The Disneyfication of Culture

Everything today is like and dislike, good and evil, good and bad, or love and hate. There is no middle ground, there is no third position, there is no nuance, and there most certainly is no considered option of ambivalence. You must decide, and if you don’t decide, you are bad. I don’t make the rules, that’s just how it is. It doesn’t matter how good your arguments, logic, or even firsthand experience is of the thing deemed bad, if you side with the bad then you are bad.

I’ve thought for a while about writing a piece about this phenomena. This splitting of all things into two sides engaged in binary opposition. I considered it - and still consider it - a result of modern entertainment’s inability to entertain moral greyness. It turns out, however, that the term ‘Disneyfication’ has been used before, and in finding its definition so apt, I wanted to utilize it in this piece. Per Merriam-Webster, Disneyfication is defined as:

the transformation (as of something real or unsettling) into carefully controlled and safe entertainment or an environment with similar qualities (here)

This definition, however, structurally rests on just what it is we consider ‘controlled’ and ‘safe’ to be. With respect to something physical such as a roller coaster, we would consider it safe if it passed certain engineering checks and therefore wont kill us if we opt to ride it. In fact, pretty much everything we consider to be safe or controlled is deemed so because it has been filtered through various third-party bodies or institutions that uphold certain standards. Whether we like it or not, if we live amongst other people in what we call ‘civilization’, then 99% of our day only works because of unspoken trust. Yet, we wouldn’t exactly state that anything and everything we opt to use has been Disneyfied, so just what is it that this Disney-esque transformation is presuming? For there to be a transformation, from one thing to another, or from one state to another, there needs to be at least two options, there needs to be two sides.

If in becoming Disneyfied we understand something to become controlled and safe (as per the definition), the assumption is that prior to the transformation the state, place, or environment was chaotic or unsafe. I don’t think it’s a stretch - and is the primary point of this piece - to argue that the process of Disneyfication is one where the ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ is transformed into the ‘good’, and from this process the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ are defined, at least in abstract. That isn’t to say that the content of the bad and the good are defined, no. Only that during the process of Disneyfication we understand what it is to be on the good side and, therefore, why it must be bad to be on the bad side. This all sound rather convoluted and muddled so far, let’s get back to basics, back to the point at the start.

We like things. We dislike things. There is no inbetween, apparently. We are either for or against, we are either superior moral bastions of current-day goodness, or we are the worst baddies imaginable. As a culture, we have, in a Girardian sense, become utterly two-dimensional. We like certain things because other people like them, and we dislike things because other people like them. When enough people - or the right person - starts to like something we once disliked, well, maybe it turns out we liked it all along. No, we don’t have to defend or give reason for our likes or dislikes. Yes, they will shift amidst waves of cognitive dissonance. The headline said it so we repeat it. The popular tweet said it so we agree with it. It was on the radio. ‘I’ve heard.’ ‘They say.’ etc.

Also in a Girardian sense, ‘like and dislike’ is largely synonymous with ‘good and bad’. We feel ourselves safer on the side of the good, and will do anything to make sure we’re not on the side of the bad (even if that means having absolutely no principles at all). What’s the good? What everyone says it is. What’s the bad? Whatever happens to be against the good. Where do they come from? That’s a question of Disneyfication.

The reason I use the rather phonetically clunky term Disneyfication is because Disney films - and Disney ideology in general - have been long term proponents of the idea that the good guys are always utterly infallible, charming, and saint-like, whereas the bad guys are always dressed in black, horrid, and as evil-as-can-be. However, even with such a wellspring of stereotypical and shallow content to mine as examples, it doesn’t matter, the forced dichotomy matters.

Disneyfication, then, is a controlled and safe space created via tautological morality. Evil is evil because it’s evil. Good is good because it’s good. The dichotomy has always already been established. In this sense, it doesn’t even matter if there is transformation or character arch from good to bad, because that would further bolster the unquestioned binary morality preset by the Girardian mimesis at hand.

“You have no measure with which to measure yourselves. You live exclusively according to “I like” or “I don’t like,” you have no appreciation except for yourself. You recognize nothing above you—theoretically, logically, perhaps, but actually no. That is why you are demanding and continue to believe that everything is cheap and that you have enough in your pocket to buy everything you like. You recognize nothing above you, either outside yourself or inside. That is why, I repeat, you have no measure and live passively according to your likes and dislikes.” - Jeanne de Salzmann

In my piece Avoiding the Global Lobotomy, I gave a short list of various talking points or ‘current things’ that people may have forgotten that were, at the time, the thing to talk about, the good of the day, the thing to publicly like, etc. It is rather apt that in just the three years since I wrote that piece I could expand that list 4-fold - though it would be tough to remember which things to put in it. The point being that the Disneyfication of culture moves at about the same pace as Disney film releases. It’s not a matter of sticking to a principle or idea and seeing it through, but simply of waking up each morning and bellowing out of the window “Tell me friends! What is the good I need to agree with today? What do I need to like? Has anyone or anything fallen prey to badness?” As per the de Salzmann quote above, there is no measure of modern men, they are simply vessels that quickly move from one like to the next, without ever thinking about what it is they actually agree with or what they actually know.

There are, to be sure, legitimate moral questions regarding what actually is good or bad. Yet, axiomatically, that is, largely, in terms of believers vs non-believers, such questions shall never be answered, or at least never find an agreed upon conclusion. One could state that by emphasizing the general laziness of Disneyfication one is also haphazardly giving leeway to ‘evil’, but that would simply return us to the question as to what evil even is.

Once more, the content no longer matters, all that concerns the masses is whether or not they are on the right side, whether or not the right side is actually right is of almost zero concern. And why is this exactly, why is it people desire to have the ‘correct’ opinion or be on the ‘right side’ so much, if not for actual belief or opinion? The answer is comfort, safety, and/or security. Though, to paraphrase Jünger, the ideal of the mass or crowd is quickly dispersed by machine gun fire, one should not be too quick to disregard the absolute comfort that comes with idling amidst crowds and masses. In this sense, any individual member of the crowd can eat their cake and have it too. For one can yell the mass opinion from the safety of the mass, but when such is dispersed into a scattering of fleeing individuals the opinion ceases to be. The crowd allows for Schrodinger’s Opinion, an ideal which at all times both is and is not. There is a serious skin in the game, but only if everyone sticks around, after which there is no skin at all.

Disneyfication bolsters the like/dislike, good/bad dichotomy in such a way that one feels they need only signal certain allegiences and such herd-accepted virtue is transmuted equally to them. Likewise, the process furthers a malicious tautology where the ‘good’ is that which is mimetically deemed good, and the ‘bad’ that which is mimetically deemed bad. There are no basic axioms. There is no moral guidance. There are no ethical standards. There is no basic logic. There is no difference of ideas. There is solely the good and the bad, and they arise from the fluxing, emotional whims of masses raised on Disney films, where the bad guys are clad in black and the good guys always win, ergo…?