Bloodbath at the House of Mouse

Timelines are easily distorted, more so when you’re away.

When you’re in the routine of normal working life, one day is broadly pretty much like another – the days have a tendency to roll together, specifics become less distinct, and whether you did something a week or a month ago largely becomes an irrelevancy.

When you’re travelling however, the same rules no longer apply, primarily because of the sheer volume of stuff we attempt to pack in, in our desperate hopes to see and experience as much as possible. Life is more dynamic and the hours more dense with activity. Something from a few days ago feels like it happened a couple of weeks ago, and things done a month ago might as well have happened last year. It’s routine to ask yourself ‘when did this happen?’, only to find yourself mentally mouth-agape upon realizing it was only late last week, not late last summer. My theory is that it’s probably your brain protecting you from going completely off the rails trying to make sense and order of everything.

About the only two things that bring such confusion to an end is when you get home (when, finally, everything seems so long ago), and when you close the loop – when you go back to where you started, see things that you subconsciously saw but didn’t register before, and realize that the trip wasn’t that long after all, and it’s depressing as all hell now it’s nearly over.

Still, there was little time to reminisce. We needed to ready our weapons, steel our souls, and march bravely and without hesitation into the face of California, the face of capitalism – indeed, arguably the face of the USA.

We were to head to Disneyland.

From the exact timing of shows and events, to their eerily prescient calculation of wait times in queues, they show the rest of the world how to get its shit together. Whether you’re an avid fan of the House of Mouse, or you just have a passing familiarity, no-one can argue that they don’t know how to run a gig.

Their brutal, ruthless, relentless efficiency – the sort of efficiency you’d hope the CIA or FBI possess, but know is just a myth; the sort of efficiency even McDonalds fantasize about, green-eyed with envy - is coupled with an almost unearthly ability to extract money from your pocket at every point in your journey through the Happiest Place On Earth™, yet leave you somehow unfazed the entire time.

We arrived at a Disney character themed car-park and before you could say “Jiminy Cricket – I’ve been robbed!” we’d handed over $15 for parking, $614 for a two day Park Hopper pass for a family of four, and had boarded a magical mystery bus bound for Disneyland, a mile distant.

The shuttle service, like everything at Disneyland, gives new meaning to the old cliché ‘well-oiled’ – buses are numbered and run in a constant stream meaning there’s little, if any, wait at any time of the day - signboards telling you which bus goes to which park are everywhere, and even your parking ticket gives you a reminder. The intent is that you’ll switch your brain to neutral, keep your hand heading for your wallet, and just enjoy.

And, I’m not too proud to admit, that’s exactly what we did, taking in just about every ride at least once, sometimes twice, over the course of a two day assault the likes of which Disney has probably only rarely experienced – 8:30am to 10:30pm Saturday, and 9:00am until 4:30 (when we had to finally leave to catch our return flight) on Sunday. 

Although to my eyes Disneyland seemed flat-chat, it was actually a pretty quiet Saturday in Anaheim. Of course, that didn’t stop there being lines for almost everything, from rides to meeting characters – I stood in line for an hour so Elise could meet Minnie. Still, things moved, albeit slowly, and you could always get to food or drink of, surprisingly, a reasonable standard when needed. One guy in the “Minnie Line” told me the worst he’d seen Disneyland was, amazingly, Super Bowl Sunday – he’d decided no-one in their right mind would be at Disneyland that day, but a million people of evident wrong mind proved him to be incorrect. Apparently it was almost impossible to see from one side of Main Street to the other for the throng of bodies. Even more astoundingly, it’s not completely unheard of for Disneyland to close when it’s too full. For a company as dedicated to the pursuit of the almighty dollar as it is to perpetuating the Disney myth, you know that if it willfully turns paying guests away then it really has got to be packed.

I guess it’s stating the obvious, but Disneyland is a thoroughly weird place. There’s great concern in the media about the premature sexualisation of children, but Disneyland flips this on the head, catering for the infantilisation of adults. If those going around carrying helium balloons, singing “It’s a Small World” and wearing Minnie t-shirts and ear hats were classic socially retarded types without friends it would somehow be easier to accept and digest, but the desire to recapture your youth seems to cut across all demographics in Disneyland – no discernable factor seems to provide differentiation between who would and wouldn’t go with it. Trendy teenage guys wear Mickey t-shirts, as do their dates, as they wait in line at the Dumbo ride. In Australia – certainly where I grew up as a kid – they’d be beaten to a pulp. Here, no one seems the least bit surprised. I’d noticed it in Hong Kong Disney and had put it down to a peculiarity of the region –adult Japanese women giggling coyly in knee-high white socks and private schoolgirl uniforms – but it’s obviously not the case. It’s just a Disney Thing I don’t get. I’ve got no issues with Disney, no particularly strong feelings one way or the other, but the idea of me slipping on a Mickey t-shirt and ears would just seem bizarre. I’d do it for a dare; here, it’s standard issue.

On this trip I’ve been to two worlds of fantasy, catering to every whim, anxious for you to smile, spend your money, and come back year after year – Disneyland and Vegas. Like Vegas, it seems the more I visit it, the less I’m sure about how I feel about it. The comparison with Las Vegas isn’t as irrelevant as it might seem at first blush – both are synthetic, completely artificial constructs dedicated to living without consequence, to the might of the consumer, the power of the almighty dollar, and the firmly stated (if not necessarily believed) dream of everyone living happily ever after. I don’t have as much of an issue with Disneyland relative to Vegas – in Vegas, real people can and do get hurt. In Disneyland, broken dreams amount to not getting a ride on the Matterhorn. In Vegas, they’re far, far blacker and don’t offer the luxury of allowing you to get up earlier so you can beat the crowds the next day.

I guess I don’t have an issue with it at all, the more I think about it. Ultimately, I think, I just don’t get it. It’s just weird – hell, I’m weird – but this is an entirely different kind of weird. I’m glad it’s the Happiest Place on Earth, I guess, glad it’s something children can love before they become too jaded with the world, but I’m also glad it’s surrounded by walls - not to keep us out, but to keep it in. I’d hate it to spill out and mess with reality too much.