Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of
individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic
strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland
(L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the
American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory
reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a
cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real"
country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is
the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as
imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the
America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order
of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of
concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order
to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary,
its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the
adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is
everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to
foster illusions as to their real childishness
Jean Baudrillard wins again!