Page 46 - The Disneyization of Society

THEMING

New York’s South Street Seaport. This former maritime and mercantile district has
been redesigned as a shopping and eating area with allusions to its past. However,
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for commentators like Boyer, this is a filtered past that does injustice to the reali-
ties of the districts and the lives of those who lived and worked there. Artefacts,
buildings, and streetscapes involving cobbled roads are used as icons of heritage
but in the process lived history is obscured. It is a highly nostalgic, not to say
romanticized rendition of the past. For Boyer, South Street Seaport is a way of cre-
ating a feelgood mood about the past in order to occlude the problems of the pre-
sent – ‘highways in disrepair, charred and abandoned tenements, the scourge of
drugs, the wandering homeless, subway breakdowns and deteriorating buses,
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visual litter and auditory bombardment’. But in this past, conflict, class and eth-
nic inequality, oppression, and the dangers of labour are concealed in order to
project an image that is consistent with and encourages consumption. Thus, not
only is this a commodified past, it is a past that contains significant omissions in
the cause of consumption.
Waitt makes very similar points about Sydney’s The Rocks. 78 He notes that the
version of history that the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority devised is only
one of several versions of history that might have been selected. Like Boyer’s com-
mentary on South Street Seaport, Waitt argues that the heritage diet that is offered
is a sanitized one that ignores such issues as Aboriginal claims and history, the
role of women as merchants or as conscripted prostitutes, conflict and the suffer-
ing of labourers. Instead, an idealized and mythical world is created, themed on
a past divested of ugliness that serves as a backdrop to shopping and eating.
Interestingly, these criticisms of history at South Street Seaport and The Rocks
are strikingly similar to those that are often levelled at the representation of history
at Disney theme parks. In addition to projecting a highly sanitized, nostalgic view
of history in the Disney theme parks, critics have observed that the company
regularly omits certain areas: the problems caused by corporations; issues of class,
race and gender; and conflict. These are almost identical to the kinds of critique
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levelled against the festival marketplace environments discussed in this section,
where designers are accused of cleansing the past in the cause of providing a
positive and invariably nostalgic version of history that commodifies history to
render it a suitable rationale and milieu for shopping in these heritage enclaves.
The message is simultaneously one that conveys a sense of loss (for a past life that
was simpler or more exotic than the current one) and upbeat (because it commu-
nicates a sense of the recovery of that lost era). In a sense, this is a case of triumph
through nostalgia. As a strategy it is by no means a certain recipe for success: a
case in point is that of Flint, Michigan, whose civic leaders attempted in the 1970s
to turn the town, which had been ravaged by the closure of a General Motors
plant, into a tourist attraction. 80 Massive sums of public money were raised to
build a museum, which closed within six months of opening, and to help subsi-
dize a luxury hotel. In addition, subsidies were committed to a Faneuil Hall-style