The Future Isn't What It Used To Be

IN WALT DISNEY’S Tomorrowland, you still have to push the faucet to get water to wash your hands. I know this because I stood waving my soapy hands at the men’s room spigot for about 15 seconds, expecting water to magically appear, as it so often does these days. Finally the guy next to me said, “You have to push it.”

Still recovering from this irony, I left the men’s room and noticed, along the wall outside, a deserted bank of AT&T pay phones. The future, it turns out, just isn’t what it used to be, but then, at Disneyland, neither is the past.

It was a perfect blue, warm, sunny day in mid-April, Wednesday of Holy Week in fact, when I joined the cosmopolitan herd trekking from the Pinocchio parking lot to the gates of Disneyland—the original one, in California. But unlike the other middle-aged people there, I went unencumbered by children, and I didn’t pay $92 to enter the kingdom of Mickey. My trip was a corporate junket related to my higher-ed day job. I was responsible for three college students, but they had their per diem and didn’t need me, so I was free to wander, observe, and refuse to stand in those mile-long lines for the famous rides.

My first stop was on the faux turn-of-the-last-century Main Street, at “Market House.” It looks like an old-time general store, with wide-plank hardwood floors and rough lumber pillars. But closer inspection reveals a Starbucks in disguise: the same pastries, sandwiches, and drinks as at any Starbucks the world over. But the ultimate Disney touch was the small army of young Latina baristas behind the counter in floor-length, puffy-sleeved dresses straight out of Little House on the Prairie.

Market House is a perfect emblem of the Disneyland ethos. On Main Street, the imagined American past (complete with Disney’s famous robotic Lincoln) serves as a sort of cultural Ambien, washing away the anxieties of postmodern life and easing us into a self-affirming dream land. “See,” we tell ourselves, “we were so good once. How bad could we really be?” Who wouldn’t buy some of that?

All that goes double for Frontierland, where the Mark Twain riverboat plods along a green cement-bottomed “river,” as it has for decades, into a past where there never were, and never will be, any slaves—and ditto for the Caribbean of Disney’s famous pirates.

But the strangest trip out of time has to be Tomorrowland, where, in 2014, Disney’s imagined future still looks a lot like the 1970s. You can see the Tomorrowland skyline from Main Street, and even at that distance, it’s disorienting. There’s a big replica of an Apollo-style rocket, and a tower festooned with those enormous heavy, steel satellite dishes that even my rural Kentucky neighbors don’t have anymore.

Despite the retro exterior, Tomorrowland contains some genuine glimpses of the future, most notably ASIMO, the robot developed by Honda. ASIMO (the name stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) is a cute little thing, shiny white, a little over 4 feet tall. Its coordination, agility, and artificial intelligence are pretty impressive. In the Disneyland demo ASIMO is functioning as a domestic servant, but its mistress does suggest that it could prove useful doing other work that is too dangerous for humans. Maybe it could clean up that nuclear power plant in Japan, the one that’s still simmering more than three years after the tsunami.

And, by the way, does anyone else remember when the peaceful atom was someday going to cleanly and cheaply light up our lives? Seems like that future is past, too, even at Disneyland.