The Happiest Place on Earth [1]
"Children, I wanna warn ya / 'Cos I've been to California
Where Mickey Mouse is such a demon / Where Mickey Mouse is as big as a house!" [2]
I.
Cotino is the first Storyliving community being developed by Disney in Rancho Mirage, California. Work started on the 618-acre site - which will feature residential housing, hotels, resort
facilities, and a retail centre, all surrounding a 24-acre grand oasis and an artificially blue lagoon - in April 2022.
Disney are so confident that it will be a successful venture, that, in December 2023, they announced plans for a second such community, Asteria, in Pittsboro, North Carolina, which will include 4,000 homes (the same month that the first houses in Cotino went on sale, although the community will not be opened until 2025).
II.
In an article published in The Guardian [3], Oliver Wainwright discusses Disney's plan for curated living,
i.e., a life which unfolds in a perfectly stylised and completely
controlled environment so as to ensure that residents and guests experience the magical joy that the company has been peddling for a hundred years.
Wainright calls it a fantasy world, but it's really much more (and more sinister) than that; this is a model of zen fascism overseen by Mickey Mouse and other Disney cast members where neighbours will be able to "bond over Disney-themed art lessons, enjoy dinners inspired by Disney
stories and join family days with Disney-related activities".
Wainright also informs us that the themed homes curated by Disney imagineers will be priced in excess of $1m, whilst the forthcoming town centre will feature "a street market where local artists will sell Disney-themed arts and
crafts" and there will be "'abundant opportunities for laughter'".
Oh, and if you're wondering how to keep a large lake sparkling blue all year round in an area that suffers from extreme drought, well, that's thanks to patented Crystal Lagoons technology.
This expansion by the world's largest mass media and entertainment conglomerate into the real world is surely something that Uncle Walt would have approved of and might have amused Jean Baudrillard were he still alive to witness it ...
III.
Baudrillard wrote an important piece on Disneyland more than forty years ago in his seminal text Simulacres et Simulation (1981), describing it as "a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra" and a "frozen, childlike world [...] conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized" [4] and awaiting resurrection.
Obviously Disneyland exalts American values in miniature and cartoon form. But it does more than this: its real purpose is to conceal the fact that it is the real America, just as prisons are built in order to disguise the fact that society is itself carceral.
Baudrillard writes:
"Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle."
He continues:
"The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the 'real' world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness."
With the opening of Cotino next year, I'm not sure whether the Disney executives so skilled in playing this game of concealment have finally triumphed and the Happiest Place on Earth will soon expand across the globe, or if, perhaps, they have made a fatal miscalculation and all but the most fanatic of Disney adults will decide they've had enough of staged reality and curated living.
Notes
[1] This was the original slogan for Disneyland, Est. 1955.
[2] Lyrics from 'Do You Wanna Hold Me?' by Bow Wow Wow, from the album When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going (RCA Records, 1983): click here.
[3] Oliver Wainwright, 'Let's move to Disney Town! Will life in its 2,000 themed homes be a dream or a nightmare?' The Guardian (08 April 2024): click here.
[4] This text by Baudrillard was translated into English as Simulacra and Simulation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994). Material quoted here and following is from a section entitled 'The Hyperreal and the Imaginary' in the first chapter, 'The Precession of Simulacra'. See pp. 12-14.
