California dreaming

Why visit a simulation of California when the real thing is all around you? ANDREW GUMBEL joins the crowds at a new theme park to find out.

Jennifer, my official guide around the new Disney theme park in California, has a problem. She wants to help. She really does. She tells me she is there to answer my questions and encourages me to ask anything that is on my mind.

But clearly I am breaking some unspoken rule of theme park etiquette, because every time I do ask something her eyes glaze over, her mouth quivers in a nervous smile, and she does her best to pretend I have not asked a question at all.

We are touring Disney's California Adventure, a concept that takes the theme park idea to new levels of chutzpah since the fantasy world it purports to recreate - the state of California - is actually all around.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to ask questions about the dizzying $US1.4 billion ($3.4 billion) cost of the enterprise, the relatively cramped space (22.26ha of what used to be the Disneyland car park), the company's hope that tourists will now treat Disneyland like a resort destination rather than a day trip, the fears of overcrowding, and so on.

But, at every turn, Jennifer's body language suggests that I have merely indulged in idle chatter that merits no response. "Would you like to eat lunch now?" she offers. "We have a wide variety of Mexican, Asian and Californian restaurants at the resort, and you are invited to sample any of them as part of your tour."

I try again on a different tack, this time asking what the company's policy is about talking to the press on theme park tours. No reaction. A colleague accompanying me idly mentions that many young people visiting Disneyland in the early 1970s used to drop acid to enhance their experience.

"Would you like a fortune cookie?" Jennifer hastily interjects. "Or a quesadilla? They're freshly made."

Finally, a query penetrates the thick walls of robotic corporate programming. Are the people dressed up as Goofy or Buzz Lightyear members of an actors' union, I wonder - not because I really want to know but because I am desperate to keep the conversation going - or do they fall under some other category of employment?

"We refer to our characters as characters," she replies firmly. "We don't see them as people."

Preview day at a Disney attraction is an exercise in cultural dislocation that most visitors have no opportunity to savour. The constant surveillance, presented as a form of benevolent hospitality, resembles nothing so much as an official trip to Libya, complete with the vague promise of an encounter with a member of the supreme leadership that may or may not materialise.

But this exercise in corporate control, and the extraordinary fear and paranoia that it betokens, is actually not a bad introduction to the park itself - which, being Disney, is a triumph of corporate image-making over any serious engagement with reality.

The California of the California Adventure is a series of finely honed cliches, carefully emptied of dirt or sleaze and dressed up in the same pastiche architectural style that Uncle Walt first perfected at the original Disneyland more than 40 years ago.

Perhaps nothing epitomises the place better than its centrepiece attraction, a dizzying Imax tour of the Golden State called Soarin' Over California. The audience is lifted 14m in the air to simulate the take-off of a helicopter and then whizzed from one end of the state to the other, taking in pristine images of the mountains, the redwood forests, the San Francisco skyline and, finally, Disneyland itself. The film zips by at 48 frames a second, twice the normal speed, which lends the show an immediate air of hyper-reality. A pine odour wafts over the audience for the forest sequences, a wind blows you across the Sierras, and a whiff of orange blossom accompanies the glories of California's agriculture. It is a remarkable feat of studied artifice, perhaps the closest the world has come to the "feelies" of Huxley's Brave New World.

The tour of California starts all over again outside the theatre: a pint-sized Golden Gate Bridge; a recreation of Hollywood Boulevard as a film set, all art deco splendour and lavish oriental ornamentation, without a hint of the dereliction, drugs or prostitution of the real Hollywood; a market garden trying to look like the Central Valley but really doubling as a promotional vehicle for A Bug's Life; a version of Monterey's Cannery Row, curiously populated by men in lederhosen trying to bounce quarters off a table into a pewter beer mug, and by a high-toqued chef juggling a baguette on his nose; a Napa Valley winery, serving real wine (a shocking departure for the Disney puritans); a Yosemite-style mountain peak shaped into the head of a grizzly bear; and finally a beachside pier complete with rides, sideshows and overpriced snack bars.

It is not only a sanitised version of California, it is also overwhelmingly a white man's view. The Native Americans and original Spanish settlers are relegated to a mural. The huge Asian and Mexican populations of the state are reduced to floats in a daily parade. And blacks are nowhere to be seen.

It is hard not to have mischievous thoughts about what a truly honest Californian theme park would look like: power cuts on the rollercoaster, in acknowledgement of the state's huge ongoing electricity crisis (it could still happen), or a bumper-car ride simulating gridlock on the San Diego freeway, or an invitation to guests to dress up in Los Angeles police uniforms and whack an image of Rodney King.

But a theme park by definition is not about reality. It is about a mediated reality in which signature features are copied and the rest simply discarded. Ironically, the real California has become so infected with the Disney architectural ethic that the California Adventure park ends up holding a mirror to something not unlike itself.

The park's Mondavi winery, for example, is a copy of the real Mondavi winery, whose California ranch style is itself based on hacienda architecture and elements of Mediterranean style. In other words, Disney's California is a replica of a replica. Why, one might ask, would someone pay $US43 to visit a simulated, antiseptic version of Venice Beach, when the real Venice Beach is free of charge and barely an hour's drive away?

The answer, sadly, seems to be because it is convenient and predictable. That's why more and more Americans are going to Las Vegas to see the Paris, Venetian and New York hotels (which, at heart, are just Disney resorts with slot machines); it saves the bother of schlepping to Europe or the East Coast and alleviates all worry about foreign languages, crime, garlicky food or dodgy toilets.

The area around Disneyland is, in fact, the very worst California has to offer. Anaheim is a mishmash of freeways, car dealerships, fast-food joints and smog, all stuck in an overheated plain of faceless suburbs.

The joy of Disney, though, is that a visitor need never know. The lines may be long, the food overpriced and the smiles all fake, but in some unnerving way it feels to many people just like home. Have a nice day.