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The son, Robbie Elias, has a bed shaped like a pirate ship in his bedroom. By opening a chip-enabled copy of
Peter Pan
, something as simple as story time can be turned into a wholly different animal. The room is transformed into a sound-and-light show, with clips from the animated classic, full orchestral music, and Tinker Bell zooming past the windows and setting lampshades to spinning and drawers to slamming. At one point, the cannon at the foot of the bed begins to smoke, signaling its readiness to fire. Pulling the rope at the end of the barrel somehow causes it to shoot invisible cannonballs that pierce holes in the pillowy banks of clouds on the movie screens on the opposite walls. It’s very cool, but very, very stimulating. (Goodnight bowl of mush, Goodnight … 
oncoming speeding locomotive train!
) An ancient and unimpeachably wholesome act of parenting is reengineered to be the equivalent of hooking one’s kid up to a glucose drip five minutes before bedtime. It also relieves any child of the task of using his imagination. The same thing happens in the dining room, where Atkins takes out an Eiffel Tower snow globe from a bibelot cabinet. Placing it on a special lighted shelf, the frames around us change to pictures from the Elias family vacation to France. “Then we can talk about our trip,” he says.
Or
, I think,
we could talk about our trip. Someone has only to say,
“
Hey, remember that awesome trip we took to France?
”

The Dream Home is, at best, an upgrade of gadgets already familiar to most people, like photo albums, for example. That kitchen faucet is undeniably nifty, and a coffee table whose surface is an interactive screen where one can page through a virtual copy of the original manuscript of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground
, downloaded from the British Library (a large iPad, basically, but we don’t know that yet), is absolutely covet-worthy. There is even some mild amusement in the Magic Mirror. But what might have been truly new, exciting, or groundbreaking has been punted on (more of that in a moment), leaving Atkins and Zofrea to sex up what is ultimately an electronics showroom for crowds, most of whom are carrying telephones that can already do half of the stuff here.

Does the Elias Family Saga turn this trade show into an immersive experience? One is certainly deposited into a sea of people. They let in groups of seventy visitors at a time, but guests can stay as long as they like and the space fills up in very short order. Another impediment is that the Elias characters never interact with one another—kind of a basic requirement for a dramatic entertainment—so the carefully constructed back-stories and relationships might as well never have been written in the first place. Moreover, they’re all wearing the same yellow Astro Blasters jersey, which makes them seem like less dramatis personae than employees at a Best Buy. And no one, neither guest nor Elias, is sticking around long enough to have anything but the most glancing contact. They appear, greet us, say something breathless and generic about their upcoming trip to China while directing our attention to some gadget, and then beat a hasty retreat with a cheerful “See you at the party out back. Have fun!” To cut them some slack, there is almost no way to inject
emotional urgency into the phrase “See, my iPac phone connects with the Life/ware system that connects through Microsoft Windows …”—but why even try? The narrative hook of the Elias family and their “story” is about as effective as decorating bullets. Who’s going to appreciate the flowers that have been lovingly painted on as they whiz by?

Actually, a bullet—decorated or unadorned—starts to look mighty attractive after a while once the crowds come in. The Dream Home is a place of ceaseless activity and cacophony. The Life/ware consoles compete with one another from room to room. The light levels cycle rapidly. The window shades—printed in an attractive Alphonse Mucha–style swirl—rise and fall like carousel horses. The crowds want to try things out, pitting Dad’s Barry White against Mom’s ABBA not twenty feet away. At one point I park myself near one of the control panels and unilaterally select Grandpa’s Andrews Sisters playlist, not giving anyone who approaches even the slimmest of chances of changing the music for a few blessed minutes. This is just one of the many dispiriting aspects of 360 Tomorrowland Way: it would be just as jangling even without visitors, if it was only the family here. Rooms reassemble themselves upon the arrival of a new Elias, responding to RFID tags sewn into their soccer jerseys (although if two people enter the room at the same time, Mom’s preferences prevail, the Peace of the Hearth being of paramount importance). Things chez Elias are both adversarial and negligent, as though a family with shared interests who might agree upon what to hang on the walls of the dining room was somewhat laughable, as though we have all of us, up until now, been living lives of quiet desperation, muffling our desires and personal preferences in ambient music, lighting, cuisine, and artwork. The Life/ware system is predicated on the notion that the personal preferences of each family member are inimically
different. And such environment-shifting software seems a questionable power to bestow upon a child, if only because of its potential narrowing of horizons. The notion of guiding a juvenile mind away from a constant diet of
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
might seem heretical here at Disney, but surely shaping the tastes of the young is a fundamental part of taking care of them, a more benign aspect of the moral attentiveness that makes us inoculate them against disease and teach them not to steal. Is the fear of a tantrum so great that a Brueghel painting, say, must perforce morph into a large photo of a gumball machine just because an eight-year-old has walked into the room?

Passing the Parrish-style mural on the courtyard wall—beside the very ordinary laundry room that still filled this apartment dweller with envious wonder—I head to the much talked-about party out back, in the AstroTurfed “yard.” With an expected eight thousand visitors marching through the space every day, any natural grass would be trampled into oblivion just as surely as if it had been napalmed. It resembles a car commercial set in a dealership where there is a balloon-festooned shindig in progress. Will we all kiss at midnight? Unlikely, since there isn’t a scrap of sustenance or drop of inhibition-lowering liquid in sight. With a cocktail or two, this could become the scene in DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments
where the Israelites, doubting the existence of their god, smelt a golden calf to worship—and for some nubile contract players to writhe upon—the bacchanal reaching its acme just as Moses returns with the tablets of the Law in hand, and you know the rest of
that
story …

A major aspect of the party that is preventing the kind of unenlightened behavior that goeth before a fall is the fact that no one is looking at anyone else. There is a deafening chaos of competing Zunes (Microsoft’s MP3 players), a Taylor Morrison Homes design-it-yourself monitor, a race-car simulation game
complete with juddering driver’s seat (what garden would be complete without one?), and a barbecue with a flat-screen monitor that can dispense cooking instructions, but no food. And there, a vanquished Apollo, now reduced to serving as nothing but a decorative pedestal for another noise-dispensing screen, is a small-scale model of the original House of the Future.

It is a dog pile of consumption, overhung with colored Chinese lanterns. It all makes one yearn for the monastic serenity of the Times Square subway at rush hour. The cherry on this sundae of despair is the helium squeak of two little girls karaoke-ing their way through the main anthem from
High School Musical
, the
musica sacra
of the tween canon, “Start of Something New.” Frankly, it all feels anything but.

At five thousand square feet, the Dream Home is plush and commodious. In the entire place, the only thing that might qualify as a space-saving Innovention is that kitchen faucet. Otherwise, nothing is dual-purpose; nothing folds down into anything else. Nowhere is there even a tip of the hat to a world of dwindling resources or our dependence on fossil fuels, foreign or domestic. Far more than the atomic-age louvers and aerodynamic icing of the fifty-year-old versions of the future, this house seems mired in yesterday. Your grandfather’s tomorrow was more ingenious. Atkins doesn’t really understand my reservations, thinking that my problems with the Dream Home are aesthetic. “We’re in Southern California. We think
this
way,” spreading his hands wide apart, “not
this
way,” he says, spacing them vertically. Precisely.

Art director Tom Zofrea gets it. He acknowledges and applauds the current trends toward mixed-use, human-scale homes and neighborhoods, with the lost art of walking enjoying a locomotive renaissance. “If you read the architectural literature and what architects are looking at for the future, they are
looking at reinventing the mixed-use, New York flats above the retail space. I actually think that’s a great way to go, it sends the right message, absolutely positive.” Why then does this have no place in the Dream Home? The reasons are both practical and philosophical. With Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility requirements and fire-code compliances, there would be almost no way to make it much more compact. True enough, but the conspicuous absence of even a mention of alternative fuel sources, of solar or wind power, smacks of marching orders from on high. “What we’re trying to do is to keep a very optimistic and open view of the future, and the optimistic view of the future is ‘we’ll solve these problems and we’ll learn to design around them,’ ” he says. The Dream Home, therefore, exists in an unspecified time and space when the challenges of oil and sprawl have been vanquished, although how exactly is never mentioned. Disney may have said it first but they seem to have forgotten that it really is a small world, after all.

In an odd coincidence, the very week that the Dream Home opened, at the other end of the Disney corporation’s spectrum, Pixar releases
Wall-E
, its thoroughly dystopian masterpiece, a film premised on a world choked by garbage and waste, a planet no longer habitable and made so, at least in part, by—let’s not mince words—the fat fucks who build gargantuan homes that make little or no concession to the limited resources out there.

The Monsanto House of the Future actually began as a research project between the chemical company and MIT as a means of exploring the ways in which plastics and man-made materials could be harnessed in ways they never had been previously. The original promotional film begins by speaking rapturously of the many wondrous innovations (see how lovely a word that is, all on its own?) that had already vastly improved
lives: waterproof roofing materials; shockproof vinyl coverings for electrical cords; materials that could be produced industrially and cheaply. “This is indeed a revolution,” says the voice-over.

The current revolution—one that Disney has ignored here—is sustainability. We should be walking through a five-hundred-square-foot home where you cook with, drink, urinate, heat, cool, and drink once more the same four gallons of water. The overwhelming feeling here is of a home from 2004, already ancient history in the public consciousness, pre–subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the world economy. The paint is barely dry and this is already out-of-date; a timid, delusional, exurban mausoleum that can only be accessed by a decreasingly affordable car (the Monsanto House didn’t even have a garage). More than the waste, the equating of acknowledging reality with bumming people out is what seems most glaringly old school. By the time I visit in late 2008, we are already shuddering on the brink of a cultural moment where, after suffering through years of falsely elevated and baseless hopes, it feels downright animated-woodland-creature-chirpy to face up to facts. A young fellow waiting to get into the Dream Home wears a T-shirt whose sentiments presage the necessary tough times ahead which still hold the promise of the rosiest of new dawns: 1-20-09.
BUSH’S LAST DAY
.

It’s not a total bust. The Dream Home does provide one moment of absolutely authentic wish fulfillment: a father in the family room, in front of the vast, gorgeous, pool-table-sized sheet of glass that is the Elias family television set. He is on the sofa, asleep.

Superman has taken the morning off. Although appearing among us in mufti, he is immediately identifiable by his square jaw and the comma of dark hair upon his forehead. With an affable hello he greets the other Hollywood Boulevard regulars who have gathered along with a small crowd of tourists standing outside the classical façade of the old Masonic Temple, now the theater where Jimmy Kimmel does his evening talk show. The USC Trojans marching band, or at least a skeleton crew thereof, goes through its paces, a casually synchronized, loose-limbed routine in which they instrumentally exhort us to do a little dance, make a little love, and above all, get down tonight. Superman bops his head, enjoying his moments of freedom. In a while he will have to put on his blue tights and red Speedo and go in to work, posing for pictures with the tourists in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Maybe he’ll stop on the way at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at the corner of Hollywood and North Orange. Batman and the Cat in the Hat go there sometimes.

Suddenly, from the doors of the theater, just behind the Trojans, emerges a cheerful chubby fellow. Completely unconnected to the proceedings on the street, he is dressed in a cheap red-satin Satan costume. Dancing in time to the music, he beckons to us, crowing delightedly, “Worship
me!
Worship
me!
”

But we are here for neither the Man of Steel nor the Prince of Darkness. We have come this morning to witness the consecration of the newest star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. The “star” in question on this dull April morning is local radio personality Dan Avey, who will join the two thousand–plus others—from the greats to the somewhat less-than-greats to the downright obscure—in that characteristic luncheon-meat-pink-against-lustrous-black-terrazzo-and-brass
immortality. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, the organization that administers the Walk, has set up a steel barrier to separate those with a personal stake in the ceremony from the gawkers and hoi polloi. It is a hopeful gesture.