Disneyland, Chinatown, and "Suspending Belief"

It's just like the major motion picture Chinatown (1974)!

When experiencing something visceral, beautiful, or out of the ordinary it's common to respond to it by joking that it looks just like the simulated version of that thing as it appears in a video game, movie, or theme park. "It looks like a screensaver!" someone might say in response to a stunning tropical beach; "It feels like Disneyland," someone might say, with a touch of wonder in their voice, as they stroll through the streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans.

The usual pivot is some kind of commentary along the lines of how sad it is that our lives are so thoroughly mediated by pop culture and electronic media that our baseline of experience is not the natural, lived world but the representations of it we have been inundated with since birth. When we see the thing itself--the beautiful forest, the famous building--we become disoriented bleary eyed Neos, pitied by all nearby Morphiouses who intone that we feel like that because we are using our eyes "for the first time."

But I would like to construct an alternative telling. It is true that we live in a visually, audially, and spatially doubled world--one in which there is the place we are in, and then the world within that world as depicted by the video games we play, the movies we watch, the theme parks we visit, and even various public and commercial spaces, with their chintzy faux architecture and ambient music. If we live in urban or suburban spaces, the immediate world is often lackluster and functional, designed to make you work or shop or usher you into a far more exciting and beautiful inner world. A movie theater in Van Nuys looks like hell, screams at you to pay no attention to it--but the screens inside contain infinite beautiful multitudes.

The appreciation of beauty, then, occurs not typically in our experience of the immediate world--with its asphalt and Burger Kings and street lights and Target employee uniforms--but in the mediate world that has mostly been constructed by artists. We appreciate the beauty of an image of a model or movie star, the beat in a song, the interactive robustness of an environment in a video game, the attention to detail in a multi-episode plot arc. We appreciate the vastness of Los Santos in GTA5, the detailed window scenes above the stores in Main Street, the controlled transformation of Walter White over five seasons.

Sherman Way, the quintessential dreary commercial corridor

For most of us, we don't think about the girl down the street, but the girl on the magazine cover. We don't look at Sherman Way, we look at Tatooine. We have been trained--by habit, by architecture, by the imperatives of consumerism--not to look at or pay attention to that which is not explicitly designed to be consumed.

Now, I don't know if this is good, bad, tragic, or weird. It could be any of those things. But supposing it is true--that it does describe the kind of animals we now are--we modern urban animals--I think there is a way to invert it in such a way that we can once again wring awe, beauty, and the rest of it out of the immediate lived in world.

The crucial loophole in this crushing logic of media consumption is that the immediate world--the present, lived in world--is no different than an infinitely detailed theme park. This theme park has actors who are on the job 24 hours a day; it has back alleys and secret doors that let you in to fully realized environments; it contains an infinite variety of narratives and story lines that
criss cross each other and stretch back in time to the very beginning.

Always do the opposite of what an in-world sign says

If you can somehow suspend your belief that you are in the regular mundane world, then you can enjoy an environment like San Francisco's Chinatown with just as much relish and energy as you would a particularly well-done section in Disneyland. While waiting in line for Indiana Jones, think of how much attention you pay to the effort made, the detail--the sculpted rocks, the sound effect tracks, the bric-a-brac on the drafting table, the interactive props--and that adds to the experience. Well what if Chinatown had been constructed by Imagineers? What if every alley had been meticulously drafted? What if the people swishing Ma Jong tiles and smoking cigarettes were animatronics? What if you could--were encouraged, even, by the designers--to try the door or wander up those stairs? Is that graffiti some kind of clue or Easter egg? Does it relate to that piece of paper over there?

We are trained to appreciate the world only when it's a world that has been designed for us to appreciate. But if we can fool ourselves into thinking that our world has been designed for us to appreciate--well then, I'm living in a theme park that makes Disneyland look like the Northridge Mall. Maybe?