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SELLING
SAFETY: So, coming out of this, I have also become very interested in the theme parking of other kinds of spaces. Everybody knows well the work done on the redeveloped downtown, on regional shopping malls. This has been widely written about: the best work is by architectural historians and architects, like Margaret Crawford and Michael Sorkin, and also people in film studies, like Ann Firedberg, who is interested in the visual aspects of the shopping experience. But what I have been noticing is the specific role of multinational media corporations in re-shaping and re-styling spaces. I am thinking of a broad set of examples, Universal Studios CityWalk in Los Angeles, which is a simulated city space, places like the Viacom Stores and Disney Stores, which aim to sell brand as much as to sell merchandise, and the Disney redevelopment of 42nd St and Times Square, the ESPN bars and stores, but also pay-to enter playgrounds, arcades and adventure zones run by companies like Disney, Sega and Game Works. In these spaces, a broad spectrum of media content is infused into shopping spaces, neighbourhood spaces, places for children. Media producing and distributing conglomerates, like Dreamworks, Disney, Sega, Viacom, Universal, and MCA/Seagrams are interested in creating new kinds of places. Or, at least I see them as new kinds of places. This is taking place particularly in Southern California. There's an urban and suburban boom here, a speculative process of building new kinds of communities from scratch. As California's economy seems to be taking off again, it is constructing very extensive new suburbs at a fantastic rate. This is a process that has a strong focus on children and families, and I think media companies come in here, in the words of Michael Eisner, Disney's CEO, trying to 'hook up the inside with the outside'. These new media-filled spaces are attempts to hook up the traditional site of media consumption, which is the home and the family, with the public world. Ellen Seiter: I think that one of the things that was most compelling about your book was that it took apart in a very detailed way how Sea World got to be a place that is homogenous. You took the analysis far beyond simply saying, 'The price of admission is so high that it creates a homogeneous environment.' Sea World is part of a whole phenomenon of leisure targeting a specific segment of the upper middle classes which has money for vacations, and spends intensive amounts of money during these relatively brief vacation periods. For these affluent families, the sensibility is that expenditure on children is good and that places like Sea World maximise these magical moments of leisure time. What was so unusual about your book, however, was the way you went back into local history to show how the site of Sea World is geographically isolated, intentionally cut off from public transportation, and de facto segregated. The freeway is the only route to Sea World, although it is in the middle of San Diego. African-American kids in south east San Diego can't get there. Your local research in the development of San Diego's tourist economy in the 1950s and 60s demonstrated how class-and ethnically segregated spaces are made. Ticket prices are only one thing that cuts people out: zoning, transportation, and city-wide development decisions are another part of it. SD: The process is continuing in stark ways in the building boom now underway. There is a vacancy rate of under 2% in San Diego at the moment, for example, which means that people are coming here faster than the houses can be built. These houses are being built nowhere close to an older core, even outside the edge city, and this means new commercial service areas have to be built. This landscape is going to be determining people's experience for the next 75 years, unless we do things very differently. American suburbs are a pretty radical social experiment that arrays life before affluent people as a set of product choices. You choose your school, shopping centre, movie theatre, park and that is that. Everyone else pretty much fits themselves in as they can. This is what we perceive as and call community building. ES: A recent report done by a policy institute that is sponsored by the local Labour council (The Centre for Policy Initiatives) that said that only 1% of people in San Diego take public transportation to work. SD: Because it is impossible to do so. The real estate developers will not build, and will allow to be built, the transport infrastructure. ES: When people move to the suburbs, they are making a set of consumer choices related to children. Some of what is supporting the wildly inflated prices in the real estate market is the idea of children's safety. But the peculiarity is that we have this intensification of anxiety about the safety of affluent children who are already incredibly privileged and well off. These children have mothers to stay at home to take care of them, and their parents have bought homes in school districts where there is a quite homogeneous population. The shooting at the school in Colorado is an example of this incredible escalation of fear about the safety of kids. And the news reports here emphasised the utter incredulity of affluent parents everywhere that white kids with lots of money in supposedly good schools were capable of this sort of violence. There is a shocking disregard for the children of working class parents in much of this discourse. At some level, I think there is a growing recognition that if you are really worried about the safety of children you need to keep them closely supervised by adults - not necessarily mothers but adults (teachers, day care workers, counsellors, coaches, therapists) who are paid a decent wage and committed to working with children. (And of course gun control is necessary, too.) The United States has consistently opted for consumer solutions to the problems of caring for children: we have the proliferation of consumer products aimed at entertaining and educating children, like Club Disney - more and more expensive ways to entertain kids on weekends and during summer. SD: There is a funny and sad example of this which shows how thoroughly the commodified option for children has become the only option. Disneyland has a terrible problem every summer with parents who drop their kids off at Disneyland. Parents who can barely afford it buy their children annual passes to the theme park because it a lot cheaper than an expensive summer camp, which is the only other thing going. So there are these hordes of seven- to ten-year-olds going around Disneyland unsupervised and of course this raises lots of safety and enforcement and supervision issues for the theme park management. They are making and trying to enforce rules that keep parents from dropping the kids off. This shows the paradox of appeal as a safe place, a family friendly place, against the complete lack of social support for parents and children in any other realm than the expensive commodity realm. It shows that the explosion of these family oriented, media-linked and saturated commodities are directly related to a couple of decades of vigorous privatisation and disinvestment. It is no accident that in Southern California our taxation policies have disinvested in recreational centres, and child care and day-care, not to mention day care and schools and universities, at the same time as middle class families have had both parents pushed into the workforce. Then you have the explosion of Club Disney, Discovery Zone, Kindercare - a corporate day care provider chain. All this commercial space for kids is directly subsidised by the fact that its potential competition, the public sphere, has been largely, purposefully destroyed. There is very little in the way of support for families, and it is even worse for working class families. I see these two things as directly related. ES: There has been an amazing expansion of corporate culture into public schools - Pizza Hut offered at every public school in California for lunch. Every elementary school I know serves fast food from a major chain one day a week, and in the junior high schools all you have are Taco Bell, Pepsi, Pizza. The curriculum is full of corporate sponsorship, so that Barnes and Noble is going to sponsor your kids' reading club, and MacDonald's is going to sponsor your PE class, and the cable company is sponsoring your social studies lesson and wiring the school for 'free'. This is a massive PR effort with approved forms of children's culture. SD: Isn't it paradoxical that companies are creating these cultural spaces that are full of media - like Club Disney or Discovery Zone - at the same time when parents are really worried about how much media their kids are exposed to? ES: In my research, I have been interested in parent's oppositional readings of children's media. Under what circumstances does a parent look at a cartoon or a movie or a video game media and say that this is wrong, this one steps over the line. What precisely are the range of grounds on which adults object to children's culture? What makes parents say, 'OK this one is wrong and off limits'? In some ways I think children's media is one of the best places to talk about ideology because it is common in everyday conversation for adults to articulate their perceptions of ideological themes in the media. It is also very complexly interwoven with child-rearing practices, religion beliefs, gender roles, and class position. Some oppositional readings are now being catered to through niche markets. Affluent families are in many ways extremely invested in consumer goods and dependent on high ticket items such as computers, CD ROMs, educational materials, and books. Ironically, middle class adults spend enormous amounts of money in the attempt to shield children from mass market goods and television, and avoid advertising which directly targets children. There is this growing niche market for Christian fundamentalist parents - SD: Indeed, there is a Christian cartoon series called 'Veggie Tales' that is now really booming now on cable. Basically, it is Biblical precepts in cartoon form, taught by talking vegetables. It sounds silly, but is very popular in heavily Christian states. ES: What I tried to do in Television and New Media Audiences (1999) is tease out why objections to children's culture are narrower than they might be - so rather than saying 'I don't like having a character on my kid's T shirt', on the grounds that it is trashy and undistinguished (a violation of a taste culture) we need to think about why MacDonald's is sponsoring the jogging class at school rather than someone else. SD: Or we need to think about something scarier here in San Diego. Why is Monsanto, a major pesticide and genetically-engineering corporation sponsoring the environmental studies curriculum in the public schools system? ES: That is one of the most shocking examples of the naiveté in the US - SD: Well, I don't know if it is naiveté. The San Diego Natural History Museum, which is a small, non-profit museum, is desperately underfunded and has to take huge amounts of local and national sponsorship to keep going at all. This museum has developed an environmental studies curriculum for the elementary schools district in San Diego city and county. To do this they got funding from Monsanto corporation. This is what is referred to as a partnership with business, which is the buzzword in public school and university funding. I have friends who are environmental activists; they started the San Diego Cancer Coalition because they wanted people to understand the relationship between these very highly toxic chemicals that are often used in environments like schools and homes, and accelerating cancer rates. They have a small underfunded programme to encourage schools to reduce the use of dangerous chemicals and use safe alternatives in spaces where children are spending eight hours a day. You can imagine how these people feel when they see these chemical business partnerships come into the schools, described as 'environmental education!' I think there is naiveté and also celebration of these sorts of partnerships. The public and non-profit institutions are desperate for funds, but this raises the question of whether that so-called environmental curriculum is a curriculum, or a product, or is PR initiative. There is a deafening silence about these issues in Southern California. In Northern California there's more outrage about it and resistance to it. That's just one example of the spill-over of private interest into public institutions for children, of overt marketing to children. ES: My research on schools for Television and New Media Audiences showed that children's media spills over into everyday life in a way that the parents and teachers can't control. Licensed characters are a major presence in the public school environment; sexually explicit material is shown on television during all parts of the television schedule; children see lots of scary, graphic material on television news. Most popular children's entertainment contains material that many if not most adults think of as somewhere between mildly to completely inappropriate for young children. Even with Disney films, parents are often thinking 'gee I wish they didn't do that embarrassing, gross thing in the movie'. SD: What do you think is going on there? Is it Disney and Fox speaking to the eight year old sensibility? ES: Well, these companies have a veneer of wholesomeness and moral uplift, but the truth is that they are quite tuned in to the anarchic, unconscious, hedonistic strands in children's culture. Now sexual and scatological jokes are one thing when kids generate it - part of a tradition of kids folklore - but it is something else when adult screenwriters mimic it. I often find this kind of disengenuousness between what is in the Disney films - often a sort of randy, sexist humour - and the Disney concept of a warm and fuzzy family experience. SD: A friend of mine gets the Disney channel, I don't because of where I live, and he said that he has been surprised to watch stuff that is pitched at eight and nine year olds with his daughter and to see relationships between boys and girls really be figured as adolescent and sexual. So in other words you have a nine year old boy ogling a nine year old girl, which is not really what is happening to most nine year olds. ES: The entertainment industries clearly have a more Freudian model of the child, which is the child as sexual, interested in bodily functions, and experiencing rage and anger against adults. These things have always existed very uncomfortably alongside American puritanical ideas about childhood. SD: There is this seizure of a role of moral guardianship by companies like Disney that are on the one hand commodifying everything as fast as they can, and at the same time saying that this is a safe commodity. That is certainly how the Disney redevelopment of Times Square has been talked about. The city of New York has been saying, all right, true, this is New York City's historic entertainment district, but if it is going to be that we are going to bring in the clean wholesome powerful tourist draw. There has been a twenty year struggle in Manhattan by real estate companies to seize control of land that was affected by recessions and corporate movement out of Manhattan. The idea was on the one hand to make a lot of money out of this redevelopment, but also to clean up Times Square, clean out the sex trade, and also clean out the small businesses and low income residents who were clustered around there. These people and businesses were seen to stand in the way of turning this into high rise offices. To make a long story short, nothing worked until Disney became one of the anchors of this new district, with their new Amsterdam Theatre and Disney Store. Since then several more media corporations and other 'anchors' have been persuaded to cluster in that area. It's both economic and an ideological process, changing a major tourist attraction in Manhattan from a sleazy but interesting place into a high end tourism-dominated, corporate-dominated space. It is not clear whether this has been as successful an operation as everyone wanted it to be, not at all clear that Times Square has been entirely 'cleaned up', as all kinds of activities proliferate there, as you would expect in a dense city. But this is an example of how some cultural products are understood in the US as clean and safe for families, no matter what environments they are inserted in to, no matter what their actual uses are. Disney as a brand means 'safety'. ES: When Disney and opened the Amsterdam Theatre with the stage version of the film Beauty and the Beast , it was an interesting success in terms of dragging out the profitability of a license to new lengths, squeezing every last drop out of a movie property. The ticket prices are really astronomical - in a way these Disney stage productions become one of the ultimate high-income family travel destination spots. So much effort is going into targeting the highest end of the family market. I am scratching my head about this. Can they really make so much money off the very high end of the market that they don't they need the mass market anymore? SD: Well, the strategy doesn't work with every product, and they have had some real bombs in terms of filmed entertainment that hasn't taken off. But Beauty and the Beast is an example of real success. What Disney has been brilliant about doing is making that concept a product on so many levels at once, in so many places, that this multileveled quality is its profitability. The New Amsterdam was a real coup, and conversely, New York City has helped to bestow enormous prestige on Disney. Yes, talk about PR, and the prestige of Disney in New York, the PR is just sensational, and the sense that is a philanthropic effort, Disney are giving us our cultural heritage back. That very much has to do with tourism in Manhattan, but with regard to the New Amsterdam theatre, this represents the high end of the market, but it launches touring versions of the show, and TV shows, cheap ice-capade versions and travelling road shows of Beauty and the Beast, and all the licensed characters as well. ES: When you repeat these characters so many times in so many proliferations you lose the sense of fixed meanings of the characters. Beauty and the Beast was hailed as having a plucky heroine who has got her nose in a book, but really the story was very much about male murderous rage, and how girls need to be tuned into the sources of this murderous rage in men. It is another version of an old Hollywood saw about relations between the sexes: men really they love you even when they appear to be trying to kill you. I remember seeing Beauty and the Beast with my daughter when she was four years old and thinking oh please... In my interviews with pre-school teachers they all had the gender critique of Disney, they all were aware of a general sexism in Disney and at the same time felt that it was nothing to get too upset about. In terms of the children's culture, the girls did seize on Disney stories - because Disney pretty much has the girls' market sewn up. In their playground games, Disney heroines were dominant: Belle from Beauty and the Beast; Ariel from Little Mermaid; Mulan, etc. But when they played Beauty and the Beast it was largely about Belle and her dog, or her horse, or her pets - the Beast hardly figured in it at all. Really the girls play a variant of house, and the struggle is who gets to play the dominant female. Heterosexual romance isn't much part of it. Another interesting thing for me is how they are getting adults to buy all these Disney products, the way Disneyland is having weddings. This idea that you are interested in Disney for life, that the magic of Disney is touching your heart for life. SD: I teach a class on the Disney industries and some of the students are what I call Disney nationalists, they want to work there for life, and tell the truth sometimes I am completely lost in this, I don't know how to figure it out. Disney seems to offer a set of values that people aren't getting from anywhere else, and Disney is so good at getting their products out there. ES: My experiences of teaching children's culture is that there is a great deal of rapture in Disney culture, so the best interventions to make pedagogically are around labour practices. You know, 'did you ever have a relative who worked at Disney over the summer?' It seems to be one of the only entryways in to politicise students a little bit, because if you just do the ideological critique of it as popular culture, what we were doing in the seventies and eighties, the students look at you like you don't have any magic in your heart, you don't know how to be young again. SD: Well, certainly in my Disney class there is always someone who has worked in the operations division at Disneyland, which is the division running the theme park, and doing crowd management. That student always stops the show, and their classmates sit there with their mouths open, as they tell them how it is a repetitive, humiliating, low wage job where they are not treated with a great deal of respect. Anything that hooks up consumption to production is demystifying and I think you are right that students admire the strength and the power of the organisation, which has something to do, here at UCSD with their class background as well. That is why my classes are always so full, they want to get a job with the company. They aspire to be part of something that is so influential. Students think that what Disney is selling is something called imagination, and I try to talk to them about what we mean by imagination and about how the fact that these licensed images are everywhere is evidence of a certain kind of imagination, but it is evidence of a marketing imagination. On the one hand they admire that, but if you talk to them about how this takes up a lot of space, and crowds other things out, pushes other kinds of culture and cultural production out, and how it is only available to people who can afford to buy it, that sometimes is a way to get them to question it. ES: When I teach superheroes and cartoons I like to talk about which evils of the world are off limits from these fantasies, and the different kinds of social explanations that are buried in the cartoons. Umberto Eco pointed this out in his classic piece on Superman: he can do anything in the world but all he devotes himself to is protecting private property, catching robbers, etc. Ann Dyson has written a remarkable book Writing Superheroes (1997), where she follows superhero stories into an Oakland classroom and talks about the kinds of arguments they provoke between the black kids and white kids, the boys and girls over fairness, and how, in their own stories, the kids often come up with more genuinely utopian fantasies than what they are accustomed to. SD: It seems to me that a lot of your recent work is very responsive to intense and contemporary American political situations, vis a vis criticisms of and attitudes toward media. It's a kind of ethnographic history of the present. In some ways, it even is very Southwestern since the sunbelt in many ways leads the US rhetorically on these issues. Orange County, San Diego county are a kind of cutting edge way of life, though perhaps not one we'd personally prefer. You do get to see privatization up very very close - you get to see the influence of fundamentalist Christianity up close, in our own kids' schools. So, where do you see your work going next? Are you going to go deeper into these media and taste culture issues? ES: Most recently I produced a CD-ROM about television superhero characters that included games, stories, pictures, and other media for kids and their educators to use. In the US there is an increased interest in media literacy, and I think it is important for academics with sophisticated understandings of media aesthetics and audiences and industries to try to influence some of this curriculum. So this CD ROM is my attempt to make an intervention at the level of curriculum. The CD ROM is for children and adults to play together and in many ways its goal is to help parents and teachers to see and understand the complex relationship between the images and stories of the popular media and the imaginative play of young children. HeroTV integrates materials from a classroom ethnography research project in which I worked with teachers to bring superheroes into a preschool for positive, nonviolent, and imaginative encounters. So the CD ROM complements TV's images and plots with real kids' stories and drawings. I don't think superheroes should be banned and I think that censorship is a poor response to the contemporary environment of children's media. Children find superhero stories very compelling and powerful. You can't explain their appeal as simply TV brainwashing kids. Genuine imagination and exploration go on in kids' superhero play and storytelling. One of my goals is to widen the scope of media literacy education (which in the US has tended to focus on the lack of realism and the preponderance of violence) to include a focus on racial, ethnic and gender stereotyping, and on political economics - there are quizzes and games testing knowledge of the workings of the toy and television industries. In my next project, I am starting an after school programme in an elementary school in a working class, ethnically diverse section of San Diego. The goal is to help the kids produce a community newspaper while teaching journalism, desktop publishing and digital photography. Susan Davis, George Lipsitz and Jane Rhodes are going to teach with me in this new programme so it will bring a strong cultural studies/ethnic studies component into the project. The project is set in a community centre where the executive director, Scott Kessler, is a radical and an activist, and has a deep feeling for the ways the city's political decisions impact on children's lives. I think bringing scholars into the community and into a potentially activist context and using multimedia education as a pretext for community journalism may produce some interesting results! SD: As for myself, I want to do more work on the ways place is created - the ways it is being even more thoroughly commercialised than it has been up to now - and that fact that, as it seems to me, this intensive commercialization makes place itself valuable. I think the place builders - real estate conglomerates increasingly involved with media conglomerates - realise that place with a cast of authenticity, a vernacular quality - is enormously appealing. Jon Goss has written about this vis a vis festival malls and market places - how their designers need to create crowds and festivity as away of building life into spaces that are quite instrumental. What's not been noticed enough, and is still developing I think, are attempts to use commercial spaces to create a new public life and a sense of being collectively. Much of what's being emulated are the old cinema-going experiences of earlier periods. Those were, of course, extensively commercial too, but not so fully designed out of market research criteria. It's interesting that these corporate public spaces are always looking backward and trying to reinvent a marketable gloss of public life. I don't see any sense of some possible new public life in their imaginations. It's all about the centralised creation of intensity, and on very socially selective and filtering bases. Ellen Seiter teaches in communication at UC San Diego, and her recent book Television and New Media Audiences is published by Oxford University Press, 1999. Susan Davies teaches in Communication at UC San Diego, and her recent book, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience was published by University of California Press in 1997. |
