To Hellholes and Back Page 25

  “Pirates” has been a Disney staple since 1967, but I wonder how memorable the current commercial incarnation will be for kids who are already geared up by the movie for most of the imagery on display here, and, more importantly, in the gift shop at the end of the line. Like so much of Disney, the ride seems to be more about affirmation than surprise. Expectations are met. Just as they do at the Museum of Modern Art or casino buffets, people move between stations more or less satisfied, but hardly ebullient.

  In spite of all the gainsaying, “Pirates” is nevertheless the most intriguing attraction at WDW for its presentation of a land and lifestyle that, the commercially redeemed Captain Sparrow aside, is so patently un-Disney. Cartoonish or not, what you find here is a dystopian world of debauchery, filth, and vermin; a place where drunks lie in gutters jeering at passersby, white “wenches” with heaving bosoms are sold as slave brides, and illiterate thieves and con men are celebrated as picaresque heroes. When you consider the purity of everything else Disney promotes, it’s an astonishing departure; although, in light of the day’s keynote speaker in the Hall of Presidents, perhaps not so inconsistent after all.

  Adventureland Enchanted Tiki Room/Toontown Hall of Fame Tent

  The tiki room isn’t exactly the living definition of “enchanted.” I mention it only as tribute to the unhorsed father standing outside the entrance who delivered to his wife and daughter the best critique of any attraction I heard all week: “Don’t bother with that one. It’s just a bunch of plastic birds that sing.”

  This casual dismissal of yet another guidebook starred attraction points me back to my original question of whose dreams exactly are being serviced here? I’ve vowed to approach Disney on its own terms, but whatever dreams are coming true at WDW, they certainly aren’t mine nor evidently those of the flummoxed parents or weeping children pouring out of Mickey’s Toontown Hall of Fame Tent, where kids can have their photos taken with six-foot-tall cartoon celebrities whose expressions are frozen in manic glee. I haven’t seen so much abject terror since the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Apparently, schmoozing with grotesque caricatures doesn’t come naturally to kids not yet socially conditioned by cocktail parties and meetings with people in HR.

  Do today’s media-saturated children really dream of photo ops with top-heavy, silent stuffed animals? Of taking part in walking parades through the hot park? And if so, how come I see so many eighty-pounders scrunched up in baby strollers?17

  Space Mountain/Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith

  The gimmick of these two mainstay roller coasters is that the bulk of the twisting, turning journey through the middle of the mountain—or the streets of LA, in the case of the latter, on the hilarious conceit that a headlining rock band is worried about arriving at a gig on time—is made in the dark. But not being able to see the asphalt falling away, hundreds of feet below you, actually makes both rides a lot less scary than conventional coasters. Ronnie and Joe’s five-out-of-ten scoring feels about right; for an equally appropriate summation, I offer, in its entirety, the second-best review my own writing has ever received: Meh.

  The best review, for those keeping score: “This book is so full of shit that the toilet overflows on page one.” Who says literary critics are just failed writers?

  Africa

  No one’s ever going to mistake a twenty-minute ride through Floridian “savannah” for the real thing, but on the whole, Disney’s Animal Kingdom does a commendable job re-creating the African jeep safari, right down to the nattering twits who, despite explicit directions to remain quiet and still in the presence of animals, can’t help tittering and pointing and shouting and generally making baboons of themselves at the sight of any creature with stripes or the ability to eat grass. In the Animal Kingdom, wildlife is delivered on a platter, with plenty of healthy-looking giraffe, hippopotamus, elephant, lion, and even a massive white rhino making appearances.

  During two weeks spent running around southern Africa, my safari group spotted precisely one rhino. For sitting on our asses and being driven in a truck to within thirty yards of the formidable herbivore, we were congratulated repeatedly by Tebo and other guides, who can go years between sightings of the great armored beasts. In Disney “Africa,” the rhino encounter is essentially the same as it was in Africa Africa. While guests are assured they’re in the midst of a magical moment of interspecies communion, the poor, endangered brute just stands there looking tired and sad, plainly uncomfortable and dimly aware of the staged nature of the interaction. Awesome, but also sort of big and stupid.

  The high point of “Africa” is the silverback gorillas. As with the Taj Mahal, you’ve heard about the grandeur but you still aren’t prepared for such a commanding presence. I’ve seen grizzlies in the wild from pants-pissing range, but even from behind a fence the gorillas’ occult glares are every bit as heart-stopping.

  During the Kinshasa confinement, Henri, Team Congo, and the bungling moron Jacques had supposedly spent time trying to arrange a gorilla expedition for me in North Kivu. With civil war raging in the great apes region, however, I have my doubts that their behind-the-scenes efforts were overly sincere—nobody seemed all that disappointed to inform me there were no available flights to Kivu. So seeing the gorillas in WDW feels like closing the circle a little bit.

  Miley Cyrus

  One of my early ideas for spicing up my descent into the Disney simulacrum was to immerse myself completely in the brand, ideology, and demagoguery by spending all available hours outside the physical domain of company property exposing myself to a nonstop stream of Disney Channel programming, back-catalog movies, and cartoon marketing vehicles. However, I only get four minutes and nine seconds into this bit of stunt journalism before realizing that a) I’ve always hated the obviousness of chary schtickmeisters like Morgan Spurlock and b) I dislike child extroverts even more today than I disliked them in junior high. I don’t need a week of exposure to beautiful little full of themselves Keanu Reeves look-alikes flirting nonstop with tightly corseted fourteen-year-old crotch benders (“You Wish!”) to know that I’d rather spend a week locked in a room watching Murder, She Wrote re-runs.

  I alluded to Miley Cyrus earlier because as of this writing the tween-teen sprite remains the indisputable face of Disney, a logical but vastly more far-reaching extension of the Britney Effect. As with her troubled predecessor, there have already been disquieting indications that the Hannah Montana star will not occupy this high-pressure position much longer—a public flap over a lurid Vanity Fair cover shoot; a twenty-year-old boyfriend; a tricky leap into feature films; a dues-paying setback in the Golden Globes Best Song category in which she was nevertheless included in the serious-artist company of Clint Eastwood and Bruce Springsteen. (Easing the collective minds of those fearing an unalterable shift in pop music tectonics, the Boss prevailed with another mumbling slice of Americana about scarecrows and one-legged dogs from the film The Wrestler but turned out to have more in common with Hannah Montana than his fans would care to acknowledge when he closed his Super Bowl halftime set a few weeks later with the peppy Cyrusean exhortation: “I’m going to Disneyland!”)

  At the moment, anyway, Cyrus remains the Duchess of Disney18 and, thus the target of slurs and vague disdain from people like me who admittedly have never seen her act, sing, or dance and frankly don’t need to in order to know that she sucks, that we resent her employer for exploiting the sexuality of a kid young enough to wear lip gloss unironically, and still hold in contempt her horndog father for becoming a huge success on the back of a piece of line-dance twaddle called Achy Breaky Heart and a Kentucky waterfall—mullet, if you prefer—that required the sacrifice of at least three muskrats.

  Inclined as I am to howl at the prevailing winds of pop culture, however, I occasionally find it necessary to reinforce the self-delusion that I didn’t spend four years slogging through journalism school for no good reason. Trashing Disney’s reigning strumpet sovereign without so much as an i
ntroduction to her body of work seems irresponsible even by my standards. Primed with a resurgent sense of professional integrity, I return to my puce and coral time-share outside the gates of the Kingdom, pound the last five Coors Lights in the fridge, and flop on the couch with the goal of subjecting myself to at least one full half hour—no breaks, not even for pissing—of Hannah Montana.

  I know that to some I come off as the type who likes to stir the pot simply to get under people’s skin, the kind of person who defends the indefensible and utters the unutterable simply to bolster a contrived reputation for social iconoclasm. This is patently untrue—not counting dead-and-buried flings with Panic! At the Disco and red Chuck Taylor high-tops, I stand by every crackpot belief, trend, and theory I’ve ever championed. In the wake of my one-man Miley viewing party, my critical integrity is important to emphasize because it takes less than fifteen minutes in front of the TV to turn me into her latest apostle.

  Anyone who hasn’t seen her program may consider the following claim feckless drivel designed to incite the cultural vanguard, but I mean it when I say: I really like Miley Cyrus. She’s got talent. She’s got spunk. She can act. Her music isn’t exactly to my taste but neither is André Rieu’s or Il Divo’s and I don’t hold that against them or my mother’s CD shuffle.

  Moreover, I’m impressed with her show. The supporting cast is likable. For a kid’s program, it’s loaded with humor, clever writing, and decent one-liners. It’s a savvy showcase for a young actress in whom I can’t help but see—Sacrilege alert!—a young Lucille Ball. Or at the very least the next Jennifer Aniston.

  I know. I can’t believe this either. I’ve publicly stood up for Robbie Williams, Dan Quayle, and clove cigarettes in the past, but this is beyond defense. Which is why I subject myself the following evening to round two of the Miley experiment. Ninety straight minutes. Hannah Fucking Montana. This time as sober as a pregnant Mormon.

  If anything, the command performance only adds new layers of appreciation to my initial appraisal. The mildly subversive you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do subtext of Hannah Montana takes me by surprise. Where I expect to be bored silly by a punch-and-cookies role model of obedience and puppy-love virtue, I find instead an ambitious little materialistic tart with something of a bitchy streak, though an indisputably likable one with a vaudevillian sense of comic timing. Beyond catering to the rock-star fantasy harbored by every American kid since 1956, the running conflict that propels Miley’s on-screen persona finally demonstrates to me that Disney really is in touch with the most powerful and universal childhood fantasy of all—to grow up. Right this minute. In this context, the Vanity Fair cover, sketchy boyfriend, and hussy-of-the-week wardrobe make perfect sense.

  But the most shocking discovery of all? In the role of the protective father, Billy Ray Cyrus comes off pretty damn likable himself. Though to be honest I never really minded Achy Breaky Heart all that much.

  While my hodgepodge odyssey has warmed me to the possibility of a more peaceful coexistence with The Mouse, I remain troubled by the idea of an all-powerful Disney media machine supplanting the ascending ambitions that once motivated this country with a sleepwalking commercial directive of made-in-China consumer wish fulfillment. To help sort out this gathering emotional conflict, I summon an audience with a man as close to the tightly guarded Disney dream-making combine as you can get without Pentagon-level security clearance.

  Martin Millay is a burly, tattooed twenty-six-year-old from Pennsylvania who, if not a Disney lifer, is at least a blissful member of the cult. By his own admission. “Internally, we joke about the brainwashing,” Martin confides within minutes of meeting me. “But you want the brainwashing. They train the shit out of you here and you like it.”

  Martin and I meet at an outdoor table in the Downtown Disney Marketplace just as extravagant fireworks are making their nightly appearance. Over beers, he reviews his Disney career, which he began as a reservation agent in the company’s Florida call center. A business major with a knack for public relations and speaking in sound bites, Martin quickly moved out of grunt territory and into the marketing department, where he proved such a keen soldier that he was rewarded with a promotion vaulting him well ahead of all but a handful of peers.

  “Inside Disney there’s a logistical team called the ‘Dream Squad,’” Martin explains. “This is an elite team that delivers prizes and basically solves any problem with guests. As a Dream Squad ‘super greeter,’ you wander the park with almost ultimate power. If there’s a little girl crying and you want to grab a stuffed animal off a shelf and give it to her, you can. You can award a FastPass or gourmet meal to any family you want.”

  Random gifts handed to bummed-out guests are fine—the FastPasses, for instance, allow customers to skip ahead in lines—but what super greeters live for is the chance to bestow highly coveted prize packages on the unsuspecting. These include complimentary nights in Cinderella Castle and Grand Marshal Tours of every Disney park around the world—including Paris and Tokyo—valued at one hundred thousand dollars.

  “I did Cinderella Castle twenty-two times during my time with the Dream Squad,” Martin says. “My last week I gave away the Grand Marshal Tour. I felt like I was the one winning the prize. Literally, my knees got weak. The super greeter next to me started crying. I mean, you’re literally giving someone one hundred thousand dollars.

  “Only about a hundred people a year get to be on the Dream Squad. It’s a hugely privileged position. These are the best people Disney has to offer. I took a huge pay cut to be on the squad.”

  “How much?”

  “I was making about forty thousand. As a super greeter, I got nineteen thousand.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “Up to now, it’s been the highlight of my professional life. People freak out. They cry; they faint; they pee themselves—the whole gamut. I got to do things for families in the true spirit of giving.”

  Martin is such a completely decent guy that it’s hard to ask him the asshole questions I’ve come prepared with. But after a fifteen-minute spiel on the glories of spending a night in Cinderella’s bedchamber (sans Cinderella), I slip off the mink gloves.

  “I understand that it’s better to give than receive,” I tell him. “But giving away stuff is Marketing 101 for building a customer base. Every radio station and crack dealer in the country does the same thing.”

  “You’re right. I once gave an eighty-nine-year-old lady a three-hundred-dollar gift while she sat waiting for her family to finish on the Tower of Terror. The business rationale of this is that you know the eighty-nine-year-old ain’t coming back, but her family will be coming back forever.”

  “That sounds more like you’re fulfilling Walt Disney’s dream than the old lady’s.”

  “The way we approach it, even if guests didn’t realize it was their dream, at the end of the day they’ll think it was.”

  “Does the overcommercialization bother you?”

  “It can. We could sell anything with Mickey ears on it. We could take a shit and shape it into Mickey Mouse and sell it.”

  “All the Johnny Depp sightings cheapened Pirates of the Caribbean for me.”

  “A nine-year-old has no clue that the Pirates of the Caribbean movie wasn’t the first time it’s ever been done. To have anything make sense at Disney, you have to look through a nine-year-old’s eyes. That’s the target. It’s old enough to know and young enough to not be cynical.”

  “Why does Disney want everybody to be nine forever?”

  “The park is just a metaphor for a perfect world. A place where reality can cease to exist for a while.”

  “The social control freaks me out a little.”

  “It’s very much the way support groups work. Everyone’s here for a common purpose, so no one’s going to look at you twice for being overly nice or stopping to pick up someone else’s trash or wearing mouse ears…. You’d be surprised how compliant people get in this environment. Walt was in some cases almost
a Marxist—he wanted everyone to be happy, but not to make the choice to be happy.”

  This last observation is eerily similar to one David Foster Wallace made about the Florida-based cruise ship industry in his landmark travel essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: “The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure, but that you will…. That they’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun…. you will have no choice but to have a good time.”

  After all the Disney stroking, I assume Martin entertains Eisner-size dreams of company domination. But it turns out he’s recently taken a job at the American Cancer Society, staying on with Disney part-time “just to stay involved with the company.” Ironically, it was his experience on the Dream Squad that moved him away.

  “As a super greeter, the most memorable…there was…this sounds…there was a woman with stage-four breast cancer. She’d been battling it for three years. The family had decided to stop the treatment, let the Lord take His course.

  “She was in the guest-relations office. They were getting a guest-assistance card, which puts her in the FastPass line. After some discussion, she volunteered the information about her condition. I met with the family. They were just these cool people from New York. They didn’t ask for anything. The mom and dad were in their midthirties. They had two girls, seven and four. They had an older boy who’d gone to five weeks of baseball stadiums with the mom. The girls wanted to do Disney World.

  “We hit it off. I spent a lot of time with them. We all went on the Tower of Terror together, then the Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster. That sort of thing. A VIP tour of the park.