Andrew's Wiki
Dollywood

Relationship of suburbanite Tennesseans v ones who “came down from the mountains” (popular joke) (alienation gesture)
Relationship between Smoky Mountain National park history, Dollywood’s production, and growth of Pigeon Forge (symbiotic: one can’t exist w/out the other)
Willed artificiality of Dolly herself sets the stage for caricatured culture (her ostentatiously fake chest, her spangles, her big hair)(ie, we mean to make our culture look like a cartoon)(must read her autobio)
Creation of small “worlds” inside the park (the Country Fair, the 50s stuff) just like other theme parks, but PLUS the mountain culture area—imagines an American history in which mountain people’s culture is just as important and significant as any other real or imagined moment or group in American culture. If you set the 1950s next to the mountaineer, you claim the same nostalgia for the mountaineer as you do for bobby socks and poodle skirts.
But they’re parodying their own culture, you say? Well, the move to make the mountaineer culture a tourist venue … is the same move that made them come down from the mountains in the first place. They reenact the same move the national park system did: the system took their homes and made it a tourist destination; so they took their culture and made it a tourist destination too. It’s a situation in which you “join” them rather than beat them.

Created on June 23, 2008 07:42:39 by Escha Ton ()