by David Rakoff
“I like everything,” I replied, feeling misrepresented and only half amused right back. “I don’t hate the world. I’m scared of it. There’s a difference.” I wanted to tell her that she was only getting half the story. But if one is staying in and saying “I’d rather not,” whether the disinclination is born of anhedonia or of fear, the distinction is academic at best.
And so it came to pass, in a moment of dark recrimination, sick and tired of these Bartleby tendencies, and in want of a healthy dose of alacrity, hopefulness, and appetite, I lit out for the territories—a counterphobic campaign to see the handiwork of the men and women who said Yes. My destinations: one striving for perfection upon this earth; one a monument to undying love from friends and strangers alike; and one a mere way station to a heavenly reward. Constructed Edens, all three.
I.
Great Expectations
Tom Morrow is naked but for his clear plastic lab coat, although the peekaboo effect only reveals a sexless Lucite-over-circuitry body, supporting an Arcimboldo face of transistors beneath a stiff brush cut of copper hair. It is Tom Morrow we must glide by, Tom Morrow we must heed before we can reach our destination. As voiced by Nathan Lane, Tom Morrow is a schticky Cerberus guarding the gates of the Future, waggling his titanium eyebrows, singing a show tune about the great, big, beautiful tomorrow that awaits us all, a suburban paradise of unconditional leisure where our lawns will be mowed robotically. Tom Morrow promises us techno-wonders the likes of which we have never seen before: “And I’m not talking about Mr. Coffee, whose work I admire,” he jokes. A gag that invokes a device none of the younger folks in the crowd will remember should have been the first sign, but before we have time to register the fact, the moving floor has carried us along and we have been deposited at the front door of the Disney Innoventions Dream Home.
Clad in fieldstone set with arts-and-crafts wooden doors with Tiffany-style glass transoms, overhung with lattice hung with artificial flowers, it looks like a high-end casino. In the art nouveau ironwork of the railings one can make out that unmistakable circle, topped at ten and two o’clock by two smaller circles—the silhouette of the Mouse That Started It All. This bit of slipped-in iconography is known within Disneyland as a Hidden Mickey. It’s an actual Term of Art around here and one can spend hours trying to suss them out throughout the park, like looking for the “Ninas” in Hirschfeld drawings.
An interest in speculative social engineering has always been a part of the Disney mission. Epcot, now by all accounts little more than a glorified food court, stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The Dream Home follows in the steps of Tomorrowland’s original utopian domicile, the Monsanto House of the Future, sponsored by that corporation’s division of plastics, before the very word became an ironic joke. Opened in 1957, it was meant to represent a home in 1986. The Monsanto House featured such theretofore unheard-of marvels as a microwave, an ultrasonic dishwasher that rose from beneath the counter, closed-circuit-TV intercoms, and an electric razor. Old footage shows that it really was a wonder. A gorgeous building with walls of plastic windows, perched atop a central post, echoing Buckminster Fuller’s visionary Dymaxion House. The House of the Future was simultaneously sleek and voluptuous; imagine a gigantic futuristic cold-water faucet: a lovely white plus sign of a building with the mid-century grace of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, gently inflated like a water wing.
Contemporary accounts of the advent of electricity on the domestic front almost always make mention of a horrified realization of the kinds of filth people lived with before they could see it properly illuminated. The House of the Future’s atomic-age promise was a similar serenity born of cleanliness and the ease of achieving same. Built in an America of widespread prosperity, the brief efflorescence of sexual equality during World War II having been effectively quashed, it was a house that would be kept not by a promised slave class of robots doing all the work, as in Tom Morrow’s song, but by a growing middle class of servantless women. Economically scaled and compact—the boy’s and girl’s rooms were separated by a retractable wall—it was the extreme convenience of surfaces that could be wiped down, clutter that could be concealed behind immaculate laminate panels, that figures so heavily in the narration (“Here’s the answer to the continuous activity of the younger set … tough, durable, easily washable … Plastic, in combination with plywood, fiberglass … even the fabrics on the furniture are of man-made fibers,” says the voice-over. And then the proud kicker, “hardly a natural material appears anywhere”). The House of the Future stood near the entrance to Tomorrowland for a decade, until 1967. Apparently, the wrecking ball simply bounced off and the structure had to be taken apart piece by piece and carted away.
The Innoventions Dream Home is not a freestanding dwelling like its predecessor. It’s not even a full home. There is neither a master bedroom nor a bathroom. Instead it is a series of representative rooms occupying the ground floor of the Innoventions building, a two-story structure built in 1967 to house the General Electric Carousel of Progress. Innoventions was opened in 1998 as a hands-on, interactive exhibit that showcased the latest technological devices, such as voice-activated computers, high-definition TVs, and smart-cars. The second floor still has a driving course with a freaky psychedelic backdrop of planets and spaceships where one can try out a Segway, the device that was supposed to change everything but instead ended up as a punch line.
While we’re on the subject of outsized claims that border on the risible, can we pause for a moment to talk about that term, Innovention? A neologism that, in an effort to turbo-charge meaning, takes two perfectly eloquent and unassailable words and by combining them renders both suspect. It is a word developed by committee, one that can only be spoken unironically if one is being paid to do so, like menus in chain restaurants that list “Snacketizers” and “Appeteasers.” Can’t you just taste the process-mapping? The neon-orange layer of melted reconstituted-milk-solids-derived “cheese,” the pink stratum of animal-protein-cultured “meat”? Vacuum-packed and irradiated and shipped to some franchise that itself was unpacked from boxes sent directly from corporate, with ready-made walls of homey, weathered fake brick and battered retro license plates. “Innovention” can only leave a similar taste in the mouth. It makes one suspicious, wondering about the ways in which the object in question is found so wanting, so insufficiently innovative or lacking in invention to warrant this linguistic boost.
The home is a partnership between the theme park, a housing developer called Taylor Morrison, and various software companies, including Microsoft. Disney hired a playwright, Greg Atkins, and an art director, Tom Zofrea, in order to raise a visit to the Dream Home over and above mere electronics-showroom gawking, to create an “immersive” experience, an environment peopled by actual characters with an actual story. So the Dream Home is where the Elias family lives (another sort of Hidden Mickey, Elias was Walt Disney’s middle name). There is no formal script to speak of so much as a governing narrative, which is as follows: young Robbie Elias, age ten, scored the final goal for his soccer team, the Astro Blasters, thereby winning them the championship. The entire Elias family is off to Beijing for the finals and they’re having a big bash to celebrate and we, complete strangers, are invited.
There are multiple actors filling each role. The casting hews closely to the TV sitcom model, where the dads are fat guys reassuringly married to hot moms. There is a soccer coach, a supportive next-door neighbor (as well as her nosy counterpart, played by the same person, as best as I can tell from the show’s “bible” with which I am provided), a teenage daughter, and two grandparents to round out the characters: Grandma’s feisty and Grandpa is a good-natured fumferer. Both are shockingly young-looking.
The saga begins with Brian Elias, the dad, an architect, stepping out of the front door in his yellow soccer jersey and welcoming us, Our Town–like, with a monologue. “Hey everybody, how you doin’? You’re all here for the party. Well, as you probably know, my son Robbie’s so
ccer team, the Astro Blasters, just won the national championship and we are headed to China for the finals. Yeah!!! Not to brag too much but Robbie did score the winning goal. It was so cool. It was even covered by Good Morning America. We recorded it. It’s playing in the family room. Check it out. We all ready to party? Let’s go in!”
But wait! Things suddenly take a decidedly Ibsen turn. For you see, Brian Elias is locked out. Of his very own home. O, bitter irony for this architect by trade, this master builder, if you will. No worry, he shows us a fob that can open the door electronically. But “I’m really prone to losing things,” he tells us. “Like keys, fobs, my mind during tax time.” So he can also make use of the hand scanner that reads his palm as he passes it over an electronic console. Suddenly the Tiffany transoms fade away and are replaced by the telltale contrail of Tinker Bell tracing her phosphorescent path across the entire façade of his home. Brian runs through changing the windows to holiday displays for Halloween, the Fourth of July, and Christmas. “I’ll never have to untangle a string of lights again,” he tells us with a satisfied chuckle.
I am on a walk-through with Greg Atkins, the playwright. Aesthetically, the Dream Home is a mix of styles, a warm place full of wood, earth tones, and a multitude of well-chosen knick-knacks (all nailed down, not surprisingly). There are none of the Jetsonian fins and boomerangs nor surgical whites of an Apple Store that one associates with a past or present-day cutting-edge environment. The future, such as it is, is behind the walls, most notably in something called the Life/ware system, which has touch pads at the entrance to each room. Icons on the screen correspond to each Elias family member. When Dad presses his button, for example, the room adjusts itself to his various preprogrammed preferences: lighting, shades up or shades down, music playing, even the images that are displayed in the many digital picture frames all around. For Brian, who is an architect, the photos switch to things structural: an ink drawing of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a view of London with Norman Foster’s Gherkin office tower visible, as well as the double-helix ramps in his dome for the Reichstag in Berlin.
Atkins is an incredibly friendly guy who, while having enjoyed the experience of working on the Dream Home, hardly seems like a Kool-Aid drinker. He is pleased when I can identify a wall mural as being in the style of Maxfield Parrish, and downright thrilled when we enter the home for the first time and he has us turn left, because most people turn right, and I say “Paco Underwood,” referring to the retail anthropologist who observed this phenomenon (something I only know from reading Malcolm Gladwell). Either way, it earns me major points, which I proceed to lose five minutes later.
Above the door to the kitchen, a cross-stitch sampler reads KEEP IT SIMPLE. If spare means simple, then this spa-like kitchen is the place. The backsplashes are thick plastic embedded with yellow gingko leaves; a kidney-bean-shaped central island is of some icy frosted polymer. Even the sink is confoundingly austere, nothing more than a round stainless basin and a small metal lever. “Press down on it,” Atkins tells me. I do, and the faucet rises from underneath the counter like a curious asp. It is incredibly cool, and being able to retract something that might chip a plate or interfere with washing vegetables seems a genuinely practical application. Not so much the voice-activated kitchen computer. Like all omniscient machines possessed of benevolent intent but lacking decision-making power, it is a she. “Lillian” (Lillian was the name of Mrs. Disney) can read the radio frequency identification tag on a bag of flour, for example, and suggest recipes. She knows when one has run out of an ingredient and can connect to an online grocer and order more. That seems convenient enough, but does it require that one affix these RFID tags to all of one’s ingredients so that they fall within Lillian’s purview? That seems like a lot more work than writing a shopping list. More likely such items will be purchased already tagged by the supermarket. But will Lillian know, for example, when I’m down to three cloves of garlic? Enough for a sauce but a woefully short supply if I were contemplating making a gazpacho (he worried faggily).
I try some of the cupboards, which do not open. I think that, like on many stage sets, these are false fronts, until it is pointed out that we have punched the Dad preferences on the console. Apparently Dad engages with the kitchen on a strictly need-to-know basis, which instantly brings up associations to clandestine contents in drawers, Betty Friedan’s “the problem that has no name,” and the Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper.” Does pressing “Mom” give me an all-access pass to the bottle of Valium? The cabinet that holds the “personal massager” or box of cornstarch with the secret diaphragm in it, which is taken out and used during the joyless afternoon countertop rutting with Pedro, the grocery delivery boy (’scuse us, Lillian)? Oh, Eliases, what darkness you all conceal.
The picture frames on the breakfast-room walls show shifting images of children’s artwork. Authentic examples of “Best Dad in the World” type drawings made by Atkins’s own children, he tells me. This is Ignored Hint Number One. There are also beautiful food-related photographs of a coffee cup in Paris, bins of brightly colored spices at outdoor markets, all taken by Atkins from his travels. Ignored Hint Number Two: he is all over this room. Taking a fridge magnet printed with a bakery logo from a drawer, Atkins goes to the interactive “bulletin board,” and rubs the magnet against its surface. A lovely little girl comes up on the screen. Her name is Cassidy and she greets us and invites us to order baked goods. “Do you think that’s a pretty girl?” he asks me.
Suppose you are at a party. A man comes up to you, holding a silver tray of canapés. On his starched white shirtfront, there is a gaping, bleeding hole, the exact shape and size of his heart, revealing a glistening, bloody void. When you look down to his tray, what you see arrayed on all the toast points are slices of red flesh. You spy a valve, and something that looks very much like a section of aorta. Moreover, all the hors d’oeuvres are still pulsing with the life that only recently coursed through them. So when the man asks you if you would like to try one, and then adds, his voice laden with import, “I made them for you myself,” do you upend his tray, sending the snacks flying with a dismissive and disgusted, “Fuck no! That looks like heart and I loathe heart and anyone stupid enough to serve it to me!” Do you say that? No, you do not.
Unless you are an idiot.
So. “Do you think that’s a pretty girl?” he asks.
Because I am in Disneyland, where the dewiest nymphs seem more often than not the farthest thing from innocent, with a habit of disrobing for Annie Leibovitz or bearing children at the advanced age of sixteen, I allow as how yes, she seems lovely, if not a mite “chillingly professional.”
She is Tom Atkins’s daughter.
Atkins is too nice and classy a guy to do anything but laugh at my faux pas, but I beat a hasty retreat to the bedroom of the fictional teenage daughter (I read somewhere that she is named Chelsea, but the poor thing needs to work on her self-esteem since she introduces herself with a “Hi, I’m the daughter”). Two of the walls are interactive bulletin boards that can show artwork, photos, and movies. But the main attraction is her Magic Mirror. Looking through the glass at a camera, I am body-mapped and my face is scanned and refracted into an Eiffel Tower fretwork of planes and angles. The computer now recognizes me and, like the daughter, I can try on outfits virtually, without the tedium of having to actually disrobe and reclothe myself. The mirror offers me choices of hairstyles, accessories, dresses, etc. As a test, I am given a luxurian ’do of cascading black hair. Looking into the mirror, which has the tiniest time delay, the “hair” superimposes itself around my head, ebony and shiny and immovable as lacquered beetle wings. The dress they put on my body is a CGI creation, as smooth and undifferentiated as the skin of a dolphin. I am a bosomy porpoise. The garment, meant to simulate a swaying skirt, undulates like a sea anemone, even though I am not moving.
The son, Robbie Elias, has a bed shaped like a pirate ship in his bedroom. By opening a chip-enabled copy of Peter Pan,
something as simple as story time can be turned into a wholly different animal. The room is transformed into a sound-and-light show, with clips from the animated classic, full orchestral music, and Tinker Bell zooming past the windows and setting lampshades to spinning and drawers to slamming. At one point, the cannon at the foot of the bed begins to smoke, signaling its readiness to fire. Pulling the rope at the end of the barrel somehow causes it to shoot invisible cannonballs that pierce holes in the pillowy banks of clouds on the movie screens on the opposite walls. It’s very cool, but very, very stimulating. (Goodnight bowl of mush, Goodnight … oncoming speeding locomotive train!) An ancient and unimpeachably wholesome act of parenting is reengineered to be the equivalent of hooking one’s kid up to a glucose drip five minutes before bedtime. It also relieves any child of the task of using his imagination. The same thing happens in the dining room, where Atkins takes out an Eiffel Tower snow globe from a bibelot cabinet. Placing it on a special lighted shelf, the frames around us change to pictures from the Elias family vacation to France. “Then we can talk about our trip,” he says. Or, I think, we could talk about our trip. Someone has only to say, “Hey, remember that awesome trip we took to France?”
The Dream Home is, at best, an upgrade of gadgets already familiar to most people, like photo albums, for example. That kitchen faucet is undeniably nifty, and a coffee table whose surface is an interactive screen where one can page through a virtual copy of the original manuscript of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, downloaded from the British Library (a large iPad, basically, but we don’t know that yet), is absolutely covet-worthy. There is even some mild amusement in the Magic Mirror. But what might have been truly new, exciting, or groundbreaking has been punted on (more of that in a moment), leaving Atkins and Zofrea to sex up what is ultimately an electronics showroom for crowds, most of whom are carrying telephones that can already do half of the stuff here.