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By Root 1419 0

parks; theme parks are whole suburban counties; suburban counties are malls. And of course mall stores sport “themes” of their own and specialize in impulse shopping. Necessitarian outlets for everyday items like hardware, stamps, and pharmaceuticals and traditional five-and-dime variety stores are almost entirely absent. In their place spring up nature stores, museum shops, new age boutiques, game and music box studios, and consumption mini-marts such as The Sharper Image and Brookstone that sell nothing you need but everything you want—once you enter the store. Alongside the mini-marts are brand-name stores and commercial offshoots of the big-time theme parks. Hundreds of Disney stores, early entrants in the mall sweeps, now face competition from other studio shops like Warner Brothers and MGM’s. The grand opening of the Manhattan Warner Studio store displayed Mickey’s competitors Bugs Bunny and Tweetie Bird inviting sundry New York sophisticates (animal and human) wearing silk top hats to “Discover New York’s Newest Entertainment Shopping Experience,” thereby offering the question “When is a store a theme park?” a simple answer: “When it is an ‘entertainment shopping experience.’”

To ensure that malls are fun, many developers are installing hightech virtual reality arcade games at very considerable cost (up to $2 million) and thereby further collapsing the distinction between Disneyland, McDonald’s (which is also experimenting with the games), and the suburban mall. An investment analyst predicts “malls may find it necessary to have that kind of amusement to keep up as a destination point.”31 Malling neighborhoods and then theme-parking neighborhood malls makes them sure destination points for everyman and everywoman too, especially since in the suburbs (where well over half of America lives today), the mall is the “neighborhood” and commercial space is the only community space in sight.

Theme parks that are really shopping malls and malls that are actually theme parks are everywhere. Movie studios build them as real-world monuments to their other-world fantasies, durable goods producers establish them as entertainment arms of their sales strategies (Nike Town, for example—see above), and governments and states sponsor them in hopes of burnishing an image or commemorating a past or turning a profit. The same French government that successfully exempted the French audiovisual industry from the last GATT round played a major role a few years earlier (along with leading French financial institutions) in assembling the property and building the hotels for EuroDisney. They even financed a stop on the express train service that is France’s pride. The French private sector retains a 51 percent holding in EuroDisney today, though its poor performance in its first years has left investors with a bad taste and Disney with its first prospective fiasco.

In the self-effacing spirit of government under assault, the state has mostly stayed on the sidelines. Local authorities have the right to demand concessions from developers to allow curb cuts and building permits, but they have played the zealous suitor to, rather than the public regulator of, the developers and have asked little. Indeed, H. Wayne Huizenga, the Blockbuster video magnate who also owns a group of professional sports clubs and recently merged Blockbuster with Viacom, Paramount’s successful buyer, has also persuaded the Florida legislature to allow him to build “Blockbuster Park” on twenty-five hundred acres of swampland north of Miami as a kind of sixty-eighth Florida county. The enabling legislation calls it a “Multi-Jurisdictional Tourism, Sports and Entertainment Special District,” while locals call it “Wayne’s World.” A five-member council representing district landowners will govern. There is only one landowner, however: Blockbuster. The pro-park chairman of the Dade County Commission explains, “We’re tinkering with the outer edges of democracy as we know it—the privatization of government.”32 Not so very long ago, this pungent phrase might have been deemed