Monday, February 23, 2009

Umberto Eco, brookes77

In Umberto Eco's studies of "The City of Robots", he discussed Las Vegas and mainly Disney world and Disney Land. He discussed how when we go to disney world or disney land and we park our cars and give ourselves to this fake world, that strips us of our power and our ability to make our own decisions. We listen to these voices that tell us what to do and how to do it. Yet, at the same time the parks do a good job in replicating the past, yet making the rides, the people, the events, "realer" then "real". An example of this would be "Santa's village" a park i use to love to go to when i was younger. This made Santa so real to me, yet he is not real at all. The park, forces the idea of santa on you making an even bigger deal then what you learn about in your own home. He states " Walt Disney, who had finally managed to achieve his own dream and reconstruct a fantasy world more real then reality, breaking down the wall of the second dimension, creating not a movie, which is illusion, but total theater, and with anthropomorphized animals but with human being." His research is very true when he discusses how we enjoy this imitation of a perfect world almost so much that the "reality will always be inferior to it".
These falsified cities, parks, are perfect worlds. They allow us to experience past events, wars, pirates, etc . yet when the ride is over we see sunshine, and we do not have to live in that world anymore, and we have the ability to forget and move on. This is not reality.
Another example, is on the last page, of how we lose complete power over ourselves when entering these parks and act like robots is that: "Tomorrow, with its violence, has made the colors fade from the stories of Yesterday. In this respect Disneyland, is much shrewder it must be visited without anything to remind us of the future surrounding it. Marin has observed that, to enter it, the essential condition is to abandon your car in an endless parking lot and reach the boundary of the dream city by special little trains." Our cars are what give us the ability to proceed with the future, to have our individual lives and agendas, yet without them we are confined to the parks agenda, and our individual schedule is no longer important to anyone. Although the park allows us to see that these are just representations of the real, it makes us want to live in a world like this, with fear but only till we are done fearing, with perfect houses, events that have a set beginning and end. These parks are enjoyable, yet they turn us into robots that have a skewed vision of what is real life and what is not.

1 comment:

CMC300 said...

Good post. You have analyzed the reading well. You make some good points about how people feel when at theme parks.

-Starfish