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 [log in to unmask]