Disney’s pedagogies of pleasure and the eternal recurrence of whiteness

Disney, escape, and pedagogies of pleasure

Disney – through its various products, movies, and theme park experiences – sells the promise of an escape by offering us “an opportunity to enter into a more vibrant and imaginary world” (Giroux and Pollock, 2010: 7), one free of the conflicts and tensions of everyday life. The notion of “escape” thus permeates the Disneyverse, and the pleasure that Disney consumers expect to experience emerges from the promise that they can escape from not only the dullness of everyday life, but also its complexity. Villmoare and Stillman (2002) explore the specific characteristics of Disney’s enactment of pleasure, explaining that at Walt Disney World, pleasure is something that is enjoyed passively, “without questioning, without imagining what else might be” (p. 92). In Disney theme parks, pleasure can be experienced passively because the landscapes of escape and fantasy have already been “imagineered”; the characters and their stories, as well as the very structure of the park experience, have already been thought out for visitors (Hubbard, 2014). Therefore, pleasure is experienced at Disney as a sort of mindless “freedom.” As Villmoare and Stillman (2002) observe,

the pleasures are experienced precisely because a visitor does not have to think seriously about what to do next or what kind of environment to do it in. One can do whatever one wishes to do, and the setting is known to be safe, clean, and amusing. (p. 92)

This passive pleasure is, by design, exclusive; it is experienced individually or in small groups of people, and “not in interacting with others” beyond one’s family unit (p. 92). Thus, visitors to Disney theme parks escape into a safe, clean, efficient, tidy, controlled world that is free from the “contentions, stress, tough decision-making and plain messiness of democracy” (Villmoare and Stillman, 2002: 82) and where they are, as in a Huxleyan dystopia, “free to have a most wonderful time” (Huxley, 1932: 70). We perceive the theme parks as paradisial, uncomplicated spaces. As Aronstein and Finke (2013) note, “To face towards Disneyland is to face away from both the immediate ‘real world’ … (with its hot-pavements, poverty and crumbling infrastructure) and the ‘real worlds’ we have left behind (home, work, bills)” (p. 612). In fact, the sign that welcomes visitors to Disneyland declares, “Here you leave the world of today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” Thus, the notion of escaping into pleasure is embedded in the very architecture of the park itself.

The pursuit of pleasure in Escape from Tomorrow

While there exist a multitude of texts, both generated by and about Disney, that could provide insight into the ways that The Walt Disney Company teaches us into particular understandings of escape via pleasure, Escape from Tomorrow (Chung et al., 2013) offers a compelling critique. The film follows Jim White (actor Ray Abramsohn), a newly laid off, sexually frustrated father on a family trip to Walt Disney World as he suffers a mental, and eventually, physical breakdown. As filmmaker Randy Moore explains, “I think the film is really about defining the word ‘escape’ and how so many American households seek it out in a yearly pilgrimage to a materialistic Mecca” (quoted in Carey, 2013: 11). In what follows, we analyze how pleasure and the promise of escape from conflict are expressed in the film. We use Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence not only to analyze how Disney constructs “escape” but also to ask fundamental questions about the nature of pleasure and the impossibility of escape from the white supremacist heteropatriarchal master narrative of Disney.

Understood in the context of Western heteropatriarchy, Jim White, the white, middle-class “Everyman” in Escape from Tomorrow, illustrates the ways that Disney teaches us into pleasure by “offering an antidote to the boredom, brutality, and emptiness of everyday life” (Giroux and Pollock, p. 7), and, in particular, the brutality of systemic racism. In the film, Jim’s journey traces his failed attempts to escape such conflict and illustrates the inescapable master narrative of the white subject as personified in The Walt Disney Company. The film opens with Jim unexpectedly losing his job, struggling in an unhappy marriage, and suffering the disrespect of his young son. The brutalities of everyday life are encroaching upon Jim at every turn; his familiar subjectivities as a professional, provider, father, and husband are all called into question. While Jim is clearly experiencing the proverbial mid-life crisis, he is also, as the white Western subject, experiencing his white male subject position as being threatened, resulting in a state of discomfort and anxiety. For example, while riding “It’s A Small World,” Jim sees what appears to be an Asian doll transform into a devilish specter with slitted eyes and a fanged grin. Jim recoils in fright and discomfort, bolting up only to realize that there is no escape from the ride. Next, he sees a traditional African mask, stark in its blackness against a white background, don menacing cat eyes and protruding fangs. He begins hallucinating as he experiences the threat of these Others who sneer and even laugh at him. Threats to his virility and desirability are exemplified by a series of disturbing visions: his wife saying, “I hate you,” his daughter’s hair changing from blond to black, and his son’s eyes turning into ominous black slits.

Jim’s obvious anxiety reflects the angst that “arises from the fragility of being in the ‘master’ position. Masters unconsciously know that mastery cannot remain theirs forever: there’s always the threat of being toppled” (Kaplan, 1997: 79). Throughout the film, Jim attempts to set aside these anxieties through the pursuit of pleasure. He first seeks to engage and lose himself with/in Disney’s imagineered world – he wanders Fantasyland with his family, takes a family photo in front of Cinderella’s castle, and rides Snow White’s Scary Adventures, the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and It’s a Small World. Later, however, when Jim becomes frustrated by endless lines and the banality of parental obligation, he seeks an alternative escape into pleasure, this one fueled by sexual passion and a self-image of a younger, fitter, and more desirable version of himself. In seeking this sexual pleasure, he moves beyond the imagineered, sanctioned Fantasyland of the Disney parks. However, these new fantasy escapes have been constructed for him, as well – not by Disney but by a broader white patriarchal heterosexist culture. Jim enacts the white male gaze (Mulvey, 1975) as he follows two French teenagers around the park. He fantasizes during the Autopia ride that the girls are riding in his car, flirting with him and kissing him on the cheek. He follows them to the Enchanted Tiki Room and tries to make eye contact with them, imagining that they are smiling seductively at him while the phallic fountain erupts in the background.

Jim’s pursuit of pleasure extends from sexual conquest to the need to reassert his white supremacy through the exploitation of the Other. During an evening stroll through EPCOT, he buys a fez in Morocco, dances in Germany while lederhosen-clad musicians play, and tries on sombreros with his family in Mexico. While in Mexico, Jim explores the pavilion featuring a pre-Columbian pyramid, a fabricated Yucatan jungle, a mariachi band, and colorful carts and shops that offer “authentic” Mexican wares. Mexico is thus commodified as Otherness “offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling” (hooks, 1992: 21). Jim’s pursuit of pleasure among the cultures on display at EPCOT reaches its climax as he takes delight in this exotic world of stereotypes, reinscribing his colonizing subject position. According to hooks (1992),

When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, and sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other. (p. 23)

Jim’s experience of the World Showcase exemplifies the description offered by Houston and Meamber (2011), who explain that the site “immerses guests into a static, historical, ancient, and exotic world of stereotypes grounded in carefully screened native employees, scaled-down architectural replicas, and culture-bound retail merchandise and dining experiences complemented by live cultural performances” (pp. 179–180). The World Showcase offers Jim the promise of pleasure through “safe” consumption of the other.

In spite of Jim’s best attempts to escape through frenzied consumption, his pursuit of pleasure quickly begins to unravel. While riding the Gran Fiesta Tour in the Mexico Pavilion, Jim imagines festive skeletons coming to life, taunting him with wide eyes and mocking squeals. Taken aback, he attempts to leave his seat, but finds himself trapped in the boat, a realization that illustrates the assertion that pleasure “is a deceptive escape. For it is an escape that fails.… it breaks just at the moment where it seems to get out absolutely” (Levinas, [1935] 2003: 62). As his boat passes through a cave and fireworks explode above a pretend Mexico City, Jim vomits violently into the dark water, symbolizing the limitations of his pleasurable pursuits and his disappointment in his inability to escape. As Jim continues toward his ultimate demise – a bloody death from a mysterious flu contracted at the park – all his attempts to escape the anxiety of the unstable white Western male subject position are futile. His wife and children are disgusted with his vomiting; he is ill and exposed. Gradually, Jim’s identity – as a husband, father, lover, and the white powerful Everyman – is called into question as he is abandoned by his wife and son, is rejected by the French girls, loses his daughter, and gets kidnapped by a Siemens scientist who reveals to him that even his imagination is not his own. Ultimately, the fantasy of escape dies when Jim finds himself facing his horrifying death, alone and utterly naked.

Disney and the eternal recurrence of whiteness

The unraveling of Jim’s theme park experience and his ultimate physical demise reflects the profound realization of the futility of pleasure as an escape. When Jim’s wife awakes to find her husband dead, a uniformed crew quickly arrives to load his body into a white van amidst scenes of costumed characters leading a new crowd of visitors in the park opening countdown. Just as the van is pulling away from the hotel, a black SUV arrives, and a new and improved Jim emerges wearing a white suit and sporting a different family. Notably, Jim’s new wife is the “exotic” woman Jim has fantasized about during the film, suggesting that he is now even more secure in his white subject position. This “resurrected” Jim has arrived to occupy the same subject position, where Jim is once again the colonizing white Everyman who is continually made over in the image of Walt Disney himself. The death of the “original” Jim and his resurrection show that even “death is not an exit” (Levinas, [1935] 2003: 54). Death, like pleasure, is a futile path to escape.

Jim White seems to be stuck in a kind of endless repetition, as even in death, he cannot escape the experience of his own being and must continually return to it. This being is grounded in a white heteropatriarchal supremacy that both permeates and is perpetuated through Disney’s pedagogies of pleasure and escape. Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence” is helpful in further exploring Jim’s stuckness in the endless loop of Disney’s white supremacist world, as it helps us read Jim as larger than Jim, as not just a character in the film but as representative of larger social processes. In other words, eternal recurrence helps us understand how white supremacy is constructed and reconstructed through patterns of repetition. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche (1887 [1974]) first introduces the concept of eternal recurrence – that is, the idea that time replays itself, that life repeats in a kind of endless replay – which he proposes as “the greatest weight” (p. 273). According to Loeb (2013), eternal recurrence claims, “I am reliving a life that I have already lived before” (p. 652). In one explication of the idea, Nietzsche (1887 [1974]) presents this scenario:

The greatest weight. – What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” (p. 273)

Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) conceptualizations of performativity and citationality lend insight into how white heteropatriarchal supremacy is continuously – but certainly not inevitably – (re)created. Butler (1993) draws on Nietzsche’s notions of repetition in her theorization of performativity, which she defines as “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (p. 2). Butler (1990) argues that the creation and (re)creation of social constructs depends upon “a performance that is repeated” (p. 191). She further states that “this repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation” (p. 191). As we see in the film, the reincarnated Jim steps into a set of socially established meanings around white heteropatriarchy, which are thus reenacted through this very repetition. Furthermore, these repetitions occur “within a highly rigid regulatory frame” and “congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (p. 45). As illustrated in the film by its normalization of white supremacy, social constructs become “a sequence of repeated acts that harden into the appearance of something that’s been there all along” (Salih, 2007: 58). This process of repeated acts allows social constructs such as race to be circulated, commodified, and consumed.

Butler’s “highly rigid regulatory frame” that is created and recreated anew with each performance or repetition of behavior is akin to Nietzsche’s ([1892] 2006) “knot of causes,” which he discusses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The animals imagine the fictional philosopher Zarathustra saying at his death, “The knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence” (Nietzsche, [1892] 2006: 178). This “knot of causes” helps shape the conditions within which the repetition of life occurs, and we see here how the subject who is also recreated takes part and is implicated in this repetition. White heteropatriarchical structures, then, are only recreated through “micro and macro patterns” that are “reenacted through the gerundive condition of lived practice. By performing our existence or more simply saying, by the ways we live, we are creating patterns of existence” (Ferrando, 2013: 4). If we read Jim White allegorically as both Walt Disney himself and as The Walt Disney Company, we can see how the micro and macro patterns of particular actions and discourses – for example, Jim’s repeated pursuit of pleasure through sexual conquest and the exploitation and consumption of the other, as well as his literal reincarnation – create and recreate the centrality of white heteropatriarchy.

Within Disney theme parks, the constant repetition of particular discourses of pleasure, as we have discussed, offer an escape to an uncomplicated utopia. Our strong emotional investments in safety, cleanliness, predictability, and efficiency, repeated as we continually engage with Disney discourses, attach us to a particular experience of pleasure that is enjoyed passively within the regulatory frame of an affective economy. Here, “emotions do things” (Ahmed, 2004b); as they circulate and repeat, they attach us to the conditions of institutionalized racism and make ordinary socially constructed forms that we come to take for granted. Thus, within the context of Disney theme parks, through the pursuit of pleasure we become complicit in the perpetuation of white, heteropatriarchal privilege. By investing and engaging in an affective economy founded on pleasure as the promise of escape from the brutalities of racism and imperialism, both past and present, we recreate and reenact the “micro and macro patterns” (Ferrando, 2013) that normalize white supremacy. These patterns are reflected in Jim White’s pursuit of pleasure and his futile attempts to escape from the conflicts and tensions of everyday life within the confines of the Disneyverse. His demise and reincarnation illustrate that we cannot escape the cultural ubiquity of the Disneyverse or the institutionalized racism it reproduces.

Accepting inescapability

As Jim White discovers, we cannot “escape” from the complexities of life in spite of the promises of pleasure. Escape is impossible because it would require us to transcend the white, heteropatriarchal narratives that pervade the Disneyverse and beyond. Like Jim, who is perpetually reincarnated in Disney’s image, consumers, particularly white, middle-class consumers like ourselves who frequent Disney theme parks, are drawn toward the promise of pleasure and the lure of escaping responsibility for ourselves and our complicity in the perpetuation of white supremacy. Even those who teach against Disney or actively refuse Disney’s ideologies reinscribe Disney by keeping it at the center of critique. As Ahmed (2006) explains, “even when we are involved in critique, complaint, and opposition, or when we say ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’, we keep ‘it’ at the center of attention, which aligns us with ‘it’ and with others who share that alignment” (pp. 133–134). For example, even the critique contained within Escape from Tomorrow operates to keep Disney at the center of attention, as does Disney’s refusal to acknowledge the film. Thus, the inescapability of white heteropatriarchy leaves us – white, middle-class scholars of popular culture – to live, write, and teach with/in its irreconcilability. While this eternal recurrence may seem like a nihilistic trap, Nietzsche (1887 [1974]) proposes that it can also be met with the opposite reaction – one could, instead, “crave nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal” (p. 274). In fact, both Butler (1990, 1993) and Snaza (2013) see productive possibilities always already embedded in the notion of eternal recurrence, and suggest that focusing on the ways in which the eternal recurrence necessitates the decentering or erasure of the subject offers pathways to such a life-affirming position.

For Butler (1990, 1993), the idea that regulatory regimes such as racialized norms are created through repetitive processes already contains within it the possibility to repeat those norms differently because the concept of performativity questions the very notion of the Western subject – that there IS a subject to begin with (Salih, 2007). That is, Butler’s concept is founded on Nietzsche’s (1887 [1996]) claim that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, acting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction imposed on the doing – the doing itself is everything” (p. 29). Thus, there is no “real” identity behind the performance of the norm, which makes the performance all there is. In this way, while there are clearly material consequences of that performance, there is no “truth” or inevitability behind the centrality of whiteness. For Butler (1990), the productive potential becomes “not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or, indeed to repeat and, through a radical proliferation” of constructions of social norms, to displace those very norms that “enable the repetition itself” (p. 148). Thus, a possibility to decenter white heteropatriarchy lies in that process of radical proliferation in which those norms are repeated differently. While Jim White’s character in Escape from Tomorrow is reincarnated as a new and “improved” white Everyman, which recreates and perpetuates white heteropatriarchal norms, a radical proliferation of Jim might bring a completely different character into the narrative to disrupt rather than perpetuate the normative patterns.

Similarly, for Snaza (2013), eternal recurrence is always already the becoming of the “dissimilar” (p. 90). The productive potential for dissimilarity lies in the affirmation of one’s fate. For Nietzsche ([1908] 2007), experiencing the eternal recurrence as a life affirming rather than horrifying proposition is tied to the idea of “amor fati” (the love of fate) – “that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it – all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary – but to love it” (p. 35). The surrendering of the will to fate also paradoxically involves a choice. “Amor fati” is not just a surrender, but an active affirmation, a choice, a “yes.” Thus, as Deleuze ([1962] 1983) explains in his reading of Nietzsche, the same exact life can never return, because in saying yes to one’s fate, that very act of affirmation holds the potential for difference. Returning to Escape From Tomorrow, we can see the ways that Jim White is presented as a helpless cog in the Disney machine, unaware that his actions and even his memories are being manipulated by Disney. In order to realize his own potential for difference and his ability to possibly decenter social norms, Jim would have to willingly accept the eternal recurrence of whiteness and acknowledge his own complicity in the repetition of white heteropatriarchal norms. It is through this paradoxical choice to actively surrender to the inevitably of eternal recurrence that we access the potential for difference.

According to Snaza (2013), eternal recurrence also opens up the possibility for difference because of its “selective” nature, and specifically because the most important selection that occurs is “the selection that destroys the individual ‘I’ and its ‘self’” (p. 90). Drawing on this notion of the destruction of the self, Snaza (2013) argues that eternal recurrence is “another name for the overcoming of ‘man’” (p. 89), which involves interrogating the myths of Western humanism that, as we see through the figure of Jim White, help perpetuate the centrality of white heteropatriarchy, including the key fiction that structures appearing to be normal and natural (such as the colonizing “everyman” portrayed by Jim) are inevitable as well as the myth that humans have autonomy and control over nature, including other human beings. This “overcoming” is not an escape but rather an attempt to acknowledge and expose the ways in which the “human” has been constructed in Western thought and practice.

For Snaza (2013), overcoming man means relinquishing the fantasy that humans have dominion “over the earth and all non-human beings living upon it” (p. 84), a Western humanist idea that drives the underlying ideologies of imperialism. These ideologies’ “justifications for slavery and colonization frequently turned on an understanding of the racially marked slave and native as ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’, and in need of civilizing or humanizing” (p. 84). Overcoming man means rejecting “man” itself as a fiction, as well as problematizing other myths such as the promise of progress toward an “improved” humanity, and the belief in science as Truth that leads to more control. As we see repeatedly in the film, these are the very myths that drive Jim White and the ways in which the past, present, and future are presented in Disney parks, as we discussed above. Walt Disney’s vision of the future, for example, invokes a belief in the improvement of humanity via a secular modern scientific capitalism that can create freedom through controlling and regulating nature and other people. EPCOT was originally designed to be

a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise. (Walt Disney, on EPCOT, 15 December 1966, quoted in Fjellman, 1992: 397)

With “amor fati,” we relinquish these fictions of the Western subject who is perceived as “self-sufficient” to displace or decenter the self and the will, and accept “the conditions of human life: vulnerability, sensibility, and … the will as pathos” (Stauffer, 2009: 37). For us, this act of acceptance involves acknowledging and exposing the inescapable whiteness of Disney and our own complicity in it through our engagements in its pedagogies of pleasure. It is a conscious act of (a “yes” to) non-transcendence; a decision to remain in place, to bear an unbearable situation, or, as Nietzsche argues, to endure the idea of eternal recurrence. According to Nietzsche (1967), such an endurance involves “the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism … abolition of the ‘will’; abolition of ‘knowledge-in-itself’” (p. 540). Saying yes to one’s fate, then, seeks to replace Western myths about truth and humanity through the repetition of a new truth, “that the total character of the world is in all eternity chaos, lacking order, arrangement, form, beauty, or wisdom … the truth, that is, is eternal recurrence” (Loeb, 2013: 656). In other words, affirming one’s fate means learning how to live immanently, which includes learning how to embrace and live with/in transience and contingency (Ridley, 1997).

This paradoxically active/passive choice can signal an ultimate affirmation of life that is a kind of freedom-in-inescapability, a freedom that arises from the productive possibility engendered by the acceptance of “the now not as we wish it to be but as it is, in all of its difficulty” (Maudlin, 2014: 149, italics in original). For us, in particular, the acceptance of inescapability involves an acknowledgement that Disney’s pedagogies of pleasure teach us into a sanitized escape from the complexities of life that perpetuates white heteropatriarchal privilege. As illustrated by Jim White’s narrative in Escape from Tomorrow, the promise of escape via pleasure that circulates through Disney’s affective economy distracts us from the tensions, conflicts, and brutalities of our past, present, and future, including the ways in which we are complicit in these very brutalities through our everyday behaviors and discursive practices. This promise lures us into an insidious state of comfortable forgetting that empowers the perpetuation of social inequalities.

Accepting inescapability demands that we relinquish such comforts and confront the difficult knowledge of the impossibility of transcendence. And yet, while we cannot rely on comfort or pleasure as a means of escaping the ubiquity of racist/colonialist/imperialist Disney narratives, there is a certain relief that comes with the relinquishment of Disney’s impossible dream. As Singer (2013) aptly notes, “For all its bleakly apocalyptic imagery, the feeling Escape From Tomorrow ultimately imparts in the viewer is relief from the burden of having to believe in an unattainable fantasy. Chasing that dream could haunt someone forever” (para. 12). Relinquishing the expectation for escape may be discomforting, but clinging to futile hopes for the kind of escape Disney promises is far more destructive. As Lacan (1990) notes, “More than once I’ve seen hope – what they call bright new tomorrows – drive people … to kill themselves” (p. 43). Thus, as a cultural artifact, Escape from Tomorrow, unlike the Disney texts it critiques without apology, does not offer us a fairy tale with a happy ending. Instead, it gives us something far more important: a glimpse into the audacity of inescapability.