Did you read in the news recently that Disney’s town has had its first murder? The Mouseketeers are ringing their ears, while most commentators appear to be pushing the whole line that one murder in twenty years isn’t all that bad.
If I’d been confined to a town named Celebration, who knows what I might have ended up doing. This place seems like hell. The houses in a range of selected styles, which are only allowed to be painted a selection of pastel colours; while the town square is lit by fake gas lamps and features a range of ye-oldie shops selling nick-naks; there is even a plastic Christmas Tree. The website informs me that it is ‘now snowing nightly’, despite the 90 degree heat. Above it all presides the Disney Corporation, described most excellently by the Guardian as ‘the Vatican with mouse ears’ (oh the mental images).
The worst thing about this scene, however, is not the sinister rodent overlord, but the kitsch and what it represents. The pastel colours, the gas lamps, the front porches and even the typescript used on the shopfronts is all evocative of a bygone age. There really isn’t much modern architecture here, and when it appears its modernist-pastiche, evoking like Grease or Dirty Dancing the ‘golden’ disappeared America of drive in movies and Friday nights at the milkshake bar. It meant to evoke a different America, a better America from forty, fifty, eighty years ago (it’s certainly not a constant) where streets were cleaner, where families stayed together and where a neighbourhood was really a neighbourhood.
Things were better back in the good old days.
You’d never get me living in Celebration, and it’s got nothing to do with Disney. If I’m honest I can’t see that much difference between this theme-park creation and all the Barratt estates which cover the flood plains of Britain. But I hate the suburbs and I admit it might be my own fault. Maybe it’s because being driving distance away from a public house makes me uneasy. Maybe it’s because I’m not so good at spending time on my own. Maybe it’s all the clean windows and polished doorsteps. Whatever it is, the idea of spending more than two days in a semi-D on a housing estate makes me want to pop open the valium and get started on the gin. Desperate Housewives eat your heart out.
But no one seems to mind my objections, and over the years Celebration, with its pastel colours and olde time shops has flourished. So whatever happened to the American Dream? Why are we all looking back to a bygone America of the past when the continent was meant to represent the future? Let get something straight. Patishe and historicist architecture is not cute, and it’s not just a style. Its an ideological statement of conservative values, a spatial articulation of a reactionary position that the ideal path for the future is to return to some golden past (which , in America, seems to coalesce somewhere around 1957). But this is all clearly rubbish; there is no golden past and the fifties may have been a time of nice Cadillacs but they also were a time of segregation and oppression. That a town exists constructed on these very values is a terrifying statement of the current state of America.
You’ll understand that this means that when I’m killing time buying aubergine curry in rusty tins from newsies on Cowley Road I can argue that it’s a radical statement of my faith in the future.
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