Tourism

Before discussing something particularly interesting to me in Illouz's article, I want to say that I really enjoyed reading it because it was a. so well grounded with simple examples at points where the language is mildly ambiguous, b. very cogently written, and c. it is a very clear nuancing of older ideas that does not "call them out" as being wrong, but very appropriately recognizes that these ideas may be latent in other critiques/analyses of consumer culture, but ought to be made explicit - simultaneously recognizing this article is a point of departure/expansion, rather than the end all be all of articles on emotion and consumerism.

So, I'm not sure if we're going to talk about this later, but I want to talk a little bit about the tourism that is mentioned in the article. I think the points made about LA Gang Tours are really interesting, so I'm going to work in a slightly different direction - towards the particularly hyperreal tourism that goes on. Of course, disaster tourism is itself in many ways hyperreal by constructing a safe space of experience while looking at disaster, but I'm more interested in the particularly hyperreal tourist attractions. Which of course brings up Disneyland.

Mainstreet USA kind of defines hyperreality; it is a sign for the idealized America of the 1950s that never really existed. Not to mention the rest of the park - and Disney even went a step further by making it so for most people, once they visited the park, it was already nostalgic since they already knew the park because of the TV show The Wonderful World of Disney. Here's the opening:

This is really interesting to me from a consumer level because it means not only is there nostalgia present in the literal presentation of Mainstreet USA (which at the time must have been very surreal - an attraction that is already nostalgic for itself), but there is also some feeling of nostalgia/etc for the show/watching the show. Further, we know it is unreal, yet it still evokes a sense of nostalgia for the past. I think Baudrillard's point about the function of Disneyland is really salient in this particular case - "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation." In the context of LA Gang Tours in particular, this makes a lot of sense - the tours seem more real because Disneyland is less than an hour away, and those tours are NOT the idealized America (well, maybe they are in some sense) that Disneyland marks. Indeed, our nostalgia/emotions towards the rest of our consumer society are in some way taken out of the realm of fictional emotion because of places like Disneyland. I think this works further on the level of other advertising (like for toothpaste), where our emotions that are derived from consumer habits (like going to the mall and whatever else) seem more real because they do not flow directly/they do not copy exactly the model presented by advertisements.