The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Places on Earth (58 page)

Walt
selected
Main Street
’s turn-of-the-20
th
-century time period as an era that was both exciting and reassuring.  He had none of the scorn for small-town America that some cynics had.  Sinclair Lewis’ 1920 best-selling novel “Main Street” was published when
Walt
was a mere nineteen years old but already a world traveler who’d served in the Red Cross following WWI. The novel effectively satirized the provincial pettiness and smug stagnancy that can be found in some small heartland communities.  Some readers didn’t pick up on the satirical tone, but many did, and in some circles the phrase “Main Street” became shorthand for being backwards, petty, and hopelessly–even proudly–ignorant.

By the early 1950’s when
Walt
was designing his park, he had lived in both small towns and cities in the Midwest, in Europe, and in Southern California.  He seemed to be able to find the best in any community in which he resided.  No matter how successful he became,
Walt
never lost his clear-eyed affection for small town turn-of-the-century America.  He saw in it qualities that could both galvanize and comfort the American soul, whether in 1955 or in 2013.

Disneyland
’s
Main Street
is exciting because it’s set in that sublime American transition time between gas light and electricity, horse-drawn vehicles and automobiles.  The energy of American progress was pervasive then, palpable even in small towns like
Walt
’s
Marceline
,
Missouri
.

It was an era that
embodied those quintessential moments of “becoming” that
Walt
loved, those instants when one crests a wave and finds oneself lifted immediately upon another, that eternal pursuit of the horizon, that continual quest through successive frontiers. 
Walt
was creative and curious and restless and spent his whole life moving from one incredible moment and endeavor to the next, always in pursuit of the better, the newer, never chasing fleeting fads, but true advancement.

At the same time
that
Main Street
communicates progress, the turn-of-the-20
th
-century setting is simultaneously reassuring because hand-in-hand with its air of promise and prosperity is a quaint charm that feeds a craving for nostalgia.

One of
Main Street
’s attractions is the
Main Street Cinema
, where original
Mickey Mouse
movies, including
Steam Boat Willie
, play all day and night while the park is open.  As
Walt
famously said, he never wanted anyone to forget that his far-flung empire was started by a little mouse–a little everyman who in many ways was
Walt
’s alter ego.

In a
large sense,
Main Street
is the American origin story.  It’s an evocation of the American creation tale, and the kick is that the American origin story is a never-ending one, a perpetual tale of creation and re-creation, an eternal now.

* * *

Main Street
hasn’t changed appreciably since 1955.  To understand
Disneyland
’s
Main Street
, and appreciate its carefully engineered and still potent effect, it’s important to understand something of the time in which it was designed and built.

When
Disneyland
opened in the summer of 1955, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn; that autumn, they beat the New York Yankees in the World Series.  The United States was ten years out from World War II, the great conflict which had wrought immense changes upon the American spirit and psyche.

The years during and immediately following World War II had
seen, quite understandably, a resurgence of public appetite for nostalgic turn-of-the-century productions.  Soldiers in harm’s way and worried, exhausted loved ones coping with shortages and rationing on the home front were all hungry for images of what was perceived as (and in many ways was) a simpler and more innocent time.

Some
of these nostalgic productions were better than others, most notably Vincent Minnelli’s love letter to bygone days (and future wife Judy Garland), “Meet Me In St. Louis” (1944).  In 1947 there was a radio revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” a celebration of the American small town, and Eugene O’Neill’s comic masterpiece “Ah, Wilderness” was given a highly romanticized Technicolor treatment in the 1948 film “Summer Holiday”.  In the same year, George Stevens directed the subtler, far better period piece “I Remember Mama” with the inimitable Irene Dunn in the title maternal role.

By the time the war ended and the surviving soldiers were mustered out and
shipped home, the GI Bill funds dispersed, and the Levittowns going up all over the country, the 1950’s were well upon us.  The 1950’s, when
Disneyland
was conceived, constructed, and opened to the public, was a unique and complex epoch that inspires easy sterotypes but defies easy analysis.

There was clearly a central identity conflict in the
United States during the 1950’s, easily glimpsed in the films, television programs, and music of the day.  Citizens were still enamored of the past, and paradoxically both optimistic about and anxious about the present and the future.

In what was an unplanned and unconscious but nevertheless pervasive collective move, following World War II the U.S. middle class, riding a
n unprecedented wave of prosperity and wanting to leave behind the traumas of the war, entered into a mutual social fantasy that would persist well into the 1960’s.

A wave of
popular 1950’s Westerns, Technicolor-drenched musicals, and idyllic television shows presented an idealized world of clear-cut goals and values and easily resolved conflicts.  These works stand in stark contrast to the slew of dramatic potboilers and atomic-age science fiction and horror B movies that rolled into the local movie houses during the same era.

The
Westerns, musicals, and TV sitcoms reflected the country’s unprecedented post-war affluence and influence.  The war had been won, the U.S. was a young super-power, production and consumption were booming, and there seemed to be no end in sight to American progress and promise–a shining new wave of manifest destiny.

In response to the gender-role inversion of the war days, when women had flooded the workforce and capably adopted what had been traditionally male
labor roles, a new post-war ideal of woman as either saintly mother or childlike bombshell took the country by storm, with Donna Reed and Marilyn Monroe as the best examples and high priestesses of their respective roles.  Media images of women portrayed moms sporting pearls and housecoats in the kitchen, or goddesses in diamonds and shimmering cocktail dresses out on the town. 

In a complete about-face from the fast-talking, capable comediennes and heroines of the 1930’s and 1940’s (think Arthur, Davis, Garbo, Hepburn, and Stanwyck), w
omen who exhibited too much spirit had to be gently but firmly broken, as in 1953’s musical “Kiss Me Kate,” an entertaining but thematically dated Cole Porter version of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”.

A t
omboyish character like Annie Oakley, winningly portrayed by Betty Hutton in 1950’s Technicolor “Annie Get Your Gun,” can’t win her beau until she purposely loses a shooting match to him to soothe his ego.

To really understand how profoundly women were simplified into
mother/wife or bombshell roles, take a look at 1950’s print advertising.  It’s hard to believe such demeaning ads moved product.

Of course, m
en were no less constricted than women by 1950’s role expectations and codes of conduct.  Men were straitjacketed into the role of not only primary but
sole
provider, a caged world of grey flannel suits, and steady climbs up the corporate ladder.  Father
had
to know best—and no tears were allowed.

Children were cast in the role of adorable, aw-shucks scamps like “Dennis the Menace”. 
As reflected in their television presence, they were allowed to create mild mischief; they were even allowed to have problems, provided they were mild perplexities that could be wrapped up in twenty-two minutes by a few words of advice from all-knowing Mom or Good Old Dad.  (“Leave it to Beaver” was one exception, quite progressive in its day in terms of understanding children’s perspectives, and “Father Knows Best” was actually very progressive in its treatment of the education of and respect for women.)

Not just gender
and family roles, but
all
roles were starkly defined in the 1950’s.  Not since the Victorian age was a people so consumed with propriety and surface appearances, only now it was not just the elite Astorian Society with a capital “S” but the entire burgeoning American middle class.

In 1950’s codes of conduct, t
here were many things one did not say and did not do, a sharp division between public and private behavior that seems alien to our more casual, reality-TV-obsessed and blog-driven age.  In the 1950’s, private lives really were private (unless you were on FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s list).  Good was good and bad was bad; in the myriad Western films and TV shows, the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black and the good guys always won.

Everybody knew their place
, and even if it was an extremely uncomfortable and unjust place (such as the minority experience during this era) everybody was portrayed on celluloid as embracing their prescribed role unless they were ungrateful, histrionic, or just plain nuts.

In the 1950’s p
rogress was good, but progress meant advancements in science, health, wealth, consumer products, technology, and transportation.  There was little widespread focus on social progress, as there soon would be in the turbulent 1960’s, a turbulence that would be fomented, interestingly enough, by the children raised during the halcyon 1950’s.

In
contrast to the Westerns, musicals, and sitcoms of the 1950’s, and going well beyond the anguish of the melodramas, the science fiction and horror movies of the same time period reflected the bone-deep anxieties percolating under America’s nervously smiling, middle-class surface.

These
monster films bared the sublimated neuroses and angst of a population that, although richer and healthier than it had ever been, was embroiled in a piping-hot Cold War and the unpredictable Atomic Age, among the most frightening and paranoid periods in U.S. history.  Movie goers sat in the dark theaters while the monster films gave voice to their unspoken fears.

1955’s “Them” is the best among a legion of
1950’s movies about tiny creatures being inflated to gigantic, murderous size by atomic energy.  Ants in the southwestern U.S. are infected by the fallout from atomic tests, balloon to monstrous proportions, and go on a killing spree that ends in the Los Angeles River tunnels.  As is
de rigueur
in these films, U.S. military and police might finally trounces the creatures, and a scientist character makes a grave closing speech about the dangers of atomic power (with, naturally, a high-pitched Theremin playing eerily in the background).

As far as have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too cinema goes, these films do their thing.  They let 1950’s movie goers
cathartically experience their atomic fears in the air-conditioned (sometimes) safety of the movie house, and then reassured viewers that although science and the military were creating these dangerous atomic energies, science and the military would protect the public if anything happened to go badly wrong.

One of the great thematic fears of the
1950’s was that people might not be what they seemed.  1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is blatantly a cinematic reaction to Red scares and 5
th
-column fears in Cold War America, and the era’s emotional repression.  Mysterious giant pods appear in people’s homes and overnight evolve into cold, evil-alien replicas of these people, the copies nearly indistinguishable from the originals.  The pod people all think with the same collective mind and slavishly pursue collective goals.  Strangely enough, what was meant at the time largely as an indictment of Communist group-think is, to modern eyes, a workable metaphor for the restrictive middle-class codes of conduct in the United States of the 1950’s.

Although
it’s not a horror film in the supernatural sense, Nicholas Ray’s 1955 “Rebel Without a Cause” was part of a crop of disturbing and prophetic melodramas (sociological horror stories) exploring a growing restlessness and disenchantment among middle-class and upper-class American youths.  In “Rebel,” teens being given every material advantage in prosperous post-war Los Angeles get intoxicated, walk the streets late at night, and harm puppies.  The film opens with three perpetrators of these crimes (James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, respectively) being hauled into the local precinct station for some tough love and psychobabble 1950’s style.

What’s wrong with these kids?  Why isn’t the material success that suffices for their parents enough for them?  As the film unfolds, often surprisingly and tenderly, the answer seems to be that these kids are hungering for raw, genuine emotional connections that aren
’t part of their post-war family landscape.