This happy place

Disneyland is for intellectuals

I can’t remember what I was talking about to my soon-to-be PhD adviser on my campus visit to UC-Irvine in 2005. It was something related, I am sure, to popular culture, as despite my alarming number of literature-based degrees (any number above one is alarming), when left to my own devices I will usually talk about the most vacuous television possible. The other day when I joked to my ex-husband that the Family Curse that has claimed my grandfather (canoeing), father (biking) and mother (jogging) will come for me next, he said, “I don’t know how you can get killed watching TV.” I’m sure Death will find a way.

At any rate, my educated guess is that I was trying to explain Jersey Shore to a German who had never heard of it before, and my Doktorvater-to-be said: “That sounds like an Adorno nightmare.” And, already a savvy grad-student poseur, I nodded and laughed even though I did not know what that meant.

To this day the only Adorno I remember is Notes on Kafka, which, to be fair, is probably the most significant work of Kafka analysis in human history, but I don’t think the “Adorno nightmare” of national treasures Snooki and The Situation had much to do with an allegory that has no key. (Although…)

I think my adviser was probably referring to Adorno’s 1954 writing about television which I definitely have had memorized since graduate school, and did not just pull up on JSTOR to look at just now for the first time ever. Perhaps the Shore denizens’ numerous instances of televised inebriated melee was indicative of popular culture’s presentation of “sham conflicts” between individual and society; perhaps the Gym-Tan-Laundry trifecta was metonym of a multilayered pseudoreality whose overt meaning belied a bleak exposé of peak-Millennial vacuity.

In 2005 I simply took an “Adorno nightmare” to be any particularly egregious display of Capitalist materialism masquerading as pleasurable cultural content by way of cynically constructed fake reality. And I probably wasn’t entirely wrong—either in that simplification, or in the recognition that there was, and remains, no greater physical manifestation of the aforementioned palimpsestically significant artifice than the 500-acre conglomeration of literal fantasy worlds a dozen miles up the Interstate from campus:

Disneyland.

Back then I fully insisted that my decision, with my cohort Erin, to purchase what was then a $129 Southern California local annual pass to what I was aware, and remain aware, is an unabashed monstrosity of multilayered pseudo-reality — where the subtext gets buried underground in the dingy, weird smelling “backstage” tunnels between attractions I got to visit (BUT NOT PHOTOGRAPH!) with my dance troupe in 1993 — was me being In On The Bit, the simultaneous immersion in and critical recognition of the Adorno Nightmare.

I haven’t been able to afford an annual pass since then (they no longer cost $129; I do not believe a single entry can be had for that little now), but I remain, to this day, unapologetically obsessed with Disneyland.

When I got pregnant I began counting down the years until my offspring would be (by my estimations) tall enough to ride the Indiana Jones Adventure (seven, the answer was seven). My ex-husband would likely argue that my daughter has grown to love theme parks as much as I do because I have conditioned her to…but that’s why Adorno thought analytic philosophers were fuckin robots, MAN. (He’s probably right, but I DO NOT CARE.)

I do, indeed, recognize the deeply suspect nature of individual Disney storylines and intellectual properties themselves; of Walt Disney’s own McCarthyite tendencies; of the Walt Disney Company’s extraordinary cynicism when it comes to the innumerable techniques of parting myself from my money in the name of The Magic(tm).

But also…

…now, just as in graduate school, I am in desperate need of a full-immersion pseudoreality where my overstimulated, grief-addled, barely-functioning-because-I-am-so-consumed-with-pain cerebral cortex has no choice but to squeegee itself all the way the fuck blank in favor of a Disney-issue reptile brain unrelenting litany of short-term dopamine hit needs: Rides. Snacks. Bathroom. Treats. Next ride. Next treat!

So here we are, my daughter and I, in the Adorno Nightmare Squeegee’s biggest challenge to date. Over two recent days and 50,000 steps and many hundreds of monetary sacrifices to the Adornean Gods of The Bit I Am Still In On (Maybe?), we attempted to squeegee away the pain with The Magic. And sometimes, it worked.

Pictured here is the actual high point of the trip according to my daughter, which was that Pirates of the Caribbean broke while we were on it, and we got stuck watching this scene for about 20 minutes. She was absolutely thrilled to bear witness to what she and her deeply worrying YouTube history deem a “THEME PARK FAIL” and Adorno would call the latent becoming manifest, and what I would call an inauspicious start to my otherwise flawless “rope drop” morning plan which involved hitting about ten rides before the sun got high enough in the sky to look at me directly.

Here we are leaving Indiana Jones in total victoriousness, stuffed version of the Haunted Mansion Bride in tow. (The high point of the next day? When the Haunted Mansion broke down while we were in line and we got to take the “chicken exit.”)

In addition to receiving sacrifices of every cent I have ever earned and most of my brain cells, the first morning at Disneyland also claimed my UV umbrella somewhere in an Indiana Jones Jeep, and because I had also forgotten my sunglasses-that-go-over-my-regular-glasses back in the hotel, this meant that for our last sweltering hour I was left to the meager protection of this nevertheless very dope Haunted Mansion baseball cap.

Just looking at this I am teleported with a zap back into that moment.

Hot and tired and only 10K steps down, yes; in desperate need of an offsite lunch and a rest by the pool before returning to sundown shenanigans.

But I can feel those stupid Main Street cobblestones under my feet, precisely engineered to evoke a specific sort of euphoric nostalgia for a thing that never was, and despite the expense and the ridiculousness of it I would return right this second to the Happiest Adorno Nightmare on Earth, the smell of churros and popcorn and pirate water and ice cream and sunscreen and a mind completely devoid of the stuff of my actual dreams.

In those dreams, the real ones, my mother visits almost every night, the iconic shape of her haircut in profile as she and her fluffy little demon dog walk toward me, her smile just barely coming into focus before my lucidity crashes in and reminds me that she is gone, and I wake, once again, crying.

Thank you as always to everyone who has bought me a coffee or purchased a deep-cut Oasis joke t-shirt and made this questionable series possible.

Next: More unhinged digressions ostensibly held together with vacation photos, I don’t know.