The American Dream and Other Fairy Taleswithin the theme parks that bear her family name, sitting in on meetings with the Disneyland Workers Unions and learning about how many of them are scraping by just to survive. “We’ve had cast members who’ve had to make the decision between medication or food,” one worker tells Disney.
It is weird to come to awareness, slowly, of how big a deal that is. I’m sure Angelina Jolie’s kids and Beyoncé’s kids will have to deal with this slow awakening that happens. Little by little, I started to sense something big was happening. And it was fun, mostly, when I was young, because we would go and tear the place up. But sometimes it was a little bit of a bummer, because there were openings we’d have to show up for in our very nice clothes.
My parents and I really, really went at it for years. I didn’t like it. I felt like I was at Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving table. My mom loved Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. She was really on the right wing, and very much in the great new troll tradition of the right wing, which is the baiting, and the owning libs, and all that. It was excruciating for me, because I didn’t want to be in constant opposition.
The conservatives see those as attempts at bringing real life in this direction, and people who lean liberal—progressives—see those things as just reflections of the way it is. There’s a different theory of change in operation on the two sides, which accounts for the radically different way of understanding things.
At the end of the film, it’s mentioned that Disney will soon raise its minimum compensation to $18.50 an hour, though you argue that number falls short in places like Anaheim. What fixes would you like to see Disney impose to improve the lives of their workers?