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The day began with Walt Disney driving his steam train into “Main Street” station. The Republican Governor of California and the President of the Santa Fe Railroad were with him in the cab of the locomotive. There to greet the train were Ronald Reagan and two other celebrities who covered the day on television, watched by an estimated audience of 70 million.⁴³⁷

“Here age relives fond memories of the past. And youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America,” Disney said in the town square outside of the station.

“The happiest place on earth,” promised the big sign on the highway; 3.6 million people visited Disneyland in its first year.⁴³⁸

“Fond memories of the past” – Main Street begins with the railroad station. The station and the buildings along the street recreate the imagined commercial heart of small town America, the little stores selling things to passers-by. Disney had grown up in Marcelene, Missouri, a town that had developed around the railroad station, and some of his family had been railroad workers. The “fond memories” were idealized from his own past.

“Promise of the future” – in 1959, Disney added a monorail to Disneyland, and Vice President Richard Nixon came to the ribbon cutting with his wife and daughters. Disney, said the Monorail’s designer Bob Gurr, thought that the electric monorail was the solution to the urban problems created by the motor car, able to carry more people than cars, cleanly and quietly gliding through the city of the future.⁴³⁹

The railroad is part illusion, at 3 ft gauge scaled down to 5:8 of the standard gauge of 4 ft 8½ in. Its design was based on a model railroad Disney had built to run around his house.⁴⁴⁰ The Disneyland station as well as the buildings on Main Street were figments of forced perspective, with the ground floors at 9:10 scale, the second floors 8:10 and the third 7:10.⁴⁴¹ At first, linear perspective had only been on a horizontal plane, but with the arrival of skyscraping modernity, artists came to apply the same principles to the vertical plane.^§MS2.2c Now Disney was employing these principles to an architected recreation of the past.

Disneyland was an idealized spatial extension of the innovations Disney had created two-dimensionally of the cinematic image. Of Disney’s animated films, Walter Benjamin^§MS0b said, “So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films … is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them.” But then also, “These films disavow experience more radically than ever before.” And enigmatically, “In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.”⁴⁴²

Benjamin revered pioneering Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein,^§MS1.1.3f and Eisenstein also revered Disney, whose methods he called “animism,” or “the momentary endowment of life and soul of an inanimate object, … for example, when we bump into a chair and swear at it as if it were a living thing, or the prolonged endowment with life that primitive man confers upon inanimate nature.”⁴⁴³

So too in Disneyland, where on Main Street, the animism is undergirded by the idea of capitalist community. Disney parses the historical main street, then redesigns it. This transformation happens not just by special visual effects. It also replicates fundamental patterns of differential interest while fudging them in the redesign.

For all its meticulously stylized historical references, Disney’s Main Street is not true. There are none of the ordinary things that would have been the objects of use and exchange on the main street of Disney’s childhood; all that the shops sell on Disneyland’s Main Street are sugary foods, trademarked trinkets, and Mickey Mouse ears.

Not true also was the ideal of the small shopkeeper. Disney, always going broke, and always working his way out of trouble by clever innovation, lit upon the idea of corporate sponsorship. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway sponsored the railroad, and for that, it was officially branded the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad.⁴⁴⁴ Coca Cola, improbably, had its own store on Main Street. It was as if corporate America could retrospectively colonize main street in order to spin its own genesis myth.

Far from the idealized small businesses of the historical main street, the workers in every store were wage workers for a single corporation – Disney. There was nothing of the market in this Main Street, and the control of the corporation was feudal in its proportions. The overwrought niceness of the “cast” was tutored at the “Disney University.” Alert to the slightest disturbance, the street was subject to the rigorous order of private security police. Its excessive cleanliness was maintained by a vigilant cast, costumed as period street cleaners. Dirt and social antagonism were edited out of the retrospective narrative, and so were class and race – the Congress for Racial Equality in 1963 called out Disney for its dearth of Black employees.⁴⁴⁵

As for capitalist community, guests (not citizens) found themselves wandering down Main Street, passing anonymous strangers they’d never seen before and never would again. This was a far cry from the imagined community of small town shopkeepers who might have known their customers and where passers-by in the street might have known each other. On the street, solidary interests extended little beyond the nuclear family. If Main Street was untrue to the past, it was in certain senses true to the configuration of alienated interests in the present.

Though in certain respects, Main Street was untrue to its present as well. In the fifties and sixties, suburban malls and big box stores were destroying main streets. In any event, Disneyland’s Main Street was more like a mall than a street, with its rigorously controlled, tightly planned structures – so in this way, in another moment of untruth Main Street paradoxically becomes true again. Just like Victor Gruen,^§AS2.3c Disney quarantined his meticulously designed utopia from the enormous, ugly parking lots that surrounded them. There is walking and there are trains, new and old, to get around Disneyland, but car ugliness is excluded, a forbidden reality.

Disney, the great parser of capitalism’s past and future, told fibs to reach some of its inner truths. Richard Nixon acknowledged the depth of his feeling for Disney, and his genius, with a commemorative medal. “I once asked Walt Disney how I should describe him when we went out and dedicated the monorail at Disneyland. He said that he was an ‘imagineer,’ which means he was an engineer with imagination.”⁴⁴⁶

Disney got some things wrong – there was to be no cleanly, sleekly, monorailed future. And on November 17, 1973, Richard Nixon was in the auditorium of Disney World’s futuristic Contemporary Resort Hotel, through which a monorail whisked visitors to attractions, when he gave his famous “I’m not a crook” speech.

Then, in August–September 2015, another theme park, this time parsing Disney’s parsing of the world: an art installation by the street artist Banksy, created in the ruins of the abandoned Tropicana – once the largest outdoor swimming pool in Europe – in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England.

“Dismaland” was billed as a “bemusement park,” with works by Banksy and fifty-eight other artists, a “family theme park unsuitable for children.” “The UK’s most disappointing new visitor attraction!” said the brochure.

Are you looking for an alternative to the soulless sugar-coated banality of the average family day out? Or just somewhere cheaper. Then this is the place for you – a chaotic new world where you can escape from mindless escapism … A theme park whose big theme is: theme parks should have bigger themes.⁴⁴⁷

Six million people crashed the park’s website in their effort to get tickets, and 200,000 visited in the thirty-six days it was open.⁴⁴⁸

Dismaland revealed things about modernity that had been wantonly edited out of Disneyland. Visitors entered through a fake screening area, with morose guards and a long list of forbidden things in red-crossed warning signs. Inside: a “hook-a-duck-from the muck” sideshow; a merry-go-round from “occupy the reality studios” ridden by a mannequin with a gas mask; a police truck sinking in the lake: a refugee boat crossing the moat in front of a ruined Cinderella’s castle; a bevy of paparazzi photographing the crash of Cinderella’s pumpkin coach; glum security guards selling black balloons emblazoned “I am an imbecile.”

“The shittest, most depressing theme park in the world,” one critic dubbed it. Or perhaps also a “gross send-up of Weston-super-Mare, … cruel mockery, art as clickbait.”⁴⁴⁹

Alongside Satoshi Nakamoto,^§AS2.4.1b Banksy is another of late modernity’s famously missing people.⁴⁵⁰ Perhaps a woman? Perhaps a collective? So commentators have mused.⁴⁵¹ Some geospatial researchers found a numerical answer that added up for them, publishing their results without hint of irony in the Journal of Spatial Science.

Here, we use a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) model of geographic profiling, a mathematical technique developed in criminology … to analyse the spatial patterns of Banksy artworks in Bristol and London … Our analysis highlights areas associated with one prominent candidate (e.g., his home), supporting his identification as Banksy. More broadly, these results support previous suggestions that analysis of minor terrorism-related acts (e.g., graffiti) could be used to help locate terrorist bases before more serious incidents occur.⁴⁵²

Meanwhile, the Disney Corporation’s income in 2014 was $48.8 billion, making it larger than the economies of two-thirds of the world’s countries.⁴⁵³ And in Disney World, guests wearing MagicBands – rubber wristbands with RFID chips^§MS1.1.1g – use them to schedule their rides and pre-order food. At all times their movement is tracked, so channeling the obsessively controlling corporate spirit of Walt Disney, but on a scale not even he could have imagined.

“Welcome Mr/s (Your Name),” the host says as you cross the drawbridge into Cinderella’s castle, to eat a meal that knows the name of its consumer even before you arrive.⁴⁵⁴

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⁴³⁷ Neal Gabler, 2006, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 532–33.

⁴³⁸ Ibid., p. 537.

⁴³⁹ Christian Moran, 2015, Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: Walt Disney and Technology, New York: Theme Park Press, pp. 90–93.

⁴⁴⁰ Steve DeGaetano, 2015, The Disneyland Railroad: A Complete History in Words and Pictures, New York: Theme Park Press, p. 11.

⁴⁴¹ Neal Gabler, 2006, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 533.

⁴⁴² Walter Benjamin, 1999a, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, translated by R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 535.

⁴⁴³ Oksana Bulgakowa, 2010, “Disney as a Utopian Dreamer,” pp. 116–25 in Animism, edited by A. Franke, Berlin: Sternberg Press, p. 119; Sergei Eisenstein, 1986, On Disney, London: Seagull Books.

⁴⁴⁴ Neal Gabler, 2006, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 527.

⁴⁴⁵ Ibid., pp. 528–29; Marc Eliot, 1993, Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince, New York: Birch Lane Press.

⁴⁴⁶ www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=1973

⁴⁴⁷ www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/08/dismaland/

⁴⁴⁸ www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/26020/1/welcome-to-banksy-s-dismaland

⁴⁴⁹ www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/41049/1/three-years-legacy-of-banksy-dismaland-weston-super-mare-england-tropicana

⁴⁵⁰ Will Ellsworth-Jones, 2012, Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall, New York: St Martin’s Press; Robert Clarke, 2012, Seven Years with Banksy, London: Michael O’Mara Books.

⁴⁵¹ www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/why-banksy-is-probably-a-woman/382202/

⁴⁵² Michelle V. Hauge, Mark D. Stevenson, D. Kim Rossmo, and Steven C. Le Comber, 2016, “Tagging Banksy: Using Geographic Profiling to Investigate a Modern Art Mystery,” Journal of Spatial Science 61(1):185–90.

⁴⁵³ https://medium.com/matter/burning-down-the-mouse-7113c261a8a5

⁴⁵⁴ www.wired.com/2015/03/disney-magicband/

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 320–324. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Banksy’s “Dismaland” §AS2.5.1b