Dark Ride to the Source

Over the course of thirty-six hours, my daughter and I rode with Mr. Toad into the depths of hell, squinted at a bonfire of sewing spindles, choked on hairspray, broke the fourth wall at least fifteen times, smiled at a thousand strangers, fell asleep with grease-glistening fingers, and learned to navigate the Lightning Lane as if it were a second language. We sang each other the Small World song and begged each other to stop singing the Small World song. We braved the dynamite and shadows of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, where my first boyfriend once sank into the glittering depths of a doom-skewed mushroom trip; and in the darkness of Space Mountain, we felt as close as we’d felt since the womb. Or at least, I did. The gap between I and we grew and shrank like the bathroom lines: nonexistent, then massive. I lost and regained faith in myself as a good mother many times, often over the course of a single hour. I felt a kinship with other parents whose children sported impossibly large frozen lemonades, or light-up wands—my kindred capitulators, my kind—and I spent massive amounts of money, and hated capitalism, and googled Disneyland Annual Pass and hated myself. 

I felt great surges of love for strangers, our fellow revelers: elderly couples sitting in side-by-side motorized scooters on the Mark Twain riverboat, virgins wearing First Time pins, a woman breastfeeding in the darkness of an animatronic-pirate grotto, a burly man with a Millennium Falcon tattoo giving his wife a hard time about texting too much. Were you working? She was getting a poor performance evaluation on her capacity for leisure. 

You haven’t lived until you’ve watched your child stand on a pile of fake treasure, at the edge of a fake island, in the middle of a fake lake, and shout in a guttural demonic voice “All of this is mine!” In truth I was a little bit horrified, but also immediately gratified, because I realized it would make an incredible photo, and photos were the treasure I was hoarding. It was a kind of digital mercantilism, gathering all those images as proof. Of what? Her joy. My own ability to bring her joy. Photos were the symbolic representation of our happiness the same way money is the symbolic representation of power. We paid money; we got bliss. Like most of the ostensibly altruistic feats of parenting, taking her to Disneyland was also deeply self-involved. I felt like her happiness was something she owed me—as if I were collecting my dues, this proof of my child’s joy, in repayment for my labor: the work of keeping her alive for six-and-a-half years, and then delivering her to the Happiest Place on Earth. 

The happiest place on Earth: the primal fantasy of Disneyland is essentially one of acquisition and optimization, as if happiness itself were a commodity that could be hoarded. Purchased like a plastic wand. Sucked down like a frozen lemonade. Ridden like a rocket through the womb.

Ever since I was young—a child of Los Angeles, a bookworm with a taste for fairy tales, a high-femme acolyte at the temple of princess-adjacent beauty ideals—I have loved Disneyland. Passionately, defensively, preemptively, snobbishly. (Disney World who?) The Ivy League professor I’ve become knows that Disneyland is deeply flawed: a capitalist thirst trap that preys on escapist fantasies, delusional nostalgia, archaic gender scripts, and patriotic confections of American history scrubbed clean of genocidal violence. But the child I was? She simply loved it. Unmitigated, unqualified, intoxicating, rapturous, immersive, wish-I-could-curl-up-and-die-in-it love. And that child still lives. She still loves. 

The first time I can remember crying at beauty, actually crying from the sense that something was so beautiful I could hardly stand it, was at Disneyland. We were celebrating my friend’s birthday, and the whole day felt almost impossibly sweet, a frosted layer cake of sentiment and spectacle: the Magic Castle at dusk, the fireworks, the baby-tee clad bodies of my friends beside me, our inside jokes and funny voices, the sweaty-palmed feeling of holding hands in the twilight—honestly, remembering it now almost brings me to tears again.

When my boyfriend took mushrooms in Frontierland, a couple years later, we were staying awake till morning—graduating seniors got to spend all night in the park—and when he pulled the withered little mushroom caps from a plastic baggie in his pocket, I told myself I didn’t need them. My glands already produced enough wonder. But there was something mildly exciting about the fact that he was on mushrooms—every good girl likes a boy on a trip—and then his trip went bad, and you’d think that would have made me glad not be on mushrooms, but really it only made me regret it. Why did I have to play babysitter? If I wasn’t going to get to transcend our proximate reality for another one—shimmering and luscious, collapsing space-time all around us—at least I wanted to be the one in crisis. 

At Harvard a few months later, surrounded by the red-brick pageantry and elaborate rituals of East Coast elitism, I felt ashamed of my hometown. Los Angeles was shallow and superficial; everyone got nose jobs and fake tits and nobody read Heidegger. No one even understood winter. I decided that if I wore enough wool scarves—or at least, the same wool scarf enough times—I might pass as someone from New York instead. I was embarrassed by Los Angeles, but also convinced that everyone had gotten it wrong, misunderstood it, reduced and distorted it. As a way of defending Los Angeles, I became fiercely defensive of Disneyland, because Disneyland felt like everything people didn’t like about LA on steroids: the fantasy, the saccharine, the sunshine. 

At our college literary magazine, perched in a little wooden clapboard house with gin-sticky floors, we talked about short stories other students had submitted—we took it so seriously, their achievements and their failings—and I found myself with the overpowering, almost primitive urge to write a story set entirely at Disneyland, which felt like the absolute opposite of Harvard, although both were part of me: the mascot of my deep core, on the one hand, and my aspirational yearning, on the other. I wanted to stitch the former into the fabric of the latter. My story was about the end of youth, and anorexia—both preoccupations of mine back then—about the desire to stop time and disappear from the world. It included rhapsodic evocations of both mountains, Splash and Space, the prose unfurling across breathless sentences that looped like roller coaster tracks, but its heart belonged to one ride: Pirates of the Caribbean. At the climax of the story, my narrator literally steps off the boat, wades knee-deep through the dark water, and walks toward the burning pirate town. She wanted to be reborn among the pirate dead. She lived out a fantasy I’d had myself, many times—to stay on the ride forever, to never leave the fantasy. 

All this to say: I loved Disneyland as a kid and I loved it as a teenager, and once I moved away from home, I loved it even more fiercely than I’d loved it before. By the time my daughter turned six, it felt like my entire history had brought me to this threshold: taking my child to Disneyland. I wanted to watch her overwhelmed by the uncomplicated joy I could no longer surrender to—at least, not uncomplicatedly—myself. 

The moment we arrived at the park, on a sunny April morning, she wanted to go straight to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The iconic silhouette. She was clear about her intentions. She didn’t just want to see the castle, she wanted to go inside it. I grew anxious, and told her I didn't know if we could actually go inside. Her adamance brought us right to the crux: Would her desires prove impossible to satisfy because she wanted the fantasy to be real? 

It was on Pirates that I realized the pleasure of Disneyland wasn’t just about disappearing into fantasy, it was about disappearing into fantasy together.

After we’d crossed the drawbridge, she pointed out a doorway in the side of the castle, “Of course you can get inside, Mama,” she said, ever patient with my doubt. We found ourselves in a series of narrow faux-stone hallways devoted to a “walk-through” retelling of Sleeping Beauty comprised of elaborate dioramas nestled inside sconce-lit alcoves: spurned Maleficent with her menacing horns, the fairy godmothers scooting around like superhero grandmas, the futile bonfire of spindles that fails to save anyone from the dark machinations of destiny. It’s as if the story is really happening, a peep show playing out in the deep subconscious recesses of the castle; and when you step into Fantasyland, you get to enter it. 

Back in the 1950s, Disney invented something utterly new with his signature dark rides, which moved riders through immersive landscapes that brought familiar stories to life. People wondered why you never saw Snow White on the ride; it’s because you were Snow White on the ride. You weren’t reading the story. You were in it. As Pinocchio, you escape the sinister puppet-master and slide into your own personal rumspringa at debauched Pleasure Island; as Alice in Wonderland, you ride a caterpillar car into the wild kingdom of the Queen of Hearts, where the King shares the great lesson of his life: Rule 42: The Queen Always Wins.

Fourteen years into sobriety, it’s possible that dark rides are the closest I will ever get to any kind of hallucinogenic experience. Your body physically enters the story; it’s the great unfulfillable fantasy of youth. Indeed, one of the things that Disneyland gets right is that we don’t simply want to see fantasy; we want to live inside it—and it’s not just children who crave this immersion. Adults want it too. 

At the beginning of Mickey’s Runaway Railway, my daughter and I stood among strangers in front of a large movie screen and watched a cartoon about a picnic gone wrong. At the climactic moment, a runaway train actually bursts through the screen, tearing it open to reveal a whole world on the other side: the fourth wall broken, as my daughter’s eyes, gleaming and thrilled, watched a seam torn open in the fabric of reality. 

The screen broke, and we stepped through the rupture. We stepped into the beyond. 

That first day we were ambitious and well-hydrated. We darted from ride to ride with the determination and dexterity of cartoon sidekicks. We stopped for no man. (Except one man with a churro.) We rode the Astro Orbitor at sunset and Astro Blasters just after; “it’s a small world!” (more than once) and the Monorail (a mistake). We claimed Tom Sawyer Island and the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse as our own by exploring every inch of them. 

All the while, my daughter kept pressing on the boundary between fantasy and reality as if it were a bruise. She told me she felt like she was really being shot at beside a Frontierland arcade game, then solemnly informed me that the man in an eye patch we’d seen on Tom Sawyer Island “wasn’t a real pirate.” Her voice was matter-of-fact; she was a purveyor of information and a dispeller of falsehoods. But of course she was saying it aloud for a reason: She wasn’t sure whether or not to believe it. 

Standing in line for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, we passed the spot where my high school boyfriend reached the nadir of his shroom-fueled hero’s journey, pawing at the red rock with his bare palms and trying to explain to me what he was seeing. Back then I hadn’t known whether he wanted me to say none of it was real, or all of it was; and with my daughter, I didn’t know either. Did she want me to corroborate the fantasies of this place? Or did she need me to be the reality principle? I think she wanted to have it both ways: to believe and not believe at once. She wanted to feel fully immersed in the fantasy, but she also wanted to touch the truth of reality, like when she was first learning to swim: She loved pushing away from the wall of the pool, and she loved the safety of reaching for it again. Living in the liminal space between the real and unreal was a pleasurable discomfort, a thrilling uncertainty. 

But another part of her wanted to cross the threshold fully and step right into the dream. All day long, she kept reminding me about the white-hot core of her Disneyland fantasy. She wanted to visit the “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique,” where ordinary girls find themselves turned into princesses, and ostensibly feminist mothers find themselves turned into shameful betrayers of the cause. I told her we didn’t have a reservation. A classic chess move. I was buying time.

So many Disney films involve a crucial moment of transition or awakening—Sleeping Beauty and Snow White raised from their enchanted slumbers; Cinderella magic-wand-tapped into a luminous princess—and the promise at the core of Disneyland is one of alchemy as well, that you will feel not just transported but transformed. One of the accusations often hurled at Disneyland, that it invites us all into escapist fantasies, has always felt more useful as a question: Who does fantasy allow us to become? If we stop making Disneyland a scapegoat and allow it instead to become a teacher, a sunbaked and sugarcoated Virgil, it has something to teach us—about our own relationships to nostalgia and myth, about the parts of ourselves that want to dress up as princesses or follow dark rides into simulated danger; about the parts of us that want to die as pirates, lounge around with skeletons, and then get reborn, and die once more—and do it again, and again, and again. 

Before it was the Happiest Place on Earth, Disneyland was just 160 acres of orange trees in the middle of nowhere. Walt Disney had a vision, but no one else believed in it: that he could create an attraction utterly unlike anything that existed, far from everything else, and that people would flock from far and wide to see it. Essentially, that he could build a place where people could disappear—mind, body, and soul—into imagination, and that they’d pay to do it. 

He was right, of course. Since its opening, more than 780 million visitors have made the pilgrimage. As historian Richard Snow writes, “In the mid-1950s, nobody had heard the term ‘theme park’ (nor would anyone, until Disney built the first).” The closest thing we had was something like Coney Island, which Disney had visited and hated. (He said, “the whole thing is almost enough to destroy your faith in human nature.”) He imagined himself building the anti-Coney Island, a clean and wholesome realm. By the time it opened, Snow writes, “he’d hocked his life insurance, sold his summer home, and borrowed every dollar he could to build what was a three-dimensional tribute not so much to himself as to how he would like to see the world, and persuade others to see it.” 

The park opened on July 17, 1955, a brutally hot day in the middle of the Cold War. Disney had planned and built the park in just two years, a feverish blur of late-night brainstorming sessions fueled by milkshakes, tuna fish sandwiches, and Chesterfield cigarettes. Disney’s commitment to immersion was studious and comprehensive: dirt embankments to block out the noise and bleak expanses of the world beyond; live trees and foliage imported from all over the world; artificial waterways with union boatmen to navigate them. By making sure that even necessities like food and bathrooms were “on theme,” Disney found a way to make even the crass facts of embodiment part of the fantasy. Take a shit in a jungle hideout! On his carousel, Disney wanted every horse to be a jumper—he had no time for stationary horses, why bother? 

Disney made himself at home in his own fantasy, building himself an apartment above the fire house on Main Street and celebrating his thirtieth wedding anniversary on the inaugural cruise of the Mark Twain Riverboat. He was on a first-name basis with everyone: Call me Walt, he said. Only mister around here is Mister Toad. But Not-Mister was still used to being the boss. When he sent a postcard of the Matterhorn to one of his art directors, he wrote only two words on the back: Build This. Always, he was thinking about keeping his visitors enraptured, keeping them caught between overwhelm and confidence. He wanted them to feel lost in the magic. He wanted them, always, to want something more. 

He arranged the park around iconic landmarks—the Moonliner rocket, the railroad station, the castle—that he called “wienies,” named for a habit he shared with his poodle, Duchess: When he came home from work, he’d pull out two raw hot dogs from the fridge, eating one himself and offering the other to Duchess, dropping small morsels that she’d follow room to room. In this way, his park visitors were like beloved pets, guided by morsels of wonder, led from delight to delight in the grand mansion he’d built for them. 

Seventy years later, losing ourselves in this land of indulgence, the long lines felt like the only trace of something virtuously difficult. We couldn’t get everything we wanted right away; we had to wait. Our boredom felt like the price we paid for the promised land; like a pilgrim bloodying his heels on his long journey. “I’ve never been this bored in my entire life,” my daughter said, approximately four minutes into a forty-minute line for “it’s a small world!” We filled the time with games of Exquisite Corpse, drawing wild Frankenstein creatures that felt like unruly alternatives to the wide-eyed princesses strolling around us: a pirate with nipples and visible waves of stench coming off his elbows, with a boat for a leg and a popsicle for a face. 

Sometimes I filled the time with stories of Disneyland’s disastrous opening day: How kids got stuck on the canal boats and had to get pulled back by rope; how the Dumbo ride kept squirting white goo that someone had to catch in a bucket (this was called “milking the elephant”). My daughter loved these early disasters, perhaps because Disneyland had become such a seamless creature, titanic and invulnerable—a great megapolis full of every pleasure she could imagine—that there was real pleasure to be had in imagining it riddled with troubles. No story pleased her more, however, than the one about the sprinklers that spouted orange juice—a plumbing error that felt like a testimony to something endlessly extravagant at the core of this place. Even its plumbing ran sweeter than water. 

Whenever we got bored, I told myself that waiting in line was like doing calisthenics: My daughter was developing her inner resources. But the desire to make every experience worthwhile for her, even standing in line—How can standing in line strengthen her imaginative muscles?—began to feel like another version of the impulse at the core of this place: to have not just a good experience but the best possible experience. Even the slogan Happiest Place on Earth feels like an indictment as much as a promise: If you aren’t happy here, you haven’t done it right. 

If Disneyland clobbers you with fantasies of doing it right, then nothing made them immediately actionable as effectively as the Lightning Lane, a paid service on our Disney “Genie app” that allowed us to snag time slots in expedited lines. (In the Lightning Lane, I found a way to fail even the strange definition of virtue I’d attached to waiting in line.) Before long, I’d become fanatical about booking our next Lightning Lane immediately after redeeming the last one, getting agitated when I didn’t have reception in the gleaming fortress of Space Mountain and couldn’t reserve our next one right away, finding myself quietly impatient with my daughter: Stop exploring that secret pirate’s grotto! We’ve got to haul ass to Mickey’s Runaway Railroad! I grew so focused on my own Lightning Lane strategies that I started judging other people for theirs: squinting at folks who’d “spent” their current Lightning Lanes on lines that only saved them ten minutes, Look at these fools! Who had I become? Hovering under the surface of my devotion to getting the Lightning Lane just right, there was—of course—a deeper sorrow, missing the Disneyland of my youth, when there was no possibility of booking anything on an app, when you had no choice but to wander around and wait for a really fucking long time for every single ride. 

The stress of the Lightning Lane was the stress of feeling total optimization within my grasp: The ridiculous sense that if I could use it just right, we’d have the maximum amount of fun; that if I could just make all the right choices, I’d give my daughter an experience that matched the dream she’d brought with her. (At the end of the Indiana Jones ride, a solemn temple voice intones: “Real rewards await those who choose wisely.”) It’s a distilled, steroidal, high-gloss version of the anxiety at the core of parenting itself: If I can just make all the right choices, then my daughter will find and realize the best version of herself. This delusion is at once self-aggrandizing, self-punishing, and utterly false. I don’t control her, she is subject to many influences beyond my own, and some part of her is beyond any influence, anyway. It is her own. As my best friend once reminded me: A parent is not a carpenter; she is a gardener. We don’t construct our children. We tend to them.

That first afternoon, my daughter was in fierce pursuit of the perfect amount of fear. She liked the fast turns on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad but not the dynamite. She liked the whooshing wind and rushing stars and delicious darkness and stomach butterflies of Space Mountain, but she hated everything about Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye, especially the giant cobra with the glowing red eyes. Fantasy scared her more than anything physical. She loves a big drop, a hairpin turn, big speed, big wind, a big splash. But the sight of the Evil Queen’s poison apple? It brought her to tears. 

She was committed to the inner chemistry experiment of titrating her own fear—I want to open my eyes for THIS part of the ride, but not this one—and she liked the rhythms of fear and consolation. Holding my hand after being scared was superior to not being scared at all. It was emotional hygge: Coming into a warm living room after heading into the cold was far better than never venturing into the cold in the first place. 

My daughter felt betrayed, however, whenever I failed her as a collaborator in these calibrations of anxiety. As we left Snow White’s Enchanted Wish, she was angry that I hadn’t been able to warn her about exactly when the poisoned apple would appear, so she’d had to keep her eyes closed the whole time. I hadn’t understood that warning her about the apple was my job until I’d failed at it. As she verged toward meltdown, I could feel myself splitting into two selves: a physical self that stayed on the ground with her, feeling a rising panic—as if the fact that she was starting to cry here, at Disneyland, was a special kind of failure, even as it also seemed an almost inevitable byproduct of the high expectations we’d brought with us—and also a rising frustration with her, Don’t make me feel like I’ve failed to make you happy! 

Another self hovered above us both, understanding that she was angry because she’d been afraid, and that she felt betrayed by me whenever I could not single-handedly solve her problems. This spectral second self, floating above our physical bodies as they hustled toward the exit, tried to deal with my anxiety about her meltdown by coming up with plausible psychological explanations for her meltdown. That old delusion: the faith that understanding a problem well enough might make it go away.

In her quest for the right amount of fear, my daughter found her perfect match in Pirates of the Caribbean. The first time we rode it, she loved it with Goldilocks-style gusto: It gave her something to be afraid of, but not too much to be afraid of. It felt so good—almost sinful—that my favorite ride was now her favorite ride.

But what can I say? We both loved Pirates. We loved the goats with gold necklaces; the octopus clutching a crystal pendant with one of his tentacles; the pirate skeleton drinking red wine that moved in a wavering red plume down his esophagus. We loved the robot pirate who dangled his dirty foot over the railing of a bridge, and loved crying out in whisper voices “Get your stinky foot away from us!” We thrilled at the pirate hiding in a barrel, with his fingers over his lips. Sssh. Don’t tell. We wouldn’t. We would keep his secret forever. 

We loved the gentle rocking of our boat, the swimming-pool smell in the dark, and the way the pirates kept insisting the same thing, their voices like parrots calling from the dark, over and over: “Dead Men Tell No Tales.” Every time we heard it, she liked to whisper in my ear, “Why are you telling us? We know already!” and giggle madly, and sometimes I’d say it too, in the bright sunlight or the early dusk, just to hear that sweet pure peal of her laughter—which wasn’t pure at all, of course, the way nothing is. It was full of the money I’d paid for us to be here, the delusional vision of America that surrounded us, the sugar in our blood. But still, it felt good to hear it. It felt better than anything.

Our second time on Pirates, when we rode past a pirate skeleton lounging in a bed full of treasure, and I let go of her hand for a moment to take a picture, she cried, “Mama!” and immediately grabbed my hand again, indignant that I’d momentarily taken myself away from her in order to preserve the moment for posterity. It felt like a tiny indictment: I’d betrayed her for the way I wanted to someday remember her, and when she grabbed my hand back, she was asking me to return to the present tense.

It was on Pirates—sitting pressed together on our boat, feeling the heat of her hand in my hand, sneaking glimpses at the gleam of her eyes in the dark—that I realized the pleasure of Disneyland wasn’t just about disappearing into fantasy, it was about disappearing into fantasy together. What closeness comes from slipping into a shared dream? It’s the intimacy of a shared retreat from the larger world, a shared set of reference points and memories, and a shared vulnerability: the suspension of disbelief, the entry into these dark and garish holy places, the surrender to fear and wonder. It wasn’t that I felt everything my daughter felt—fear, wonder, surrender, resistance—but that I could stay close to her as she felt it, even if her imagination was a place where she would always be, on some level, alone. 

Once it was dark, we stumbled back to the Grand Californian Hotel, a soaring cathedral of craftsman stained glass and faux redwood logs. Our boxy room was little more than an electrical outlet we plugged ourselves into, curled up like commas in our shared bed, still glowing from the faint thrill of our names displayed on the TV screen. We were as hungry as athletes, or soldiers. She had a grilled cheese with neon orange oozing from its belly; I ate my cheeseburger like an animal. As we snuggled in bed, her breath still smelled faintly of chocolate milk. It was satisfying—almost hypnotic, always a relief—to listen to her breathing go slow and steady as she drifted into sleep. 

Our second morning, we were inside the park gates by 7:30 a.m. Because we’d stayed at a Disney hotel, we got early access. We headed straight to Fantasyland. 

As we crossed the drawbridge and walked through the castle, my daughter finally asked what her eyes had been asking ever since we woke up: Could she get the makeover?

I'd never been obsessed with princesses myself, and her attachment to this makeover felt like a betrayal. She was turning her back on the overlap in our Venn diagrams. Gardener, not carpenter. I repeated this like a mantra. But carpenter or not, it was clearly my fault. I’d let her watch Disney movies. I wore dresses nearly every day; sometimes told her she looked pretty and then frantically, abruptly added other compliments, “And you have a big heart! And a huge imagination!” in a way that probably just reinforced for her the idea that all these traits were inescapably linked. 

Reader, I said yes. I took my daughter to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique. She turned into Elsa, the ice queen from Frozen; she got her nails painted and her hair braided and sprayed, covered with some kind of sparkle frost and then sprinkled with a pixie dust that was supposed to make her dreams come true. She’d been asking for this makeover for months, but once she was inside of it, her voice turned brittle and fragile, like something was about to break inside of her, to crack open with happiness or disappointment; her mood quivered like a glass of water so full it was about to spill over the brim at any moment.  

After the makeover was finished, after the dramatic “mirror reveal” that left her almost stunned, in a stupor, she was in a volatile mood, see-sawing between emphatic declarations—I love it—and tender moments of uncertainty—Does it look okay? She tripped over her frost-blue dress only moments after leaving the boutique, as if it were forcing an absurdly on-the-nose objective correlative: Princesses can’t play. She was cold, but she didn’t want to wear her jacket. That way you couldn’t see her gown! 

The “meaning” of Disneyland isn’t just about the descent into fantasy; it’s also about the struggle of emergence. It’s about what we carry back with us.

Near Goofy’s Play Yard, she held up traffic in the bathroom because she was looking at herself in the mirror too long; I almost died. I’d been complicit in making her want terrible things, and then I’d given them to her. I’d taught her to injure herself in ways that felt like desire. It wasn’t just my high-femme style or the fact that we’d watched Disney movies. I wondered if the faint whiff of my old eating disorder still clung to me like stale body odor, the claustrophobia of my old obsessions: counting calories, running endless treadmill sessions, living toward my numbers on my dorm-closet scale. Back then I’d understood anorexia as an attempt to escape reality, an attempt to stay on the dark ride forever, but in the years since, I’d come to understand it more fully as an exaggerated reflection of reality, like an elongating fun-house mirror: Don’t take up too much space. Don’t give yourself what you want. When I allowed my daughter to dress up like a princess, maybe I was opening the doorway to this unholy chamber of fixations. Put on this dress. Deform yourself to fit inside of it. 

I compensated for my guilt by asking her too many questions about how she was feeling. My surveillance of her mood was annoying, I knew, and very American. Was she having fun now? And now? And now? I wanted to optimize her fun the same way I wanted to use the Lightning Lane app to optimize our schedule. It felt like failure whenever she was unhappy—wanting candy I wouldn’t get her, furiously sorrowful that she wouldn’t be getting a glowing light-up ice cube in her lemonade—and always her unhappiness felt like proof that I hadn’t equipped her well enough to tolerate moments of frustration. I felt a shameful sense of pleasure when I saw other kids struggling, or other parents growing frustrated. Was this schadenfreude, or just a sense of relief that my own struggles were not proof of deficiency? (Perhaps all schadenfreude just a sense of relief that our own struggles are not proof of deficiency?)

When the moment finally arrived to meet our first princess (Snow White), it was almost overwhelming to watch the little girls meeting her in front of us: their shyness; their stupefied silence; their bashful adoration. Their awe was like humidity in the air. They waited for the princess to tell them how to speak. She asked them how far they’d traveled, and what treats they’d eaten on the journey. She told them the dwarves loved gooseberry pie. It was like watching these girls meet in the flesh the ideals that would compel and tyrannize them for the rest of their lives: perfection, sweetness, and devotion to the comfort of others. 

Observing my daughter’s fragile mood after the makeover, I felt like a gardener who’d let arsenic leach into the soil. I sensed her brittleness was neither satisfaction nor disappointment but a more precarious feeling that shuttled wildly between these poles. It had something to do with the ways we are undone by getting what we want. No longer consolidated by desire, we fall apart a little. It’s more comfortable to live inside a state of wanting, because it is intrinsically a state of hope. Once we get something, we have to reckon with whether getting it made us as happy as we’d hoped it would. 

We spent most of our second day returning to what we already loved, and by the middle of the day, we were mostly just riding Pirates over and over again. We’d get in line as soon as we exited—no need to discuss, really, we just looked at each other for confirmation. After riding enough times past the Blue Bayou—the restaurant located inside the ride, a backyard strung with glowing lights—we finally decided to eat there, helping ourselves to overpriced thimble-sized portions of white bean cassoulet and crab cakes. It felt thrillingly transgressive to eat something inside the dark ride, as if we were Persephone and this tiny portion of cassoulet would tether us to this sing-song underworld for good. 

By the fourth or fifth time we rode, my daughter had figured out exactly how to manage her fear of the talking skull at the start: She would keep her eyes closed for the skull itself, but as soon it was out of sight, I should let her know, so she could open her eyes for the waterfall drop into darkness. After we listened to this talking skull repeat its mantra enough times—dead men tell no tales—my daughter finally remarked that really the ride was actually nothing but dead men telling tales: flocks of talking skeletons, the chatty skull presiding over everything. 

Dead men tell no tales. It felt apt enough. The park is a dreamscape scrubbed clean of the dead, an America whitewashed of its crimes: the Wild West without the slaughter of Native Americans, only swinging-door saloons and red-rock railroads; Adventureland without the stain of imperial cruelty, all alliteration and animatronic alligators; New Orleans Square without slave auctions, only decorative balconies and bordello-adjacent décor. The spiritual and material landscapes of the park rage against mortality itself—all this violence so aggressively erased that one easily imagines Lady Macbeth standing at the edge of the park, rubbing her hands, Out damned spot. Disneyland offers not only the promise of escaping reality but the delusion of living outside of history itself. Disneyland invites you to indulge in the fantasy of evil as something “over there,” neatly delineated from the forces of good, rather than something diffuse and closer to home: the war your tax dollars are funding, the labor that made your iPhone. My daughter’s joy at everything around us hardly felt like an excuse; in fact, it felt like an even deeper indictment. What was I teaching her to love in this landscape of revisionist history—this wonderland of historical amnesia? 

As long as Disneyland has existed, people have hated it. Not casually, but fiercely. I felt their breath on our necks the whole time. It’s not unlike Newton’s third law. The rabid love that some people have for this place inspires an equal and opposite reaction in others. Just three years after the park opened, the writer Julian Halevy offered this cool truffle of understatement in The Nation: “One feels our whole mass culture heading up the dark river to the source—that heart of darkness where Mr. Disney traffics in pastel-trinketed evil for gold and ivory.” At the core of his attack were the accusations of sentimentality and escapism: “Life is bright-colored, clean, cute, titivating, safe, mediocre, inoffensive to the lowest common denominator, and somehow poignantly inhuman…The invitation and challenge of real living is abandoned.”

Our fifth time on Pirates, or maybe our sixth, the conveyor belt at the end of the ride stopped working, the one that brought our boats back to the end of the ride. Our boats started backing up, right next to the pirate who said over and over again, “I humbly accept this magnificent treasure,” and we rocked gently in the water, as the pirates rattled the bars of their pirate-prison beside us. We rocked a little harder whenever another boat bumped the cue from behind. That’s when my daughter said it: “I wish we could stay on this ride forever.” 

Just like the narrator of my story, who wanted to stay on the ride forever, and then actually tried—stepped into the dark water and walked into the fantasy. The surge of resonance I felt just then—at the fact that my daughter had somehow arrived at the same longing my own character had felt, twenty years earlier—stank of something deeply delusional, as if I wanted my daughter to be the heroine of a narrative I was writing. (Don’t all parents fantasize that our children might follow the scripts we write for them?)

Of course, we couldn’t stay on the ride forever. We had to return to the sunlight, deliver ourselves to the endless asphalt of the parking lot, and surrender to the stuttering of stop-and-go traffic all the way home.

Baked into the experience of Disneyland is the experience of the come down: exiting the fantasy and returning to the logistics and demands of daily life. On Space Mountain, I was fascinated—and god help me, moved—by what I’d privately started to think of as rocket-ship pathos: the experience of stepping off the ride just as someone else was stepping onto it. The people leaving the ride had just lost the thing they’d been waiting for—they could no longer look forward to it—just as the people getting onto the ride were poised at the threshold, just about to experience it. I began to feel powerful surges of pity for the riders disembarking from the rocket ships: It was all over for them. This is a microcosm of the larger sadness of exiting the park and blinking in the harsh asphalt glare of the dismal parking lot: stepping out of fantasy and back into day jobs and bedtime friction, dismal headlines and the impotence of reading them. 

In his withering early critique, Halevy accused Disneyland of offering the existential equivalent of sentimental comfort food (“the invitation and challenge of real living is abandoned”), but I think Jean Baudrillard gets it closer to right. In Simulations, his 1983 treatise on Disneyland, Baudrillard describes the park as “real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit.” 

Disneyland is not just a warm bath of fantasy; it’s also that sharp, chilling sensation of leaving the bath, and facing the cold air on your nerves again. Like the conveyer belt at the end of Pirates, bringing us back to the sunlight; like the brittle aftermath of transforming into a princess, and stumbling around the park in a frost-blue skirt; like the tiny sadness of stepping off the ride each time; like the sagging sadness of clicking through the turnstile on the way out.

Baudrillard’s iconic analysis of Disneyland effectively inverts at least one common critique of it. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,” he writes. He argues that the grotesquely fantastical landscape of Disneyland becomes a means of “concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” In other words: The explicit, garish fakeness of Disneyland is just a way of convincing us of the reality of everything else. In this logic, even critiquing the fakeness of Disneyland, by contrasting it to the “real” world beyond its dirt embankments, effectively co-signs on the most powerful delusion it’s selling. It’s as if Disneyland were a pickpocket, distracting us with its elaborate theatrics from the real crime—the true theft—happening elsewhere. 

I find myself greeting Baudrillard as a comrade in a certain project of defense, though I suspect he likely wouldn’t feel the same way: I appreciate the way he turns the critiques back on themselves, forces them to confront what they are evading in their righteousness, and their desire to quarantine fantasy over there, when really the fantasy is all around us. It’s more honest to understand that our joy is always steeped in the juices of capitalism and amnesia; better to confront this directly. 

Which is all to say that leaving the park wasn’t the end of Disneyland but something more like its climax: passing through the turnstile and crossing the endless parking lot, squinting at the photo I’d taken of our parked car in a sad simulation of squinting at the candy-colored park map; watching the whole park complex get smaller in the rearview mirror as we joined the vast, gleaming snake of rush-hour traffic lurching and honking its way north on Interstate 5. 

The “meaning” of Disneyland isn’t just about the descent into fantasy; it’s also about the struggle of emergence. It’s about what we carry back with us, what it feels like to cross the border from the imaginary back to the parking lot: not only the quiet, irrational disappointment—can’t I stay on the ride forever?—but also the effort to console and regulate ourselves as we return to reality. Console and regulate myself? I was forty years old. But there was something about Disneyland that made me feel young—not just the return to childish glee, but the return to a certain childhood stubbornness. I want good feelings forever! As Baudrillard points out, framing Disneyland as the opposite of the “real” is part of the larger desire to “believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere.” We aren’t all children. But we are all living in fantasy. I don’t mean to suggest that the fantasies of Disneyland felt the same for me and for my daughter. In fact, part of the work of coming back from my fantasy involved cracking open the pronoun itself, that "we" that I kept binging on like comfort food, and remembering that my daughter and I didn’t feel the same things—even though sometimes, in the park, it had felt that way. 

Once we left the park, I tracked the ways my daughter kept it close to her. Back at my mother’s house, she wanted my mom and brother to see her in her princess dress and makeover, with the glitter in her hair and the opalescent veils fluttering from her shoulders; she wore her dress on the flight home; she carefully portioned out the Nerds we’d gotten on Main Street so that for days she could keep putting little rainbow-colored pieces of the park inside of her. In these gestures, I watched her reckoning with leaving the fantasy behind, just like I watched her reckon every night with the process of leaving behind her imaginary play—the work of extricating herself from her own intricate storylines and changing into her pajamas. 

For me, leaving Disneyland also meant leaving behind the pleasure-heavy version of parenting that it briefly allowed me to inhabit: joining my daughter in that IV drip of wonder, sharing our suspension of disbelief, binging on the delusion that we were passing our feelings back and forth like a single hydraulic system; giggling at our little inside jokes and points of reference; and this shared joy was fine and good, as a passing tone, a peak experience, but it was not reality. Or rather, it was not the total reality of durational, multivalent, ongoing everyday life. The sense of our total communion was itself a kind of dark ride, my own dark ride: this brief, fleeting reinhabitance of the womb-dyad. That’s what I had to accept, as we found ourselves thrown back on the sunbaked asphalt shores of the parking lot: We hadn’t shared a consciousness at Disneyland, and we didn’t share a consciousness anywhere else either. 

So yes, I’d felt moments of absolute togetherness in our joy, but that state of absolute togetherness wasn’t sustainable. It wouldn’t give us oxygen. Like fantasy, that kind of radical togetherness is meant to be inhabited, and then returned from. It’s the passage back and forth that keeps our nerve endings alive, that keeps us earthbound and yearning—not escaping the invitation and challenge of real living, but perpetually returning to it. 

At the edge of the parking lot, we had to rejoin the rest of humanity in a big lurching river of traffic. We had to return to the daily rhythms of our actual life: the daily struggle over hair-brushing, the finger-work of coaxing out her nightly rat-nests; waffles burned in the toaster and steaming bowls of ramen and spelling-bingo homework; negotiating how many more slices of cucumber, how many more minutes of playing before bed; how many times her voice would call from her darkened room: One more little snack. One more kiss. One more hug for my stuffy who can’t fall asleep…

The moment we left the parking lot, my daughter leaned forward in the backseat and asked me the inevitable question: When will we go back?