Existential Authenticity in the Theme Park Experience

By Jeremy K. Thompson

The myth of the American West. The spirit of discovery in jungles uncharted. The childhood realm of fantasy and imagination. These are the landscapes that compose the great American theme parks, providing millions of paying guests each year an opportunity to escape from the everydayness of contemporary living and enter a world that’s better than their own, a world where a culture’s collective dreams become manifest in tactile form, where the world inside is presented as being more real than the one outside. Upon entering the glimmering gates of a modern theme park, an individual finds themselves transported into an alternate reality where new, often contradictory metaphysical rules govern the nature of being. Careful analysis will reveal that an immersion in the hyperreal serves to both deny the ontological weight of the themed edifice’s existence, while simultaneously distancing and alienating the individual from experiencing both the world and themselves authentically. This will require an examination of what it means for an object ‘to be’ within a theme park by analyzing how an individual perceives and relates to these objects, as well as how they experience their own sense of being when this world is marked by apparent inauthenticity. ‘Theme park objects’ will refer to those material entities that attempt to replicate as accurately as possible an original object (an environment, historical entity, story, idea, etc.) that forms the basis for ‘theme park experiences’.

“To speak of things that one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real. The ‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake.’ Absolute unreality is offered as a real presence. The aim of the reconstructed Oval Office is to supply a ‘sign’ that will then be forgotten as such: The sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement.” (Eco 7)

In his examinations of America’s obsession with reconstructing and even improving historical reality through entertainment cities, Italian semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco indicates that the constitution of a simulated, hyperreal object (such as found in a theme park) is not a structure of defining what that object is (i.e. using descriptive properties to assess what distinct elements simulated objects commonly possess) but, through the use of the infinitive verb “to be”, is in how we understand that the object is, (i.e. that fundamental state of existence, that which allows an object an object ‘to be’). In this case, perceived in an environment of the hyperreal, the simulated object ceases to be a symbol for the original and becomes perceived as numerically identical to the original located many miles away (if an original even ever existed in concrete form), thereby changing the object’s state of being. The goal of the simulated object is not just to represent the original; it must strive to actually become the original, to make the observer think as though they were in the presence of the original entity it refers to.

An immediate defense against claims that theme parks lead to inauthentic experiences assumes a position of naïve realism. The premise is that all objects present themselves to us as they really are, and pure sense data is responsible for one’s understanding of the object and whatever aesthetic pleasures may result. Because they are constituted by the same building blocks of matter there is no ontological difference between the authentic and inauthentic, the world simply ‘is’. Extrapolated to how we subjectively perceive theme park objects, when there is no remaining scientific distinction between the material composition original and the simulated object, for the observer it will be identical to say that the object is authentic (indeed, in many cases theme parks do purchase ‘real’ objects from their native environments). This is why amongst theme park enthusiasts there is such a strong emphasis on ‘attention to detail’ as being the ultimate virtue a park can have. The goal is to achieve a state of total realism, and one’s enjoyment and evaluation of a theme park environment is directly correlated to the degree of ease that they can be persuaded of its authenticity. Even in cases where there is no original object that the theme is replicated upon such as Fantasyland’s Cinderella Castle, it is still judged on how authentically it reconstructs in the material world an abstract ideal; in other words it is “fantasy that is absolutely reproduced.” (Eco 43)

What has not been accounted for is the metaphysical dimension an object acquires when seen with human eyes. The world as we experience it is not disclosed to us as simply bundles of sense-data; objects, particularly those described using language, become imbued with other properties and conditions that exist outside the bounds of space and time. When a world traveler sees a pagoda in rural Japan, the very fact that they are able to give that object a name is testament to it having properties not imbued within the materiality of that object itself. Examples of these extra spatial-temporal dimensions that become part of that objects existence include social categories such as being made 500 years ago, an artifact from a feudally structured culture, intended as a place of worship, etc. Even seemingly base descriptions are not context-neutral: “made of wood and paper” or “utilizes geometric patterns”, while appearing to point to an ontologically material condition of the structure, is still defined by social convention such as what it means for one to experience ‘paper’ or ‘Euclidian triangles’ within the world.

What makes theme park objects such an unusual subject is the way they require an additional metaphysical dimension along with the one we normally experience when we reflect meaningfully upon these objects. A theme park pagoda contains similar metaphysical attributes: it was built three years ago, it is made of painted polystyrene, intended as a place of souvenir-purchasing, etc. We rationally accept these qualities as truthful, yet when the patron buys a ticket they also sign an unwritten contract saying that they will accept a different narrative provided by the theme park in exchange for a more pleasurable experience. Now that replica pagoda is perceived with two simultaneously contradictory metaphysics: it is believed to be three years old and 500 years old, made of synthetic materials that are also wood and paper, a hallowed place of Buddhist worship that is also a hallowed place of consumerist worship. This dual knowledge gives rise to the sensation that one is having an inauthentic experience in a theme park. It is neither permissible to accept that the theme park’s narrative is an authentic reality, but it is also taboo to openly accept that everything is a counterfeit. Therefore the theme park enthusiast goes through the day in a perpetual state of internal contraction, simultaneously understanding everything to be a replica, yet willing it to not be so. Parks are then described by their level of immersiveness and ‘attention to detail’, in the hopes to find a fleeting moment in which the theme park’s metaphysics is able to be perceived as the authentic metaphysics (a strong sense of atmosphere is often cited as a psychological imperative to achieving this state), after which the superego will be given the satisfaction of knowing how clever the designers were.

At this point a more stable definition of the term ‘authenticity’ will be required to fully understand what claims these arguments make, and so a reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 text Being and Nothingness will be utilized to provide that working definition for this project. Chapter two, entitled “Bad Faith”, can alternatively be translated from the French as “Self-Deception”, which Sartre uses to explore the concept of what it would mean for one to become an authentic being. One of the base assumptions is that humans are (at least within subjective reality) free beings capable of choosing which life projects have meaning for themselves. However, many attempts are made to deny one’s freedom by living a life in which they define their existence through predetermined social positions. The classic example Sartre provides is of the café waiter, whose excessive, fastidious behavior suggests that he is amusing himself by play-acting the role of other waiters (Sartre 59). No person can authentically be a waiter (which is a social identity defined by external forces) while simultaneously being free. If freedom is a necessary condition to human experience, then to believe that one’s self is a waiter is to deny the possibility of other futures, thereby exercising bad faith in regards to one’s own freedom. It is important to note however that the waiter is still fundamentally a free being (he freely chooses to self-deceive that he has no freedom). Therefore, authenticity can be roughly defined as fully realizing oneself to be a free moral agent, and not subsuming meaning defined by the external world but rather recognizing oneself capable of defining their own meaning.

While this may well define what it means for a person to be authentically realized, it is not as readily apparent how Bad Faith can be applied to a concrete entity such as a theme park object. However, this would make a fundamental mistake of reifying a subjective concept describing one’s inner state of being and applying it onto the realm of the objective, as if objects in-themselves are capable of possessing another metaphysical dimension such as authenticity. Thus, one does not describe the object itself as being inauthentic, but instead would be said to experience that object inauthentically. This is equivalent to Bad Faith, as one has the ability to experience the world in a way that is meaningfully truthful to their own existence, but the presence of an inauthentic experience indicates that some external force is providing a narrative that shapes this meaning contrary to their own freedom. One is free to authentically see the Haunted Mansion as they rationally understand it to be (literally smoke and mirrors, among other effects), but this will rob them of the satisfaction that the Imagineers intended to provide. Thus, they force naivety and reject their own freedom of interpretation in order to submit themselves to the ontological narrative provided to them by the theme park. Like the waiter, the willing theme park patron still exercises freedom through the act of denying it.

However, unlike the waiter (indeed unlike most other forms of self-deception humans face), the theme park experience is unique in that we are imminently conscious of the deception. The waiter may or may not be aware that he is play-acting, but in the theme park everyone is constantly aware that they are participating in a fictional world; that behind every magical edifice is a warehouse containing its secrets, and that inside every swashbuckling pirate is a complex audio-animatronic system that gives it the appearance of life-likeness. It is in the theme park that one is able to enjoy a deliberate willfulness towards inauthenticity. Freed from the weight of taking their inauthentic being seriously (earnestly believing oneself to be a waiter, a factory worker, a wife, a revolutionary, a philosopher, a moral person, etc.), the theme park does indeed represent a chance to look that inauthentic being in the face and laugh at it, indulging in the escapism from genuine moral responsibility inauthentic lifestyles afford one. The dual knowledge of awareness of the inauthentic experience while willfully submitting to it does represent a step in the direction of realizing one’s freedom however it still fundamentally operates within the realm of the inauthentic. Eventually the joke will wear thin and the charade must end, however this often manifests itself in a return to the prior lifestyle in which the inauthentic state of being is not acknowledged at all. It is perhaps of small surprise that those who do find their lives to be existentially authentic have little utility for theme parks.

More of Sartre’s philosophy can be described in the prevalence of animatronic figures throughout theme parks such as Disney or Universal Studios. Sartre, borrowing from Karl Marx, describes the relationship an individual takes towards other people as a process of thingification, in which others are perceived not as existent for themselves with their own wills and sense of freedom, but as objects within the extended, external world we observe. Rationally we are at tension with this type of perception because followed to its logical conclusion would result in solipsism which has another plethora of logical problems. Thus, in the section of Being and Nothingness entitled “The Look”, Sartre describes what happens to the individual sitting in the park when he become conscious that another being is looking at him, that is, perceiving him as an extended object within the cinema of this other person’s life narrative. As he is being watched, he becomes aware that he is having metaphysical dimensions projected upon him which are not part of his own internal, authentic being; he recognizes himself as a social object ‘belonging’ to this other person’s world, the meaning of his existence provided to him by this external gaze. As soon as the stranger looks away, the world returns to his own and everything becomes part of his own subjective interpretation once more.

Animatronic actors, on the other hand, do not present this difficulty when their gaze passes over our bodies. Behind their glassy eyes we recognize there is only sophisticated whirring electronic machinery that does nothing to disturb our own sense of subjectivity. Theme park patrons are therefore free to place whatever meaning they wish on these robotic characters without the fear of any look that might be projected back at them. Despite its lifelikeness, one has no moral responsibility to these others, but the goal is still to believe these machines to be authentic beings as much as possible; perfection is achieved only when the guest could be tricked into believing they are in the presence of a real human, only retaining the knowledge that there is not actually anybody looking back at them. Achieved is a sense of relief that this common existential confrontation is for once not present in the look, along with a feeling of domination over this simulated being. For once, they can look at another human face and retain the complete subjectivity of experience that normal day-to-day encounters do not permit. “The important thing is precisely the fact that these are not humans and we know they’re not. The pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate of the human spirit; but here, we enjoy not only a perfect human imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it.” (Eco 46)

This also leads to a curious phenomenon among the obsessive theme park visitor in which their attempts to immerse themselves in this world of fiction leads to erasing from their consciousness the one part of their subjective mise-en-scène which they see with authenticity: other visitors. When exploring the wild, romantic landscape of a Frontierland, they have an absolute duty to themselves to not just avoid the look of others, they must avoid looking at other people altogether. Tourists were never part of the Wild West, and so when recalling to their mind’s eye their impressions of the intricately detailed saloon or gold mine, the other tourists standing in front of it have been erased from their memory. That’s not to say that they don’t physically register the sense data other visitors produce for them, but when they are truly absorbed in the experience, the level of metaphysical reality they are perceiving the world to be in doesn’t have any meaningful constructs for ‘tourists’, and so an attempt is made to subtly deny their existence as part of this world at all. Of course this is not always possible; inevitably there will be long queues, crowds blocking their field of view of the spectacle, etc. Once they are made actively conscious of these other patrons, feelings of resentment form over the other’s responsibility for disrupting their fictional narrative.

Furthermore, just as one will attempt to deny the existence of others in this new metaphysical reality, similar implications come to light about their own existence in the park. One is afraid to touch or interact with this world for fear that the illusion will be shattered and they will be reminded of the inauthenticity of their own experiences. They recognize that they must give up their freedom of active involvement in this theme park world and resign themselves to the role of a passive spectator, a distinctly foreign entity that does not belong in this theme. Even in cases where interactivity is part of the attraction, they experience themselves as the other playing along with whatever role this part of the park requires from them, not free to express themselves creatively beyond the bounds of this given world. The individual is forced to realize themselves inauthentically within the bounds of a theme park.

For many theme park goers, these claims about inauthenticity might be dismissed as unimportant or missing the point, indicating the empirical record of how much happiness they bring to guests as evidence for the system’s success despite (or even perhaps because of) the way it encourages a contradictory metaphysical narrative. While there might be a certain amount of validity to this, it does not to take into account the full extent of unexplored future possibilities that parks currently fail to even recognize their potentiality. Many of the more idealistic advocates hope to one day see theme park experiences become recognized as an artform and means of creative expression rather than simply the commercial entertainment activity that the majority of the population treats them as. It’s not difficult to see where this idealism can come from: theme parks are designed by large teams of creative individuals from backgrounds as diverse as painting, theater, sculpture, film and storytelling, using large quantities of material, technological and labor resources for the shared goal of examining the world as it discloses itself to the collective consciousness and making something new and affecting from that act of creative interpretation. Especially in an age where digital technologies have saturated the forum of artistic expression and rendered the most eloquent of songs and poetry into a few readily disposable megabytes, theme parks could witness a renaissance within the next couple decades as a new medium which still has tangible weight attached to it, allowing one to become wholly immersed in a real experience for an extended length of time rather than merely distracted for several minutes by a weightless digital one. Indeed, for every accusation that theme parks are an inherently inauthentic experience, their advocates can point to nearly any other artform as likewise being founded upon simulation and the hyperreal representation of reality.

To evaluate this response, the roles of freedom and the nature of being must be returned to for understanding how the theme park experience is still fundamentally lacking by comparison. When one views a themed structure such as Cinderella’s Castle, they are instructed to do so inauthentically and changing the perceived nature of that objects existence (remembering that we do not have direct access to questions of ontology that describe what the object in-itself really is). In traditional arts, that existential question of being is usually not applied to the object as foundational to its appreciation, even in cases where simulation seems to be implied. Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona, despite being a similarly imposing, whimsical structure with many symbols ‘replicating’ various animals and angels, one is free to interpret it using any metaphysical narrative that is meaningful to them; the symbolic structure is not asked to become anything other than that which the viewer decides is authentic to them. One sees the angular, modernist tableaux of Jesus Christ on the cross and all that is required is that they interpret this symbol as they see it: a piece of stone, the presence of God, the labor of skilled sculptors, etc. The ‘first metaphysical dimension’ remains in place for all of these interpretations, and while one is not guaranteed an authentic experience, the goal of art should be to challenge one towards freely experiencing themselves, unlike the theme park castle where it is law that one sees some other object in its place that has a presupposed meaning given to it, and the greater one discovers their own meaning in the object (normally bounded by the rational interpretation rather than the irrational), the smaller that object becomes. It is for this reason that the present circumstances defining the theme park experience are fundamentally limited.

Unlike Eco, I do not share the pessimism that these ‘entertainment cities’ are fundamentally limited in artistic potential, but I do agree that the current leaders in the theme park business are limited by the dependence on simulacra to craft any sort of narrative or emotional connection. At the opposite end of the spectrum, smaller local parks of historical value with an emphasis on roller coasters and other traditional amusement rides may provide a key to a solution; parks such as Knoebels Grove in Pennsylvania, Lakeside Park in Colorado, or the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in California. By forgoing the ‘themed’ experience, these places lack the extraneous level of metaphysical properties that theme parks have, and thus afford the visitor the ability to experience them in a way that is authentically meaningful for them. A carousel is presented as a carousel; a midway is presented as a midway. If a scene has a scratch or other defect, then that is what the scene becomes, it does not take on an ontology requiring it to be some presupposed concept that is different from how we perceive it to be. Other people become an integral part of the amusement landscape and the park remains a tool to facilitate, not strain one’s social involvement in the world. What is more, the truly great roller coasters allow an individual the opportunity to witness a unique aesthetic language. While the phenomenology of the roller coaster would require its own separate analysis, the experience it provides allows one to experience a highly authentic state of being (at least compared to the everydayness of contemporary living). The overload of sense-data is barely describable with language until after the ride has stopped; yet unlike as the cliché asserts, it can be far from a random experience, providing a veritable symphony of gravitational forces with progression in minuet-and-trio form or sequencing patterns that flow like a jazz ensemble… provided the designers know what they are doing (almost always they don’t).

This is all not a call for current theme parks to disband their staff of creative engineers and focus only on traditional rides, but it does provide a new rule which should guide these parks through the 21st century: if any attraction or object is required to be something it is not in order to reach maximal aesthetic appreciation, it is fundamentally limited. If it can stand the test of allowing one to freely interpret and assign their own meaning for what that object in itself is, then the boundaries of possibilities have been demolished and no emotional connection with their visitors remains off-limits that cannot already be touched by other art forms. This is a call for vastly greater creative responsibility, to meet every new project as a chance to explore radical new ideas rather than rely on preexisting ones, a chance to develop their own artistic paradigm and proudly proclaim that they do not have to pretend to be anything other than what is authentically meaningful.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Google Books. Web.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness; an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Print.