Abstract
This chapter explores the dreamscapes (the scenarios of the night dreams interpreted in this research: McDonald’s, Disneyland, shopping malls) as dream-worlds of consumption, discussing how they symbolize particular aspects of the ImCon and its typical forms of colonization of culture and subjectivity, in a dialog with the sociological theories of McDonaldization (Bryman, Encyclopedia of social theory. Sage, London, 2004; Ritzer, 2000) and Disneyization (Bryman, American Behavioral Scientist, 47(2), 154–167, 2003).
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Notes
- 1.
“The world becomes the dream, and the dream becomes the world” (Novalis, 1802/1923, p. 319).
- 2.
It is important to remind the reader that I employ “Disneyland” meaning Disney thematic parks in general; and the category of “shopping malls” can also encompass giant department stores and hypermarkets.
- 3.
The surreal proliferation and colonization of spaces (and even towns) in the United States by shopping malls has been called “malling of America”. Sen (2005) comments, “shopping malls have become a way of life in America. There are more shopping centers than movie theaters, school districts, hotels or hospitals. There are more malls than cities, colleges or television stations. (…) By 2000, there are more than 45,000 shopping malls in the United States.” This colonial trend, as with the others, is typically American but also seen globally (especially in China). However, to my knowledge, there is no sociological theory on malling that is equivalent to McDonaldization or Disneyization.
- 4.
The experience they represent is obviously dream-like: they are usually built as fully enclosed, self-contained worlds, microcosms of consumption isolated from any external reality; inside, everything seems artificial, a world made of surfaces, all consumable and desirable, a vertigo of moving images, desires, and lights. In fact malls are designed to produce disorientation and keep consumers strolling and inside (hence “neon cage”): a dream in which we abandon reality and ourselves to the control of images and their fetish. As Kowinski (1984) wrote, “the essence of the mall is control” (p. 201).
- 5.
This idea is beautifully and poetically illustrated by the movie Como agua para chocolate (Arau, 1992).
- 6.
- 7.
The analogy with Disney was mentioned by Fishwick (1983): “This appeal to children and to the child taste and mentality strongly links Disney with McDonald’s. The comic fantasy characters of Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald are the iconographic mascots. Their fantasy lives, as rich with the promise of instant gratification in the almost-instantaneous delivery of fantasy and food, are closely allied” (p. 116).
- 8.
In this sense, I believe Barber’s (1995) assessment of the issue Jihad x McWorld is basically wrong. Jihad and McWorld are not “so intractably antithetical”; they do not “operate with equal strength in opposite directions” (p. 5). What Barber fails to see is that it is rather the opposite: both share precisely the same goal, total domination of world and human beings; they have the same totalitarian ethos. Jihad represents the shadow side—truly barbaric and mythic—of the totalizing force that consumerism-capitalism has become, and that is why it can so effectively make use of capitalism, even mesmerizing it: because both share this fundamental affinity.
- 9.
The reader can find a very good and comprehensive analysis of Disney, its imaginary, and the way it fabricates subjectivity (including children’s) in Giroux (1995).
- 10.
For Baudrillard (2001), Disneyland, a “deep-frozen infantile world”, is a microcosm of the United States: “All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form”; it is a “digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values” (p. 174).
- 11.
“In Disneyland social control is refined to an art, the art of moving crowds by their own motivation instead of coercion. D-land represents the ideal in this regard. It is the perfection of subordination: people digging their own fantasy graves” (Gottdiener, 1982, p. 140).
- 12.
The logo of Walt Disney World, a Mickey Mouse-shaped globe, renders explicit its ethos of global colonization. In this sense, it is probably significant that Hitler was very fond of Mickey Mouse, Disney, and Hollywood… (see Laqua, 1992).
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Xavier, M. (2018). Dreamscapes: The Dream-Worlds of Shopping Malls, McDonald’s, and Disneyland. In: Subjectivity, the Unconscious and Consumerism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96824-7_6
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