One Big Fantasyland

In the popular imagination, there are now two Disney Worlds. One is the innocent land of Mickey Mouse, a gigantic playground happily confined behind the walls of its bustling theme park. The other is an insatiable global empire that has grown from the parks in Anaheim and Orlando, to Paris and Tokyo, then to major urban projects such as the 42nd Street development in New York and culminating in Disney’s first built community--Celebration, Fla.--a mock traditional town that uncannily resembles Disneyland’s own Main Street USA. There, Mickey’s innocent grin barely conceals an insatiable corporate appetite.

“The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks,” organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and currently at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, attempts to reconcile these extreme images of small-town idealism and corporate manipulation. Along with familiar drawings of Disney’s themed streetscapes oozing with nostalgia, the exhibition presents Disney’s earliest experiments with model homes and urban planning, including a grandiose plan for a model community of the future. And it is by documenting Disney’s constant struggle to locate an ideal balance between the two that the show is truly impressive. At Disney, we learn, the boundary between fantasy and reality was never clear.

The show is roughly divided into two parts. The north galleries are mostly devoted to the depiction of the theme park’s various “lands.” A central gallery houses a model of Main Street USA and leads into the three galleries devoted to each of Disneyland’s main sections: Fantasyland, Tomorrowland and Frontierland/Adventureland. (The intent is to replicate the park’s true layout.) Other galleries include designs for the unbuilt communities and Disney stores that represent the company’s real-world experiments, as well as unbuilt cultural attractions and various schemes for the original theme park.

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Disney’s skill as social engineers, however, can best be gleaned in the various proposals shown of the theme park’s original master plan--Disney’s most sophisticated urban design. In one early 1953 drawing, the theme park has a meandering, picturesque quality. There are two points of entry. But later schemes become progressively more rigid.

In a drawing of the final design, the second entry is gone. A formal, main axis runs along Main Street--that false, idealized America of sweet shops, corner drugstores and penny arcades--and ends at the hub, with the trademark castle looming in the distance. From there, visitors branch off into the various themed environments, always looping back to the center. A massive berm encloses the park, subtly cutting off views to the outside. The effect is a carefully manipulated narrative, where the outside world no longer exists.

The blurring of fact and fiction continues in the section titled “Lands That Never Were.” In a drawing of an unbuilt Russian pavilion for Epcot, for example, the Kremlin’s thick fortress walls are reduced to a neighborly scale, the vast expanse of Red Square is interrupted by a flowing fountain, and the powerful thrust of Vladimir Tatlin’s 1920 proposal for a monument to the Third International--which was intended to tower over Moscow’s cityscape but was never built--becomes decorative sculpture.

Culture here becomes simple, nonthreatening, homogenous. (Ironically, even this version of Moscow seemed too threatening. It was rejected due to lack of corporate sponsorship.)

When the storybook scenes are juxtaposed with images that strike closer to reality, Disney’s vision becomes more ominous. An image of a sleek space-age home--with robotic gadgets grooming and combing a smug little homeowner--is positively comic. By contrast, a series of renderings of proposed exhibition buildings sponsored by the likes of IBM and General Dynamics evoke a bland corporate culture, and a color drawing of two swooping monorail cars could as easily be an advertisement for Boeing. Unlike the nearby dreamscapes of Fantasyland or Frontierland, these attempts to gaze into the future seem like slick salesmanship, empty and uninventive.

Disney’s Imagineers, of course, were keenly aware of their failures. When designing EuroDisney’s newer Tomorrowland, the Imagineers reverted to the fantasies of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. A giant zeppelin thrusts its pointed nose out of an airship hangar. Captain Nemo’s sub floats in the still waters of a pirate bay. These are familiar, safe images that are unambiguously fiction.

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The fake and the real finally merge in two schemes represented here side by side: Progress City, a 115-foot-long diorama built for Tomorrowland, and Project X, the unbuilt community of the future that Walt Disney unveiled on the eve of his death in 1966. Both are corporate versions of the early Modernists’ urban plans, but made simple, stripped of any radical mission.

In a drawing depicting the Progress City’s radial plan, a dense cluster of shimmering towers rises at the center, surrounded by a green park belt and an outer ring of twinkling suburban lights. But turn to a sectional drawing and the scheme becomes more ominous. While commuters glide to work on monorails and “people movers” above, trucks and services are banished to a network of underground roadways--an unintentional echo of the futuristic heaven and hell portrayed in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” In the “real” version, the radial plan of the city for 20,000 inhabitants is broken up into a collection of smaller hubs, but the general scheme remains eerily similar to the fake.

What’s missing in the show, of course, is the puzzle’s final piece. In 1997, Disney completed its Florida planned community of 20,000 residents, now optimistically dubbed Celebration. But the built version was based on the nostalgia of Main Street, not the slick corporate Utopianism of the ‘60s. Modernism, to Disney, was now equated with false hopes. Nor did its more radical notions of social planning fit with Mickey’s evolving image as a pillar of family values. Instead, Disney applied the world of illusion directly to the real.

And why not a world where neighbors wave cheerily from their front stoops and everyone gets along? After all, what’s wrong with innocence? The lure of Disney’s themed environments, in fact, touches one of our most closely guarded fantasies: the deep longing for a painless world without confusion and change, where pink-cheeked children grow up secure and never shed their innocence.

The problem is that fantasy is an escape. Disney’s attempts to include the real in its theme parks never quite worked. And as urban vision, a theme-park world could never be inclusive. To function, it has to turn away the outcast, the damaged, the weak, the rebel--all those that make up a true society.

What Disney offers is the illusion of heterogeneity without accepting its complexity, its sharp edges. It is a model that may work for a park. But it does inevitable harm to a real notion of community, where just those weaknesses and inconsistencies make us truly human.

* “The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks,” UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., through Aug. 23, closed Mondays. (310) 443-7000.