From Landscapes of Desire

[victorian_robot]

These zones follow (or did so, before recent revisions) a kind of logical order, from Adventureland to Tomorrowland. In Adventureland, the ambiguities of space and time are eliminated by the elimination of time; this is a pretemporal zone (wild, unredeemed, “natural”) where “place” is the entire earth itself. At Frontierland, time enters the

Comments

[theatrehippie]

that disneyland essay is kind of amazing. but i do think he's wrong about adventureland- it's clearly temporal and place specific, what with its trading posts and such.

[crinklebat]

Hahaha clearly with both Disneyland and Forest Lawn in the same set of paragraphs, this is a book I need to read.

I would like to know which era of Adventureland he's referring to; it's changed drastically since its inception (not quite as much as Tomorrowland, but close on!). His discussion of the land makes a lot more sense if you consider the Jungle Cruise to be the nucleus of Adventureland and include the Swiss Family Treehouse; now, it's clear from traffic patterns and walkway structure that despite its non-central location, Indiana Jones is the true center of Adventureland, and Tarzan's Treehouse has no place in most people's concept of the land as a whole; to most Disneyland guests it really doesn't exist, buried as it is between two movie stars.

In any case, while Jungle Cruise and Swiss Family Treehouse are both clearly early-20th-century themed, neither of them are at all place specific and in fact the Jungle Cruise takes pains to avoid placing itself.

Have you read Architecture of Reassurance? It sounds like it would

[victorian_robot]

The book was published in 2000, apparently. To me, Adventureland has always seemed to have a very Rudyard Kipling-ish, imperialist feel that belongs to a very specific time in history. I guess Indiana Jones is a bit later than that, but not by a whole lot. And the whole theme is kind of like, white civilization investigating "savage" cultures, which doesn't make Adventureland "pre-temporal zone."

That book looks like a must-read. I want Mike Davis to do a Disneyland book, but I guess he's too cool for that.

[crinklebat]

Yeah, I agree completely on the temporal thing. Indiana Jones seems more 30s or 40s, but still solidly in the same "Ooh, a savage! Check out those quaint practices! Haha, what funny gods!" era.

At the same time, I guess you could say that to a white person going on a Jungle-Cruise-style safari in the era we're discussing, what she was observing would seem "pre-temporal" because they perceived "primitive cultures" as lacking social & technological progress of any kind. So maybe what the passage is getting at is that while Adventureland itself is temporally rooted, it's themed around an experience that was thought at the time when such experiences actually took place to be an adventure in pre-temporality. So maybe we're missing a meta-layer; Adventureland itself is themed on a themed adventure of the sort that offered westerners an experience of a culture that they believed to be rooted outside of time and progress.

I think I just tied my brain in a knot?

[crinklebat]

Also, damn, I have been meaning to read City of Quartz for seriously ten years.