Penny Lane- Dorfman Late

Disney is a destination unlike any place in the world. It attracts all walks of life, making it a cultural unifier. According to Dorfman: “Disney has been exalted as the inviolable common heritage of contemporary man;…Disney is the great supranational bridge across which all human beings may communicate with each other.” It suspends all notions of history and natural limitations, creating an unbound alternate universe. Modernism and technology aided in making fantasy a reality. The contemporary man lacks a solid cultural identity, so he is quick to accept ideology and fallacies. The post-modern era is defined by imitation and reproduction, so Disney is the perfect representation of this construction. This forum is ideal for communication because we seem less threatened by hegemonic influence, despite its latent presence. Dominant discourse is embedded in the experience, reaching out to visitors in a vulnerable state of ease. The narratives portrayed in ‘Disney-terms’ often negate history in order to tell a more commodifiable version. In our previous reading of Macherey, we learned that it is often most important to focus on what is missing from the text. Disney represents an ideal destination of escape that ignores the conflicts and suffering of our world by sprinkling a little sugar and magic on top of everything. It praises imagination and innovation, leaving out the exploitative nature of development. For example, Disney’s Pocahontas was a romanticized tale that neglects to show the horrors of genocide, rape, and disease that impacted the Powhatan Nation upon the arrival of European settlers. Furthermore, filmmakers took a poetic license when writing a romantic relationship between the protagonist and John Smith into the script. Historical records indicate that Pocahontas was merely ten or eleven when the two first crossed paths. The storyline implemented a complete distortion of history in order to produce a marketable franchise. Sadly enough, even though the plot is almost entirely fictionalized, many people hold it to be true because it is their only reference on the subject.