Holidays in Heck (25 page)

Tomorrowland survived being homeless. But it lost its zest. Walt had died in 1966, and Disney Inc. was deprived of his instinct for America's flights of fancy. For example, Tomorrowland's Hall of Chemistry closed that same year, just as an entire generation of me and my friends got
very
interested in chemicals.

Nothing speaks of living in the present like getting a complete makeover, which Tomorrowland endured in 1998. Disney, displaying one of the greatest absences of irony on record, gave Tomorrowland a “retro” theme.

Disney's press release called the new Tomorrowland “a classic future environment.” This explains the Astro Orbiter ride, built in a style that might be called “Jules Vernacular,” with lots of exposed rivet heads, ogee-shaped pieces of wrought iron containing circular holes, and rockets with nose cones like the Eiffel Tower. “Classic future” also excuses the Chevron-sponsored Autopia, a holdover from the Tomorrow-land of yore where tourists can drive on a “superhighway”—with divided lanes!—in quarter-scale fiberglass imitations of the dream cars at auto shows when Ike was in office.

My family and I arrived at Disneyland on a hot June day. We had spent the preceding two hours stuck in traffic on an un-super Interstate 5, idling away $4.35 gasoline in a rental car that was no one's idea of a dream. Autopia did not appeal.

But there was a part of moldy old Tomorrowland that wasn't past its sell-by date. A fresh-minted House of the Future had had its ribbon-cutting—with laser scissors?—earlier that month. These digs were completely original and all
brand (specifically: Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Life|ware brand) new.

Mrs. O. took our younger children, Poppet and Buster, “to infinity and beyond” (Buzz Lightyear being integral to the classic future's canon). And I led ten-year-old Muffin to utopia's latest abode.

Muffin, like her dad as a kid, is a midget aesthete, though with an interest more in interior than edifice. She has a good eye (if somewhat too great a fondness for cute kittens). My wife and I actually consult her about paint colors and where pictures should be hung. I didn't tell Muffin what I was up to, or Disney's press office, either. We eschewed friendly hovering. I wanted my daughter's gut reaction. And if that gut reaction was as strong and as positive as mine had been in 1957, if Muffin uttered the 2008 kidspeak translation of “It's neat”—“Omigod, awesome”—then we, as a civilization, are doomed.

I say this because I'd read a February 13 Associated Press story by Gillian Flaccus, “Disney Rebuilds ‘House of the Future' with Tech Giants' Help.” Various passages caught my attention and piqued my blood pressure: “Lights and thermostats will automatically adjust when people walk into a room.” My wife, for example. All winter long—with heating oil costing more per gallon than the brand of vodka we've been reduced to buying—my wife walks into a room, and the thermostat is adjusted to eighty degrees. First that sentence from the AP started a fight in my mind with my wife. Then the next sentence turned my wife on me, tooth and nail: “Closets will help pick out the right dress for a party.” The article went on to explain, “Mirrors and closets could identify clothes and suggest matching outfits.” Imagine having a full-length looking glass
and
a husband tell you, “That makes your butt look big.”

Following upon the stifling bedroom with its closet full of body image insecurities and bitchy fashion comments came, “Countertops will be able to identify groceries set on them and make menu suggestions.” You've just come back from a family trip to the Shop-N-Pay. (And, I gather, in the new House of the Future, you don't have to beam up the canned goods from the sub-household carport.) The tantrums over checkout lane candy and gum and the attempts to avert children's eyes from the cover of
Us
are over. Sticker shock has worn off. Everybody's in a pretty good mood. And suddenly the strip of Formica between the sink and the stove pipes up in a computer-generated snivel: “I hate asparagus.” “Muffin took all the Skittles.” “Meat loaf
again
?” Probably the fridge chimes in, “Well, if you don't like meat loaf make your own damn dinner.” And this is assuming that the kitchen doesn't have IT problems or an e-mail virus or an inputting error that causes the countertop to go, “macaroniandcheesemacaroniandcheesemacaroniand . . .” We already have a four-year-old who does that.

“Much of the project,” Flaccus wrote, “will showcase a network that makes the house ‘smart' and follows family members from room to room—even adjusting artwork—to preset personal preferences.”

So I enter the “great room.” (HoF II is described as having 5,000 square feet and only two bedrooms, so I assume we've got a McMansion here.) I encounter bracing fresh air, Remington bronzes, and Buddy Holly on the sound system. My wife is greeted with cozy warmth, abstract expressionism, and Bach. Muffin receives kitten portraits and the
High School Musical
score. Her younger siblings, Poppet and Buster, get plush toys, Tonka trucks, and Raffitunes.

But
what happens when we all walk in together? Just how smart is this house? Does it launch into a pathetic attempt to make everybody happy? Norman Rockwell limned some kittens and a cowboy or two and even an illustration of a museum guard puzzling over a Jackson Pollock. Maybe the Boston Pops does “Baby Beluga” to a rockabilly beat. There could be a blazing fire on one side and a freezing draft on the other. Or does the smart house, like many brainy types, get angry when it's conflicted? Our living space turns into a sauna hung with hellish works of Francis Bacon while Philip Glass blares and all the playthings come from China slathered in lead paint. I showed the AP article to my wife. She said, “You don't sell a house like this; you divorce it.”

Muffin and I trudged across Tomorrowland, following intermittent and unenthusiastic signage, toward the House of the Future. The way in was at the top of a spiral ramp that should have been an Archimedes' screw of a people mover, or something, especially since it ascended a building that once held the “General Electric Carousel of Progress.” (This merry-go-round of human improvement broke down in 1973.) Muffin asked where we were going. I told her and she said, “So it's really, really, modern?” It was more modern than that. HoF II has a subprime mortgage, or so it appeared. The joint was closed up.

“Technical difficulties,” said a Disney “cast member.”

I listened at the roped-off entrance for a telltale sound of “macaroniandcheesemacaroniandcheesemacaroniandcheese,” but I heard nothing. So one had to wonder.

I invoked what media privileges I have and called Disney public relations. John McClintock, a senior publicist, could not have been more polite and understanding. He
did what he could to get my daughter and me just a walk-through and a look-around. That was all you got with the old House of the Future anyway, although HoF II comes with performers portraying a future family (which still has one mom and one dad, amazingly enough). I understand you'll get to visit with them while they play-act packing for a trip to China—posters of Chairman Mao on the “adjusting art”; tunes from
Flower Drum Song
playing in the background; closets scolding, “That will get
so
wrinkled in the suitcase”; and countertop warning, “Don't order snake.”

McClintock called back. “Technical difficulties,” he said, plus a firm no-go from his higher-ups.

Muffin and I could look over a railing into the ceiling-free household one floor below us. It has a single-story open plan with a circular shape, though the circularity seems to have more to do with the roundness of the old Carousel of Progress and crowd control than with futurism. Not that there were any crowds trying to get in. As far as I could tell nobody but Muffin and I noticed that HoF II wasn't open.

I boosted Muffin so she could get a better view. Her preteen snarkiness blended with childish disappointment. “It looks like our hotel,” she said.

Not even. And where we were staying was best described as “Schlitz-Carlton.”

According to Disney, the shape of things to come takes shape at Pottery Barn, with a quick stop in Restoration Hardware for “classic future” touches and a trip to Target to get throw rugs and cheap Japanese paper lanterns. HoF II was designed by the Taylor Morrison company, a home builder specializing in anodyne subdevelopmental housing in the Southwest. The company's president and CEO told the Associated Press, “The 1950s home didn't look like anything,
anywhere. It was space-age and kind of cold. We didn't want the home to intimidate the visitors.”

Muffin wasn't scared. To my profound relief she wasn't interested at all. Though, in fairness, only a few of the HoF II innovations were discernible from our perch. The art on the walls, set in fussy gilt frames, did keep changing. I couldn't see quite what the changes were, but I'm guessing Manet to Monet and back.

The variegating artwork summoned memories of my Great-Aunt Lillian's annual visits. She was a very amateur painter. On the day before her arrival my mother would make a frantic rush to the attic to dig out her wealthy, childless relative's oeuvre. (Many depictions of kittens, as I recall.) Unfaded spaces on our wallpaper did not match the shapes of Aunt Lil's paintings, and she left us nothing in her will.

A coffee table in HoF II displayed, via Power Point–type projection, the text and original John Tenniel illustrations of
Alice in Wonderland
. “Daddy, read me a coffee table.” Family photos were scattered around, cased in conventional silver plate. But there was something lap-toppy about the backs of the pictures that suggested they were video capable. Uncle Mike on the mantel, forever recounting his Iwo Jima exploits.

HoF II's kitchen table had plasma screen place mats showing water rippling over rocks—just the sort of thing a drinking man wants waving away under his eggs in the morning.

I asked Muffin, “Well, what do you think of the House of the Future?”

“It's beige,” she said. Beige it is, literally—upholstered, carpeted, and painted in brownish, grayish, yellowish hues. And beige it is metaphorically. Any random dull normal person (we have one in our house) could come up with snappier
ideas for the future than HoF II seems to contain. How about self-washing windows? Automobiles have had them since the 1930s. And have you watched the clever manner by which modern convertible car tops operate? What keeps that technology from being applied to self-making beds? If a house
must
be smart (and, as a man who is continually outwitted by his wife, children, and dogs, the house can dummy up and mind its own beeswax as far as I'm concerned), then why can't it be as smart as a Toyota? Toyotas start their wipers at the first drop of rain. I wouldn't mind a house that could close its own windows, although I'm sure my thumb will be there when they slam shut.

Such ideas are too simply reasonable for Tomorrowland. In HoF II, according to the AP, “When a resident clicks a TV remote . . . lights will dim, music will shut off and the shades will draw. . . .” What if it's a beautiful day outside, I'm reading the paper and humming along to “Hello Peggy Sue,” and I just want to check the NASDAQ?

I saw no mention of the Disney house having one of those robot vacuum cleaners that trundles around hoovering on its own agenda. I hope HoF II at least has that. I want to see it face off against my Boston bull terrier. I'm giving two-to-one odds against the vacuum. Even better would be a helium balloon with a propeller and a mop of feathers that flew around dusting things. It might not do a very good job dusting, but at our house, neither do we.

I polled the family, to get their ideas of how a domicile could be inventive. My wife suggested that the “smart” closet cut the wisecracks about her knockoff Jimmy Choos and close its doors and do the dry cleaning (with ecologically friendly solvents, of course). She also proposed a “face bidet” for chocolate-smeared kiddies and an iPod “nag chip” that
periodically interrupts to tell children to do their homework, clean their rooms, etc.

Muffin wants to install hot air dryers in our shower “to save the earth's towels.” She also has an idea for a spiral slide from her bedroom to the garage. The chute would be rigged with her clothes so that she could slide right into them. Homework and packed lunch would be pressed into her hands and milk, juice, and cereal piped into her mouth as she descended to the backseat of the car. Thus Muffin figures she could go from bed to being on the way to school in one minute flat.

Poppet, our eight-year-old, envisions a system of pneumatic tubes that would deliver the stuffed animal of her choosing to the place of her choice, worldwide.

Buster, who's four, said, “Dogs on the potty.” A serious challenge to the plumbing industry, not to mention the dogs, but it's a worthy goal.

Even if Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Life|ware have no ideas whatsoever you'd think they could tap Disney's proven reserves of whimsy. Where's Mrs. Teapot, her son Chip, the officious candlestick, and the chairs that walk around in
Beauty and the Beast
? Where is the
plastic
inventiveness of Mickey and Donald cartoons? Where is Gyro Gearloose when we need him?

Denigrating the future has been a main prop of the intellectual edifice for the past forty years. Looking forward went out of fashion about the time that Buckminster Fuller's audacious geodesic domes, meant to cover entire cities, wound up as hippie-height wobbling commune structures cobbled together out of barn boards. Bruce Handy, writing in
Time
about Disney's 1998 reopening of a deliberately outof-date Tomorrowland, began his essay with the sentence, “The future isn't what it used to be.” He stated, “It's not a
novel observation to point out that our culture has become increasingly backward looking.” And he asked, “Hasn't life become messier as it's become easier?”