I saw a mouse teleport last week.
The capstone show of a day at Disneyworld’s Hollywood Studios is a multimedia dance/sfx extravaganza called Fantasmic!, note exclamation mark, presented as a journey into the imagination of Mickey Mouse, sort of like the movie Cell with Jennifer Lopez only featuring fewer segmented cows. They set a lake on fire! The steamboat from Steamboat Willy features prominently! They have lasers! It’s really cool.
The show takes place on a mountain inside Mickey’s imagination (Bald Mountain, possibly? The Magic Mountain?), and during its denoument Mickey stands at the mountain’s peak in full Sorcerer’s Apprentice fashion, calling gouts of water from the lake to fight [bad guys]. Victorious, he claps his hands—and teleports to the mountain’s foot, having undergone a full costume change in the process!
Now, were Mickey Mouse a human stage magician, we’d call this a trick, and try to puzzle out how it was done. What interests me about this moment, though, is that the “trick” is utterly transparent: place one cast member at the top of the mountain in the Mickey suit, and another at the bottom of the mountain in another Mickey suit, and vanish the first as you produce the second, with a burst of fireworks to hide the momentary transition.
But Mickey occupies a weird ontological position, doesn’t he? He doesn’t exist as a physical entity except when embodied by a cast member in contact with an audience—the cast member isn’t Mickey when she’s backstage, for example. (Many characters are portrayed by female actors, apparently.) So, if Mickey exists only when the castmember’s seen by the audience, the trick I described in the last paragraph is not a trick at all! Mickey literally ceases to exist in one place, and begins existing in another.
The mouse actually teleports.
It’s not just the effect of “a different person in the same costume,” either, since the costume is only part of the character. Obviously in a stage show like Fantasmic! the actor’s limited by choreography and blocking—but Disney characters like Mickey also move about the park and interact with people. Castmembers who portray characters obey strict guidelines, limits, and set behaviors in their contact with guests; a human cast member is running a sort of behavioral code that lets the Mouse inhabit them—or lets them inhabit the Mouse. A guest watching Fantasmic! sees no difference between the Mickey in that show and the Mickey who can be encountered wandering around the park. Disney is also very careful to keep Mickey in one place at a time, at least within individual parks—the Mouse may be in Animal Kingdom and the Magic Kingdom at the same time, but won’t be in two places within the Magic Kingdom at the same time. We’re sold the idea that these are entities, which makes the teleporting even more remarkable.
There’s room here for a physics of brand characters, I think; what limits do, and do not, apply to an entity that’s basically a performance? Fodder for future work.
Sorry for leaving you all without a post last week, by the way—I was in such a rush to prepare for our excursion that I forgot even to post a placeholder. Of course, returning from Disney (the way we roll, at any rate) feels something like returning from a close encounter of the eighteen-wheeler kind, so I’m not particularly cogent at the moment either. A few more ideological thumbnails from the trip:
- While I was joking about my vacation to Area X on Twitter, I think Disney’s a lot more relevant to discussion of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, and especially Annihilation, than one would think at first glance. In each case we’re discussing a patch of Florida carved off from the rest of the world and transformed by (MILD AND NOT REALLY ACCURATE SPOILERS BASED ON MY MISREADING OF THE TEXT)what amounts to an artist’s vision of a better, or at least substantially altered world, with a skewed relationship to time compared to the wider universe and an obsession with blurring the lines between the human and animal kingdoms(/MANRASBOMMOTT). Most magical place on earth!
- Theme Park vacations are exercises in choice constriction; this constriction is the primary way in which they can be said to be relaxing. (They’re certainly not physically relaxing, though walking I’d estimate around 14 miles a day for five days and waking at 6:15 most mornings did ease my perpetual homo computerensis shoulder tension.) In ordinary life, we face theoretically limitless possibility and practically implacable routine. At any moment we could go learn Swedish, jump out an airplane, overturn our desks and go to Washington to fistbump the President, climb the Matterhorn, but we’ll probably do whatever it is we normally do on, say, Wednesday afternoon. At a theme park, there is no ordinary—but your choice space is limited to the immediately accessible rides, restaurants, and attractions. Like video games, then, theme parks reward theming and the construction of interesting choices within those limits.
- The American pavilion at Epcot has a cool a capella group!
- Roller coasters tell stories—and the best roller coasters, like the best stories, work on the subversion and exploitation of reader expectation. If you’ve ever been on Expedition Everest at the Animal Kingdom you’ll know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, I’m not sure I want to spoil the ride.
- Disney’s playing an ethical game, moral fiction in the John Gardner sense—positive values are imagination, humor, love, generosity, and filial piety (with epicycles to support bucking the will of restrictive but well-intentioned parents, e.g. “bet ya on land they understand / bet they don’t reprimand their daughters“). There doesn’t seem to be much room in the Disney ethical system for erotic attraction, like for people being into other people without that attraction being excused by terms like “true love,” which is fine except it does make me worry a little about Star Wars, which (in the OT) for all Lucas’s “no jiggling in the Empire” silliness is clearly aware about physical attraction as an axis of relationship between its characters. While Han and Leia are clearly in love by the end of ESB, I at least wouldn’t describe their relationship as true love in the old school Disney sense. Though perhaps Disney’s moving away from that—at least, Frozen is a sign for hope in that direction.
- In general wandering around the first day of Star Wars weekend I had a profound sense of the common cause, but also of the cultural conflict, between Star Wars and Disney. They’re fellow travelers, for sure, but they differ on key points. I wonder if Disney will catch Star Wars, if Star Wars will come down with a case of Disney, or they’ll retain their mutual distinctiveness? I can see any number of ways this could play out. I’m not sure what’s most likely.