Bella Eco

In Umberto Eco’s piece on the ‘fabricated reality’ that Disney creates, I found myself thinking heavily about the idea of reality that we discussed in class. In the Disney world, “Main street…is presented as at once absolutely realistic and absolutely fantastic…their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing” (Eco 202). The last line of that quote, “believe that you are still playing” resonated heavily with me. The magic of Disneyworld is that you can walk around, feel, touch, and play with things that are not real…they are mimicking reality, they are fabricated, perfected, beautiful representations of life. Eco wrote, “When there is a fake–hippopotamus, dinosaur, sea serpent–it is not so much because it wouldn’t be possible to have the real equivalent but because the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake and the obedience to the program” (Eco 203). We are presented with spectacle because, as a postmodern society, we thrive off the idea that we can have an ‘unreal reality’. Disneyworld exists, it is a place, but at the same time, it is not real, for it is an imitation of life, a giant board game that people can walk through and touch. Postmodernism has blurred the line between art and reality, between that which is fake and that which is authentic. As Eco describes, we are able to erase the distinction between reality and fantasy, we are no longer in Real Time, we are on Our Time. Visitors of the parks allow themselves to be convinced as soon as they walk through the big iron gates. They know the park is not real, but as Eco says, “Once the ‘total fake’ is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real” (Eco 202). Disney is the perfect example of the postmodern idea of realism–the line is completely blurred between that which is reality, that which is being posed as reality, and that which has no reality at all.