Page 27 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

of theming, each of which will be covered in this chapter and elsewhere: music
and in particular rock music; sport; and Hollywood and the movies more gener-
18 ally. Schmitt and Simonson suggest five ‘cultural domains’ that are the source of
themes: the physical world; philosophical and psychological concepts; religion,
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politics and history; the arts; and fashion and popular culture. While they use
somewhat broader categories than Gottdiener, they are more prone to overlap.
For example, does Hollywood as a theme fall into the arts or popular culture?
Nonetheless, this review of two influential taxonomies of sources of theming gets
across the rich reservoir of sources that the architects of theming can draw upon.
• Place – nations, cities or even planets.
• Time – past, present and future. Images of the past are mined particularly for the sense
of nostalgia they are frequently designed to evoke.
• Sport – sport generally, as well as individual sports.
• Music – rock music and genres, such as Motown or country and western.
• Cinema – the movies generally, as well as particular genres or influential figures.
• Fashion – clothes and models.
• Commodities – such as cars and motorbikes.
• Architecture – iconic buildings.
• Natural world – symbolic natural environments, such as the rainforest and savannah, as
well as volcanoes.
• Literature – well known literary figures, such as Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde, as well
as fairy tales.
• Morality or philosophy – such as notions of conservation.

Very often, a theme may contain more than one of these ingredients. For exam-
ple, the theme of the wild west, which has been a very popular thematic motif
that was particularly influential in the early days of the theming of Las Vegas’s
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casinos and hotels, contains elements of place (the United States), time (a period
in the past), the cinema (in that it is invariably a cinematic version of the wild
west that is presented), and possibly the natural world (with the use of well-known
landscaped features such as John Ford’s use of Monument Valley).
The list has omitted one further source of theming:

• The company and its logo.

Many company brands and logos become so distinctive that they become themes in
themselves. They do not fit the definition of theming offered above when it was sug-
gested that typically, the source of the theme is external to the institution or object
to which it is applied. Company logos and brands are exceptions to the externality
of a theme and account for the use of the hedging term ‘typically’. Beardsworth and