LOS ANGELES — Regardless of how you feel about the crowds, the strollers and the high prices, Disneyland, like it or not, represents the American dream. When the pandemic forced the park, along with many of our other institutions, to close in March 2020, it was an exclamation point that we were entering a period without an archetypal ideal.
A ritual for many was gone, and a place designed to represent contentment could not operate. For Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A., isn’t a return to another era but a film set sprung to life, with facades that are alternately familiar and fantastical — there is a castle, after all, at the end of the strip. Taken together, Disneyland is designed to displace us and to transport us to a land of imagination. Even if briefly, we enter a period of timelessness.
No wonder fans wept when the Disneyland Resort reopened its gates on April 30, 2021. Disneyland had never closed for such an extended period in its 65-plus-year history, and after more than a year of uncertainty, where time stood still or time was lost, many began returning to a place where time doesn’t matter so much. Yes, there are lines and return times, but there’s also Frontierland and Tomorrowland, the romance of New Orleans Square or a Route 66 outpost (Cars Land) and of-the-moment technology at the new Avengers Campus that contrasts nostalgia with possibilities still to come.
Death, impermanence and the fears that accompany those facts permeate Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion and even Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, where eccentric vices aren’t judged and frivolity is idealized.
The consequences may be delivered with a jingle or a trick of the light, but these aren’t lectures of human indulgences. They are an acknowledgment of the human ability to persevere through life’s romanticism as well as its harsh realities, all via the stories we tell ourselves. Yes, it’s the age-old tale of good triumphing over evil, but it also shifts the theme park from a place of petty escapism into an establishment to help us make sense of our world.
When placed inside worlds where the familiar gives way to fantasy, the pressures of a clock or the weight of another passing year can be let go. We are free at Disneyland to imagine and to play, and such a place seems more relevant than ever after two-plus years of unease.
And yet there is the ever-present nagging reality that Disneyland is no place of altruism but is instead a palace designed to highlight and promote corporate interests, all while enticing us to part ways with another dollar. While we can establish Disneyland’s importance, it’s worth checking in from time to time to see how the park is being stewarded, if leadership is not just upholding its ideals but also creating a place that is worthy of the hundreds of dollars it demands.
So now that Disneyland has been open a year, let’s take stock of how the park has changed in our pandemic era. With a new annual passport program, the erasure of the Fastpass ride system and the company’s battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, how Disneyland operates in 2022 is different than in 2019. This is our evaluation on the last 12 months that the park has been open.
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