Gunsmoke and Mirrors

• kateshrewsday

Howdy, Pardners.

I write to you from the heart of Walt’s big dream, transported thousands of miles to Gaul.

It is an unlikely setting, this shrugging empire of effortless acerbic chic, for a place to site Euro Disney. The people who live here have provided thousands of years of fascination, awe and rivalry for my country.

But Disney has made its name through being squeaky clean, endlessly accommodating and acquiescent.

France is something entirely different, a bastion of umami, a champion of style which need not try, which is unafraid, laid back, brilliant, occasionally even militant.

But it seems the American dream really has been allowed to set up camp just a seven-league-boot step from the Champs Élysées and the Arc De Triomphe. I know, because I have watched Uncle Sam’s flags waving in Main Street. I have been educated, in a style only Disney can achieve, that this is, indeed, a small, small world.

And I sleep in the wild, wild West.

Our sensible room, with bed-and-two-bunks, is on the first floor of a saloon-style hotel on a street of woodclap houses, which appears to have tumbled out of an old western.

I am reminded of bawdy scenes, in which women of ill repute lean revealingly out of just such a window as the one my two children delightedly deployed this morning.

We may not have a plinky-planky pianist here in this hotel to hammer out notes as hardened cowboys and dastardly criminals down shots one after the other: but thankfully there’s a huge eatery dubbed The Chuck Wagon just down the road to do that for me.

It is untidy and crammed with edgy Spaniards this week; the tables are never clear in this huge refectory style saloon, and the clientele talk to the staff in gestures. We walk in and gruffly, mustering all the Euro-cred we can, hold up four fingers.

Four, Sam. give us four.

For there is no menu, you understand, just a wet tray, a plastic plate and a free-for-all at tip-top posh restaurant prices. Last night we paid fifty-five quid for fab French food served with all the grace and style of a Bastille riot.

As I  look outside this building, dubbed the Wyatt Earp, I gaze over a pristine Main Street, devoid of horse dung and sawdust and the stench of alcohol, at the Yellow Rose dance hall, and a spotless Wyatt Earp hotel block. We all know this isn’t the way it really was; it’s nice to play.

Most of the time.

Last night I was crossing the road towards the hotel when a small white electric buggy whirred past me, on its way to complete some ancillary task for the convenience of the resort’s leisure seekers.
And it hit me: this place isn’t a million miles away from that fictional and oh-so-notorious resource out there in the middle of a desert: Westworld.

Westworld – the 1973 film which has appeared in Shrewsday columns before – is one of three fictional parks in a book written by Michael Crichton, and later made into a film starring Yul Brynner.

Medieval World, Roman World and Westworld are simulations manned by robots. The cowboys, the centurions, the serving wenches: all are simply mechanical confections for those who choose to play.

If a cowboy is shot in a gunfight, he’s back next morning, good as new.  This is due to the underground army of scientists and engineers who come out at night while guests sleep, making right and repairing to make the next day the ultimate experience for these techno-tourists.

Which is all very well, until a fatal glitch in the software of the virtual empire causes its androids to get very nasty indeed, and turn on the tourists.

One unlikely would-be cowboy incurs the displeasure of the baddest robot, and the rest of the film is an exquisitely suspenseful set of hunting scenes: droid hunts man.

Contrived, it is, here: a wall-to-wall marketing scenario designed to drain the maximum amount of euros from its visitors.

But it is not sinister. The animals are all staffed by shrugging Gallic actors.

We are safe, and actually very happy, near the pink plastic palace on the outskirts of Paris.

28 thoughts on “Gunsmoke and Mirrors”

  1. No plinky-planky pianist? I’m disappointed.

    For some reason, I have never seen Westworld. I must look out for it; it’s always on the telly.

    So glad you’re enjoying yourself (and had time to tell us!). Any more photos?

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  2. One thing I have never been able to figure out to any degree of satisfaction about movies of the American West is that all the men of the whole town are in the saloon all day and all night playing poker and drinking. Doesn’t anyone work? How did the continent get settled with drunken card players having never left the chair in the saloon?

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  4. Ha! A bit like “When Worlds Collide”!

    Keep having fun at the “plastic palace on the outskirts of Paris”. I’m sure the kids are having a blast.

    Tom and I have wanted to take one of the Disney vacations where you get to play in the caverns underneath the parks. The underground where the artwork and animation goes on and the wheels turn. We have a friend whose daughter went to Orlando as an intern and never came home, content to live in the smallish quarters that employees can live in. It’s a small world, after all.

    The one and only time in my life that I ever fainted was at DisneyWorld in Orlando. The Submarine Ride. We were just married a few years and got free passes – that’s a long story. It was hot, the park was at capacity, which is pretty ripe in Florida, we were waiting in those horrid cattle lines. I looked at Tom and said I wasn’t feeling very well and proceeded to faint. Next thing remember was Tom handing me over to someone saying “would you please take my wife” and there I was, being passed to and fro, a lump of potatoes, until the dear man could get me to the end of the line, where the good Disney crew insisted on putting me on a stretcher and taking me into first aid and administering smelling salts (even though I was wide awake!). A young bloke came in and said “they’re dropping like flies out there” then turned bright red when he saw this little fly.

    Revived, we were promptly escorted to the front of the line, and voices were heard, whispering, there’s the lady that fainted and her nice, tall husband. Is he Captain Nemo?

    Skip the sub ride.

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    1. Thanks Nancy. Back now, and I have to confess that if I had not had a job interview on Monday I would have enjoyed it immensely. Older children make a big difference 😀
      (Didn’t get the job, but maybe I didn’t want it quite enough…)

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  7. What a fun time. Now, do you have to dress in the style of the time? That would make some marvelous photgrphonc memories for you, and, of course, us, your readers. We’d understand if, for safety’s sake the photographs were all headless 😉
    Liz

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  10. Lovely fun. You had me seriously worried, though, I thought you might have been injured when that electric buggy whirred past and then it hit you! 🙂
    I saw that android thing recently. Yul Brynner as the android impervious to all kinds of damage but set on bumping off his prey. He took an awful lot of stopping.

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  12. Oh, my heart leapt when I saw the Wyatt Earp sign thinking you were here in my home state and then I remembered the Eurodisney bit – alas! Glad it was fun.

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