Theme Park as the Spectacle

Can one perceive, in these Situationist texts of 1933-58 (Disneyland opened in 1955), an impulse towards a politicized Disneyland-the theme park as Situation and unitary urban field? "That which changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than what changes our way of seeing painting. . . . It is necessary to throw new forces into the battle of leisure.
...
The comforts of Disneyland and Disney World reveal a paradox of control by presenting the highest degree of user-friendliness in a human-technology interface while situating it within a
massively centralized apparatus.
...
All this occurs within the most protected, centralized, and technocratic of environments: complex spaces that raise pertinent questions for the understanding of techno-cultural formations; spaces that present both a traditionally grounded humanization of technology and the disembodying postmodern experience of a technological sublime; an installation which is the most extensive and explicit of strategic spaces, but which assimilates visitor tactics in the process of building a technological interface. Here Baudrillard's most euphoric and despairing pronouncements both find continual figuration.

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