Langer, "Why the Atom is Our Friend"

[Dave Monroe]

Bonus here.  Dug this out for an essay on James Gillray's Monstrous Craws at 
a New Coalition Feast to send to a friend of mine invited to give a talk on 
caricature (any suggestions?  Have already sent along apropriate excerpts 
from E.H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion, Richard Terdiman's 
Discourse/Counter-Discourse, and Ronald Paulson's Figure and Abstraction 
...), and had forgotten about the following.  From Mark Langer, "Why the 
Atom is Our Friend: Disney, General Dynamics and the USS Nautilus," Art 
History, Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 1995), pp. 63-96 ...

Two days before the launch of its first atomic sub with a nuclear ballistic 
missile capacity--the USS George Washington--the Navy delivered mail to 
Mayport, Florida by means of a guided missile fired by a submarine at sea. 
(68-69)

[cf. that messenger V-2 early in GR (and keep in mind that it was under the 
Hermes Project that the US Military experiemented with captured V-2's at 
White Sands).  See also Heinrich von Kleist's "Project for a Cannonball 
Postal System," on which see Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an 
Epoch of the Postal System]

Walt Disney's company was an ideal venue for the expession of government 
points of view.  (71)

Cinema and Universal Exhibitions have long and related histories....  early 
cinema appeared as one of many futuristic wonders in exhibitions.... In his 
integration of television and film with the Disneyland theme park, Walt 
Disney continued teh association of moving pictures and exhibitions.  Rather 
than teh earlier practice of the park containing and surrounding the cinema, 
Disney's combined film, broadcasting and publishing ventures would form an 
integrated, synergistic extension of the earlier theme park model of 
consumption.  This integrated structure, which raeched an international 
audience, formed a transnational space for selling both goods and cultural 
images.  (75)

Tomorrowland presented the future as controlled by benign and paternalistic 
forces of science and industry for the amusement and betterment of 
humankind.  (77)

The "Trip to teh Moon" ride was designed with teh help of Willy Ley and 
Werher von Braun.   (77)

Margaret J. King has said that Disneyland Drew on Disney's

own intuitive knowledge of deeply entrenched American beliefs: the 
emcahnistic, deterministic view of the doctrine of progress; pragmatism, 
applied science, the Protestant Ethic, materialism [...] copllectivism [...] 
the Scoial Ethic, specialization and centralization.  In the American 
Studies sense, the parks are perfect museums for the study of each of these 
features of the system of American popular beliefs, as well as American 
beliefs about other cultures.  (77)

[Langer is here quoting ...

King, Margaret J.  "Disneyland and Walt Disney World:
   Traditional Values in Futuristic Form," Journal of
   Popular Culture, vol. 15, no. 1 (Summer 1981), p. 129.

But to continue ...]

For the U.S. Government, Disneyland was used as a pardigm of American 
achievement.  (77)

The amusement park celebrated America's culture, and it demonstrated 
American command over a techno-corporate Utopia of the future.  (78)

Our Friend the Atom ... (79 ff.)

Disney then introducves the head of the studio's new Scientific Department, 
Dr. Heinz Haber....  In actuality, there was no Disney Scientific 
Department.  What appeared on screen waas the corner of a studio set, where 
amle and female extras garbed in white lab coats posed as studio sciene 
workers.  Haber, formerly of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Physical 
Chemistry in Berlin, was one of a group of forty German scientists brought 
to the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico after World War II to work 
on the American guided msisile project.  He became an adviser to Walt Disney 
Productions (with Willy Ley and Werher von Braun) during the production of 
an earlier Tomorrowland programme caled Man in Space (1955).

[See, apprently, "Popular, aber niemals simpel," Honnoversche Allgemeine 
Zeitung (15 February 1990), p. 12, and J.E. Tallman, "Sprechen Sie Deutch?," 
Tales of a Librarian, pp. 45-7 (Walt Disney Archive)]

Disney as American entertainer/businessman/narrator is reconstituted into 
Haber as an international historian/scientist/narrator in a system that 
blends these concepts into "the simplified understandable language of 
entertainment."  The studio's Science Department--a promotional 
conceit--became a commodified simulacrum of the giovernment's utilization of 
international groups of scientists earlir employed on the Manhattan project 
or the U.S. missile project at White Sands.  Through this, science is 
portrayed as a trannationalized effort under American supervision.  (79-80)

... Our Friend the Atom commodifies histoery into a transnational procession 
that culminates in the American domination and ownership of atomic 
technology. (81)

Disneyland soon had its own submarines.  General Dynamics helped to design a 
$2,500,000 amusement ride fleet for the theme park.  The Disney underwater 
armada was composed of eight air-conditioned "atomic" submarines.  (86)

On 13 June 1959, Vice-President Richard Nixon and his family led a parade 
down the Main Street of Disneyland to celebrate the opening of the "atomic" 
submarine ride and other new features of the park....  In effect, the world 
paraded behind Nixon to the nuclear future of General Disneydynamicsland.  
(86)

Richard Nixon and his family were the first passengers on the ride, which 
featured a tripmpast a graveyard of sunken ships.  The real meaning of 
atomic weapons technology had been contained through its transformation into 
an amusement.  (86)

And see also ...

Bukatman, Scott.  "There's Always Tomorrowland: Disney and
   the Hypercinematic Experience."  October 57 (Summer 1991):
   55-78.

... which I'll post from as soon as I dig it back up as well.  In the 
meantime, keep in mind the "integration of film and theme park" at 
Zwolfkinder, where Pokler meets with a (?) girl who may or may not be his 
daughter at, in essence (and GR of course makes this trope explicit), a 
frame at a time.  And, of course, compare those various Raketen-Stadten with 
Tomorrowland, among various other (cinematic, literary, and so forth) 
representations of the future, the futuristic.  And General Dynamics = 
Yoyodyne?  Hm ...



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