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At Disney no total acceptance
click on images for full-size:
Disney Epcot Germany
Hall inside the Team Disney casting/employment building at Disney World, Florida (Arata Isozaki)
Attacking Baudrillard's claim that Disney aims to create "an infantile world" (Baudrillard 1983, 26), Michael Pinsky points out that
The willingness to participate implicitly in the simulations -- that is, buying a ticket and entering the front gate -- does not necessarily lead to a total acceptance of the originary structures which ground those simulations. As J. Derek Harrison states, 'Most children are not fooled by electronic fantasies; on the contrary, they are curious to know how it works.' What Baudrillard refers to as infantile is in fact an acknowledgment of a self-conscious position from which the simulation is both observed and critiqued. Few people are taken in by the illusions at Disney parks. Complicity in this context is the act of becoming a reader with the tacit knowledge that Disney is a text upon which the 'real' world is not entirely excluded, but intrudes, thus problematizing the Inside/Outside binary. . . . The simulated structures are both supported and undermined by the very act of complicity which allows the observer access to them. Pinsky 1992, 101-02
There is no simple absorption. Instead, participating in the fantasies is like seeing a play, or a movie, and sweating and fearing with the character while also admiring how she acts in this role, and the way the background was altered in that special effect. We are involved in both the story being performed and in its staging; we enjoy their interplay. This duality occurs in all rituals. Often it is explicitly acknowledged, even at Disney.