition." To such Europeans writers as Louis Martin, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard, America is the land of hyperreality, where any ground for historical certainty is erased by the generation and circulation or images that have no original. Disneyland operates, acording to Eco, as an economic draw that "stimulates the desire for [illusion]." As Baudrillard puts is, "Disneyland is presented as an imaginary in order to believe the rest is real.... It is no longer a question of false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real."