A headache in technicolour. A commercialist hymn to storytelling and cultural appropriation. A delicious cocktail that still manages to be one third rush-hour, one third waiting in queues and one third motion sickness. I get vertigo even thinking about Disneyland.
In fact, I’m reliably informed that I was still crying out in fear in my sleep two mornings after experiencing the Hollywood Hotel, otherwise known as the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. I’m not going to elaborate on what the ride entails. If you know, you know; if you don’t, I’d rather not spoil it (at least not until paragraph five). I went into the entire Euro Disney park fairly cold - in that I had no clue what the three days would offer - and I’m glad I did so. Had I known about the Twilight Zone ride, I wouldn’t have boarded it in the first place. The experience was a little like watching Audition for the first time, or a Shyamalan; that unexpected jolt - clearly teased, when I thought about it after the event - is what ‘got me’. It was like seeing Ghostwatch as an unsuspecting twelve-year-old all over again.
Because, actually, despite the paraphernalia of a theme park I've already listed - the disorientation and noise and pervasive scent of candy floss - it’s the storytelling that Disney does like no one else.
As a father of two, and a comic book geek, I have a fairly solid grounding of the Marvel universe, and Star Wars has been around longer than I have. Pixar too, has lurked on my cinematic radar since the mid-nineties. But these are recent Disney acquisitions. The squeaky mice and flying pixies and bashful princesses have never done it for me and, while I can’t deny a certain ‘magic’ at seeing costumed characters weaving amongst the hoi polloi, what struck me was the background plotting that went into each and every theme park ride. These aren’t just your average carny-constructed entertainments, hastily bolted together roller coasters from the back of a circus truck. Each ride has its own justifiable, in-world reason for being there. The queues themselves, nine times out of ten, take you on a figurative journey deeper into those fictions. The Star Tours queue weaves you past various animated characters in a bustling spaceport, including C3P0 tinkering with a Starspeeder, and, before you know it, your vessel’s intercepted by Imperial forces on the other side of hyperspace. Similarly, the wait for the Avengers’ Flight Force simulator is disguised as anything but a wait, as Iron Man and Captain Marvel foreshadow the imminent interception of Kree warheads.
Admittedly, these stories are functional sketches, designed to make the waiting less arduous, a teasing appetiser for the screaming ride itself. But in the case of the Twilight Zone Tower, it goes beyond simple preamble and incitement; the supernatural backstory of the tower becomes integral to the metafictional experience as a whole. Entering the dusty, dilapidated hotel lobby, guests are ushered by sinister bellhops into an old library, where the power fails with a flash of lightning, sparking an old-fashioned TV set to life which begins playing the opening to The Twilight Zone, going on to explain how on a stormy night in 1939 the side of the tower was struck by lightning and five people disappeared from the elevator along with an entire wing of the building. Guests are then channelled through the boiler room and invited to board… an elevator.
So far so good. Once in the ride-car, a ghostly child-star, one of the victims of the original storm, hovers in the air and sings ‘I wouldn’t go in there, if I were you.’ It’s hammy, in a delightfully Disney way, but you feel at ease. And then things become a paralysing panoply of torment and terror. The car ascends, then plummets faster than gravity. Then again, and again. Forever. It’s pitch dark. Ghostly voices continue. Eventually, the elevator cranks its way to the top of the tower and the wide elevator doors thunk open to reveal glorious daylight. It’s over. The nightmare is over. But wait… You’re a million feet above the Paris park and have just enough time to register this before… The endless freefall winds you once more, tethering you to this life by a thin seatbelt.
I’m forty-four. My brother’s forty-one. We held hands. Nothing had prepared me for that ride, and I’ve flown Ryanair before. Twenty years ago, I took part in a skydive against my better judgement and that was nothing compared to this shithousery.
It was so effective for a number of reasons. But, chiefly, because it’s Disneyland. Disney. The house of the mouse. The fairy-tale castles. Tinkerbell’s glittery pixie dust. The last thing you expect is a gnawing terror that haunts you at three in the morning successive nights running (I’m a wimp, it’s clear, because my eight-year-old daughter was pretty chill about it afterwards). And yet, woven into the dark, dark fabric of that experience, is the lore and world-building that helped make it so spine-tingling. A simple ride that shot you up and down wouldn’t have half the lasting potency; it was the anticipatory, spectral myth-making power behind it that propelled the Tower of Terror forwards. Or downwards, rather. That and the torque of a faster-than-freefall-hauling giant motor.
I bloody loved it, but I will never go on it again. Not until the next time I plummet asleep, that is.
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