Wonder doesn’t happen by itself.
On Sunday, a friend and I spent a few hours at Disney100: The Exhibition at the Franklin Institute. With over 200 items from the Walt Disney Archives on display, it was— extraordinary.
And I write that as someone who has been to a lot of Disney museums and shows.
What sticks with me, right now, it how the exhibit makes a dizzying quantity of labor visible.
The first artifact is a megaphone used by Walt Disney in 1923. It was so… small. It’s supposed to make you think, “Walt touched this. 100 years ago,” and it did. But it also made me think of movie sets, of the dozens and now hundreds of people who populate them, the din over which a director must be heard.
And on and on it went. Concept drawings, props, animation cels. The “Mousegetar” Jimmie Dodd strummed by Jimmie Dodd on the Mickey Mouse Club television show. The original audio-animatronics developed for the 1964 World’s Fair.
The labor of millions of people, really, over the course of a century.
“Wonder”— the theme of this celebration, of the whole centennial celebration of the Walt Disney Company—has a longer, more complex history than I can delve into here— and Professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein, one of my friends from graduate school, has already done that—quite brilliantly.
One of the things I learned from her is that “wonder can be not only unsettling, but downright terrifying.” When Disney invokes wonder, you might think at first that they are denying this aspect of the wondrous. After all, Disney is supposed to be safe. Cozy. Nostalgic. Comfortable.
But Disney wonder is also about discomfort. There is the literal vertigo of roller coasters. There is also the way my daughter was first scared of fireworks in Disney World— fire is, after all, terrifying— and then gradually embraced that fear as a thrill, a kind of wonder.
In the exhibit, the awe I felt was over those unending hours of labor, those countless lives given over to making “wonder”: electrical circuits, sketches, inking cels, serving hamburgers, changing bed linens, balancing budgets.
Psalm 90 includes both the awe-filled fear of God— in Hebrew, the root y’ira—and, at its closing, a plea that “the work of our hands” will prosper.
To wonder at the wonderful worlds of Disney, we must also wonder at—and recognized— the work of so many humans who produced them.