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MOST AMERICAN ADULTS DO NOT want to play the parts of soldiers or villains or ghouls. Most Americans want to play characters who are beautiful, sexy, cute, fun, beloved, safe, and happy. But like the villains and ghouls who go too far, people tend to forget some fantasies are fantasies. Instead of toggling in and out, the Suspend Disbelief button clicks into place permanently.
From the earliest days of the American fantasy-industrial complex in the 1850s, snooty critics used Barnumized as a term of disparagement—in 1854 The New York Times called a celebrity conductor’s concert of classical music attended by forty-five thousand New Yorkers a Barnumized spectacle; in 1922 a movie director was said to have Barnumized classic works of literature. A few decades ago we coined the successor synonym: Disneyfication, to denote how urban America had started to resemble theme parks. Starting in the late 1960s and ’70s, pieces of cities were spiffed up and turned into reimagined reproductions of themselves—SoHo in Manhattan, Pioneer Square in Seattle, and the Old Market in Omaha, then Times Square and the imitation SoHos everywhere (including Tribeca, directly south of SoHo), each with its own Starbucks or four. Disneyfication is different from Barnumized: it’s a noun referring to an ongoing process and permanent condition rather than a one-off creation, the rule and not the exception. Practically every big city now has its own Main Street USA or New Orleans Square implant, historical fictions and quasi-fictions in which people live life.
Which isn’t an altogether bad thing. Absent the total theater modeled by Disneyland and Disney World, modern America might never have started saving old buildings or rediscovering the charms of urban life. I’m delighted to live on a Brooklyn block that looks very much like it did a hundred years ago. I love it when the old man parks his old-fashioned little truck and rings his bell and we take our knives out to be sharpened, as the people who lived here in the 1920s must have done. My favorite neighborhood bar is the one that took over a dark, anonymous old Italian social club and did almost no renovating. One of my favorite neighborhood restaurants is a simulated nineteenth-century steak and oyster house where most of the waiters are mustachioed and sideburned young men. Disneyfication has its irresistible aspects.
Walt Disney foresaw the next American century, this one, and built the prototypes. We aren’t living under climate-controlled plastic bubbles, but the visionary pastiche of Walt’s first EPCOT rendering—no more dirty factories, pedestrianized faux-1800s neighborhoods, plus pagodas, plus strolling bagpipers—has become a go-to American model for living. Even, for instance, hunting for photo ops and compulsively taking pictures of ourselves and our surroundings—didn’t that used to be something people did only at places like Disney World? We don’t yet say “Have a magical day!” to people we meet on the street. But whatever we’re pretending to be—a costumed or digital commando, a magical creature at Burning Man or Comic-Con, an artist in a million-dollar loft in downtown Denver, or a writer-angler living in a brand-new fake-old million-dollar cottage in Florida, whether our wardrobe comes from Anthropologie or our props from Restoration Hardware—we are guests and cast members (as Disney calls its employees) in America.
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THREE YEARS AGO, for my radio show Studio 360, we made an hour-long documentary about the Disney parks. We interviewed a girl named Anabelle at Disneyland in California. Her explanation of why she loves it could be an epigraph for this book. “Well,” she said, “at my age you know they’re not real. But just the whole experience of it makes it seem so real that you go along with it and play along. The school, science-y, math-y part of you is being like, ‘Oh, that’s not real, you have to stay strong, that’s not real.’ But another part of your mind, that’s I guess the dream-maker part and the fantasy part…actually is telling you, ‘Oh, but it seems so real.’ It’s like living in a fantasy book.” Coming from a nine-year-old, it was so smart and perfectly charming.
But these days at least a third of the people at theme parks are adults without children. These days thousands of couples get married every year at Disney theme parks—women imagining their weddings as the final scenes of Cinderella or themselves as Ariel or Belle or Jasmine in character-specific gowns purchased through Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings division, attended by strangers in royal-servant getups.
To produce our documentary, we also went to Walt Disney World—and to Celebration, Florida, where I’d been before. Celebration is the real town that Disney built at the south end of Disney World in the 1990s. It’s an example of New Urbanism, the movement among architects and planners, beginning in the 1980s, that considers the development of cities and suburbs since World War II disastrously misguided. America abandoned the accumulated wisdom of centuries and built streets too wide, houses too far apart, driveways and garages too dominant, and homes too far from jobs and shopping, with too much dependence on driving and too much incoherent sprawl. The houses Americans built are architecturally inferior not because they ape old styles but because they’re inauthentically nostalgic. Most New Urbanists want new houses and neighborhoods to be more accurate simulations of houses and neighborhoods from the past. New Urbanism was upscale Disneyfication before the people running Disney called themselves New Urbanists.
Celebration is a self-conscious reproduction of some fictional but ideal American town circa 1945, population 7,500, coherent, stylistically consistent, walkable, bikable, and charming. It isn’t gated, and it’s not just a bunch of McMansions plopped around a golf course. It looks like an actual community—although one transplanted from Ohio or Connecticut to the tropics. It’s a fantasy. But if I had to move to central Florida, I might choose to live in Celebration.
The Siegels are a Celebration family. When Jim Siegel took early retirement as a Ford executive, he and his wife, Marita, wanted to move someplace warmer than Michigan. “My wife said to me, ‘Well, I don’t know where you’re going to live, but I’m going to live at Disney World.’ Meaning Celebration.” He had his doubts. “Some people think of this as a fantasy place. It seems like the back lot of a movie studio. Some of my friends, their initial reaction when they came down and saw this was ‘Oh, you live in Pleasantville.’ ”
He was outvoted by Marita and their younger daughter, Julie, who was just graduating from college. She announced she’d be joining them in Celebration. Julie and her mother have always been extreme Disney devotees. During the twenty years before they moved to Celebration, they’d made thirty-three visits to Disney World. The decorations on two of the several Christmas trees Marita put up each year in Michigan were Disney-themed, as was Julie’s apartment during and after college—“all decorated, all Mickey Mouse, all of it. Dishes, silverware, placemats, sheets, Mickey Mouse toys everywhere.” The Siegels originally called their two teacup poodles Chip and Dale, but then changed the names to Lilly Disney (after Walt’s wife) and Fozzie Bear.
When we spent the day together, Julie was thirty-three and unmarried. “Disney,” she told me, “was a huge influencer for me to kind of shape who I am. I just remember always loving Walt’s dream. I think it’s really fun and magical. It’s very magical. And Tinker Bell flying from the castle at night—it’s just…the feeling you get from watching the parade is so—I get chills just now just talking about it. I was blessed enough that I had a place of escape that I could call my own.”
When Julie and her older sister were kids, Jim and Marita took them on vacation to Europe two summers in a row. At the Piazza San Marco in Venice, the parents asked the girls what they thought. “I was eleven at the time. And I said ‘Gosh, it’s really beautiful—it looks just like EPCOT.’ And then I said, ‘But I like EPCOT better because it’s cleaner.’ ” Jim fondly remembers the moment too. “ ‘Dad,’ they said, ‘we really appreciate the opportunity to be in Europe, but we’d just as soon go to Walt Disney World.’ ”
During our conversation, Julie used the word escape again and again. She grew up in a big house in a nice suburb with loving parents and did well at school. Escaping what? “I was escaping life. My mom picked me up from school one day because she just felt the frustration that I was feeling with being bored at school and not wanting to go. ‘Come on, I got our tickets already, pack your bag, we’re going to Disney World tomorrow.’ And that was not the only time that had happed during my high school. If I was frustrated with school, my mom would just pick me up and take me out of school. I had the highest absence record in my high school’s history because we came down to Disney so much.”
But as an adult, what is so great about being at Disney World? “I feel like I’m someone special. Even though there’s tens of thousands of other people around me. I am someone special, and I matter. And seeing the fantasy of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, and the magic and wonder that just kind of bubbles up in me.”
As soon as Julie moved to Celebration, she went to work at Disney World. I asked what her job was. “I got to help out the characters, mostly Mickey and Minnie, but other characters I helped out, including Suzie and Perla from Cinderella, Pinocchio, Timon. I also helped Max, who’s Goofy’s son, Robin Hood, Pooh and Piglet, Mushu, Uncle Scrooge, Turk from Tarzan.”
Exactly what do you mean, I asked, by help out the characters?
“I was very close friends with them,” she replied, “and I helped them get ready for whatever show they were doing—or if they needed help when they were meeting and greeting with guests.”
I was still confused, didn’t yet know the rules. Although when we spoke Julie had not been an employee for nine years, she still adhered to the coy Disney corporate omertà: the people who play characters in the parks aren’t supposed to say, ever, that they playSnow White or Donald Duck. Because then the fictional beings might seem less real.
I wondered if she’d moved on because, living next door at Celebration, she’d finally had her fill of Disney. “No! There is never enough Disney. It never gets boring.” Her feelings about Celebration, however, were more mixed. Tourists ask, “ ‘Does it ever rain here? Do they put the dome up?’ People have stopped me and asked ‘Is this a real town?’ They look at you a little bit like you’re imaginary, [like] I’m just a Stepford Wife, I have a microchip in my head. They act almost as if I’m part of the facade and part of the story.”
However, she likes all the deliberate make-believe in Celebration. Each evening for a month in autumn, every hour on the hour, tissue-paper leaves fall in the town center, and each evening in December every hour on the hour, snowlike soap flakes drift from the sky onto the street. “There’s music”—official strolling Charles Dickens Carolers—“Santa’s house, and you can do carriage rides with horses. During those times, when it tends to be a little bit more Disneyesque rather than just a regular old town, that’s when it makes me really happy.” Although the fake snow, which Disney calls snoap, “gets very filthy and dirty. Snow up north gets dirty and gross, [so] in that sense it’s very realistic.”
In fact, for Julie, Celebration’s problem is that it isn’t Disney enough. “I don’t like being stopped by a gang of turkeys, a herd of wild turkeys standing in the middle of the road. I don’t walk Lilly”—her poodle—“because I never know what’s going to come out of the bushes, a snake or even if a hawk comes swooping down and I’m not able to see it because there’s so much vegetation above me or if there is going to be an alligator that comes out of the swamp and starts chasing us. At the Animal Kingdom, [the animals are] all secretly and invisibly barricaded so they can’t get to you. But here in Celebration, it’s the real deal. It’s ironic.” And then there are the free-range humans. “There’s mean people here in Celebration too. I don’t walk at night. I don’t feel safe anywhere. There’s crime that happens here. I’ve seen some sketchy characters.”
If the town weren’t a Disney creation next door to Disney World, it wouldn’t be quite such a breathtaking example of America’s transformation. “People had the impression that if they moved to a Disney town,” the executive who masterminded it says now, “their lawns would never get weeds and their children would never get anything but As.” Exactly. But even without that provenance and proximity, Celebration is a perfect modern hybrid of real life and nostalgic make-believe, the original fake-small-town idea of the American suburb from the 1860s evolved to its ultimate state. It is also apt that in the 2016 election, Donald Trump lost the county and congressional district by landslides but carried Celebration.
The Siegels seem emblematic because they’re not cosplayers or MilSim fetishists but ordinary upper-middle-class Americans. Whose intelligent, self-aware daughter Julie is on the Kids “R” Us Syndrome spectrum—somewhere between Michael Jackson and most of the rest of us. “I haven’t had an annual [Disney World] pass now for several years now,” she told me, “and I really am going through withdrawal—it’s hard.” She quit working in the park, dressing up as cartoon characters, only because “I needed to get what my mom called a ‘big-girl job.’ ”
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CELEBRATION DOES NOT pick my pocket or break my leg. Kids “R” Us Syndrome isn’t close to the worst thing about Fantasyland, and adults in love with Disney World are not close to the most troubling symptom of the syndrome.*
However, I do think American adults have come to think more fundamentally like children, and that does get problematic.
Waiting to get what you want is a definition of maturity; demanding satisfaction this instant, on the other hand, is a defining behavior of seven-year-olds. The powerful appeal of the Internet is its instantaneity as much as the “community” it enables—you can send a message now, get any question answered now, buy anything you want now, meet a stranger for sex right now. Telecommunications satisfy one kind of inner child, the impulsive one with zero tolerance for waiting. As a result, over the last couple of decades, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint.
What do the brattiest children do? They shout and name-call and exaggerate, like the new generation of political commentators, like Internet trolls, like Trump. They cover their ears and refuse to listen to unpleasant facts and tell ridiculous lies. They’re selfish, and anytime they’re thwarted or someone else gets something they want, no matter how justly or reasonably, they scream That’s not fair!
In politics and elsewhere, this childish style often goes hand in hand with childlike beliefs—that is, fantasies. The original child psychologist, Jean Piaget, believed that the minds of children and adults were fundamentally different, that kids were egocentric magical thinkers and adults were rational and reasonable, and that growing up consisted of shifting from one mode to the other. Psychology has revised Piaget’s big idea. Now they cast the difference between children and adults as a continuum, not a sharp break. As Fantasyland emerged, more Americans moved away from the adult end of the continuum. Not coincidentally, psychology has also recast schizophrenia as a point at one end of a spectrum running from delusional to rational.
The UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik studies the minds of small children and sees them as little geniuses, models of creativity and innovation. “They live twenty-four/seven in these crazy pretend worlds,” she says. “They have a zillion different imaginary friends.” While at some level, they “know the difference between imagination and reality…it’s just they’d rather live in imaginary worlds than in real ones. Who could blame them?” But what happens when that set of mental habits persists into adulthood too generally and inappropriately? A monster under the bed is true for her, the stuffed animal that talks is true for him, speaking in tongues and homeopathy and vaccines that cause autism and Trilateral Commission conspiracies are true for them.
Gopnik says the mental state of young children is similar to that of adults when they’re consuming fiction. “You are not in control, your consciousness is not planning, your self seems to disappear—that’s part of what’s great about being absorbed in a movie….The events in the movie are very, very vivid in your awareness.” Now that we spend so much of our lives immersed in the worlds of the fantasy-industrial complex, it seems we have become more like little children mentally. “There is no inevitable march toward objectivity or enlightenment,” the Harvard child psychologist Paul Harris writes in his book Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others. “The endpoint of cognitive development is not objectivity and equilibrium. It is a mix of the natural and supernatural, of truth and fantasy, of faith and uncertainty.”
In the psychology of American adults, I think, the mix has become an unusually unbalanced one. This is an area where Kids “R” Us Syndrome can be more disquieting. Despite Harris’s point, there is some inevitable march toward reality-based understandings of the world: most American three-year-olds believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, for instance, while most nine-year-olds do not. Indeed, until they’re about ten, children naturally think everything that exists or happens has a purpose, designed and arranged by somebody or something to fulfill particular roles—hippos to be on display at the zoo, clouds to make rain, Mommy to be nice. Then they get older and are supposed to learn the various truths, counterintuitive and disappointing though they may be.
However, if the adults around them still cling to childlike beliefs, as so many do in America concerning religion, children don’t necessarily grow out of the beliefs. A study by a University of Michigan psychologist found that between ages eight and ten, nearly everyone has a creationist explanation for how life emerges; biological evolution doesn’t yet make sense. But by age twelve in the United States, her study found, it’s pretty much only children in fundamentalist Christian households who still believe that animals and people were created supernaturally and simultaneously.
Young children, in the phrase of one eminent child psychologist at Boston University, are “intuitive theists” who naturally tend to believe that some kind of God must be running the whole show. A major argument of this book is that Americans are not just exceptionally religious but that our dominant religion has become exceptionally literal and fantastical—childlike—during the last fifty years in particular. The fantasies of perpetual youth, Kids “R” Us Syndrome, also appeared fifty years ago, when American adults started becoming more than ever like adolescents and children in our tastes and ways of thinking. These simultaneous spikes could be a coincidence, but they look to me like another case of cultural symbiosis.
And childlike magical thinking synergy isn’t limited to Christian kinds. “How do you get yourself to a point of believing?” Rhonda Byrne asks in The Secret, the Oprah-endorsed New Age guide to success-by-wishing-and-pretending. “Start make-believing. Be like a child, and make-believe. Act as if you have it already. As you make believe you will begin to believe you have received….Your belief that you have it, that undying faith, is your greatest power. When you believe you are receiving, get ready, and watch the magic begin!”
* Although it is weird that Walmart alone sold $200 million worth of coloring books for adults in 2016.