| Disneyland: the archetype of the simulated city. A city
in which illusion becomes reality; in which the hopes and dreams of the
ideal world are realized. The crowd at Disneyland is a warm one, people
are friends, laughter, joy, imagination and creativity abound. No body
cries in Disneyland. Just like a real city, the
crowd (the population) are directed in ordered currents and flows.
We follow arrows, we stand in lines, just as we drive between the painted
lines of the street. Disneyland is, in miniature, the ideal American city.
Rules are obeyed because there is no alternative. Here is a city where
murder, rape and adultery do not exist.
No one is pretending that Disneyland is real: even children are made keenly aware of this fact.
ëYou are about to enter the world of Tomorrow' Los Angeles has become, according to Baudrillard, "a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation -- a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension. As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and a perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms. All quotations from Jean Baudrillard,
Simulacra & Simulation, 1994
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