Disney's Splash Mountain: Death Anxiety, the Tar Baby, and Rituals of Violence

Abstract

Disney's Splash Mountain:Death Anxiety, the Tar Baby, and Rituals of Violence Jason Isaac Mauro (bio) Bruce Lee is said to have been able to deliver a strike he called the "vibrating palm." This strike could be delivered at a distance, with the intended victim neither feeling it nor knowing of it, yet within hours the recipient would fall down dead. Whether or not the myth is based in fact, the point is compelling. Violence can be a soft, subtle, often unfelt thing. Cultural theorists such as Alice Miller, in works such as Banished Knowledge and The Untouched Key, would suggest that an entire atmosphere of violence might surround us, and yet, as with our atmosphere of air, the enormous force of it may be undetectable. In fact, I would hazard the guess that some of the most pernicious acts of violence pass right through us undetected, like gamma rays, while our attention is often directed to more visible, but perhaps less harmful, frequencies. It seems that as members of cultural groupings we can willfully blind ourselves to the brutality of our communal rites by dint of the glare generated by other and more flashy varieties of violence. Perhaps, then, we need a taxonomy or a grammar of violence in order to distinguish between benign, perhaps even healthy, acts of violence and potentially lethal, yet odorless, colorless, tasteless acts. Indeed, this taxonomy is always in the making, as we enact postmodern analyses of literature and culture, revealing the violent consequences of what has hitherto been accepted as neutral and even pleasant. To read Miller, for instance, is to contemplate how damaging and aggressive the seemingly most benign and common child-rearing practices may be. Parental gestures as reflexive and simple as comforting and hushing a child who is crying, she regards as the means by which parents shield themselves from acknowledgment of their own pain at the expense of their children. She would suggest that our knees are buckling under the force of a barrage of blows that, like Lee's "vibrating palm," we never even felt. In this article I will look at Disney World's Splash Mountain as an arena in which such invisible blows are dealt, and dealt principally to children. And I will use the works of psychologist William James, cultural theorist Ernest Becker, and anthropologist Victor Turner as lenses that might make visible those most damaging frequencies of violence to which we are normally, and often willfully, blind. "You know that feeling you get when you're leaning back in your chair," says comedian Steve Wright, "and you almost fall over, but then at the last second you catch yourself? That's how I feel all the time." What is so deeply funny about imagining a human psyche persisting at that particular pitch of anxiety is that such a state is unimaginable over any length of time. It is necessarily momentary, something that exists in time only in retrospect, since our entire organism is devoted to getting out of it while it is happening. We simply cannot tolerate such a feeling of threat, of displacement. James understood how intolerable such a level of anxiety is, and in his Essays in Pragmatism he argued that the only response human beings have is willfully to impose a conscious order on the chaos and trauma of such times of dislocation: "The universe is horribly confused and Gothic" and as such is "poisonous to the human psyche" (23). Our job as human beings is to carve out for ourselves a narrative that ameliorates the effect of such poisonous moments. Yet in order to edge up to these moments, we often drive or fly considerable distances and spend tremendous amounts of money, only to flee from them with gratitude and relief. Walt Disney World's Splash Mountain dramatizes both the moment of dissolution that James insists is "intolerable" and the strategies by which we reflexively push aside moments that remind us of the terror of our human predicament. The strategies exhibited by Disney's ride are typical of the strategics that the cultural theorist Becker enumerates, by which we "confidently deny man's real situation on the planet" as...