![]() The themed environments are all pleasant but non-descript and very pastel, calling to mind Greek, Spanish, or Caribbean influences as they might be used by the master planners of an upscale Floridian seniors community. Okay, so I’m supposed to feel empowered and elated. It will follow you throughout most of the midways, queues for major attractions, and of course in the majority of the shows. If they actually wanted us to engage with all their vague but grandiose messages about the wonder of nature and the importance of conversation then we’d be wading into some interesting philosophical territory (Aristotle even gets a quote inside the Shark Encounter, of all places), but the ubiquitous mood lighting, ambient soundtracks, and tasteful decorations always draw our conclusions for us as to exactly what it is we’re supposed to think and feel about nature, and usually that conclusion is very sentimental.įrom the moment I walked in I was greeted with swelling, heroic orchestral music, and after a couple hours I discovered that this music never goes away. They sincerely want you to believe that their magnificent story of wonder and imagination about the oceans and all of nature’s children is the most mesmerizing and inspiring thing you’ll ever witness outside of your most spectacular dreams! SeaWorld has an unhealthy affinity for big adjectives and abstract nouns, a telltale signal of some of the worst kinds of kitsch. Kitsch is one of those cultural factors that can make life so confused for humans, and I think part of the reason that certain people feel a special kinship with animals is because there’s a sense that, whatever the cognitive or emotional differences between us and them, animals are always genuine. Even if nobly intended, it represents just another way in which humans assert dominion over nature: meaningfully rather than physically. ![]() Kitsch always wants to transcend itself, to be more than just cheap emotional entertainment and become the aesthetic rule of law for all of humanity, and one of the best ways to achieve that is to make it appear as if its message is part of the order of the natural world. (For the initiated I highly recommend a glance at Thomas Nagel’s philosophical essay “ What is it like to be a bat?”) The concepts, values, and aesthetic content of kitsch are all presumably nonsense to animals, yet they can easily be made by humans to appear to ‘endorse’ our kitsch through simple strategic framing and manipulation. By the very nature of how the mind operates, the subjective experience of any animal is virtually unknowable to humans, as our experience is unknowable to them. Kitsch requires culture, culture requires language, and language requires memetic replicators, which function very differently in animals than humans, if the species is capable of even basic memetic replication at all. Where I get uncomfortable is when animals become the subjects of kitsch. Understanding kitsch is necessary to understand what it means to be human. What is universal about kitsch is that we can’t escape from it. Some kitsch can be awesome to witness, but most of it isn’t. Other people will even give up their lives in the name of defending their country’s kitsch. Some people dedicate their lives to creating kitsch. There’s nothing inherently wrong with kitsch, and I think it’s perfectly fine to seek enjoyment of kitsch so long as we acknowledge it for what it is. However, perhaps it was Kundera who provided the best explanation, as applied to theme parks as well as the larger political world he was concerned with, when he wrote that “kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists”. Nobody cries over bad art, but many people will shed a tear in the presence of great kitsch. What is “kitsch”, anyway? Kitsch might be defined by some as cheap and/or derivative art, although I prefer to identify it by its function: kitsch is a work of art that, when you encounter it, you are automatically conditioned to know how you are supposed to feel and respond to it. Yet, loath though I might be from that revelation, every year I willfully pilgrimage to a number of theme parks, permanently piqued by some indescribable appeal these pleasure places have over me. Whether I like to admit it or not, theme parks are rarely anything other than complete kitsch. “No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.” This quote from Czech author Milan Kundera fairly well summarizes my relationship to theme parks in general.
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