Obligatory Disneyland post!!

My mom and sis came to visit this past weekend from Oregon and I tried to show them a good time. It ended up being pretty easy to do, since mostly they just wanted to go to Disneyland. Living down here means Disney theme parks aren't quite as exotic for me as they used to be -- I'm ashamed to admit my first piece of travel writing was a breathless blow-for-blow account of my family's trip to Disney World that was spread across two full pages of the middle school newspaper in seventh grade (to my credit, it was a homework assignment and I wrote most of it on the plane ride home) -- but they are still pretty fascinating, and I always end up doing a lot of pondering while there. I've written before about Disneyland's manufactured nostalgia for turn-of-the-century colonialism, as well as the strange way many of the rides are backed by a self-referential warning against greed, indulgence and thrill-seeking, but this time my post-Disneyland polemic is nothing so collegiate .
Perhaps this is because I am going soft. Or perhaps I needed to be in a less critical frame of mind in order to convince my kin that, despite my previous ranting, I really do ENJOY Disneyland.
Anyway.
I don't appreciate roller coasters for the sake of being spun around and flung against the forces of gravity and inertia. I can understand the appeal of that sort of thing, but the fact is, it's not for me. I do like Disney rides, though, because most of them have some sort of theme or story to them. If I had to give that sort of experience a name, I'd call it "immersive fiction," because the goal of many of the rides is to immerse you in fantasy, to literally transport you through another world. It's not quite interactive -- you are on a fixed track, afterall, but like any fiction, how much you get out of the whole experience depends on how much you are willing to be immersed and suspend your disbelief -- especially if you're a repeat rider. I tend to talk out loud when I'm on a ride (I tend to do this during movies as well, but that's another blog), commenting on the action as if it were actually happening. I suspect this is relatively common. When you know that the rabbits and princesses and yetis are really just robots going through the motions, you've got to do something to validate them and support the illusion.
It's kind of like kids playing pretend, like saying "this See & Say is a time machine!" or "this is a boat, not a bunkbed!" but hyper-realized, dressed up, set to music, put on wheels and contained in 1500 feet and 2/12 minutes. As such, it doesn't required much imagination to see what this world looks like or who its characters are. It does, however, required quite a few narrative leaps to piece together a story from many of the rides. If you've seen the movies, it's not that hard to do, but I'd like to know what it's like to ride many of those rides with no prior knowledge of the story they are supposed to tell.
Some of them, like Snow White's Scary Adventure (which scared the crap out of me as a child) move with a breakneck pace, equivalent to "ok, and then this happened and then this and WHOA! then this happened and YOW! and then this and this and WHAM! and then this and ok it's over now" -- a bunch of story fragments crammed into a run-on sentence, some of them, like "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" have a strange dream-like logic where one minute it's a blustery day, then all of a sudden the room is flooded with honey, and then you wake up because guess what, it's your birthday!, and some, like "Pirates of the Caribbean" are organized more like an immersive essay than an actual story (ok, perhaps "Pirates" is the only one that works like this, even and it's been more of a narrative thrust now that elements from the movie have been worked in).
With their emphasis more on evoking a mood rather than telling a true story, their frequent use of recurring motifs, and way you are brought through the piece at its pace rather than your own, and even their average length, it strikes me that the art form Disney rides most resemble is that of a pop song. A pop song with robots that look like animals, jerky half-turns and safety bars that you have to wait half an hour in line to experience, but a pop song none the less. Instead of singing along, you just talk back to the ride.

(for the record, if I had to classify the rides mentioned here into pop genres:
Snow White = garage punk. perhaps The White Stripes
Winnie the Pooh = upbeat, dreamy psychedelia/shoegazer.
Pirates = Rhapsody in Blue
anyone else care to make comparisons?)