Disney's Splash Mountain: Death Anxiety, the Tar Baby, and Rituals of Violence

Abstract

"You know that feeling you get when you're leaning back in your chair," says comedian Steve Wright, "and you almost fall over, but then at the last second you catch yourself? That's how I feel all the time." What is so deeply funny about imagining a human psyche persisting at that particular pitch of anxiety is that such a state is unimaginable over any length of time. It is necessarily momentary, something that exists in time only in retrospect, since our entire organism is devoted to getting out of it while it is happening. We simply cannot tolerate such a feeling of threat, of displacement.