Illustration by Audrey Estok (@AudreyEstok)
Theme parks exist outside of time—or, at least, they’re supposed to. Disneyland, in particular, is notorious for rearranging temporality in its themed lands, for creating nostalgia for imagined histories (Frontierland), futures (Tomorrowland), and atemporal fictions (whatever wild alternate universe Cars Land belongs to). All visitors famously enter underneath a sign that reads, “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.”
But for the first time in its 64 years of depicting fictional and historical pasts, Disneyland has dramatically refigured its relationship to time itself. Until now, Disneyland created environments that incorporated a melange of architecture, characters, sound design, and folkloric stories to evoke not specific places or times from history, but what literature scholar Martha Bayless described as “history-flavored Other world[s].” These elements are chosen not for any notion of accuracy to the lived experience, for example, of residents in a medieval city, but rather for their ability to “imply” life through signifiers that the typical park visitor will recognize.1 What has traditionally mattered at Disneyland is not representing historical truth, but making a guest imagine what they might feel in a vague and deliberately blurred past. This blurriness is part of what enables Disney to so audaciously ignore histories of sexism and white supremacy; making the past malleable enables the company to gloss over nearly anything.2
With the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a themed attraction dedicated entirely to this franchise, Disneyland is pivoting away from blurry pasts and instead zeroing in on a hyper-specific place and time. When visiting Galaxy’s Edge, guests are transported to the Black Spire Outpost, a settlement on the never-before-depicted Outer Rim planet of Batuu, at a particular moment in Star Wars history between the events of the recent Last Jedi and the forthcoming Rise of Skywalker. It is a place and time where few recognizable characters appear (Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa are nowhere to be found), and even fewer recognizable environments or landmarks. A visit to Tatooine or Endor, this is not.
All photos by the author
The unfamiliarity of Galaxy’s Edge is in stark contrast with the rest of Disneyland which, because of the way it remixes both our ideas about history and the actual history of Disney characters from the past century, is unrelentingly familiar to even the most casual Disneyland visitor. It’s hard to argue that the Star Wars saga isn’t a fundamental American myth, at least as influential in culture today as the other mythic pasts—of pirates and cowboys, of princes and princesses—that populate Disneyland. It’s strange, then, that Disney chose not to lean into that shared cultural heritage when crafting their new land. Instead of creating a space that incorporated and remixed stories we already knew, and cherished, it reduced Galaxy’s Edge to merely one component, and an unfamiliar one at that, of the Star Wars mythology. Visitors experience one corner of this universe rather than the whole of it; Black Spire Outpost is just one Star Wars story among many.
What’s more, Disney is aggressively literal about guests to Galaxy’s Edge being “in world.” For instance, Galaxy’s Edge cast members use the word “credits” instead of dollars and “refresher” instead of restroom, and act confused when visitors use terminology that a resident of Batuu wouldn’t know. But instead of feeling immersive, it often feels stilted. By focusing so heavily on the diegetic “reality” of the experience, the emotional experience of being in a Star Wars story is lost.
It’s true that the land rewards engagement, both through repeat visits and Batuu-focused books, comics, and games. For example, during a recent visit I witnessed an appearance by a character I didn’t recognize. I watched as she snuck through a hidden door, evaded First Order officials, and dashed around the Outpost’s twisty corners, where despite my best efforts I eventually lost track of her. It was only later, while reading Delilah S. Dawson’s novel Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire, that I recognized the woman as Vi Moradi, a Resistance spy with a close relationship to General Leia Organa.
Even without knowing Vi’s identity, it was still fun catching sight of a Resistance figure in action. But, more than that, it raised the possibility of just how thrilling it would be to see someone I actually knew, someone I actually love. It’s no surprise then that the vibe of Galaxy’s Edge escalates wildly, like electricity in the air, on the rare occasions when a pair of Storm Troopers or Kylo Ren saunter down a pathway. But that is nothing compared to the giddiness that accompanies an appearance by one of the land’s true stars—Chewbacca. (To my great sadness, after several visits I have not personally witnessed an appearance by Rey, although YouTube suggests her visits are just as stirring.)
What this all reveals is that, in the primary conceit of Galaxy’s Edge, the world of Star Wars has supremacy over the characters of Star Wars. In some ways this works. The Millennium Falcon is the undisputed apex of Batuu. It is the point where all paths converge; it is the most critical photo-op; it was the moment where I had to stop and take a breath and bask in the feeling of being transported. Not to another world, but to the past: to the fictional past of the story, and to the very real past of my own life. Seeing the Millennium Falcon is the moment of transcendence that a place like Disneyland depends on.
Yet ultimately—and this is where it all kind of falls apart—the Millennium Falcon is out of context. It’s nestled in a spaceport fans have barely heard of, owned by a smuggler we’ve never met. What it mostly does is remind you how much more intense the experience would be if the Falcon was on Tatooine or docked inside the Death Star. Even after you board (which is, admittedly, very cool), you are asked to help a random smuggler complete a job. All I could think was, “Wouldn’t it be great if we were flying with Han Solo? Or dodging through the Hoth asteroid field? Or shuttling Finn and Rey out past First Order lines?”
Ultimately, this strange encounter with the Millennium Falcon is not enough. To work, a theme park needs to collapse the mythic pasts that it depicts with our own, with the past of our own lives. It is the fusion of the feeling of our shared history with our specific childhoods that prompts the full-body shivers, that is responsible for the people who stop in front of Sleeping Beauty’s castle and burst into tears. Exploring a new Outer Rim planet is fun, but it has all of the flavor of a new history with none of the emotional resonance of my own history, of pretending to be Princess Leia, or trying to speak R2-D2’s language, or reading musty Star Wars novels in the stacks of my childhood library. In Batuu, I can be in Star Wars’ past, but I am still trapped in my own present.
In focusing so heavily on the literality of its story, Galaxy’s Edge misses this emotional mark. But will it feel different in the future, when it no longer lives so aggressively in this moment, poised between a movie that came out two years ago and one that comes out this month? Will it retreat, as the multimedia world of Star Wars stories moves on, into a past as murky and mushy as Fantasyland’s? Will we see, over time, the timeline squish, as Batuu grows more familiar and older figures from Star Wars’ past get resurrected or revived? We can only hope.
Editor’s note: you can find all of the pieces in our December 2019 Star Wars issue here.
- Martha Bayless, “Disney’s Castles and the Work of the Medieval in the Magic Kingdom,” in Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein, eds., The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 39–56.
- Disneyland has often been criticized for the racism and sexism of some of its attractions and lands. See Karina Longworth, “Splash Mountain (Six Degrees of Song of the South, Episode 6),” You Must Remember This (podcast episode), Nov. 25, 2019; Marla Jo Fisher, “Disneyland reopens Pirates of the Caribbean without the bride auction,” Orange County Register, June 8, 2018; and Mary Birnbaum, “The beautiful fiction of Disneyland,” The Week, March 21, 2017.
