Consuming the West

Abstract

Main Street, USA is the corridor to the Disneyland parks, whether in Los Angeles, Paris, Florida, or Tokyo. Main Street offers the appearance of a public space, with architectural references to civic institutions, but is a bounded and privatized site, which requires an entrance fee. Main Street offers a nostalgic construction of early twentieth century American small-town life. It is also the space in the theme parks that is most dedicated to consumption. Main Street is an idealized urban landscape that has not stopped at the theme park; the Disney owned town, “Celebration,” in Florida is organized around the same nostalgic wish for an urban context that offers itself as both traditional and modern. Main Street offers a version of America frozen at a point of late nineteenth century modernity; it presents a mythical reconciliation of past and future, ecology and consumption, and the local and the global in its simulacrum of a small-town America which could never have existed, but which can be endlessly reproduced across the globe.