Disney is more than just an example of physical control, it is also an exercise of moral regulation. "Disney culture presents the particular and historical form of white, capitalist society as the essential society of reason" (Rojek, 1993, p. 22). Disney is a reflection of middle-American attitudes and values, a strictly defined sense of normalcy. It’s a powerful cultural brew, a "smooth blend of sentimental modernism, sentimental populism, nostalgia, consumerism, family virtue and corporate abundance —an intoxicating experience for the millions of Americans who passed through its gates" (Watts, 1997, p. 396).
Nostalgia plays a dominant role throughout the Disney experience. Most visitors seem to embrace the park’s utopian vision of the past and the future. Everything is vaguely familiar, with many cultural icons to trigger the common heritage and myths of America. The stories told in and by the park are attractive versions of familiar tales and events, sometimes exaggerated to the point of parody (Van Manaan, 1992). Disney represents a return to the romantic familiar. This is not so much an accurate representation of how America once was. Rather, it is a picture of how we would like it to be remembered to have been. As with much of Disney, it is the care and attention to detail that hides the inauthenticity in the story that under pins the presentation. Unfortunately, as Bryman (1995) points out, it is a "view of history with which professional historians are unable to compete in terms of either the mode of presentation or the numbers of people touched by it" (p. 142). There is no way of knowing what’s missing, no way to know which social forms and behaviors have been left out (Willis, 1993). The original location or event struggles in comparison to the manageable, seductive, non-threatening version that Disney provides. It becomes increasingly difficult to repudiate the Disney approach — this is how many of us would wish things to be. Thus "Disneyland is more ‘real’ than
fantasy because it now provides the image, upon which America constructs itself" (Giroux (1995, p. 28). The more we trigger the association with Disney, the more dominant that view becomes.
As part of the moral sanitizing at Disney, visitors are encouraged to feel safe. The undesirable and threatening aspects of society are purged. Not only is dirt, crime and poverty removed, but social deviance is curtailed. Disney does not tolerate drug consumption, unrestricted free speech, gang paraphenalia or behavior, unusual religious practices or open displays of homo- or hetero- sexuality. People are not violent or sexual in Disney, unless that behavior has been incorporated into the officially sanctioned display.