TEAM RODENT: How Disney Devours the World
By Carl Hiaasen
Ballantine/Library of Contemporary Thought, 83 pages, $8.95 paper
I’ve never liked Walt Disney Co. Even as a kid, I used to dread Sunday nights because the only thing on TV was the watered-down pablum of “The Wonderful World of Disney,” a show that seemed designed to make your brain cells dry up and die. Now that I’m a father, what bothers me more is the way Disney manipulates children for profit, producing motion pictures that have at least as much to do with marketing as they do with cinematic art. If you don’t believe me, turn on a Disney video and see how long it takes to get through all the trailers and promotional material before the movie starts. In the case of, say, “Toy Story,” it’s more than 10 minutes, every second of which is geared to one purpose: selling your kids on countless related products, with the expectation that they will plead and whine and generally harass you until you finally give in and buy them whatever Disney-sanctioned merchandise they desire.
These days, of course, there’s more to the picture, because Disney is not just for kids anymore. Indeed, writes Carl Hiaasen in his new book, “Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World,” “Disney touches virtually every human being in America for a profit,” whether we know it or not. Hiaasen is a man after my own heart; a columnist for The Miami Herald and author of seven best-selling crime novels, his ambition “is to be banned forever from Disney World.” To highlight the company’s mercenary spirit, he catalogs its holdings. “The money comes in a torrent,” he notes, “from Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone, Caravan, Miramax, and Hollywood Pictures; from ABC, ESPN, the Disney Channel, Arts and Entertainment, the History Channel, and Lifetime; from Siskel and Ebert, Regis and Kathie Lee, and Monday Night Football; from nine TV stations, eleven AM radio stations, and ten FM radio stations; from home videos, stage plays, music publishing, book publishing, and seven daily newspapers; from the theme parks in Orlando, Anaheim, Tokyo, and Paris; from computer software, toys, and merchandise; from baseball and hockey franchises; from hotels, real-estate holdings, retail stores, shopping centers, housing developments, and soon even a cruise line.” That’s a formidable lineup, but, Hiaasen suggests, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Disney, after all, continues to expand into overseas markets and has now begun to establish primacy over areas that have traditionally been considered public space.
One of those areas is New York’s Times Square, and Hiaasen opens “Team Rodent” with a description of its new and improved visage, from which the porn brokers and sex merchants have been swept aside by a wave of development, including “the gleamingly wholesome presence of the Disney Store.” Although some people might see this as a good thing, Hiaasen’s not among them, and from the outset, he offers compelling arguments against Disney’s sanitized illusions, in which there is no room for anything but good, clean fun.
Part of his problem is the Disney aesthetic, where even “Nature doesn’t fit because it doesn’t measure up; isn’t safe enough, accessible enough, predictable enough, even beautiful enough for company standards.” More to the point, though, is his belief that “Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it’s unreal. . . .” In that sense, Hiaasen sees Times Square as a metaphor, finding in its sin and sleaze an authenticity that Disney, for all its comforting safety, can’t help but lack:
“Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. . . . (B)eing grossed out is essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we’d have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture. . . . Team Rodent doesn’t believe in sleaze, however, nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. . . .
“And resistance is called for.”
There’s more than a little hyperbole in such a statement, especially since, at this point, about the only way to resist the Disney juggernaut is to bury your head in the sand. Still, it’s a mistake to assume that Hiaasen isn’t serious, or that the purpose of his book is just to rant. For him, in fact, the stakes are personal, since as a native Floridian he detests Disney most for its negative influence on his home state. That’s a process Hiaasen traces to the mid-1960s, when Disney quietly (and inexpensively) bought up 43 square miles of land around Orlando. Not long afterwards, the company set out to protect its sovereignty by coaxing the Florida Legislature into establishing the Reedy Creek Improvement District–a shadow government, administered by Disney, with unprecedented authority for a private concern.
Hiaasen’s most telling anecdotes involve Reedy Creek’s habit of stonewalling those who question its dominion, even as it operates within its own borders like a fascist state. Occasionally, what he describes is merely disturbing, as when, in 1991, Disney’s private security forces unnecessarily prolonged an investigation of a peeping tom at Cinderella’s Castle in order to catch the perpetrator in the act. Other times, though, the circumstances are tragic, like the night of Aug. 31, 1994, when a Disney security van pursued a pickup truck containing two teenage boys at speeds up to 80 miles an hour; in the course of the chase, the pickup crashed, and one of the teenagers was killed.
What Hiaasen is suggesting is not that Disney is a criminal enterprise, although he does compile an impressive list of lawsuits and complaints. He is, however, striking a cautionary note about the kinds of things that can happen when any single entity is allowed to amass too much power unchecked. In many ways, it all comes back to economics: “The absolute worst thing Disney did,” he explains, “was to change how people in Florida thought about money; nobody had ever dreamed there could be so much.” Yet equally important is the question of culture–of imagination–that cuts to the very heart of Disney’s empire. How do we deal with this monolith of entertainment, especially if its ethos of consumption does not reflect our own? That’s a question I ask myself each time my son watches a Disney video, and while “Team Rodent” may not have the answers, it’s reassuring to know I’m not alone.
