āStand Back, You Fools!ā
At 3 pm on the afternoon of May 11, 2018, the Festival of Fantasy Parade proceeded down its usual route through Walt Disney Worldās Magic Kingdom.1 Beginning in Frontierland, winding through Liberty Square, around Cinderellaās Castle, and eventually down Main Street, USA, this parade has been a highlight of tourist afternoons since it debuted in 2014. Featuring Disney characters from dozens of stories and hundreds of performers, it is a boisterous and colorful street performance that entertains children and adults alike. Among the high points of the Festival of Fantasy is the ābattleā between Prince Phillip, of Sleeping Beauty fame, and the evil sorceress Maleficent, who has transformed into a fire-breathing dragon. The dragon, a Steampunk-inspired mechanical float driven by an operator, has an articulated neck and head that can swing, raise, and lower, and at various points through the parade a hot blast of fire escapes from its mouth.
On May 11, however, the parade took a different turn. While moving through Liberty Square, directly in front of the recently reopened Hall of Presidents, the Maleficent dragon float caught fire. Rather than spewing fire from its mouth, the dragonās entire head caught aflame and burned into the sky.2 Word of the fire spread quickly, with social media making sure that anyone with an interest in Disney parks knew of the accident. Disney fan sites aggregated these posts, and mainstream media picked up the story, with coverage ranging from the Orlando Sentinel to Entertainment Weekly. While the news accounts repeated the same scant information about the fireāwhich caused no injuriesāthe videos of Maleficent doing her best Lumiere impression are the most interesting.
One of the most widely distributed videos of the fire, from Instagram user Holly Roberge, shows a Disney employee spraying the burning head with a fire extinguisher, trying to douse the flames. Naturally this image of the fire being extinguished drew the most attention, but closer examination of the video reveals the equally fascinating behavior of the Disney park guests watching the event unfold. Examining the guests visible in Robergeās video you can see that no one moves away from the fire. One guest in the foreground lifts his camera to take footage of the fire, as of course did Roberge to take the video that caught him doing so. Others opposite Robergeās camera simply stare at the fire, with one woman seeming to smile at the potentially dangerous accident.3 Other perspectives on the fire reveal similar audience behavior. YouTube user Darkaxian shows a slightly later moment in the fire, and you can see that guests have been moved away from the head of the dragon. As the camera pans from the dragonās head, where no onlookers stand, and down toward the tail it reveals a large crowd of gawkers, with most of them taking photos or videos with their phones.4
The longest video of the fire and its immediate aftermath appears on the Facebook page of Taylor Standridge, seemingly taken from the area of Liberty Square designated for wheelchair viewing of the parade. Standridgeās video shows once again that most guests chose to watch the fire as opposed to fleeing it. A few guests, particularly those with very small children, move away. A few moments later a second woman, pushing a stroller, begins to move away from the parade route. However, she quickly stops, positions the stroller on the āsafeā side of her body, and immediately turns back around to stare at the fire. Midway through the video Standridge pans to her left, past the dragonās tail, to show that the parade performers are continuing to clap and dance along with the music, even though the float in front of them has stopped. In what must have been a difficult moment for these performers, few tourists choose to engage with them; they are transfixed by the fire. Once the visible flames seem to have been extinguished, a group of cast members, wearing a somewhat motley collection of uniforms/costumes, begin shooing guests away from the area, though many guests do not cooperate. One woman in an electronic convenience vehicle simply stops in the middle of the sidewalk so she can continue to watch, and another woman remains standing on the same stone ledge she had been on for the duration of the video, never moving her focus from the dragonās head.5 Though it was unplanned, undesired, and frankly unsafe, the burning Maleficent is unquestionably dramatic and surely the highlight of those presentās vacation.
Whatās Real at Disney and Whatās Really at Stake
Just as this moment shows a struggle over controlāpark employees attempted to contain the burning float and the unruly guests, and the guests resisted to see the spectacleāscholar Thibault ClĆ©ment sees Disney scholarship as a whole as fundamentally an argument about the ālocus of controlā between Disney and its guests; how much power does each participant have in constructing reception, agency, and control?6 As demonstrated by spectators willing to brave a truly flaming dragon, Disney guests have more agency than Disney cares for and many scholars allot. Disney parks are multivalent, open to many different interpretations and ways of analysis; the scholarship on them is prolific and diverse in its approaches and perspectives. The scholarship is so extensive and varied, in fact, that numerous meta-analyses such as ClĆ©mentās exist of the scholarship itself. The two extreme poles are scholars who see Disney purely as a force for cultural illāusing the term āDisneyficationā or āDisneyizationā to highlight what these scholars view as the negative qualities of Disney. They see a virus created by Disney that has infected culture generally, with artificiality, consumerism, and lack of depth as its manifestations.7 Other scholars, especially those granted access to the Parks and Disney archive, and those allowed use of photography taken in the parks, uphold Disney for its cultural achievements and virtuosity in creating themed environments while presenting dubious arguments excusing overt racism and heteronormativity.8 Disney scholars have felt the need to clarify that they are not Disney fans, or embarrassedly admit that they are.9 Increasingly, scholars try to occupy perspectives within that continuum, recognizing that Disney, like every element of culture, contains both pleasurable and problematic elements.
By virtue of their status and their relatively early writings on Disney, much scholarship is dominated by a specific European strand of scholarship that interprets Disney parks using semiotics, interpreting the signs presented by Disney and analyzing what meaning they contain. Highly critical of Disney, prestigious scholars such as Umberto Eco,10 Jean Baudrillard,11and Frederic Jameson12 all examined Disney through postmodern lenses to comment on Disneyās existence as a sign with no referent, a hyperreal space that encourages mindless consumerism. In 1986, Eco famously characterized Disney as, āAn allegory of consumer society, a place of absolute iconism ā¦ it is also a place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like its robots.ā13 ClĆ©ment sees Vinyl Leaves, by Steven Fjellman, arguably the most influential and complete work of analysis on Disney parks, as the American inheritor of these traditions.14 David Allen concludes that this strand of scholarship is ultimately rooted in a suspicion of middle brow culture that encourages the scholar to see tourists, and particularly American tourists, as āgullible grown-up children.ā15 What is missing in these analyses, he argues, is attention to reception and the guestsā perception of their experience.
Allen counters that the focus on authenticity and whether the guests are āfooledā or not misses the point.16 Disney is not attempting to recreate actual structures or to simulate authentic experiences. Instead, Disney is using ideas and references and creating something altogether new. It is not a poor copy of reality, because there is no attempt to recreate reality. Allen uses quotes from tourists to demonstrate that guests are not fooled. Rather, part of the enjoyment of Disney is recognizing the skill of the Imagineers and reveling in the incongruity of the environments Disney creates. Or, occasionally, as in the case of Maleficent, how these skills fail. While Eco, Baudrillard, and Jameson see the guest as a passive recipient of commercialized falseness, Allen and others see Disney as essentially constructing enormous immersive theatre spaces where guests ...