Disney Death Tour is neither endorsed by, nor affiliated with, the Walt Disney Company. The tour operates in part on a logic of playfulness and parody, but it is not intended as a mockery or critique of the Walt Disney Company, guests of Walt Disney World, or the many individuals who have lost their lives within the park. Instead, Disney Death Tour creates a means for visitors of the park to encounter the deaths that occur within the park.

The careful construction and subsequent hypermediation of space at Walt Disney World offers a useful means of theorizing the ancient Greek notion of polis (πόλις), in that the park forms a unique body of citizens apart from the chōra (χώρα) of its surrounding territories (Orlando and Florida). Walt Disney theme parks are sites of no discourse: visitors pay a premium for a visceral experience that is meticulously predetermined and nonnegotiable. These sites exist as an extension of the United States’ increasingly commercialized democracy, and thus present discrete opportunities for thinking about how we might renegotiate and restructure civic potentials, writing publics, and commercial participation in forming spatial discourses.

It is no secret that Walt Disney World operates at the level of affect and attraction as opposed to logic. It works not on a paradigm of true/false, but of attraction/repulsion. Like Proust’s involuntary memory, it strikes directly at the visceral and intuitive. Or to borrow from Roland Barthes, Disney World exists as one continuous punctum as it constructs a personal image with and for us. These parks are designed as spaces that suppress analysis and enhance the visceral, curated to stress magic, playfulness, happiness, and wonder. As we explore throughout the webtext portion of this tour, this paradigm excludes things like accident, death, mourning, and memorial, and in doing so makes them abject. That being said, Disney does acknowledge death in one unique way, through their close support of organizations like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, a non-profit organization that arranges experiences or “wishes” for children diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses. So while Disney does not allow for deaths that occur within the park to be acknowledged or memorialized, part of its magical performance exists to comfort the dying.

As we discuss at the end of this webtext version of this tour (see “Punctum Notifications” section), Disney holds special significance to us, making the MEmorial a well suited approach for negotiating our personal relationships to the parks. This installation is not intended as insurrectionary, but as a means of mediating and participating in complicated public and spatial discourses. In addition, Walt Disney World’s reliance on its visibility and careful articulation of experience and space within its parks situates it as an easily identifiable microcosm for thinking about digital approaches to democratizing spatial rhetorics in a similar way that Laurie Gries (2013) uses Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama Hope image to demonstrate her iconographic tracking methodology. In this way, Disney Death Tour serves as a rhetorical field method for implementing augmented reality interventions into other hypermediated spaces, and explores the ways in which writing studies can participate in entertainment culture.

Unlike other spaces of public gathering, individual “citizens” of these parks are barred access to the typical means of civic participation available in urban spaces, such as organizing protests or leaving memorials. Thus, if we are to construct a better polis, we must acknowledge the whole body: corporate, civic, living, dead. One of the many ways this tour makes its intervention is through examining the consequences that emerge as a result of the conflation of civic and corporate space assembled within Walt Disney World, and in turn offering a digital tool for intercalating memorial discourse into this space. Unlike paranoid conspiracy theories and academic critiques aimed at Disney’s aesthetic formations, Disney Death Tour is a rhetorical intervention that operates both as a critical webtext and as an embodied critique designed to be used within the space of the park. When accessed from a desktop interface, this webtext offers a distant reading of the park’s spatial configuration through both its interactive map and this webtext. But when accessed from what John Tinnell (2018) called the “post-desktop interface” of a mobile phone and the accompanying augmented reality (AR) interface, this tour forces users to embody the critique and interact with the space. In doing so, Disney Death Tour also demonstrates the rhetorical affordances of the technological genres of mapping and AR as they relate to civic discourse within corporate and commercial spaces.

The Disney Death Tour exists in two capacities. One version is designed for the desktop and laptop computer, where visitors can comfortably read through the tour as a critical webtext without needing close proximity to the park. The linearity of this text portion offers only one suggested route, and this portion of the tour can be taken in any order. The second version is an experimental AR walking tour that involves using the map provided in this mobile-friendly webtext to discover sites of death throughout the park, as well as the Death Tour’s companion smartphone application, Hidden Mortimers, which interjects emplaced markers throughout the park with the aid of an augmented reality interface. These digital tools evolve this webtext into a location-based and context-dependent critical intervention of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, offering new rhetorical affordances and potentials for civic discourse within this otherwise closed corporate space.

A Note on Hidden Mortimers

At the time of this publication, the Hidden Mortimers mobile phone application is not available for download. While augmented reality development is becoming more and more accessible to the average consumer, it is not without roadblocks. There have been multiple iterations of Hidden Mortimers across several augmented reality platforms, each platform containing various affordances and limitations. We constructed the first mockup in HP Reveal (formerly Aurasma), an easy-to-use AR platform for mobile phones with a streamlined user interface. Like most free AR platforms though, HP Reveal operates strictly on image recognition, meaning the real-world information that users interface with (called “triggers”) to access the app’s content (“overlays”) is limited to easily recognizable images. While Walt Disney World obviously contains a near limitless amount of visual information to augment, this would require users to go through the unintuitive process of locating and scanning signs or images corresponding to each death in order to access the memorials, and thus did not quite fulfill our requirements. We experimented similarly with the audio-based AR applications Geotourist and Detour. While these applications allowed for information to be triggered based on GPS coordinates, they lacked the ability to include and arrange visual information in the ways we needed.

As such, we sought a hybrid of the two ways these AR applications arranged their information, an application that would trigger based on location, but arrange information visually. Because none of the currently available AR applications allow for this, we created a standalone application in the game development platform Unity, building off of Jacob Greene’s (2016) tutorial for humanities AR development, “Introduction to Mobile Augmented Reality Development in Unity.” This let us mark physical locations with Mortimer tombstone markers, demarcating these spaces to be explored in alternative ways.

In addition, this allowed for what we term “punctum notifications,” where the push notifications of a smartphone can update visitors with the sting of death as they make their way through the parks. When users of the app come within close proximity to the location of a death, a push notification alerts them to the memorial tagged to that location, punctuating their embodiment of the parks with a visceral reminder of a different way this space was once inhabited.

Dealing with the Disney Death Myth

Did you know? “It’s company policy. . . . [N]o one dies at Disney” (Project on Disney, 1995, p. 115). According to one of the most popular urban legends surrounding Walt Disney World, when a tourist with a heart condition goes lifeless on a roller coaster, medical professionals by decree must wait to make the death pronouncement off-property. Such a claim suggests corporate mediation so intrusive as to censor death itself. Whether we can verify the policy through documentary evidence remains to be seen. However, this “Disney death myth” characterizes power relations toward the Walt Disney Company and contributes to the mysterious ethos of the park.

Called a “Vatican with mouse ears” (as cited in in Thibaut Clément, 2012, p. 6), Disney wields tremendous influence in Florida, where it employs more people than any other company in the state, upwards of 56,000. Local government policy often reflects Disney “flexing its bicep,” as one state senator put it (Jason Garcia & David Damron, 2012). In 1967, Florida’s House granted unrivaled autonomy to the company in the form of a private charter, which allows Disney to operate its parks independent of “state and county regulation of buildings, land use, airport and nuclear power plant construction, and even the distribution and sale of alcoholic beverages” (Richard Foglesong, as cited in Clément, p. 6). With its propensity for shaping elections and securing favorable legal conditions, it might not be so absurd to imagine Disney flexing its muscles to outlaw death too.

Of course, people do die at Walt Disney World. While most deaths result from pre-existing conditions, others result from accidents on rides or negligence by park officials. Some result from a horrifying collision of natural and built worlds, like in 2016, when 2-year-old Lane Graves was killed by an alligator at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa. Unlike most deaths at Disney, Graves’s death made national news, in part because of how uniquely horrible the incident was, and in part because it occurred just two days after the Pulse Nightclub Shooting, contributing to a kind of collective mourning across Orlando and Florida. All Florida theme parks are required to report injuries and deaths to the state Department of Agriculture, and Disney has had to pay regular fines issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for safety violations. However, Disney, like any corporation, has no obligation to publicize these deaths. In fact, as Graves’s story indicates, these deaths have the potential to become national news anyway. And despite the Orlando park itself serving in part as a memorial to Walt’s death,¹ Disney has constructed no such accompanying monuments within the park to memorialize the numerous deaths of workers and visitors that occur within that space.² But with the use of mobile computing technologies, our “Disney Death Tour” offers a means of reintroducing these marginalized narratives back into this restricted write-space, creating the opportunity for users to rewrite their sensory experience of the park to include collective mourning.

Disney Death Tour commemorates those who have died at Walt Disney World. It puts commercial tourism in conversation with “critical spatial theory,” Scot Barnett’s (2012) term for viewing space as “less a fixed, neutral, or transhistorical idea and more a dynamic, ongoing process of relations involving people, discourses, objects, ideologies, histories, and the built and natural environments that together help establish the conditions of lived experience in the world.” As multimodal composition practices put writing studies into new negotiations with space, Disney theme parks and other hypermediated corporate spaces become sites where writing technologies bring new civic potentials into focus. Structured as a guided tour, the Death Tour redirects the flow of foot traffic and installs an alternative writing of theme park space that mirrors Jeff Rice’s (2012) use of digital logics to renegotiate traditionally-conceived physical spaces in Digital Detroit. At the same time, it challenges above all else the supremacy of spatial narratives; it functions as a writing, as opposed to another reading, and offers an emplaced critique as a means of creating civic opportunities for rewriting corporate space. Ultimately, this project offers a potential for a continual structuring and restructuring of space determined by its participants as made possible through ubiquitous mobile computing technologies.

Gregory L. Ulmer’s concept of the “MEmorial” offers a means of recognizing and writing communal attitudes towards tragedy. Whereas traditional monuments enshrine only official values, the MEmorial operates as an internet monument that facilitates civic practices for rewriting public space to reflect unofficial values. MEmorials bridge the psychic distance between catastrophe and complacency by constructing a visceral reminder of abject social sacrifices, in this case within the tourist industry—at Disney World, via the Death Tour, you walk among the dead.

As previously noted, the tour (both webtext and embodied versions) can be experienced in any order, but in terms of our MEmorial practice, it begins with a single tragedy:

Raymond Barlow, 65, was on a platform for the Skyway in Fantasyland when the cable-car ride was switched on for the park’s opening, sending one of the gondolas toward the part-time worker. The startled Clermont resident grabbed the four-person gondola and struggled to pull himself inside, park employees told investigators. On the way up, he apparently was looking for a place to land and let go over a flower bed, snapping some tree branches on the way down, the workers said. (Connolly, 1999)

Although the Skyway was torn down six months later, and Disney was fined $4,500 for “a ‘serious’ violation of safety standards,” the Sentinel reported that “The ride’s closing is not a result of any concerns about its safety.” As one commenter on that Sentinal article suggested, “Disney figured it could make better use of the space.” At the time of this writing, the Magic Kingdom features no marker or plaque memorializing Barlow’s fall, even though his sacrifice helps maintain Disney World and, at a different scale, the tourist industry in general. Disney Death Tour makes use of the space to better recognize similar abject losses.

Barlow’s fall and Disney’s subsequent response encapsulate some of the key spatial principles that the Death Tour explores. Power mediates space both physically, as in tearing down a ride, and through discursive construction. Conversely, as Sid Dobrin (2011) wrote, “though one body orders a space to a particular end, that order is not necessarily recognized or obeyed by all who enter that space” (p. 40). When entering a Disney park, space is ordered, but not necessarily obeyed, and the Death Tour provides an alternative option for occupying the park. Corporations have images to maintain, which for Disney means preserving its parks’s status as the happiest, most magical places on earth.³ Space is carefully arranged to suppress or containerize contradictory narratives, in this case the deaths of parkgoers and workers. Like a designated smoking section, Disney confines death to the Haunted Mansion, where the afterlife follows a safe, playful script. In Barlow’s case, the official story dismisses any link between safety concerns and the decision to close the Skyway, but the claims of those constructing the narrative cannot assuage the death myth’s subversive appeal. To die at Disney is to go off script, and flies in the face of the wholesome image of perpetual adolescence that the company cultivates. Without taking this myth’s appeal as factual truth, our Death Tour magnifies its same subversive logic. As such, we use locative computing technologies, like the augmented reality (AR) used in this tour’s phone app, to permit unsanctioned narratives into these hypermediated corporate spaces.

Disney scrutinizes what enters and leaves its property such that truth seems only to circulate in the off-record whispers of its employees:

We had a guy last summer who went to EPCOT, stood under the golf ball, took a gun, and blew his head off. But he didn’t die. He stood right there in front of all those tourists and went “cluck” and brains blew everywhere. But he didn’t die there. The medic told me that they are not allowed to let them die there. Keep them alive by artificial means until they’re off Disney property, like there’s an imaginary line in the road and they go, “He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s dead.” (as cited by Project on Disney, 1995, p. 115)

The Death Tour is premised on an urban legend. If veracity were the only metric for a narrative’s value, this one hardly satisfies. Online fact-checker Snopes (2017) examined the claim, “Disney can legitmately [sic] claim that no one has ever died at one of their theme parks, because they always ensure that accident victims are removed from park property before being declared dead.” Though it renders a “false” verdict, Snopes acknowledges that “This legend is a tricky subject to tackle, because it’s based upon the fine (and often confusing) distinction between actual death and declared death.” Actual death becomes declared death through an act of writing. Literate practices structure life and death through writing: a birth certificate declares “this person is,” and a gravemarker “this person was.” The death myth suggests the believable (to the extent that any legend is believable) potential of Disney to interrupt death through writing. To clarify, the Death Tour does not literally (or literately) accept the death myth as law of the land. It instead explores how Disney deaths circulate in a network of lore, industry, politics, and place-making.

Despite all efforts to control a corporate image, whether sinister or practical, no imagineer can stop people from dying at Disney. In addition to Barlow’s, the Death Tour maps over 55 deaths at Disney theme parks since 1977 (although an exact figure is difficult to cobble together). Many were the result of preexisting conditions or natural causes. Some were freak accidents. In many cases, families pursued legal action and reached financial settlements with the Disney Company.

That being said, while the Disney Company downplays death within their parks, they do engage with it elsewhere. Under less litigious circumstances, Disney World works with the Give Kids the World charity, offering some source of comfort for terminally ill children and their families. And in a gesture toward what Death Tour aims to further articulate, Disney erected a lighthouse statue in memory of Lane Graves near the site of his death. Make no mistake, this is a complicated and extremely sad matter. Unlike paranoid conspiracy theories and academic critiques aimed at Disney’s aesthetic formations, we are operating to acknowledge these disasters in a serious and respectful way.

Criticizing the Mouse

Critical approaches to Disney theme parks are nothing new. In 1981 Jean Baudrillard famously identified Disneyland as the perfect example of “hyperreality” in Simulacra and Simulation. And in 1995, cultural studies ensemble The Project on Disney published Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, which conducts an examination of and in Disney theme parks. In part the book is a model—it weighs the cognitive dissonance of critics-turned-tourists (“The Problem with Pleasure”), suggests playfully subversive negotiations of park space (“The Alternative Ride”), and, of course, delivers a degree of anti-authoritarian snark (“Working at the Rat”). It also helps circulate the “no one dies at Disney” myth as a counter-narrative that manages to escape the hypermediated corporate space of Disney’s parks. The Project on Disney serves as a precedent, a source for the myth, and ultimately a point of departure for the Disney Death Tour. Whereas these critical approaches to Disney offer analytic readings, hermeneutics for the park’s arrangement and the company’s actions, our approach enacts a writing.

Thibaut Clément (2012) traces intellectual suspicion toward mass entertainment. Efforts to identify the “locus of control”—the where of meaning-making—in Disney’s parks traversed the high-brow/low-brow debates of the last century. Critical hostility emerges as early as 1958, when screenwriter Julian Halevy remarked, “[Disney parks] exist for the relief of tension and boredom, as tranquilizers for social anxiety” (as cited in Clément, 2012, p. 1). Other voices saw in Disneyland a restoration of the public sphere, of performance and participation. Recent work finds the productive rather than pessimistic possibilities in commercial tourist spaces. As opposed to an early postmodern view of Disney parks as “sets of signs and representations arranged into a discourse and intended to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy,” Clément (2012) argued:

In assigning various degrees of agency to the parks’ participants, critics have gradually displaced the locus of control for the parks’ meaning, design, and operations from the Disney corporation to the individual user and the company’s socio-economic context, paying increasing attention to the audience’s interpretive activity and the parks’ competitive environment. (p. 8)

He concluded, “Visitors are not ‘cultural dopes’ but rather actively reconstruct available meanings to elaborate strategies and pursue motives of their own” (p. 8). Seeking the locus of control shifts from identifying the presence of agency to the more nuanced assessment of “how much credit the parks’ various participants must be given in shaping and assigning meaning to the parks’ environment” (p. 9). Disney Death Tour extends “interpretive activity” by reinscribing the space through digital writing implements. Assigning “credit,” however, means thinking of writing and writing subjects participating in complex, networked ecologies. As this project goes on to explore, and as MEmorials help visualize, a locus of control cannot be neatly accounted for because writing theory confounds the locus of subjectivity itself.

Including this selection of previous scholarship clarifies Disney Death Tour’s intentions—what it is, and what it is not. Not an exposé revealing corporate secrets, nor a critically aloof reading of Disney parks. Neither does it state the obvious: of course visitors cultivate personal meanings in even the most mediated of public spaces. Whereas this previous critical work formulates Disney parks in terms of either the passive reception of signs or the active construction of individual interpretations, of dominant ideologies or subversive subjectivities, the Death Tour introduces new methods for civic discourse within the corporate polis of the park. In an attempt to restructure this polis, the Death Tour employs a number of methods—MEmorality, psychogeography, augmented reality, critical tourism, as well as an inquiry into the limits of those methods.

When structured as a MEmorial, Disney Death Tour theorizes how we might write and rethink our relationship to tourism and entertainment by memorializing those who have lost their lives at Disney’s various theme parks. By enacting the MEmorial through an augmented reality application, the parks themselves are rewritten as sites of mourning and memorial, generating what Ulmer (2005) called the “inhabitable monument,” a civic practice for an everted network (p. 117). The emphasis on “me” in “MEmorial” opens an investigation as to how we relate to the larger structure, in this case Disney’s theme parks, and forces us to confront a shared experience of tragedy, or in Virilio’s terms, the integral accident built into the park’s infrastructure. While a traditional memorial might generalize these losses, a MEmorial “[takes] up the paradox of group subjectivity in electracy” (p. 118), and experiments with placing the losses of a community in direct relation with ourselves. As Sean Morey (2017) wrote, a MEmorial allows individuals to not only witness, but also to author their experience of a place in order to manifest individual and collective mourning. In Morey’s Roadkill Tollbooth MEmorial, digital monuments dispersed along the Gulf Coast and down Highway One mark sites of significance from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, where “the traveler must experience the total distance of a distributed memorial, picking up information and clues from each stop that help understand the next.” Like the markers in Morey’s Tollbooth MEmorial, the monuments in the Disney Death Tour are distributed throughout the space they critically index, opening up new avenues for visitors to engage with the park. And while our desktop site operates as a distance reading of the site of the park, when accessed from the post-desktop interface of a mobile device it operates instead as a tour guide that highlights alternative narratives within the park. The use of augmented reality boosts this effect, and forces users to enter into the space and interact with it. By doing so, users become what John Tinnell (2018) calls the “kairotic intellectual,” an author whose discourse occurs “amid the contingencies of a particular site of local action” (p. 217).

As travelers to Disney World in Orlando, we have chosen to confront the losses of life that have been made invisible as we author our relations to the polis of the park, and to the chōra of Orlando and Florida at large. Being citizens of Florida, especially so close to Orlando, means we exist in an economy emboldened by the tourist and entertainment industries. And being visitors to Disney’s parks means operating within a community that does not actively acknowledge the deaths that occur as a result of its existence. As we move throughout the park, we confront a meticulously cultivated narrative with the taboo of death; by reconfiguring ourselves within the networks of these communities, we negotiate values that are not otherwise being acknowledged.

It is important to note that Walt Disney World in Orlando serves as a monument to Walt Disney, and so in some sense the park’s existence is always already about death. But within this monument, there are ongoing deaths that are not recognized, causing dissonance within the community. As an electronic monument, Disney Death Tour theorizes how we might negotiate this monument to account for these losses. As Ulmer (2005) stated, “A first step in the design of a MEmorial is to notice an abject loss that the community acknowledges is a problem but that is not accepted as a sacrifice on behalf of a belief or value structuring a group subject” (p. 134). The cultural value of the entertainment industry necessitates structural deaths just as the cultural value of owning and driving one’s car necessitates automobile accident fatalities, what Virilio calls the “general accident.” But rather than critiquing Disney’s narrative as others have done, we instead offer this monument as an electrate means of civic engagement, of shifting the park from a space of entertainment to a monument that reflects a forgotten community value.

Previous MEmorial and AR projects have offered us a precedent on how we might theorize our monument. Morey (2017) offered “an electrate alternative to memorializing the disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010” and worked to theorize “how we might write our relationship to nature differently through digital writing and digital media,” and advocate for public policy change relating to the disaster. Madison Jones and Jacob Greene (2017) employed a MEmorial through an augmented reality mobile phone application that replaces removed ghost bikes, memorials emplaced by a community to mourn cyclists killed by motor vehicles. And while not strictly MEmorial projects, Shannon Butts (2016, 2017) adopted similar augmented reality technologies in order to provide alternative tours in places with complex histories that are abjected or otherwise invisibilized. Disney Death Tour extends these projects by theorizing how the unique affordances offered through AR tech and a MEmorial methodology can create new potentials for civic discourse within closed, corporate, or otherwise hypermediated spaces.

These projects also help configure the Disney Death Tour as what Jones (2017) described as “emplaced composition” and as a digital writing practice that forces us to be writers of the park rather than readers. As stated earlier, the Disney Death Tour does not aim to critique Disney like countless others have, but rather to construct an image of the park that includes ourselves as we relate to otherwise forgotten members of its community, in this case the dead. By writing our image through multimodal writing technologies, we are engaging in what Jody Shipka (2011) called “new mediational means,” where we consider how new tools of mediation alter not only the activities we engage in, but also how they remediate our relationship to our bodies and surroundings (pp. 48–50). When we configure a MEmorial as a multimodal and emplaced writing practice, we begin to see composition, in Shipka’s terms, as the result of an endlessly interconnected chain of events and contexts, which then leads us to look at what contexts and histories are being privileged (pp. 50–53). In the case of our critical approach to tourism, it is not enough to simply analyze our experience in a traditional sense, so we instead turn to an electrate frame of reference for negotiating our image within the realities of not only Disney, but also within the operations of the surrounding entertainment culture at large.

When framing this tour as an electronic monument, we must also reconcile the fact that we might not like the image we see as we resituate ourselves within an electrate frame of reference. Morey (2017) narrated this sentiment in the denouement of “Roadkill Tollbooth”:

The practice of writing this MEmorial, even in the virtual, relates to me how I relate to the disaster in the gulf, and how the disaster in me relates to its cause, and those abject sacrifices which must pay the toll. Now I must decide, as Ulmer states, if that image is me. If I recognize it, but don’t like it, then I must produce my own change for the sake of all my relations.

By moving from a reading of the park to a writing of it, from hermeneutics to invention, we allow for what Ulmer (2005) described as follows: “I catch sight of my superego by appropriating an event that I recognize as somehow expressive of a feeling. In this scene I recognize not so much my own history as the nature of existence as I believe it to be (a metaphysical intuition).” Or in other words, “I do not explain the problem; it explains me” (p. 138).

Disney Death Tour uses tourism to enact a methodology of location-based and context-dependent composition. It performs critical tourism, embodied participation in public writing spaces through commercial travel. In Postcomposition, Sidney I. Dobrin (2011) opened a space for putting writing studies in conversation with this definition of travel and tourism. Composition studies, Dobrin argued, should detach itself from pedagogical practices that serve to secure territory as a discipline, should move outside the classroom “to occupy new places” (p. 54). As the military metaphor suggests, occupation often entails violence, to which a tour organized around death can attest. Occupation moreover implies embodiment, where body and space work together to determine place. Disney Death Tour theorizes how composition studies might occupy new places not through violence, but through embodiment as critical tourists.

While modern theme parks and tourist attractions are thought of in terms of their entertainment value, travel also facilities a mode of thinking about place, and Ulmer (2005) reminds us that the first theorists were also the first tourists. Theoria, the ancient Greek practice of investigation through tourism, “implied a complex but organic mode of active observation-a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing” (E. V. Walter, as cited in Ulmer, 2005, p. 5). These early theorists sought out facts obscured by rumor and myth. Drawing from theoria, the Death Tour depends on physical travel and perceptual attunement in its reconfiguring of the polis of Walt Disney World. As opposed to a strict fact-finding mission, the tour reopens the park as a high-profile site for demonstrating the tourist’s place-making potential.

From Dark Tourism to Thanatourism

The Death Tour argues that death always already haunts tourist practices. In his extended travelogue, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” David Foster Wallace (1998) modeled a hermeneutic approach to a stereotypical view of commercial tourism. Although this tour works against mere interpretation, Wallace highlighted the intermingling of death, pleasure, and hypermediation of space at corporate tourism’s core. Aboard the MV Zenith, Wallace catalogued the insanity-inducing pampering of an all-inclusive luxury cruise vacation, as well as his own complicity in the polis aboard the cruise ship. He attributed the willingness to cede experiential control—to join the “bovine” (p. 310) herd of tourists—to an underlying desire to escape death. “A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness,” Wallace noted, arguing that because of death’s supreme unpleasantness, passengers on the Nadir “are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay” (p. 264). As a tourist, observed Wallace, “I pay for the privilege of handing over to trained professionals responsibility not just for my experience but for my interpretation of that experience—i.e. my pleasure” (p. 268). While not bitterly dismissive of the enterprise, Wallace forecloses travel’s critically-interruptive capacity, canonizing the tacky flip-flops/suntan lotion/camera-on-gut version of tourism. A more critically aware tourism not only disrupts similar stereotypes, it encourages invention of counter-narratives that emerge from embodied experience; the brochure says go this way, but the critical tourist has no obligation to obey. To avoid reproducing a containerized worldview, the Death Tour shifts from analysis to catalysis and invention.

Drawing from the Greek root for death, thanatos (θνῄσκω), thanatourism (Seaton, 1996) describes the allure of death through travel. Though often used interchangeably with “dark tourism,” thanatourism connotes a benign, even beneficial, commingling of death and travel. “Dark tourism,” on the other hand, elicits critique for its “negative valence” and arbitrary nomenclature (Bowman & Pezzullo, 2010, p. 199). It might seem grotesque, but the purpose here is not rubbernecking, or “milking the macabre” (Dann, 1994, p. 61). Instead, in its restructuring of civic and corporate space, the Death Tour serves as a means of recognizing and reflecting upon community values enshrined in collective sacrifices, making Walt Disney World theme parks sites of civic pilgrimage. Or, put another way, the tour operates as a form of memento mori for a networked civic sphere.

Thanatourism includes visits to battlefields, concentration camps, famous gravesites, etc.—any attraction to sites of mass death or trauma. A modernist practice, thanatourism coincides with mass media and culture. As J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley (2000) argued in Dark Tourism, for a tourist destination to be dark, “global communication technologies play a major part in creating the initial interest” (p. 11). According to Lennon and Foley, the era of thanatourism begins with two global-scale catastrophes: The First World War, an unprecedented industrial clash of modern liberal democracies, and the sinking of the Titanic, a death cruise given spectacular media coverage.⁴ Mirroring Ulmer’s (2005) insights, Lennon and Foley posited dark destinations as a means of reconciling individual experience and mass trauma through personal encounter. Collective wounds also provoke reflection on the fatal consequences of mass culture. As Lennon and Foley suggested, “the objects of dark tourism themselves appear to introduce anxiety and doubt about the project of modernity” (p. 11). Disney, on the other hand, uses its global media engine to opposite ends, where the “happiest” or “most magical” places on earth promote what Wallace called “fantasies of triumph” over death and decay.

Lennon and Foley demystify the fascination with death and tourism. Tourism, as Lennon and Foley read it, grants a means of individual reconciliation with mass cultural trauma. However, to restrict dark tourism to battlefields and gravesites presents a limited scope of pre-digested coordinates on the map. Interpreting particular tourist sites as distinctly “dark” discounts the role—and the potential—of writing death into spaces designed to obscure it. Taking into account recent efforts to develop more complex maps of writing, ecology, space, and subjectivity, thanatourism describes a process of theorizing, experiencing, and writing death alongside broadly defined public writing spaces.

Chōra: Bodies, Minds, and (Disney) World

The study of rhetoric and composition has entered its space age. An intense subset of the field seeks the where of writing, what Clément might call the “locus of control”—how writing and writers shape and are shaped by place. Previous models of intentional, localized writing subjects often fail to account for complex interactions of writers, technologies, and environs. Discussed by, among others, Sid Dobrin (2011), Gregory Ulmer (2005), and Thomas Rickert (2013), chōra helps complicate and expand both static maps of writing as well as fixed notions of place. As Rickert (2013) explained, “Plato’s chōra is an ancient attempt to think the relation between matter and activity, work and space, background and meaning” (p. 42). Applied to writing, chōra indicates the impossibly complex relational networks that surround and bind the writing subject. To “theorize subjectivity ambiently,” as Rickert suggested, abandons the search for fixed loci of control and leaves writing studies with a necessarily ethereal metaphor.

Rickert's take on ambience furthermore informs this project’s critical approach to tourism. To contrast with prior hermeneutic readings of Disney World, the Death Tour should be viewed “in terms of embedded and embodied immersion rather than connection, dispersed and interactive flow rather than node, conditions of possibility rather than static presence” (2013, p. 92). In relation to the tourist subject, chōric place cannot be pinpointed on the map, but rather witnessed as an “affective, circulating, and evolving series of encounters” (p. 44). Disney’s Magic Kingdom sits at 28.417663°N latitude, 81.581212°W longitude, but its sense of place is determined by how people “come together in the continual making of a place; at the same time, that place is interwoven into the way they have come to be as they are” (p. xiii).

As we examine in a later section, theories of articulation promisingly account for rhetorical co-determinacy between human and non-human agents. Whereas the ethereal metaphor ambience might be difficult to actuate, articulation makes visible a composition practice which leaves open the possibility of alternative writings. By engaging with Disney World—its symbols, lore, spatial arrangements, and even the absent presence of death—the tourist and the tour articulate space in Jacob W. Greene’s (2017) sense to reveal narrative pathways that are already at the location rather than imposing new ones. The Death Tour (re)considers Disney World as a place that obscures the fatal consequences of its very existence, but site-specific death markers only partially fulfill its intended use as “a responsive way of revealing the world for others, responding to and put forth through affective, symbolic, and material means” (Rickert, 2013, p. 162). The ambient thanatourist articulates space according to personal histories, desires, sensations, etc., and space in turn alters the tourist’s affective makeup. Thus, a map marker merely suggests points of disclosure in the ambient sense, “itself manifold and ambient; it can be performed, practiced, and activated in many ways, only so much of which will at any given time be directly appropriable to consciousness, intention, or theorization” (p. 72). Each encounter with a Hidden Mortimer has the potential to alter the thanatourist by exposing her to a previously undisclosed point of articulation. That point, however, does not determine a particular vector, making it impossible to project this tour’s intentional impact. Instead, thanatourism encourages articulation of space as a “process of creating temporary, contingent connections . . . through which familiar ideas begin to emerge as something new” (Greene, 2017), yet never insists upon narrative supremacy. Toward a fuller articulation of chōra and polis, this mapping reintroduces specific deaths, marking sites of the body’s most inescapable collisions with culture. Disney Death Tour negotiates a rhetoricity of tourism that is always already thanatourism.

Disney Death Tour identifies deaths at Walt Disney World in an attempt to restructure the polis of the park. As such, the goal is to provoke, but not to insult. In terms of ambient tourism, the goal is not to shame, but to engage with ambience so “as to (at least potentially) reattune or otherwise transform how others inhabit the world to an extent that calls for some action” (Rickert, 2013, p. 162). As a counter-narrative to Disney’s hypermediated spaces and muted depictions of death, the Death Tour provides a means of rumination on some of the invisible consequences of modern commercial tourism and entertainment. Within composition studies, this project explores the possibilities of more electrate writing practices distinct from literate memorialization. The alternative mapping capabilities enabled through its AR counterpart further allow us to reintroduce death as a central part of the rhetorical process. Other MEmorial-inspired projects identify various deaths supporting abject communal values, often drawing upon “haunting” as a metaphor AR’s revelatory function but leaving death’s theoretical significance unexamined. The aim is therefore not to ameliorate theme park fatalities—OSHA exists for that—but to enable civic discourses of death and memorial into widely shared community considerations of space.

The Death Tour confronts a tragic and sensitive subject with a methodology designed to avoid appropriating the dead, insulting the living, or merely exposing the skeletons in Disney’s closet. Of course, the dead cannot speak for themselves, and this tour does not presume to write for them. Therefore this critical tour argues for a new ethics of mapping death, one that confronts ethical reservations through theories of writing informed by the limitations of bodily existence. The Death Tour responds to appeals from Scot Barnett (2012) and Diane Davis (2010) to conceive of rhetoric and composition in ways that resist containerized or instrumentalized representations. Though this map gives a limited depiction of those who have died at Disney and where those deaths occurred, indicating their hidden presence does take a step toward articulating the dead within a larger networked polis of distributed identity, what Ulmer (2012) identified as “avatar.”

Barnett challenged compositionists to acknowledge and work creatively within the “limits of representation” in order to develop new maps of writing (and in turn write new maps). For Barnett, citing Judith Butler, writing commits violence when representations expect certainty from their subjects. Or, in other words, representation seeks essence. On this map one finds indications of physical death, those who used-to-be-in-the-world. The challenge is to avoid doubling down on “ethical violence.” Barnett (2012) argued,

[A]n act of ethical violence occurs when we ask of the other the question “who are you?” and demand in return a satisfactory response capable of presenting a clear and coherent image of the other’s self. Though often couched in the name of ethics, such acts, Butler has argued, nevertheless demand of the other something she cannot possibly provide—namely, an account of the self that is self-identical with the “I” in whose name she speaks.

Articulating death merely exacerbates writing’s failure to represent what not even the living other can present as a coherent self.

In one sense, this alternative mapping of Walt Disney World turns a smartphone into a can of spray paint, inscribing a corporate space with unsanctioned writings. Problematizing these rebellious assumptions, Barnett argued that “although attempting to unmask and demystify hidden power relations can satisfy in the short term, doing so also has the potential to leave in place the very thing we hoped to transcend—in this case the problem of yet another representation of space quietly asserting its own truth or authenticity.” Yes, Disney Death Tour attempts to demystify the corporate control of space at work in Walt Disney World, but rather than insisting on one interpretation of Disney (a reading), a focus on the writing-tourist shifts attention to what Barnett described as “those irreducible aspects of embodied being-in-the-world that haunt the accounts we offer of ourselves but that may never find a comfortable place in the discourses we rely upon to represent and memorialize those accounts.” Critical tourism is the participation in a contest for writing spaces through travel, and involves the embodied experience of existing in a polis. In light of Barnett’s admonishments, composition scholars must be careful not to replace one totalizing narrative with another, and instead acknowledge the limits of critiques contingent upon the limits of representation. This project treats skeptically the notion of simply preserving and retrieving the memory of the dead through writing and mostly avoids those questions altogether. Through augmented reality and electrate mapping, the question instead becomes how do we “see without knowing,” as Barnett calls for?

Throughout the process of compiling names, dates, and accounts of deaths at Disney, the Death Tour depends on journalism. It could not exist without the Orlando Sentinel’s accident database, for example, which, incomplete as it is, only demonstrates the shortage of accessible information on the topic.⁵ But to approach the Death Tour as mere exposé wades once again into the deficiencies of archival records. Literate representation offers certain affordances and limitations, which opens up the need for inventing new digital practices for civic engagement in hypercontrolled spaces. Another prominent inquiry into death exemplifies literacy and eletracy’s divergent concerns: during 12 episodes of the long-form journalism podcast Serial, Sarah Koenig (2014) examined the 1999 murder of high school student Hae Min Lee.⁶ Adnan Syed, the man imprisoned for the crime, insists on his innocence. Episode one begins with a memory exercise: try to recall in detail what you were doing six weeks ago. If the task proves difficult to answer with certainty—and as Koenig’s experiment reveals, accounts are often revised or conflicting—then consider that 1999 was 18 years ago at the time of this writing. Koenig weighed Syed’s claim of innocence against archival records, witness testimonies, and expert opinions, but the season finale leaves personal and legal judgments about Adnan Syed unresolved and perhaps even unresolvable. Serial demonstrates that even thorough works of investigative journalism depend on the limits of written memorialization as a part of their praxis.

Journalistic objectivity tends toward containerization, the demand to know for the record. When a figure like Syed resists tidy representations, and when a journalistic account reaches its disciplinary limits, the result can be frustrating. As one commenter exclaimed in episode eight, “Well then who the fuck did it?” In its expletive-inducing journalistic restraint, Serial reaches the very limits of literate memory practices. Koenig ended with a big “I don’t know,” not for certain anyway. Her exhaustive diligence not to reduce the complexities of lived experience to a snappy story resembles a Butlerian journalistic ethic. Working as an extension beyond the limitations of literate journalism, the MEmorial genre then “begins with a sting (punctum) received from a news item, a story from the daily dose of information circulated by journalism” (Ulmer, 2005, p. 118). Electrate writing practices do not displace but extend literate journalism. In response to Barnett, MEmorial projects seek not better containers, but alternative approaches.

Thinking without Knowing

As discussed in the Thanatourism section, emplacement forwards an ethics attuned to the material specifics of place, engaged locally, in detail, rather than in abstract tropes. In this sense, emplacement resembles a journalistic project. To avoid containing the irreducible complexities of lived experience to the obituary section of the newspaper, it becomes essential to work past journalism as memorialization and into the theoretical possibilities of MEmorialization as an electrate writing practice for civic engagement. Though it may be impossible to substitute writing for the memory of lived experience, the Death Tour opens a consideration of death’s rhetoricity.

In her introduction to Inessential Solidarity, Diane Davis (2010) argued that what Butler and Barnett treat as concerns to be avoided are in reality impossible altogether: “There is no longer any way to pose [ontology’s] defining question, a question of uncontaminated essence: ‘What is X?’ There is no immanent or intrinsic being, no essence in itself that would therefore be capable of presenting itself as such” (p. 4). Davis shifts the stakes from taxonomical to rhetorical and theoretical. Drawing extensively from Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, she identified a “preoriginary rhetoricity” in the condition of distributed being. According to Nancy, being is always already contaminated by community and environs; the “singularity” of the individual “designate[s] precisely that which, each time, forms a point of exposure, traces an intersection of limits on which there is exposure. To be exposed is to be on the limit where, at the same time, there is both inside and outside, and neither inside nor outside” (Nancy, cited in Davis, 2010, p. 7). This exposure, Davis said, “[Precedes] symbolic identification . . . is relationality as such; it is constitutive of being, which is always and only in the mode of exposition and not essence” (p. 7). Where Barnett’s project sought pre-reflective aspects of being-in-the-world, Davis found in the world a being-with that is always a being-for, a “solidarity that precedes symbolicity” (p. 15).

Davis (2010) made it clear that the role of dying at Disney extends beyond mere morbid fascination. She cites Nancy, who wrote, “what community reveals to me, in presenting to me my birth and my death, is my existence outside myself” (as cited in Davis, p. 10). Levinas’ use of “face” refers to both physical, face-to-face, presence disrupting indifference, and to what Davis called “the site of ‘my’ encounter with the inassimilable alterity of the other, which provokes an interruption in identification and cognition.” She continued: “What one encounters in the face to face is the other’s finitude, the other’s exposedness-that is to say, both his or her mortality” (p. 12). By pinpointing Disney deaths down to latitude and longitude, the Death Tour literalizes the processes of exposure in order to visualize sites of encounter. Disney Death Tour puts the Walt Disney World polis face-to-face with death.

This rhetorical look at death at Disney is not intended to reduce the complexities of rhetorical being(s) to simple map markers, but to articulate a reminder that, as Davis argued, “Responsibility kicks in as a response to finitude’s deadly intensity” (p. 11). Barnett (2012) tasked composition with finding ways of “seeing without knowing.” If the impulse to know risks ethical violence, Davis’s theorization of preoriginary rhetoric offered a productive direction: “Thinking is not the same as knowing, and the challenge today, the social, ethical, and political challenge is to learn to think the sharing of community without effacing precisely this sharing by conceptualizing it, turning it into an object to be grasped and put to work” (p. 8). Death depictions like those at the Haunted Mansion offer a scripted version of death without consequences. They are not sites of encounter with one’s own mortality, and are certainly not intended to be. In response to Disney’s glossy performances of death, the Death Tour inscribes Walt Disney World with “Hidden Mortimers,” grave markers with mouse ears that play on the “Hidden Mickeys” scattered throughout Disney parks. Whereas headstones operate as a literate exercise in representation, perhaps these map markers operate as facestones, renderings of death’s finitude. At these sites of encounter, “The face comes through each time as pure appeal, persuasion without a rhetorician” (Davis, 2010, p. 14). Ultimately, the Death Tour indicates not just death, but being’s underlying solidarity, being-for, realized when “communal life holds itself ‘at a level equal to death’” (p. 10).

Obviously this formulation of space applies everywhere, not just Disney World. But if we accept Davis’s preoriginary rhetoricity, and death as our new standard, then what’s needed is not better representations of death in space, but more useful reminders. Furthermore, inventing alternative and electrate writing practices often means the playful coining of neologisms and repurposing of old terms through puns. In our case, death’s rhetorical appeal means renegotiating the theme “park” to include inertia, pause, and recognition.

William Gibson’s (2007) novel Spook Country features an avant-garde augmented reality artist, Alberto Corrales, who creates “invisible virtual monuments” to dead celebrities as art installations throughout Hollywood (p. 49). Corrales’s first installation features the reenacted death of River Phoenix outside of the Viper Lounge, Johnny Depp’s nightclub in West Hollywood. Like all of Corrales’s installations, the scene of the death is viewed through an AR-capable headset at the site of its occurrence, and thus exists as a mixed reality, location-based composition. If everyone had these headsets, Corrales envisioned, “the world we walk around in would be channels” (p. 46). Of course, with the ubiquity of the smartphone, everyone⁷ now does walk around with these headsets in a way, and these channels are increasingly being realized. This is one of many ways Gibson explored the rise of ubicomp, AR, and locative media throughout the novel as a means of amending the “cyberspace” metaphor he first coined in “Burning Chrome,” and later popularized in Neuromancer. Gibson called his updated metaphor “eversion,” the idea that the network is no longer imagined as an ethereal substratum existing in a second order to humans, but rather a physical artifact with tangible relations and consequences.

The eversion metaphor echos digital humanities scholar Steven Jones’s (2014) claim of augmented reality’s primacy as our contemporary metaphor for digital spaces. Jones argued, “the augmented has displaced the virtual, and computing has gone mobile and locative;” AR, or mixed reality’s collapsing of digital and physical spaces, forces the construction of new practices and questions that “address the social, locative, embodied, and object-oriented nature of our experience in the networked world” (p. 14). To this end, the Death Tour serves to enact an everted critique at the site of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, an embodied and site-specific mixed reality intervention that invites park visitors to negotiate the narratives and dimensionalities they experience throughout the park.

Our choice of augmented reality as the specific medium for constructing the Death Tour serves dual functions. The first is simple pragmatism: the AR apparatus provides a means of interfacing with an everted network, one of Corrales’s “channels,” in a mobile, streamlined manner. In this sense it follows Andries van Dam’s (1997) claim that “the best interface is no interface—‘I think, therefore the computer gives me what I thought about (and what I should think about)’” (p. 64). In other words, the AR underpinnings enable a clean electrate app/aratus that is both immediate and unburdensome, a pocket-sized countermonument that operates without the cumbersome headset imagined in Gibson’s novel. Second, AR as a medium holds deeper significance for the ways in which this project is rendered. As such, we take up Lev Manovich’s (2006) call in “The poetics of augmented space” to “reconceptualize augmentation as an idea and cultural and aesthetic practice rather than as a technology” (p. 220). Marshall McLuhan’s famous quip throughout Understanding Media, “the medium is the message,” certainly holds sway here. But perhaps more aptly, we take up Neil Postman’s (1986) claim that the medium is instead the metaphor. The AR metaphor enacted through the Disney Death Tour is not one as distasteful as communing with spirits or disturbing a haunted space, but instead one that implements AR as a poetics for interfacing with erasure. As Madison Jones and Jacob Greene (2017) argued, “location-based AR criticism operates rhetorically not to overwhelm the user with information, statistics, and research but rather to open up affective avenues through which alternative public discourses about a location might emerge.” In other words, we are not interested in communing with the “spooks” from Gibson’s (2007) Spook Country (which he defined in various places throughout as both specter, ghost, revenant and slang for ‘intelligence agent’⁸), but rather in how an augmented medium both theorizes and catalyzes a negotiable public discourse through approaching its design and implementation as, in Manovich’s (2006) words, “an architectural problem” (p. 12). By creating digital memorials at fixed locations within the park, this AR application invites park visitors to ritualize and reflect on the augmentations with which they choose to interface.

Nathan Jurgenson (2016) put this similarly in “Always Already Augmented,” a reflection on the location-based AR game Pokémon Go:

[I]t is misleading to oppose the real to the augmented. Wandering through town we encounter a deeply augmented reality even if we are not playing Pokemon Go, not carrying a screen with us. From billboards overhead to the sounds of music from passing cars to the architecture of surrounding buildings to the city planning it all rests on, reality is augmented everywhere at every moment. And that’s not even considering the deeper augmentations of cultural norms, or the structures of language itself. Language is built on “augmenting” what is “here and now” with a record of ideas and people and actions that transcend time and space and presence.

For Jurgenson, “reality” is only distinguishable from “augmented reality” in that its augmentations have been naturalized and thus operate invisibly. What Pokémon Go offers is a disruption of this naturalization, one that makes certain augmentations more readily apparent, or, to borrow from Rickert, provides “salience.” Greene (2017) echoed this claim, arguing that the word “articulate” might be a more apt term: “Whereas ‘augmentation’ ascribes to a rhetoric of addition-as-improvement, ‘articulation,’. . . encourages us to approach location-based AR design as a process of creating and identifying emergent connections between the digital content of the application and its material surroundings.” Greene further argued that articulation “serves as a useful theoretical framework for understanding how temporary, contingent relations create emergent patterns of meaning.” In memorializing those who have died at Disney, the Death Tour articulates the architectural discourse of the park to provide recognition for the deaths made invisible within the park’s construction and through its institutional policies.

Ulmer (2005) argued that conventional memorials operate in accordance with a “public, collective value” in order to commemorate a sacrifice made (p. 130). As we have mentioned earlier, Orlando’s Magic Kingdom was constructed as a monument to Walt after his death, and our peripheral thus negotiates that monument by continuing it and, in Ulmer’s words, “open[ing] to further thought the relation between private and public experience, individual and collective actions, events, behaviors” (p. 130). Due to its reliance on triggers tied to the location of the deaths, the app renegotiates users’ movement through the park as a process of rearticulating their private relations to this public sacrifice. In constructing this electronic monument, our goal is not to instrumentalize those who have lost their lives towards a condemnation of the Disney Company, but rather to ritualize our tourism as a means of restructuring the civic body of the park.

Memento (ME)mori(al)

While the myth of Walt’s cryogenically frozen body is certainly compelling, it is also undeniably untrue. Baudrillard’s mythologizing of Disney enacts the same kind of covering up that critics of the Disney Company so often hinge their critiques on. In reality, Walt was cremated two days after his death, which resulted from complications from lung cancer (Gabler, 2011, p. 626). Walt was a heavy smoker for much of his life, and it led to his death in 1966 at the age of 65.

Rearticulating the polis of Walt Disney World through the Death Tour necessitates consideration of the ways The Walt Disney Company itself articulates death throughout its parks. Most notable is the case of Walt himself, whose many portraits and various other photographs throughout the park have had the cigarettes carefully airbrushed from them. In these photos Walt points delicately with two fingers towards nothing, or rests them awkwardly in front of him; some of these images still contain a faint trail of smoke from the missing cigarette, a secondhand reminder of what killed Walt (Cade, 2016). Tom Hanks even mimicked the artificial two-finger point in his portrayal of Walt in the 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks, yet another depiction void of smoking but not of smoke (Buerger, 2013). We are not interrogating the ethics of a revisionist approach to Walt’s image here, but would like to emphasize that obscuring the realities of death has been a part of this park’s history from its inception.⁹

That being said, there is one location at Walt Disney World that does portray death—the Haunted Mansion, the Orlando version of which opened in 1971. No deaths have been reported on the ride, but that has not negated its mythic depth. One ride operator explains that the ride shuts down several times a year to clean up ashes spread by park guests, presumably of loved ones who held a meaningful connection to the ride. When inquiring if the ashes are collected and stored somewhere, we were told that the process instead involves brooms and vacuums. While this is a rumor in the strictest sense, it would indicate that the playful irreverence of the attraction might bleed into the logic of yet another of Disney’s death procedures. Highlighting this example suggests that a playful logic at Disney can have stark consequences, and that a subtle shift in this logic, borrowing from electracy, can hold meaningful sway in constructing a spirited, inclusive image of death in collective mourning.

And perhaps this used to be the case. Memento Mori, the gift shop peripheral of the Haunted Mansion, once sold customizable death certificates, playful compositions that juxtaposed the living with the dead. While these are no longer available for purchase, the shop now offers “Spirit Photographs,” personalized 8x10" holographic portraits that, upon tilting, morph one’s face into that of a ghoul’s. And even today the ghouls and phantoms darting around within the walls of the Haunted Mansion engage in some of the only implementation of augmented reality within the park, as if Disney itself were instrumentalizing the technology as one way of communing with the dead. Their mixed reality dancing indeed inspired our own haunting of the park, our own Spirit Photography that works within the preexisting electrate logics of Walt Disney World.

Monumental Mice

It goes without saying that Mickey Mouse serves as more than just the official mascot of The Walt Disney Company, but also one of the most famous cartoon characters in the world. However, the iconic mouse was originally named Mortimer, a name often associated with death and the grim reaper, with clear etymological traces to Middle English and Latin (mors and mort-, death).¹⁰ At the behest of Walt’s wife Lillian, the name was changed to Mickey, on the basis of the name Mortimer being too pretentious. But Mortimer did eventually become a character in the Disney Universe, making his first appearance as the villain “Mr. Slicker” in the 1930 comic strip “Mr. Slicker and the Egg Robbers,” and his first appearance with the name Mortimer Mouse six years later in the animated short “Mickey’s Rival,” where he firmly cements his place in Disney’s history as Mickey’s primary antagonist.

A psychoanalytic or hermeneutic reading might view Mortimer Mouse as a repressed death drive or id. Suppressing the mouse’s true Mortimer nature by naming him Mickey causes a villain bearing the name to surface. Of course, the Death Tour considers Mortimer in a different sense—instrumentalizing him as a mascot for death within the borders of Disney World. Although most other villains have their own mascots within the park, there has never been a live Mortimer.

The Death Tour implements the Mortimer mascot to rewrite the images of hidden deaths throughout the park. The Hidden Mortimers riff off of Disney’s “Hidden Mickeys,” the concealed insertions of the iconic tri-circle Mickey head throughout Disney parks. Just as Hidden Mickeys started as an in-joke between early Disney Imagineers and has become a favorite means of secretly participating in the parks’s community (Roseboom, 2011), the Death Tour begins as a shared but hidden means of rewriting the park, one offered up to the larger community. And just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (2018) Dr. Mortimer asked Sherlock Holmes to investigate the death of his friend in The Hound of the Baskervilles, so too do these Mortimers call for a closer examination, a second look at what it means to be a visitor of the parks. This memento mori is not a morbid or repressed action, but rather an attempt at an electrate reflection on death.