The City of Robots

Following our test, we were asked to read “The City of Robots” by theorist Umberto Eco. I found this package to be of much interest since it uses Disneyland and Disney World to exemplify what he is discussing and they are both theme parks that I have visited in the past.

However, I would like to relate Eco’s works to another place which I frequented as a child in the past called Rawhide in Arizona. Even if you go on the website, it says that Rawhide is an 1880’s western town and plays western theme music to confirm this. By doing this, we are led to believe that it is a real western town when it is merely a representation of one. From the instant you walk in, it is evident that it is what Eco calls a “masterpiece{s} of falsification”. Children get to go mining for ‘gold’ which is really rocks painted with gold color also known as a reproduction of the gold itself and the way it was separated from other rocks and dirt. The total fake is admitted as when you walk in it appears real from the saloons where people eat, to the activities, to the clothes and how the employees act. There are even live gun shows between cowboys and they give out warrants and put you in ‘jail’ for things such as roughhousing. As a child, I admired the perfection of the fake and mistook it for real. The illusion produced by Rawhide stimulates the desire for it. You do things such as eating rattle snake and riding horses- just like the cowboys did. I feel as though at that age, if I went into an actual old western town I would wonder where the cowboys were and where the fights with pistols were, missing the image of a real western town that Rawhide provided me with. With Rawhide, you get confused by the verisimilitude – the fact that there seems to be a collapse between reality and fiction. This relates to what Lyotard was saying when we cannot tell the difference between the two as they appear extremely similar.