Following this thread during the last few days, I must express my surprise
in reading about the willingness of some of the respondents to accept the
phenomena of the "theme park" and its view of history as one that might
provide some insight to museums that develop historical exhibits and
displays.

I agree, from a technical standpoint, that the need of theme parks and
museums to study each other is obvious.  But, as I see it, there is a
profound difference between the purpose of museums and theme parks in this
regard.  No matter how closely the displays and presentations of one
approach the other, the different contexts of presentation (the
intellectual environments) must only serve to underline their divergent
aims and cultures:

Although scientific and historical displays in theme parks may startle and
evoke awe, they are not meant to challenge our understanding of science or
art; they are not meant to educate by posing problems or by offering
hypothetical or conjectural solutions to problems -- in fact, they tend to
ignore or conceal issues that might interfere with their message.

Theme parks do not intend to explain the rational and irrational in our
lives, nor to inform us of the differences of thought, expression, and
beliefs of others -- except as they reinforce stereotypes -- unlike museums
(hopefully).  Rather, theme parks, because their owners have a political or
social agenda of their own, must inculcate, bastardize, and simplify
historical phenomena in such a way so that important questions cannot be
asked or imagined.  The dominant view of our culture and its ways must come
to be understood as the only acceptable interpretation.  In fact, theme
park visitors should never be allowed to understand that "interpretation"
is taking place.  In many ways theme park culture is much like a secular
religious culture that insists that all real-life events be fit to its own
theology.

To do this, theme parks must take our historical events, environments,
conditions and lifestyles and sanitize them while they synthesize them.
Bowdlerized and simplified, history and other realities are turned into
neat pleasant packages that can be swallowed in dainty morsels with very
little "indigestion."  The theme park experience is intended to certify a
fanciful idealized vision of ourselves, to impose a model vision on others,
and to offer a plateau of social conduct and patterning for all to emulate.


Real history is messy, untidy, unruly.  Real history has loose ends,
unfinished and contradictory stories (if history is story), accidents,
cruelty and injustice, and is rife with unintended consequences.  History
is conflict, genius, ignorance, stupidity, arrogance.  History is filled
with human and social dimensions, the meanings of which, and the extent of
which, always seems to be available to new findings.  If history is the
known, it is also the unknown and the not known yet.  History, no matter
what direction it takes or dimension it assumes, is the subject of museums.
 Theme parks are more selective.

Disneyland cannot hold a slave auction; Colonial Williamsburg can.
Disneyland cannot show the terror, pain and devastation of war; but it can
celebrate those values that will excuse the next one.  It cannot focus on
our differences; it can only conclude that "it is a small world after all."
 Can you imagine going to Disneyworld to experience the new water park
activity: "Water Cannons of Birmingham," or the new fright ride "Bombing in
Oklahoma City?"

In the theme park, history is tidy, pigeonholed and gift-wrapped.  It is
moralized, life-enhancing, ennobling and otherwise made into activities
subservient to a "greater" ideal.  In this regard it is therefore closer in
many ways to what we call legend and myth.  In fact, the quaint stories of
Ovid's _Metamorphosis,_ intended to personify the origins and natural
histories of ordinary things may have more in common with theme park
history than theme park history has to museums.

The theme park is the permanent celebration and festivity, the saint's day
all year round, a carnival commissioned by a secular society in which each
person can celebrate his own day any day.  It is no accident, I submit,
that entry into Disneyland is everyman's triumphal entry from the outside
world to Main Street USA.  The arch that every visitor passes through is a
proscenium that divides him from the exterior world of tension and torment
and places him by virtue of a ritual calculated to bring on "suspension of
disbelief" into a world of a pasturized past, sublime submissions and
counterfeit triumphs.

The historical simulacrums, environments, enactments and epiphanies found
in the likes of Disney/Land/World speak to a national ethos that must build
a mythic underpinning for our varied and varying civilization.  Disneyland
fuses the reality of a conglomerate of ethnicities and creates a national
universal non-ethnicity that erases or irons over all inherited
differences.  In Disneyland everyone speaks English.  (This is factually
incorrect; but that is the way it seems.)

But more, the theme park, by casting American legends into story-bites and
emblematic events and welding these to the lingua franca of trademark,
emblem, logogram and corporate symbology, has created a metaphor by which
the corporate mark is equated with the symbols of national pride.  As
someone in an earlier post pointed out, Epcot center is not a paean to
progress through technology but, rather, a panegyric to that image of
progress painted by the record of corporate achievements.  Progress is a
product, not a phenomena.  "Progress is our most important product," they
say.  In this national myth, our ambitions can be achieved through the
paths provided by commercial America.  Why do people wear signature and
brand identifiable clothing?

Ironically, theme park iconography recalls the symbology of feudalism. In
feudal iconography "history" or myth and the emblems created to express
itself, serve to ennoble and verify the dominion of a feudal nobility.
When we say "history" museum, it is obvious that the word "history" as we
mean it, is not being used in the way it was understood in ancient,
medieval and renaissance times.  Then history always seemed to serve and
sanction the goals of power.

We can look at Disneyland as a veritable vision of the "United Corporations
of America."  This is a land in which artificially primed versions of
history articulate the ambiance of Disneyland life.  An ominous
interpretation of the dimensions of this tendency was expressed in the now
cult television series entitled "The Prisoner."  Its sanctity,
pervasiveness and the hold with which this mythology grips us can be easily
understood when we hear media role-models exclaim in their moment of
triumph "I'm going to Disneyworld."

The fundamental need to preserve and enforce the life ethic of the
Disney-type theme park became clear to me one day in the 1970s when, by
chance, I was at Disneyland when a group of Hippies (not I) decided to
invade the place and hold a free-form unruly romp through its well
manicured streets and picture-perfect islands.  I believe that that day was
the only day that Disneyland closed its doors prematurely.  The Orange
County Special Squad Police (or whatever) were called.  They lined
themselves up on Main Street USA dressed in full riot regalia, hard helmets
and face shields, batons, etc. --  storm troopers to a drizzle of hippies.
I can't decide which was more destructive to the Disney bubble: the Hippies
(whom I never did see) or the Police whom I photographed.  I have the
slides.

The desire to enforce standards of decorum, to establish dress codes for
workers and visitors, and to manage behavior beyond what is necessary for
the safety and well being of all present proves the theme park's program to
create a model society, recalling similar requirements during the early
days of the modern museum.  In the beginning, Disneyland did not allow men
with beards to enter, Knotts Berry Farm made clear its support of
"patriotic" pro Viet Nam War ideals and their condemnation of dissent.  I'm
told that in the early years of the National Gallery in London, attendance
was allowed only in formal dress.  In recent history, one art historical
research library in New York required men to wear jackets and ties and
women to wear dresses.

An earlier post (I believe by Mr. Geist) mentioned Michael Wallace's essay
on Mickey Mouse History.  I have not read this, but I believe that he
discusses some of these issues in depth.  (Mr. Wallace will be known to
many museum-l readers as the author of the article on the Enola Gay flack
that appeared recently in Museum News.)  In addition, I would suggest
interested readers look at a particularly revealing book that examines the
immediate history and birth of some of the institutions this thread is
discussing: the museum, theme park and fair:  In _The Birth of the Museum:
History, Theory, Politics_ (London: Routledge, 1995), author Tony Bennett
traces the evolution of the museum to the need for bourgeois society to
create incentive for common people to reform their social habits and adopt
a middle-class value system.  Here rules of propriety and decorum were to
be derived from the social and moral suasion of arts and science
institutions.

If the history of the museum in contemporary culture has served to
dismantle the class-based hierarchy of arts programming (perhaps beginning
with the "Harlem on my Mind" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art),
the museum is still bending under the weight of its traditional association
with its highly educated so-called "elitist" patrons.  In fact, both the
museum and the theme park, for better or worse, have redefined themselves
as proselytizers of the corporate persona.  Corporations have been as quick
to seize upon the benefits of being associated with the "elitism" of high
culture bending to modern tastes as they have been quick to allow
themselves to be identified with the omnipresent ephemera and flotsam of
brand-name promotion, and with the theme park as a corporate image maker.

Museums still differ from theme parks.  But the presence of corporate
sponsorship in each worries me because I see it as a force that will tend
to erode the differences between them and may tend to modify museum
missions.  Corporations depend upon the promise of a stable society and
depend upon dependable demographics and the expanding middle class.
Museums today must create specific kinds of products in order to obtain
corporate funding for future activities.  These products more and more
often are not the exhibits or displays, but rather the audience that has
come to the museum.

Am I alone in finding it frightening that so many exhibits are designed
specifically to draw in that audience, and that more than one contributor
to this thread of "museums and theme parks" has suggested that museums had
better design their exhibits so as not to offend the extremes at the
political spectrum if they have an interest in self survival?  If that
viewpoint holds sway, then I think it will not be long before we will no
longer notice much of a difference between theme park and museum.
______________________________________

Robert A. Baron
Museum Computer Consultant
P.O. Box 93, Larchmont, NY 10538
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