Pilvi Takala

Real Snow White, 2009

The absurd logic of the ‘real character’ and the extreme discipline of Disneyland become apparent when a real fan of Disney’s Snow White* is banned from entering the park in a Snow White costume. As visitors are encouraged to dress up and a lot of costume-like merchandise is sold at the park, the full costumes are only sold for children. The Disney slogan ‘Dreams Come True’ of course means dreams produced exclusively by Disney. Anything even slightly out of control immediately evokes fear of these real, possibly dark and perverse dreams coming true. The fantasy of the innocent Snow White doing something bad is so obviously real, that the security guards and management refer to it when explaining why the visitor can’t enter the park dressed up as Snow White.

You expose the park’s rigid control mechanisms, but also how intensely invested people are in the fiction you represent. That for me was key – our desire to buy into the fantasy. Disney’s fantasy is extremely well produced and the park is tightly controlled to create a specific image. But your fantasy has to be in line with Disney’s, which might be completely differetn from your relationship to the character in an animated film. (…) I was interested in how we transform into consumers at the gates of Disneyland. How adults, who wouldn’t mind anyone dressing as Snow White elsewhere, can claim that there is a ‘real’ Snow White in the park.