Page 55 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

Country. Heartbeat is a popular television series based in a fictional village called
Aidensfield which is in fact Goathland. The association with the television series
46 marks the place and its inhabitants indelibly in the minds of potential visitors
as having a certain cluster of characteristics. Mordue shows that whereas the
villagers were not unhappy about the use of Hearbeat as a lure for visitors, they
drew a distinction between genuine tourists visiting the village and the moors and
the day trippers. 121 While the former were regarded as being prepared to appreciate
the village and the region for its intrinsic characteristics, the day trippers were
believed to want only superficial contact with the village and also behaved in
ways that were disliked. It was felt that unrealistic and unhelpful packaged ver-
sions of a rural idyll were being created that clashed with the realities of village
life. At the same time, the day trippers in buses, cars and campers were seen as
causing considerable disruption to the village and its residents.
Liverpool has made use of its associations with popular music and with the
Beatles in particular as a source of cultural heritage. This use of such associations
can be viewed as another example of a cultural narrative of place. Urry, for exam-
ple, refers to a Discover Merseyside brochure from 1988 that refers to ‘Beatleland’. 122
However, Cohen’s research shows that for many Liverpudlians the link between
the city and the Beatles is unfortunate because they view the four members of the
group as people who deserted the city. Thus, while she quotes one tourism offi-
cial as saying that the Beatles ‘are to Liverpool what the Pope is to Rome and
Shakespeare to Stratford. If you can milk it then you should’, 123 residents took a
less enthusiastic view of this version of their city’s heritage, not least because for
many of them, the Beatles were perceived as having deserted the city.
Finnish Lapland’s claim to being Santa Claus Land also proved to be contro-
versial because other countries have similar claims. Pretes observes that ‘The
mayor of Drøbak, home of the Norwegian Santa, asked King Harald and Queen
Sonja to cancel their trip, planned for March 1993, on the grounds that visiting
Rovaniemi would lend support to Finland’s claim’. 124 In fact, the trip did go ahead
but Santa’s Village was not visited. A similar kind of dispute broke out around the
time of the premiere of The Lord of the Rings in December 2001, with three com-
peting claims to being Tolkien Country: New Zealand, where the film was made;
Moseley in Birmingham, where Tolkien grew up; and the Ribble Valley in
Lancashire, where Tolkien did most of his writing. 125

Intrinsic narratives of place
With intrinsic narratives of place, the theming takes the form of bringing out
inherent features of the place in question. The features are ‘there’ but need to be
imprinted in the consciousness of visitors and in many cases exaggerated in order
to make the message clear and unambiguous.
For example, the marketing of East African safaris is permeated with a sense of
being able to encounter nature in the raw. 126 This is expressed through an emphasis