Pre-Class Eco/Dorfman- fang

Reading Eco and Dorfman make all of my VHS tapes of Aladdin and Hercules feel dirty and wrong. The theorists take my nostalgia of long car rides with a mini-TV watching Disney movies and turn into shame. Nevertheless, they both are incredibly right with the hegemonic aspects of the films and develop Baudrillard and Zizek’s notions of hyperreality and the questioning of what we can see as real.

Eco notes how America is different from other countries as we have “cities that imitate a city” (Eco 200). From cities as big as Las Vegas to as small as Celebration

, we, as a society, seek to take emotions and ideas and turn them into a faux-reality. For his piece, Eco uses the quintessential artificial city, Disney Land (or World). Eco states that “Disneyland is more hyperrealistic than the wax museum” (202). Spots like Main Street come off as a standard American fixture with boutique (but overpriced) shops and friendly faces as if every Main Street in America is flooded with smiles and a sturdy economy. Even areas like Tomorrowland appear as just a standard city with a few modernist architectural aspects. He further delves into the artificiality of utilizing robots or animatronic figures for their shows not just because they are cheaper and more manageable than people, but they add to the fabricated reality aura that Disney provides (Interesting unknown fact: the intense humidity in the It’s a Small World Ride causes the hair on the little robot kids to grow so once a month, hairstylists actually come in and do their hair like they are real people).

Dorfman probes the more universal aspect of Disney, movies. As Ruqayyah mentioned in an earlier post, there are very few people, not just children, people that do not know Disney. Whether it is a child from a huge area like Tokyo or an adult living in a small town in Wisconsin, Disney is one of the most universal facets of global culture. Disney is also well aware of its influence. As Dorfman says “Disney thus establishes a moral background which draws the child down the proper ethical and aesthetic path…to attack Disney is to reject the unquestioned stereotype of the child, sanctified as the law in the name of the immutable human condition” (Dorfman 111). The films and characters become more than just media texts, they are cultural fixtures of modern society. Having said that, I still want to be Aladdin and there is no theorist with a PhD to tell me that it is not cool to want to be a hero.