All Our Yesterdays

By BRUCE HANDY

The future isn't what it used to be. Take Tomorrowland. When it opened in 1955 as one of the five original sections of Disneyland, Walt Disney himself appeared on the live opening-day telecast and promised "a step into the future with constructive predictions about things to come." He may have been a dull public speaker, but in envisioning "the world of 1987," as it was at one point conceived, he did offer up such astounding attractions as TWA's Rocket to the Moon and Monsanto's all-plastic House of the Future ("Hardly a natural material appears anywhere"). We now know that people still live in wood and brick houses; and that even if TWA did fly to the moon, no one would go because the service would be ghastly; and that if Disney could have given 1950s parkgoers a genuine look at the future, the most amazing thing about 1987 would have been the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was an opening-telecast co-host, along with Art Linkletter and Bob Cummings. But Disney, among the century's most enthusiastic futurists, was never one to let the unknowability of man's fate get in the way of a good show. We shouldn't laugh at his earnest, hopeful visions, just as people of the future shouldn't laugh at ours (computers in every classroom! peace through global trade! a cleaned-up Jerry Springer!).

One wonders what Disney would have made of the latest Tomorrowland, which opens to the public this Friday after undergoing its first complete makeover in more than 30 years. The thrill rides and better-life-through-technology displays will still be in evidence. What is noteworthy is the new design scheme, which, instead of purporting to give us a fanciful if sincere glimpse of life in the 21st century, takes hodgepodge inspiration from the 1939 New York World's Fair, Jules Verne novels and even Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, to name just a few sources. The new flying rockets look more Flash Gordon than NASA; the cars for a high-speed roller coaster-like attraction suggest a Victorian version of the Batmobile--H.G. Wells by way of Tim Burton. In the grand tradition of Disney artifice, the new Tomorrowland is an oxymoron made manifest: "a classic future environment," in the words of a park press release. In short, it is a perfect Tomorrowland for the Nick at Nite generation. (Of course, they could have saved some money and just put colossal quotation marks around the entrance to the old Tomorrowland, but that probably would have been too arch for most people's tastes.)

It's not a novel observation to point out that our culture has become increasingly backward looking. But you have to pause when even people who are supposed to look ahead start going all retro on us. It's not just Disney. One of the most striking trends in architecture is what you might call amodernism: buildings--like the new ball parks in Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Md., or the new performing-arts center in Fort Worth, Texas--that don't just make clever nods to the past but out-and-out regurgitate it. A glimpse of tomorrow used to be the prime selling point in automotive design; today the most talked-about new car is Volkswagen's redo of the Beetle. Steve Jobs' reformed Apple, meanwhile, hopes the public will fall in love with a new home computer, the iMac, whose design was inspired in part by The Jetsons, a 30-year-old cartoon parody of the high-tech world made real by guys like Jobs.

Could it be that people today just don't care about the future? That's what Tony Baxter, the "Imagineer" who oversees Disneyland design, seems to be getting at when he discusses Tomorrowland's overhaul. Baxter talks at length of the need for the park to make "an emotional connect" with visitors, to draw on prevailing cultural myths. "Dreams about the future were very easy to tap into in the '50s," he says. "There were so many challenges left unrealized because of the Depression and World War II--there was a lot left to dream about." The promise of the future then was one of hope, of a technological utopia. But the sometimes bad, mostly prosaic way in which many of those dreams eventually came true (space-travel perception: vacation on the moon; space-travel reality: a bunch of Russians stuck for months in a ratty old orbiter) may have dulled people's appetites for looking further forward. We like our microwave ovens, and cell phones are surely a boon to the self-important, but hasn't real life become messier as it's become easier?

That's why Baxter and his colleagues are betting that the public will be more excited by yesterday's heroic tomorrow than today's more jaundiced one. Given that the nation's most prominent exemplar of earnest, old-fashioned futurism is Al Gore, it's not a bad wager.