the way we never were

Reading a biography of Disney, it is remarkable how the golden ages - of turn-of-century America, or of his studio - never occur except in the imagination, but there occur strongly.

The actual struggle of America or of Disney to rise directly transitions to the disillusionment of power and structure.  There is no intervening golden plateau in time.  But there is a golden plateau in imagination - the hopes of youth and the security of experience drawn together onto a mental plane, a central clearing, that becomes a permanent, though unreal, stage for the enactment of what never was.

When I was an undergraduate, my writing style came from a deliberate effort to complement - even match - the material being written about.  (This was made easier by the fact that I was writing mainly about written material.)  And the style also grew from an attempt to present things in an order of natural development: each section would be presented when it was done brewing, no sooner or later.  My idea was to create nothing - only to give new and fertile ground to the material and let what grew - grow.

Disney had something of that approach to America: it was a cultural rather than artistic relationship.  And that is the sense in which Disney is authentic.  To watch a "Silly Symphony" is to watch a tribe of 1930s Americans watching their nimblest members perform a new ritual dance (sound animation) in a new clearing (the cinema) to whole tribe's satisfaction.  To visit Disneyland is to visit a tribal festival, enacted by a 1950s American tribe, for itself.  (Unlike a World's Fair, which is nominally for others: the "public".)

The Disney festival is, for example, supremely commercial because the 1950s American tribe is so.  It has a fantasy-driven relation to the outside world because that is what the tribe has.  It idealizes Main Street because that is what the tribe does.  The satisfactions and embarrassments derive largely from that cultural correspondence:

Disney gave the American tribe many of its ritual dances and costumes.  They evoke a time that wasn't, but an imagination that is peculiarly true to the tribe and thus quite unlike the fantasy worlds of loftier and more literary artists.