Disney in the City
Culturebox went to a party in the new Times Square the other night. Not a
real party, with people she knew, but a Party party, the kind with spotlights
outside that shuts a neighborhood down. It was opening night for Disney's ESPN
Zone, a shiny new theme restaurant suggestively located on the ground floor of
the shiny new Condé Nast building. Disney CEO Michael Eisner was there, and
tennis player Martina Navratilova and hockey player Wayne Gretzky and
basketball player Bill Russell--though Culturebox only learned of their
attendance from the press release she picked up as she left. The stars, having
allowed themselves to be interviewed on the way in and broadcast on giant
screens to the crowds in the streets below, floated past in their bubbles of
protective personnel so quickly that Culturebox never saw their faces.
Some fun was had, though fun was not the point. (The point is reading about
everyone else's fun the next day.) There was the curiosity of being part of the
first and last group of adults--as opposed to children at birthday
parties--likely ever to pack this dining-establishment-cum-gaming-center again.
There were the excellent sushi and crab legs and lushly lit vegetables at the
"Studio Grill," a food court modeled on a TV sports center, which will surely
not serve such fare in the future. There were bass fishing and skateboarding
and parachuting against computers. On the way home, as Culturebox pushed past
the Day of the Locust- like throng lining 42nd Street and the
uniformed New York City policemen troublingly acting as Disney's bouncers,
there was the towering new entertainment complex that is Times Square, with all
the other theme restaurants and studio stores and the latest soon-to-open
tourist attractions, such as the Broadway theater that offers neither plays nor
musicals but brief medleys of each and Disney-owned ABC's new studio for
Good Morning America . And there was Culturebox's urge to get out of
there as fast as she could.
The economic value to New York of having Disney renovate Times Square may be
indisputable, but when you get right down to it, or rather down in it, the
place is no fun. Disney entertainment products (this party included) belong on
television, in movie theaters, in kids' books, on the computer, even in
amusement parks, where there is no comparative sense of scale, such parks being
perfect, self-enclosed worlds. This is the paradox of mass culture: The more
impersonal and unreal the form, the more of a sense of direct connection you
feel. Beauty may be merely a cartoon character who exists on a variety of
so-called "platforms," but her charisma affects you as intimately as it does
her Beast. (It affects Culturebox that way, anyway.) Project her image onto a
billboard or looming screen in a predefined geographical space, however, such
as the crowded heart of one of America's oldest urban centers, where passersby
will just have come from and will immediately go back to neighborhoods scaled
to their height and humanity, and you reveal her to be a virtual monster rather
than a girl full of moxie. In the war between the old Times Square street and
the new Disney-style monumentalism, Culturebox predicts, monumentalism may
triumph in the short run, but street size will win out in the end. A body just
doesn't like to feel so small.
