Post by Li Cornfeld, McGill University

In an early action sequence of Tomorrowland, the new fantasy film from Disney, quirky proprietors of a Texas junk shop called Blast From the Past open fire with technologies of the future. The shopkeepers Ursula Gernsback (Kathryn Hahn) and Hugo Gernsback (Keegan-Michael Key) wield glowing guns whose candy colored sparks rip through the ceiling; defeated, their bodies spontaneously combust. The murderous merchants were “AA units,” or “audio-animatronics,” explains a mysterious young girl called Athena (Raffey Cassidy), moments after rescuing their intended victim (Britt Robertson) from the blast. Then she twists a screwdriver into a blue port on her own shoulder; Athena, too, is a robot. Futuristic technology might destroy the world, warns Tomorrowland, but it can also save it. In a return to Disney’s mid-century technofuturism, the movie implores audiences to choose optimism.

Tomorrowland’s resident optimist, a variant of Dorothy in Oz, is neither a good robot nor a bad robot; she’s Casey Newton, from Florida. With the help of Athena, and Athena’s old pal Frank, a jaded recluse played by George Clooney, Casey (Robertson) journeys to the otherworldly Tomorrowland, an alternate dimension colonized by an elite group of humans during the last century to foster accelerated advances in science and technology. Decades ago, for example, Tomorrowland discovered particles that permit a voyeuristic form of time travel; Hugh Laurie’s villainous Governor Nix sneers that on Earth, “physicists are still arguing over whether or not they exist.” A chance to glimpse technology of an immanent future, of course, was the promise of the original Tomorrowland, Disneyland’s futurist region from which the movie takes its name.

When the first Tomorrowland opened in 1955, its signature attraction, the TWA Moonliner, promoted the future by inviting tourists to participate in an imagined moon landing. (The Tomorrowland movie signals its investment in this midcentury vision of the future when it frames the dismantling of a NASA launching pad as the end of futurity.) A decade later, Tomorrowland acquired The General Electric Carousel of Progress, a 1964 World’s Fair attraction that took audiences on a tour of domestic life throughout the 20th century, culminating in a future of ease and leisure afforded by technological development. The Tomorrowland movie, whose earliest scenes take place at the 1964 World’s Fair, sets the atmosphere with the Carousel of Progress theme song, There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. Songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman, in a lovingly compiled memoir, recall that they wrote the song about Walt Disney himself, whom they describe as “an optimistic futurist,” dedicated to building a future that was “great, big, and beautiful.”

Tomorrowland bemoans the loss of that vision. Director Brad Bird, who co-wrote the script with Damon Lindelof, avoids self-conscious corporate references, and so while the mythologized spirit of Walt Disney pervades the movie, the man himself goes unmentioned. (“Audio-animatronics,” a Disney coinage, is perhaps oblique enough a reference to warrant inclusion.) When Frank speaks wistfully of his 1960’s childhood, before the future became “scary,” and when Nix charges that the people of earth “didn’t fear their demise—they repackaged it,” Bird surely intends to level the critique at what he perceives as a global culture of fear and resignation. Still, bracketing dubious nostalgia for the Cold War as an era without a politics of fear, we might consider how Disney’s own corporate history indexes a departure from space age optimism.

Disney expanded its investment in fantasy futuristic landscapes with the launch of EPCOT, a theme park adjacent to Orlando’s Magic Kingdom, in 1982. Modeled on the industrial futurism of a world’s fair, and centered around a domed “Spaceship Earth” that showcases communications technology “from the stone age to the information age,” EPCOT celebrated the same technofuturism that girded the development of the original Tomorrowland. Yet this second Orlando theme park also crystalized Disney’s abandonment of its earlier, ambitious vision: the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was originally conceived as an industrial-residential community that would revolutionize America. (The futurist settlement of the Tomorrowland movie, with its gleaming central tower and elevated transportation systems, takes its design cues from the original EPCOT plans.) Opening EPCOT as a theme park, Disney committed itself to the creation of fantasy futures rather than to their realization. (“It’s hard to have ideas and easy to give up,” laments Tomorrowland.)

By the mid-1990’s, Disney reversed its orientation to the future altogether: it reinvented Tomorrowland as “the future that never was,” a retro-futurist celebration of historical visions of “tomorrow” that failed to emerge. In an editorial that deemed the change “profound for a company whose founder was one of postwar America’s great popularizers of technology,” the New York Times worried that “as technology has entered lives, it has departed from many imaginations.” Curiously, the Tomorrowland movie likewise fails to fully imagine its own technofuturism. For all its exhortations to picture a better future, the movie never reveals much of what’s behind Tomorrowland’s shiny façade. Its most developed conception of Tomorrowland’s technological capabilities – also its most playful – are the audio-animatronic robots who make their way to Earth.

Audio-animatronics, too, have a long Disney history. Disney engineers began experimenting with lifelike robots in the mid-1940s, and by 1955, audio-animatronic animals populated Disneyland. Humanoid audio-animatronics made their debut at the 1964 World’s Fair, where Disney assured fairgoers “a final result so lifelike that you might find it hard to believe.” Even Disney detractor Richard Schickel would remark on the “astonishing fidelity” of the Fair’s audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln. Today, Disney promotional copy touts its remaining World’s Fair audio-animatronics as employing “Disney’s latest animation technology of the time,” an indication that, following the company’s midcentury robotic enthusiasm, audio-animatronics garnered little further attention—at least, until this summer’s release of Tomorrowland. When the movie pins its optimism on the development of fresh units of AA’s who will revitalize Tomorrowland, Disney casts its newest vision of the future in the mold of its own past.

Take, for example, “Tomorrowland.” The fourth season finale is likely going to be a polarizing episode in terms of audience response, taking Don Draper in what some may view as a self-destructive direction, but in constructing those moments Weiner does little to change the series’ rich thematic tapestry. While I initially felt as if the finale’s marginalization of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and their predicament kept it from truly wrapping up the season, in thinking about the approaches taken throughout this project I realized that it is more cohesive than I imagined.

While the agency may have been marginalized in the episode, my response to the Topaz account was still influenced by Devon Powers’ look at the state of advertising in the 1960s.

When the show lost its one prominent recurring minority in Carla, Don and Betty’s nanny, I thought back to pieces from LeiLani Nishime, Allison Perlman and particularly Kristen Warner (who focused specifically on Blackness and Carla’s role in the series) which dealt with the role of race within the series.

My attention to Megan’s attire during the Los Angeles scenes may have been initially trivial, but as that story developed I considered her fashion in light of Elana Levine’s analysis of the fashioning of femininity.

As Don” fell in love” with Megan, I thought both on Jennifer Clark’s discussion of masculine detachment (and his decision to attach himself to Megan in particular) and Joe Wlodarz’s investigation of the eroding barriers between the personal and the professional (which seems apt considering he is marrying his secretary).

As Peggy visited with Joan to gossip about Don and Megan’s engagement, I returned to both Anne Helen Petersen’s take on the role of gossip in the show and Mary Beth Haralovich’s look at how Peggy serves as our guide throughout the series.

As Sonny and Cher’s “I’ve Got You Babe” swelled up during the final scene, I recalled Tim Anderson’s piece on the role popular music plays in the series’ narrative.

And as the episode came to its conclusion, and Twitter lit up with responses, I reflected upon Louisa Stein’s piece on how Mad Men’s fandom operates, and how the show’s unique fan community will respond to the finale’s event.

But, in the end, perhaps the biggest question goes back to Krya Glass von der Osten’s piece which started us off: with hype at an all-time high for the series, did season four live up to our expectations? There is no question that there were some strong individual hours of television, with “The Suitcase” likely one of the series’ best efforts, but the collective season has been more difficult to gauge. Don and the agency have both spent the season in a state of flux, while numerous other characters have had opportunities to move forward but ended up stepping back. After the substantial change created by last season’s finale, the instability of the circumstance it created has made the characters less likely to make any dramatic changes; until Don’s decision to marry Megan, the characters were reacting more than acting, whether it is Joan and Roger’s affair being the result of a mugging attempt or the agency’s collapse being the result of Lucky Strike’s departure.

However, what I find most interesting is those moments trapped between action and reaction: was Don’s New York Times ad a confident action, or a desperate reaction to Lucky Strike’s departure? And was his decision to marry Megan an action to regain control of his life, or a reaction to the short-term stability she offered and its potential role in solving his identity crisis? When we start pondering Don’s motivations, we get trapped in a vicious cycle wherein his true purpose seems hopelessly lost, but this has always been the case. Don’s actions in the finale are just as confounding and complex as they were before, and so we can still frame this finale – as disruptive as it first seemed, to me at least – in the context of previous seasons.

Perhaps what is most telling is that Don Draper did not seem to act out of desperation: while his decision may be sudden, and impulsive, it did not have the sense of fear which has driven previous behavior. And similarly, there is no desperation from Matthew Weiner in “Tomorrowland”: the episode may be eventful, but it never seems as if there is no control over the series’ future. It may not nicely bring all of the season’s themes or storylines to a close, but Mad Men’s fourth season finale offers the promise that those themes and storylines will continue into subsequent seasons, and that’s enough for me.