Last Sunday, Splash Mountain took its riders on their final journeys into the b’rer patch. This popular ride— which opened in 1989 in Disneyland (CA) and 1992 in Walt Disney World (FL)— was based on Disney’s Song of the South (1941), a film that has not aged well, to put it mildly.* It is steeped in Jim Crow era stereotypes. Fans waited in lines of over three hours for one last plunge into the abyss, one final round of audio-animatronics singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.
The next day, people were selling water from the ride on ebay.
What kind of pilgrims would Disney acolytes be if they didn’t have holy water?
The first ebay post that I saw featured a tiny mason jar of this sacred H2O, held aloft in a white hand, in front of a sign near the ride entrance. It was going for $149.95. Here’s a screenshot.
It’s eBay and religion in its Platonic form: Disney collectible meets that timeless religious powerhouse, holy water. Water is never just water. Here it looks a bit like an iconic Catholic vial of holy water but also a bit Southern Baptist— that Mason jar screams “rustic chic” to me. But of course, water isn’t just a Christian thing—from sacred rivers in India to the Jewish mikveh, or ritual bath, it’s a thing humans need to survive. It’s our body’s sine qua non but also a malleable symbol that can be exalted as something precious in and of itself.
Some of the waters actually sold, though not at such a high price. Other sellers, like Mr. Philip Halfacre of Louisiana (featured in the New York Times), openly admitted that their posts were not real Splash Mountain water, just all in “good fun,” and later took the posts down.
But what matters here isn’t false advertising. It doesn’t matter if the water is real or not. What matters is desire— and belonging.
Splash Mountain holy water conjures the longing at the center of the whole Disney project: not a fake, but a wish for something so much more real than the everyday that it jars us out of slumber and into fear or joy or weeping. But still something you can bottle and take home with you. One of the earliest kinds of souvenirs— a splash of water from a sacred grove— pilfered from the very place that elevated that practice into an entire ethos. Exit through the gift shop, and you shall be redeemed.
“Lively objects,” writes David Chidester in Authentic Fakes, are “focal points of desire” that “can create meaningful religious worlds.” (4). There are a lot of different worlds happening in the discourse around Splash Mountain.
Some of them are clinical, almost scientific: “just collected” says one seller on ebay. “LAST DAY OF RIDE” writes another. That one stops me. I picture the end times. An apocalypse, an uncovering. Hordes trying to board before the last log flume lifts off, like an ark leaving before the flood. Why do people care about endings so much? What did this ending lay bare?
Of course, it shows us much about race. Because racism is also part of the story of religions. On Twitter (still sputtering along, another ending?), the discourse of #SaveSplashMountain continued routine battles between critics of “woke Disney” and fans who support the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts. (The mountain will not actually fall. It will be re-themed an open in 2024 as “Tiana’s Bayou Adventure,” honoring Disney’s first Black princess). This is a story we’ve heard before—not just now, but for decades.
There is a purity culture at work among the #SaveSplashMountain acolytes. Sometimes, yes, as parodied by other Disney fans, the posts are explicitly racist. (There is literally a #BrerLivesMatter hashtag. It’s bad. Very bad.). It is also rhetoric about the (mis)perceived purity of the Walt Disney Company, about a wholesome, entirely Christian, non-profit-driven version of the company that never quite was and yet for these fans always will be. Some fans called Iger the “anti-Disney,” cementing Walt’s Christlike status. Others insisted Walt would want the attraction to stay and this harmed his original vision for the park.
Walt Disney died in 1966. He never rode Splash Mountain.
There are also fans and scholars who acknowledged that it is indeed time for new stories— but that the ride is complicated, we can also acknowledge our personal nostalgia for it.
Some fans (probably a very loud minority) wanted to “save” Splash Mountain from the winds of change, while most are ready to move on, sometimes with a twinge of regret.
But why save the water?
This is not the first holy relic in Disney fandom. In Marceline, Missouri, you can buy a shard of Walt Disney’s childhood “dreaming tree,” under which he sketched and dreamed, at the Walt Disney Hometown Museum. ($15; don’t panic, the tree was felled by a storm, not an axe). It’s also not the only ride closure to inspire the rending of garments or a social media outcry. (Just ask Mr. Toad or these other folks).
But something about this week’s episode in Disney devotion feels like a leveling up, a virtual revival meeting, a great, wet awakening. As I watched it unfold, first on social media, then The New York Times, it seemed simultaneously organic, natural, the next logical thing to happen, and yet also a bit like entering the Twilight Zone. The holy water image is so drenched in religious imagery that we have effectively jumped the shark. How could anyone miss it?
Splash Mountain Holy Water makes me suspect it’s not overly facile to compare Disney to a religion. Or perhaps it’s now so facile— the story is simply writing itself— that I wonder if it can be written any other way. So then what is there to say? We’ve either reached so many layers of simulacra that even Baudrillard’s head is spinning, or so few that all of the categories, including “religion,” have simply collapsed.
That’s why I see the vials of chlorinated theme park water for sale on eBay as something much more than just nostalgia for an imagined white Protestant paradise, what people think of when they think of Disney in the mid-twentieth century.** What holy relics do varies by religion—but as Caroline Walker Bynum writes, many scholars agree that they have collective meaning and some kind of religious agency.
Collective meaning is what Disney always does—in a deeply sensual way. When fans posted on Twitter about even the smell of the Splash Mountain water, other fans knew what they meant. They shared so many stories of the ride, both personal and yet, somehow more—an amalgamation of memories that were all the same but all just a little bit different— as ritual so often is. That time we all closed our eyes for the ride picture. That time we got completely drenched. That time dad’s hat, newly purchased, was lost forever. That time we saw the fireworks go off just as we crested the biggest drop, and then the sky lit up completely as we floated to the end of the ride.
Those last two are my own memories. But millions of other people have a version of that memory, too. People with whom I share almost nothing in common.
Agency is a trickier prospect here. Splash Mountain water does not promise healing, or a free trip to Disney World. But it does offer the magic of proximity. “LAST DAY OF RIDE.” It is a kind of substitutionary pilgrimage. Couldn’t make it to Anaheim or Orlando for the frenzied effervescence of the ride’s last day? Couldn’t grab a last glimpse of the heavenly choir before the gates began to close?** Don’t worry. Ebay’s got you. Here’s a bit of that feeling.
Just a splash.
Extra thoughts:
*It was always problematic—the NAACP criticized it as early as 1946— but in the 1980s Disney still thought it was a good idea to design a ride featuring the film’s animal characters, though not its humans. By 2020 it had become unthinkable. You cannot stream it on Disney+.
**(Historically, it wasn’t just white Protestant men who built that version of Disney either, but that’s a story for another day).
***For me this video clip evokes the images from the Neilah service, the closing prayers at the end of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, which feature many images of gates about to close; it is also looks a lot like the moment the ark holding the Torah scrolls closes in a routine Jewish service.