I could write an entire book about Joe Rohde and his Instagram feed alone.
Those of you who are not diehard Disney parks fans are now asking, “Who the heck is Joe Rohde?”
Rohde, who retired from the Walt Disney Company in 2021, is a legendary Imagineer—one of the creatives who combine the arts and engineering to tell stories in which you can dwell for awhile. Most famously, he led the design of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, including its iconic Expedition Everest roller coaster. A graduate of Occidental College with a degree in fine arts and an avid traveler, Rohde began his work with the company as an EPCOT designer in 1980. He was behind Pandora— the Avatar-themed land that opened with great success at Animal Kingdom in 2017— and a host of other projects.
With his trademark flashy earrings (worn on one side) and sartorial choices that sometimes echo Indiana Jones, Rohde is a charismatic presence on scores of behind-the-scenes Disney parks documentaries.
But the real treasures are on social media.
Rohde’s Instagram feed is part travelogue, part design seminar, part history lesson. Dubbed “Disney’s philosopher-king” in the Los Angeles Times, Rohde drops discussions of Foucault’s heterotopia alongside lush photography and analysis of, well, everything.
When I first visited Disney’s Animal Kingdom in 2016, my first thought was, “Holy orientalism, Batman!” There’s nothing in Animal Kingdom that’s as egregious as the nineteenth-century art that inspired Edward Said’s critique of how Europeans exoticize the Eastern “other”— in fact, they constructed their very selfhood as “the Occident” over-and-against it.
But, I mean, I walked into the “Asia” section and there were Himalayan-style prayer flags everywhere. We were being asked to explore a place presumed to be exotic to the visitor. It wasn’t subtle.
This is why I was so surprised to read Rohde’s posts about Harambe— the town at the center of Animal Kingdom’s “Africa”— and the animal preserve tour that begins there, where he acknowledges that going “out on safari” is a “colonialist concept,” which is why the “story” of Disney’s safari ride is about a visit to a nature preserve, rather than heading out to dominate the wild.
Acknowledging the presence of colonialism, of course, doesn’t mean it is absent from Animal Kingdom—or the Disney empire more generally. But many of the minds behind the last forty-odd years of Disney creation are attuned to cultural critique— and deep study of human culture. Joe Rohde is, as they say in Boston, wicked smaht. I wish I could sit down and have a beer with him.
In another post, I was surprised to learn that I, too, had missed some religion in Disney World—because, thanks to the wonder of FastPass (RIP), I didn’t have time to look up:
“In the queue for the Kali River Rapids attraction are murals on the ceiling depicting traditional Buddhist parables in which animals act out moral precepts. These are called the Jataka Tales. The ceiling of this building, indeed the entire building is based on a building on the island of Bali called the Kerta Gosa.” He adds, “All the murals that you see in the building are original. They were painted by an old Balinese master painter.”
I’ve gone on that ride four or five times— always noticing the name “Kali”—and wondering where she was?— and the fact that the ride’s story sets it on the grounds of an “ancient” temple. It turns out I wasn’t even thinking about the right part of Asia—or the right religious tradition.
Or perhaps, it’s just all mashed together, as Disney so often is. An evocative feeling of a place—not the place itself. And it never claims to be, though the “Balinese master painter” implies a level of authenticity.
And I think about climate change, and Bali— and Florida— and all the places that might sink into the sea. I wonder where these kinds of murals will linger longest, these traces of our humanity, all real and all illusion, all at once.
This week, Rohde had a post about dopamine— the chemical our own bodies produce that sometimes makes us feel very, very good (a bit like a drug). (It’s a neurotransmitter, it’s complicated, and it’s fascinating—I’m not a scientist, so I’ll stop there). If you’ve ever felt a rush of anticipation and then thrill as you opened an e-mail with amazing good news, or gotten addicted to your “likes” on social media, it’s likely that dopamine played a part.
Rohde acknowledges— as he does in other posts— the power dynamics of design and capitalism:
“One could argue that certain forms of experience design elicit these addictive-adjacent responses. As addictions go, visiting a theme, park or other immersive attraction is pretty low on the self-harm scale. But there you have it. Experience design is a form of dopamine mining.”
The thing about reward systems in our brain is that they thrive on unpredictability and getting more—upping the ante, surprise. Rohde notes that this has ramifications in the marketplace:
“Businesses, driven by efficiency, are tempted to not overdeliver. This is the ‘How much is too much?’ question. Why give the people more than what they expect? After all here’s a survey that says they expect exactly this. If we give them that they will be happy.
And they well may be happy, but they will not be compulsively driven to return to the experience over and over again. For that to happen, the experience has to be so much better than expected, and so full of novelty and surprise that it continues to elicit the dopamine response. So strictly speaking, from a biological perspective, there is no such thing as too much until it is too much to be perceived at all.”
Drugs, the brain, and religion constitute a long and important topic—-one well beyond today’s post. Ingested substances like peyote mushrooms, imbibed substances like wine, and the relationship between our brains and minds and religious rituals— from meditation to fervent dancing— have all been explored, and there is much, still, to learn.
I also don’t want to engage in a reductionist or entirely materialist argument—- “oh, that profound experience you had was just dopamine. It wasn’t ‘really’ sacred.” I’m not the adjudicator of that.
But I do think a lot about how religion is embodied—and about newness. Joe Rohde’s Instagram feed has thousands and thousands of posts. But what I’m taking away from exploring it so far is how profoundly an encounter with the new—- new places we haven’t been, new tales we haven’t heard, new roller coaster drops— jars us awake.
Disney is repetition, yes. But is Disney also Disney because—to paraphrase the gospel, with apologies—it makes all things new?