Hyper-reality

When you walk down Main Street USA in the Magic Kingdom, the buildings tower over you.  But, not as much as you think.  While they appear to have multiple floors, the buildings actually are cleverly designed using an optical trick.  The facades of the upper floors diminish in size the higher they are.  If you could view them at eye level, you would find that the windows on the third floor are dramatically smaller than those on ground level.

It is called forced perspective, and it is a technique used by movie makers for years.  Many of the shots in the Lord of the Rings films used this technique to make the actors who played the hobbit characters appear smaller than the other members of the cast.

Disney wants to immerse you in its fictive reality by convincing you that it is real.  For this reason, theming is extensive and elaborate.  Small details that are noticed only subconsciously in passing are added to create depth of scene.

Umberto Eco, the Italian academic and author, went to Southern California and wrote a thoughtful essay about the experience.  In Hyper-reality, he suggest some helpful categories when considering objects and their environment.

He begins with the real.  Consider Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  It is the actual historic work in its original setting.

If someone were to paint a poor copy of the master's work, and put it on display it would obviously be a fake.

But if one were to build a replica of the chapel and paint the ceiling to be an exact likeness it would be a real-fake.  The identifiers between what was real and what was copy would diminish to a point that they are indeterminate.

If on the other hand, someone took the ceiling and placed it in a museum of modern art it would be an example of the fake-real.

Eco suggested that Disney used its techniques of immersion and art to create a reality that never existed anywhere, but appears to all intents and purposes as real.  This is what he calls hyper-reality.  It happens when the fake is so real that it appears more real than the real ever was.

Eco calls it hyper-reality.  Disney calls it magic.