ENTERing the View: Triangulating “Subject” Bodies

Abstract

On 23 February 2010 Disney’s Magic Eye Theatre at Disneyland California re-opened the 1986 Captain EO as a tribute to Michael Jackson, who died unexpectedly in 2009. EO replaced the long-running Honey I Shrunk the Audience, which had itself replaced the original EO, operating from 1986–97. Both “attractions” are embedded into the Disney theme park as immersive “rides” — audiences don 3-D glasses and sit in theatrical audience configurations to experience these filmic events. In Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, the entire premise was to make the audience feel as if it had shrunk in size. Using a combination of 3-D effects in which on-screen characters suddenly increase in size as the auditorium physically moves, the audience experiences a shifting sense of perception; the audiences are indeed an integral component of the design. In lieu of the animatronic characters within so many Disney rides (starting with birds in the “Enchanted Tiki Room” and expanding into characters in such rides as the 1967 “Pirates of the Caribbean”), immersive 3-D action became this “ride’s” gimmick. These are, however, theme park rides that audiences encounter as theatre: bodies fill the audience in theatrical rows, and through glasses are drawn into immersively “live” experiences such as a snake sliding forward and opening its jaws inches from the audience’s eyes, or a large meteor hurling forth causing a momentarily shudder.

The subject is a process, made of constant shifts and negotiations between different levels of power and desire, that is to say wilful choice and unconscious drives. Whatever semblance of unity there may be, is no God-given essence, but rather the fictional choreography of many levels into one socially operational self. It implies that what sustains the entire process of becoming-subject is the will to know, the desire to say, the desire to speak; it is a founding, primary, vital, necessary and therefore original desire to become.

(Braidotti, 2002: 22)