The Uses of Adversity
Ah, Witold,
You are a gentleman, and have generously let me get
away with a couple of whoppers, which I must address before we get started on
this next round. In my zeal to defend our Andrew Ross, I've given myself the
necessity of defending Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins--from myself. One
of the only luxuries of traditional long-form prose is the chance to read over
in the morning what one thought brilliant at 3 a.m. and chuck it. But now we
have the Send key, that great enabler of the slipshod thought, and verily I
have not mastered the button, because as soon as the coffee kicked in this
morning, I cringed at what I saw. For anyone misled by my first garbled posting
(quickly corrected), Frantz and Collins did interview Eisner and Stern, and if
their conversation did not widen to encompass the far corners of the solar
system then that is no affront to their book, which is subtitled, after all,
"Living in Disney's Brave New Town," and not "Theorizing About Creation in Its
Enormity!"
But my notes also remind me that Frantz and Collins
have themselves leapt the White Vinyl Fence when they felt the urge, and have,
for instance, documented elegantly the plight of Disney workers unable to
afford Celebration, who must rely on impact fees to help with their mortgages.
Mea dammit culpa. It is said it is the luxury of the Internet that what the
Send key giveth, the Send key can taketh away, but I still regret the error,
especially in a missive declaring the requirement to respect the literary
endeavor.
The chapters on the schools in both these books
fascinated me, especially insofar as the schools, though technically under the
aegis of Osceola County, Fla., were such centerpieces of Disney's design and
Disney's pitch. In fact, Disney considered Celebration a campus before it
considered it a town, at one point planning to situate the Disney Institute
there. Also, Disney may be a hard-core, bottom-line business with a wealth of
real estate and construction experience, but because the company has been an
entertainment medium for so many generations of children, and been that before
all else, I believe the Disney fathers would locate the company's heart closer
to education than town building. The school should conceivably have been the
town's one ironclad asset.
And in a curious way, it has turned out to be just
that. The question that in a real way motivates both Celebration, U.S.A. and The Celebration
Chronicles is this: How does an idealized place built by a dream factory
and marketed as a utopia become real? The Celebration Company planners wanted
their artificial creation to rise up off the gurney, but didn't know what kind
of lightning bolt might galvanize their Frankenstein. Frantz and Collins
recount Celebration's efforts to create "new traditions" through
Disney-sponsored sock hops, pumpkin carvings, parades, and crafts fairs. But in
the long run, what has worked best is what the company could not at all
provide, except inadvertently: conflict and difficulty. You ask if the
Celebration's first committed crime was a setback or a victory, and your point
is well taken. Were I deputized by the Osceola County Sheriff's Office to look
into the matter, my primary suspect would be some Disney "cast member" in a
company-supplied burglar's mask, so deftly did the crime advance the town's
necessary maturation. The school kerfuffle did the same. Ross reports,
"Celebrationites encountered obstacles to happiness that compelled them to
forge community bonds ... The strong community its creators had hoped for would
come into being as much in response to adversity as to the conveniences and
advantages built in the town's design."
It's an encouraging irony that a creation as
poster-pretty and perfectly controlled as Celebration would be sparked into
real vitality by the inevitability of a little discord, and that error would
favor it so. (Would that the errors of reviewers shone so well to their
credit.)
--Russ
