Authors: Benjamin Barber
T
HERE IS NO
better emblem of the transformation of reality by commerce and the displacement of the actively imaginative reader by the passively receptive spectator than the commercial theme parks that increasingly dot our landscape. They are temples to modernity, our secular churches in which the values of play, health, fun, travel, leisure, and the American way are sanctified in a painless liturgy that draws together entertainment, information, and an effortless hint of instruction. The themes in McWorld’s theme parks are the themes of McWorld.
I mean to use
theme park
generically, not just to allude to the Six Flags parks and Walt Disney Worlds and MGM Studios, but to highway commercial strips, malls, and chain eateries. There is a sense in which McDonald’s is a theme park: a food chain featuring its own Mickey Mouse (Ronald McDonald), its miniature nonmechanical rides in the “playlands” outside, its commercial tie-ins with celebrities like Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and with hit films like
Dances with Wolves, Batman Returns
, and
Jurassic Park
, and its pervasive claim on American lifestyle—all of which make it far more than just a fast food restaurant chain.
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Its annual report rightly focuses on the role of “one of the strongest brand names in the world, with instant recognition” as it seeks to position itself as “the leading foodservice retailer in the global consumer marketplace.”
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It opens as many as one thousand new franchises each year,
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and can boast that one of its newer branches overlooks the intersection in Tiananmen Square where a seeming eon ago a young man captured the imagination of the world by stopping a column of tanks dead in its clanking tracks. It spends $1.4 billion a year on advertising, and projects a planetary capacity of forty-two thousand restaurants (only fifteen thousand built so far).
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Jim Cantalupo, president of international operations, explains how McDonald’s “is more than just price. It’s the whole experience
which our customers have come to expect from McDonald’s. It’s the drive-thrus … it’s the Playlands … it’s the smile at the front counter … it’s all those things … the experience.”
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Brand names sell an experience, and the experience becomes the defining attribute of a food marketplace that is also a theater of consumption and a theme park of lifestyles. The experience sold must be more than just a quick lunch. Fast food fits life in the computer world’s fast lane, the bites and the bytes propelling our bodies and minds through the day at breakneck pace, not a second to lose. Eat fast and serve the business world’s god of efficiency. Serve yourself and reduce the number of jobs available. Stand up and eat or take it with you, and transform eating from a social into a solitary activity. Switch (in Eastern countries) from rice or vegetables to meat and increase fat intake, medical costs, and the pressure on agriculture (growing grain to feed cattle that go into the beef we eat is radically inefficient, using up to ten times more grain than is consumed by humans who make grain their diet). The McDonald’s way of eating is a way of life: an ideology as theme park more intrusive (if much more subtle) than any Marx or Mao ever contrived.
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The theme park metaphor rests on the theme park reality.
Theme parks have their origin in the great world’s fairs and industrial expositions that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were intended as Enlightenment advertisements for a better future by the people who were converting science into industry and technology into commerce for an already globalizing market. In his vivid essay “See You in Disneyland,” Michael Sorkin cites Prince Albert’s address at the opening of the 1851 London Exposition. Speaker Gingrich has nothing on Prince Albert, who is remarkably up-to-date in his futurological enthusiasm:
“[W]e are living at a period of most wonderful transition which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind…. The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease [T]hought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at
our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and capitalism.”
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If, as Sorkin suggests, “the Prince Consort’s evocation of a world shrunk by technology and the division of labor is the ur-theme of the theme park,” then it is also the leitmotiv of McWorld and Prince Albert is the natural progenitor of Ronald McDonald (Sorkin calls the Prince a “mouseketeer avant la lettre”) as well as of cyberenthusiast Gingrich.
Whatever the genealogy of the theme park, it finds its most common outlet nowadays not in the specialty fairgrounds in Anaheim and Orlando but in shopping malls all across the country. For these malls are entertainment plazas built around the multifaceted pleasures of shopping. Once upon a time, stores found a home in downtown neighborhoods among workshops, churches, restaurants, theaters, schools, and town halls as elements in an architecture of public space that integrated shopping into other public activities and at the same time gave to commerce an appropriately complementary and utilitarian role. The isolation of commercial space from every other kind of public space hinted at by the world’s fairs and certified by mall development has allowed commercial consumption to dominate public space, transmuting every other human activity into a variation on buying and selling. Margaret Crawford, an astute student of mall culture, has noticed that the express aim of the developers is to contain the entire world within the shopping plaza. She cites one of the builders of the world’s largest mall, who at the opening ceremony boasted: “What we have done means you don’t have to go to New York or Paris or Disneyland or Hawaii. WE have it all here for you in one place, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada!”
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Joan Didion has suggested that malls are actually addictive, a space where “one moves for a while in an aqueous suspension, not only of light, but of judgment, not only of judgment, but of personality.”
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The boundaries that separate the mall from the world are intended to remove every boundary between what goes on inside the mall and in the world: very few exits, no clocks. As fast food energizes consumers to shop (“dining” takes time away from shopping) and movie multiplexes provide entertainment incentives to consumption, so the architecture of mall space—the
placement of stairways, the grouping of shops by income level, the theming of stores, the funneling of pedestrian traffic—has as its sole object the facilitation of consumption.
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The mall is not so much part of the suburbs as their essence, for suburbs themselves strive to take on the aspect of a theme park. A pamphlet from the California Office of Tourism invites readers to take a fresh look at Orange County (this was before the county went belly-up bankrupt, which gives the following an even more affecting comic poignancy):
It’s a theme park—a seven-hundred-and-eighty-six-square-mile theme park—and the theme is “you can have anything you want.”
It’s the most California-looking of all the Californias: the most like the movies, the most like the stories, the most like the dream.
Orange County is Tomorrowland and Frontierland, merged and inseparable….
Come to Orange County. It’s no place like home.
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Malls are theme parks; theme parks are whole suburban counties; suburban counties are malls. And of course mall stores sport “themes” of their own and specialize in impulse shopping. Necessitarian outlets for everyday items like hardware, stamps, and pharmaceuticals and traditional five-and-dime variety stores are almost entirely absent. In their place spring up nature stores, museum shops, new age boutiques, game and music box studios, and consumption mini-marts such as The Sharper Image and Brookstone that sell nothing you need but everything you want—once you enter the store. Alongside the mini-marts are brand-name stores and commercial offshoots of the big-time theme parks. Hundreds of Disney stores, early entrants in the mall sweeps, now face competition from other studio shops like Warner Brothers and MGM’s. The grand opening of the Manhattan Warner Studio store displayed Mickey’s competitors Bugs Bunny and Tweetie Bird inviting sundry New York sophisticates (animal and human) wearing silk top hats to “Discover New York’s Newest Entertainment Shopping Experience,” thereby offering the question “When is a store a theme park?” a simple answer: “When it is an ‘entertainment shopping experience.’”
To ensure that malls are fun, many developers are installing hightech virtual reality arcade games at very considerable cost (up to $2 million) and thereby further collapsing the distinction between Disneyland, McDonald’s (which is also experimenting with the games), and the suburban mall. An investment analyst predicts “malls may find it necessary to have that kind of amusement to keep up as a destination point.”
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Malling neighborhoods and then theme-parking neighborhood malls makes them sure destination points for everyman and everywoman too, especially since in the suburbs (where well over half of America lives today), the mall
is
the “neighborhood” and commercial space is the only community space in sight.
Theme parks that are really shopping malls and malls that are actually theme parks are everywhere. Movie studios build them as real-world monuments to their other-world fantasies, durable goods producers establish them as entertainment arms of their sales strategies (Nike Town, for example—see above), and governments and states sponsor them in hopes of burnishing an image or commemorating a past or turning a profit. The same French government that successfully exempted the French audiovisual industry from the last GATT round played a major role a few years earlier (along with leading French financial institutions) in assembling the property and building the hotels for EuroDisney. They even financed a stop on the express train service that is France’s pride. The French private sector retains a 51 percent holding in EuroDisney today, though its poor performance in its first years has left investors with a bad taste and Disney with its first prospective fiasco.
In the self-effacing spirit of government under assault, the state has mostly stayed on the sidelines. Local authorities have the right to demand concessions from developers to allow curb cuts and building permits, but they have played the zealous suitor to, rather than the public regulator of, the developers and have asked little. Indeed, H. Wayne Huizenga, the Blockbuster video magnate who also owns a group of professional sports clubs and recently merged Blockbuster with Viacom, Paramount’s successful buyer, has also persuaded the Florida legislature to allow him to build “Blockbuster Park” on twenty-five hundred acres of swampland north of Miami as a kind of sixty-eighth Florida county. The enabling legislation calls it a “Multi-Jurisdictional Tourism, Sports and Entertainment Special
District,” while locals call it “Wayne’s World.” A five-member council representing district landowners will govern. There is only one landowner, however: Blockbuster. The pro-park chairman of the Dade County Commission explains, “We’re tinkering with the outer edges of democracy as we know it—the privatization of government.”
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Not so very long ago, this pungent phrase might have been deemed oxymoronic or perhaps just moronic. If any institution is irreducibly public by its very definition, it is government. But state sovereignty apparently ends at the gates of the theme park. To be without boundaries, unaccountable to any public authority whatsoever, is no longer just a metaphor on Planet Reebok.
The theme-parking of reality has many overseas zealots. Led by Berlin concert manager Frank Georgi (who had fled the German Democratic Republic in 1989), businessmen from the eastern states of Germany are currently discussing an “Ossi Park” theme fair on a five-hundred-acre army base near Wandlitz in Brandenburg that sits astride what was once East German leader Eric Honnecker’s nuclear shelter. According to the planners, visitors to Ossi Park (the attraction is named for the slang term for Easterners during the Cold War) will:
experience a condensed “typical year” in the [Communist era] German Democratic Republic, including state-organized mass celebrations, such as May 1. One-day visitors will be required to leave by midnight, as they were in the GDR; guards will patrol the border; attempts to escape will lead to hour(s)-long imprisonment. All visitors will be required to exchange a minimum of hard currency for eastern marks …. Political commentary will be available through a reconstructed “black channel” as it was in the GDR; there will also be static-ridden transmissions of western German television (and) blackmarketeers and an underground opposition. [The whole park will be surrounded by barbed wire and a wall and will] include badly stocked stores, snooping state secret police
(Stasi)
and scratchy toilet paper known as “Stalin’s Revenge,” whose texture, according to an old GDR joke, ensured that “every last ass is red.”
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Whether the plan, goofy to be sure but hardly goofier than some of Disney’s projects now under way, will come to fruition is uncertain
in Germany’s troubled fiscal condition. That it could even be conceived suggests how far the theme park ideology has come from its inception in London in 1851 or its second coming (with Disney) at Anaheim in 1955.
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Walt Disney World is McWorld’s front parlor. The cartooning of reality with which Walt Disney established his first theme park at Anaheim nearly half a century ago foreshadowed McWorld’s seductive blend of commerce, illusion, manipulated desire, and vicarious satisfaction. According to an early promotional piece: