sawsaw Eco

I really enjoyed reading this essay, "The City of Robots," by Umberto Eco. I found his points on Disneyland to be right on track. Disney creates a utopian society that represents a better reality. He writes on page 203, "Walt Disney, who had finally managed to achieve his own dream and reconstruct a fantasy world more real than reality, breaking down the wall of the second dimension, creating not a movie, which is illusion, but total theatre, and not with anthropomorphized animals, but with human beings." Disney attempts to not only represent reality but to make it better.
Is Disney capable of having real animals and real people? Yes, but it would take away from the “reality” they created. When you’re at Disney you want to pretend like you’re a kid again with super heroes and princesses. "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 meant to admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program." (Page 203) The main reason Disney is so successful among people is because it is an escape from reality and throws people into a perfect world with no hardships. Does Disney have problems underneath the Mickey Mouse costume and the happy sing along tunes you hear? Of course, but the guest never see or hear about it! What's astonishing to be is that people feel safe and happy at Disney yet children are being kidnapped, people are dying on rides and most employees of Disney say that hate going to there job.
Just this past Saturday I went to Epcot with a group of my friends, one friend and I were walking into the bathroom at one of the countries and there was a guy in the bathroom taking pictures of us on his cell phone. Most people think that everyone who goes to Disney is a nice person and is there to watch the character shows. What they don't realize is that it's full of perverts, addicts and crazy people!
Lyotards quote: “It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented,” (Page 46) clearly defines what Disney is doing. It doesn’t represent the “real” world but instead creates an allusion of what we want our reality to be. Eco writes on page 203, “Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality that nature can.” This quote connects Lyotard and Eco’s idea of dismissing reality. It shows that even nature which is as close to real as we can get, is not truly real, we are supplied by an allusion of nature by technology.
This essay made me as take a deeper look at Disney. There is no part of Disney that represents reality or the real world. Yet, why is it so successful and iconic. I am forced to believe that it is not the realistic world Disney created that makes people want to go but it is the unrealistic allusion of what our world should be that keeps attracting millions of people. If Disney wasn’t a fantasy land but a reality land would you still want to go?