Carl Hiaasen (2 page)

A few blocks away, Peep Land hangs on by cum-crusted fingernails. Inside … well, just try to get past the video racks. Sample: volumes one through five of
Ready to Drop
, an anthology featuring explicit (and occasionally team-style) sex with women in their third trimester of pregnancy. And that’s not the worst of it, not even close. The shop’s library of bodily-function videos is extensive, multilingual, and prominently displayed at eye level. Skin a-crawl, I am quickly out the door.

Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits, unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by which we can govern our private behavior. Because being 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—our art,
our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick shrinks at both ends. 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. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America’s values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company and not the other way around.

So there’s a creepy comfort to be found amidst the donkey films and giant rubber dicks, a subversive triumph at unearthing such slag so near to Disney’s golden portals. (Hey, Mickey, whistle on
this
!) Peep Land is important precisely because it’s so irredeemable and because it cannot be transformed into anything but what it is. Slapping Disney’s name on a joint like this would not elevate or enrich it even microscopically, or cause it to be taken for a shrine. Standing in Disney’s path, Peep Land remains a gummy little cell of resistance.

And resistance is called for.

I
N 1996 THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
reported $18.7 billion in revenues, a thunderous 54 percent jump from the previous fiscal year. Its operating income was $3.3 billion (up 35 percent) and its net income was $1.5 billion (up 11 percent). In 1997 its revenues surpassed $20 billion.

Disney touches virtually every human being in America for a profit. That is rapidly becoming true as well in France, Spain, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, Australia, China, Mexico, Brazil, and Canada. Disney will devour the world the same way it devoured this country, starting first with the youth. Disney theme parks have drawn more than one billion visitors, mostly kids. Snag the children and everybody else follows—parents,
politicians, even the press.
Especially
the press. We’re all suckers for a good cartoon.

The money comes in a torrent, 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.

At the core of Disney’s platinum mine is entertainment. No other corporation has the capacity to crank out enough product to gorge the public maw. But as deep and bland as the mainstream has become, there are billions of dollars to be made outside of it; not everyone on the planet wants G-rated fare. When Disney targets adult tastes, it’s careful to leave Walt’s name off the
credits. The same folks who brought you 101
Dalmatians
, a movie featuring adorable puppies, also brought you
Pulp Fiction
, a movie featuring junkies, hit men, and bondage freaks. The same folks who produce
Home Improvement
, a program about a wisecracking TV handyman, are also responsible for
Ellen, a
program about a wisecracking lesbian.

“Mickey is a clean mouse,” Walt Disney liked to say, but these days not everyone thinks so. Fifteen million Southern Baptists, displeased with the content of certain Disney films and television programs—especially
Ellen
—profess to be boycotting. Protesters of like mind recently gathered at the entrance of Disney World to demonstrate against the company’s policies of providing health insurance to partners of gay employees and holding an annual Gay Day at its Orlando theme parks. The demonstrators, who foisted pamphlets on carloads of incoming tourists, belonged to Operation Rescue National, an antiabortion group that is branching out to combat homosexuality. One marcher carried a sign that read “If You Love Jesus, Turn Around.” Of course the tourists kept coming. Nothing short of flamethrowers would have stopped them. If anything is more irresistible than Jesus, it’s Mickey.

That Disney is defying the morality police is a positive sign, one that somewhat softens my visceral antipathy toward Team Rodent. Given a choice between intolerant moralizers and unflinchingly ruthless profiteers, I’ll have to stand with the Mouse every time. Many publicly held corporations would have caved at the first throaty outcry from fundamentalists, but Disney continues to stand firm. Obviously the Gay Day promotion makes enough dough and generates enough goodwill that Team Rodent can afford to ignore the Bible-thumpers.

The secret weapon is trust. Disney is the most trusted brand name in the history of marketing. It hooks us when we’re little and never lets go, this unshakable faith that Disney is the best at knowing what’s best. Who better to trust with Quentin Tarantino or a lesbian sitcom?

Remember also that the the company’s granite base of consumers is a prosperous and relatively open-minded Middle America; a Middle America that still finds patience (and even loyalty) for Bill Clinton, a president reported to claim biblical license for soliciting extramarital blow jobs. Team Rodent knows the tolerance level of its audience because it
raised
its audience. The fundamentalists’ “boycott” of Disney is doomed to flop because
Middle America isn’t participating and doesn’t, if you’ll pardon the expression, give a rat’s ass. Middle America completely trusts Mickey with sex, violence, and occasional unwholesomeness, as long as it’s mildly entertaining.

Even so, one must wonder what the Disney brain trust was thinking in the summer of 1997 when, one week after the Southern Baptists denounced the company, its Hollywood Records division released an album called
The Great Milenko
. A brief but representative sample of lyrics:

Decidedly more Peep Land than Pat Boone. Other cuts on the album celebrated dismemberment, mutilation, forcible sodomy, necrophilia, and, in one instance, nonconsenting sex with a llama.

The group alleged to have written and performed these songs is named the Insane Clown Posse. The stars are presented as two white
“Detroit street rappers” calling themselves Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. On the album they are pictured as tongue-wagging jesters with painted faces. On the Internet they are pitched as “a celestial circus of lunacy, madness, and excess that travels through time and space to distort pleasant youthful memories into a horrific living night … these clowns carry axes instead of balloons.”

Tupac Wayne Gacy!

The outcry over
The Great Milenko
was immediate and predictable. Six hours after the CD landed in music stores, Disney yanked it off the shelves. The company said that although the lyrics had been screened (and some songs cut) by its legal department, nobody had shared the material with the company’s image-obsessed chairman, Michael D. Eisner.

At first it sounded plausible—
Milenko
bore all the signs of a bureaucractic fuckup, and wasn’t Disney overdue? As Team Rodent’s realm grows larger and more far-flung, airtight control becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. With so many creative and ambitious people on the payroll, it’s inevitable that some will slip Eisner’s reins.

But is that what really happened?

The
Milenko
CD was released and recalled on June 24, 1997. Other than a brief spate of news
stories—“How’d Disney Ringmasters Let It Happen?” asked the
Los Angeles Times
—the incident faded quickly from the headlines. Disney appears not to have suffered at all, financially or imagewise. In fact, a case could be made that the company
benefited
from the publicity by responding so decisively. Never before had a hundred thousand units of anything been removed so swiftly from the reach of innocent consumers. It was as if Disney, under siege from the religious right, meant to reassure Middle America that it knew exactly where the lines of decency were drawn.

Which raises the intriguing possibility that
The Great Milenko
wasn’t a blunder at all, but actually a sly public-relations trick. Suppose Disney was looking for a bone to throw to the fulminating Baptists. What better sacrifice than a tediously offensive rap album that nobody was going to buy anyway?

In retrospect, the likelihood of something so raunchy slipping past Eisner seems remote; the guy is legendary for micromanaging. Somebody high in the organization had to know
Milenko
was in the pipeline, because Disney was prepared for the ensuing uproar. Too prepared.

My theory: Eisner
is
the Insane Clown Posse.
Hell, those fabled “Imagineers” of his could have knocked off the liner notes on their lunch break, and had a hoot doing it. Who ever heard of white Detroit street rappers? And what’s with the candy-ass faux-Kiss mascara? The songwriting is so strenuously witless that it’s got to be a parody. How else to explain this ballad:

On the day Disney yanked the Posse’s CD, Messrs. Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope lashed out in cyberspace: “It all starts with a friendly big fluffy mouse named Mickey, who is really a lying rabid infested filthy rat in disguise.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be an Eisner riff, tweaking all of us who harbor such acid sentiments. Undoubtedly he’s aware that his empire is the subject of percolating distrust, hatred, and even fear. The question he probably asks himself is why. What has Disney really done but brought joy, wonder, and laughter to billions of people? What accounts for the rising backlash?

Insane Clown Michael surely has his theories. My own virulence is rooted in this belief, based on what I’ve seen with my own eyes: 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, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. Imagine promoting a universe in which raw Nature doesn’t fit because it doesn’t measure up; isn’t safe enough, accessible enough, predictable enough, even beautiful enough for company standards. Disney isn’t in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving to improve upon it, constantly fine-tuning God’s work.

Lakes, for instance. Florida’s heartland is dappled with lovely tree-lined lakes, but the waters are often tea-colored from cypress bark. For postcard purposes, tea-colored water was deemed unsuitable for Disney World’s centerpiece, Bay Lake, so in the early 1970s Team Rodent sprang into action—yanking out many of the cypresses, draining the lake, scraping out the bottom muck, replacing it with imported sand, then refilling the crater. All this was done to make the water bluish and therefore more inviting to tourists. For good measure, Disney even added beaches.

(My own Bay Lake fantasy: sneak in one night and dump a truckload of hungry bull gators in that lovely deep-blue water. I know friends who’d be thrilled to help, and who also have experience in
the transport of large crocodilians. My conscience is all that’s stopping me—the Magic Kingdom is not a safe place for a reptile, and I fear the alligators would be systematically hunted down and trapped, or worse.)

In recent years Team Rodent has become even less bashful and more technologically advanced at superimposing its own recreation-based reality. Disney-brand fun needs a script, and a script needs performing, and a performance needs a stage. No one is fussier about the production details than Team Rodent, and it pays off. Operating profit from Disney’s theme parks and resorts has risen steeply in recent years and now accounts for more than 25 percent of company earnings.

One place the formula didn’t work so well was France, where Disneyland Paris (then called Euro-Disney) opened at a cost of $4.4 billion in the spring of 1992. Dreary weather and a weak economy weren’t the only reasons for disappointing attendance. The wine-loving French resented Disney’s no-alcohol policy, while employees balked at the company’s famous Aryan-android dress code, which forbids makeup, nail polish, and facial hair. Critics and commentators despaired that Disneyland Paris was a blight on native French culture, and the leftist
newspaper
Libération
harshly dubbed it “Mousewitz.” At one point the park was losing the equivalent of $1 million a day, and was reported to be on the verge of closing. It was saved by a complicated financial restructuring and a grudging decision by Disney executives to act more European and loosen up the rules. Today wine is served at Disneyland Paris restaurants, and revenues at the park are rising.