Levine / Fractured Fairy Tales Television & New Media / February 2005

ARTICLE 10.1177/1527476403255820

Fractured Fairy Tales and Fragmented Markets Disney’s Weddings of a Lifetime and the Cultural Politics of Media Conglomeration Elana Levine

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

This article analyzes the institutional and textual features of a Lifetime Television series called Weddings of a Lifetime. It argues that the synergistic melding of Disney, ABC, and Lifetime in Weddings of a Lifetime not only typifies media industry strategies in an age of conglomeration but also evidences the complex textual meanings produced through such institutional practices. In this case, Disney’s cross-promotional efforts at once bolster and challenge the company’s vested interests in the ideologies of heterosexual romance and marriage. While the linkages between Disney properties maximize the program’s selling power, those same linkages, along with the series’ blurred generic boundaries and pretensions to “reality,” fracture the idealized fairy tale that its stories of romance and marriage ostensibly relate. The article seeks to extend the discussion of media conglomeration into a specific case study to examine the effects of this institutional development on a media product.

Keywords:

Disney; Lifetime; media conglomeration; fairy tale; romance; synergy

The summer of 1995 proved a particularly prolific season for new unions. As couples worldwide exchanged conjugal vows, the Walt Disney Company trumpeted its purchase of broadcasting giant Capital Cities/ABC, a merger the entertainment industry pronounced “a marriage made in heaven” (Gibbs 1995, 24). Meanwhile, weddings both romantic and remunerative unfolded at the Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida, where David Cobb and Suzanne Mackie became the first couple to be married at Disney’s Fairy Tale Wedding Pavilion. Cobb and Mackie’s nuptials were soon featured in the first episode of Weddings of a Lifetime, an ongoing series of specials airing on Lifetime, the women-targeted cable television

TELEVISION & NEW MEDIA Vol. 6 No. 1, February 2005 71–88 DOI: 10.1177/1527476403255820 © 2005 Sage Publications

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network. Co-owned by ABC and the Hearst Corporation, Lifetime Television joined the Disney family with the Disney/ABC merger. Each of the early episodes of Weddings of a Lifetime traced the history of a “real-life” heterosexual couple’s romance, including the planning of their Lifetime-sponsored fantasy wedding, before presenting the wedding ceremony itself. The program has aired quarterly since 1995, although beginning in 2000, the series turned away from showcasing the Lifetimesponsored weddings of average Americans and turned instead to celebrity wedding coverage and more narrowly focused wedding specials (e.g., Dream Weddings on a Budget). This article focuses on the earliest episodes in the series, for they best exemplify the program’s synergistic potential. The first two installments, in the mid-1990s, were set at the Walt Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida, and succeeding episodes continued to promote Disney properties. For example, a February 1997 edition celebrated the theme park’s twenty-fifth anniversary in conjunction with a young couple’s wedding and the bride’s parents’ renewal of vows in honor of their twenty-fifth anniversary. A March 1999 episode featured the first couple to wed during a Disney Cruise Line Vacation. The intervening episodes were staged in alternately glamorous or quirky locales, among them the Sandals Caribbean Resorts, the Windows on the World restaurant in New York City, and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. To host the program, Lifetime hired a succession of celebrity couples, all of whom had ties to the cable network’s part owner, the U.S. broadcast network, ABC. Married in real life, on one of ABC’s daytime soap operas, or both, hosts such as Jack and Kristina Wagner, Michael E. Knight and Catherine Hickland, and John and Eva LaRue Callahan guided viewers through the fairy-tale weddings of the featured couples. The series thus teemed with layered images of weddings and romance—the real-life couples getting married, Disney fairy tales like Cinderella, the celebrity couples’ real-life relationships, and the fictional romantic histories of their soap opera characters. In this article, I argue that the synergistic melding of Disney, ABC, and Lifetime in Weddings of a Lifetime not only typifies media industry strategies in an age of conglomeration but also evidences the complex textual meanings produced through such institutional practices. In the case of Weddings, Disney’s cross-promotional efforts at once bolster and challenge the company’s vested interests in the ideologies of heterosexual romance and marriage. While the linkages between Disney properties maximize the program’s selling power, those same linkages, along with the series’ blurred generic boundaries and pretensions to “reality,” fracture the idealized fairy tale that its stories of romance and marriage ostensibly relate. This article attempts to move beyond large-scale denunciations of media conglomeration that, while compelling, do not always grapple with the cultural politics of the media conglomerates’ products.1 Following Janet Wasko’s (1996) call

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for studies that combine “political economic analysis with insights drawn from cultural analysis . . . emphasizing the economic as well as the ideological” (p. 349), this article investigates the institutional and textual implications of Disney’s Weddings of a Lifetime.2 In so doing, I hope to extend the discussion of media conglomeration into specific case studies that examine the effects of this pervasive institutional development on the media products we consume.

It’s a Small World After All: Disney and the Institutions of Media Conglomeration By the time of Weddings of a Lifetime’s debut in the mid-1990s, Disney’s status as a global media conglomerate was emblematic of the economic trends that have increasingly come to rule most industries, perhaps none more so than the culture industries. Selling to global markets, trafficking in ephemeral images instead of material goods, depending on cross-promotional synergies to support its horizontally integrated subsidiaries, Disney and its fellow media superpowers have both created and been created by our global economy. One result has been what Michael Curtin (1997) has termed a “globalization/fragmentation dialectic” (p. 187), a tension between global and local profit bases, mass and niche markets. Each side of the dialectic enables the existence of the other: niche markets are profitable because they buy a specialized alternative to mass-targeted products; global operations are feasible because local resources provide reliable income. Almost as often, however, the two sides can conflict. In Disney’s case, expanded holdings and cross-promotion have given the company a globalizing boost, but the conglomerate’s attempts at fragmentation, at niche marketing their products, have created some serious problems. Protests against films such as Priest (1994) and Kids (1995), both distributed by the Disney subsidiary Miramax, indicate the difficult balancing act Disney has faced in diversifying its customer markets. The trickiness of the act is particularly intense for Disney because its image as creator of family entertainment has been as central to its success as (and perhaps the most impressive of) its corporate machinations. In this way, the company’s image is deeply wedded to its economic status as a successful media conglomerate as well as to its cultural status as a bastion of family values. Today’s global media conglomerates, Disney among them, realize the globalization/fragmentation dialectic that defines their existence through the mixed strategies of mass expansion and niche marketing. To manage these two potentially contradictory goals, the conglomerates often rely on synergies between their various operations. In the early 1990s, for example, the Time Warner empire marketed the rap music created by its Death Row Records to a narrow audience of “urban” youth. Such niche marketing

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could be profitable for Time Warner because it was neatly balanced by the media giant’s more global, or mass, market stakes in subsidiaries like Warner Television productions. This variety of product allows Time Warner and the other companies in similar circumstances to circulate creative content between their various operations while also allowing more profitable outlets to distribute or promote products from the more limited arms of the company (Curtin 1997, 191). Disney’s participation in the mergers and synergies that earmarked the late-twentieth-century media industries was significantly maximized with its purchase of Capital Cities/ABC and attendant half-ownership of Lifetime. Such ownership structures have helped Disney and others to create a commercial intertextuality, a textually evidenced synergy, which gets played out in the conglomerate’s products (Kinder 1991, 172). For example, Disney’s Touchstone Television productions, Home Improvement and Ellen, both aired on ABC in the mid-1990s while the stars of each series made the Disney-produced films The Santa Clause (1994) and Mr. Wrong (1996). Meanwhile, Disney’s television syndication distributor, Buena Vista, originated the popular daytime talk show Live with Regis and Kathie Lee from ABC’s owned and operated WABC-TV in New York.3 ABC sitcoms such as Roseanne, Family Matters, Step by Step, and Boy Meets World sent their characters to Disney World for special “vacation” episodes in the early days of the merger (Nashawaty 1996, 8). And the Disney-MGM Studios theme park began an annual ABC Super Soap Weekend in 1996, featuring ABC soap stars and attractions such as “gift shops . . . a suds-themed restaurant and re-creations of such daytime trademarks as the General Hospital nurses’ station” (It’s a Soap World 1996, 54). Disney’s cable properties also proved to be potent realms for synergy, with the kids-targeted Disney Channel, the male-targeted ESPN, and the female-targeted Lifetime reinforcing the Disney image as a family company that could also meet the individual needs of different family members. ABC’s half-ownership of Lifetime has provided multiple opportunities for commercial intertextuality throughout the relationship’s synergistic history. As co-owners, the Hearst Corporation and ABC created series such as Lifetime Magazine (coproduced by ABC News) and Our Home (which drew on Hearst properties like Good Housekeeping magazine) (Bronstein 1994). Weddings of a Lifetime, in employing the celebrity couples as hosts, capitalizes on ABC’s in-house production of the network’s daytime soap operas All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital. Real-life married couple John and Eva LaRue Callahan, for example, played married couple Edmund and Maria on the network’s All My Children until LaRue’s departure from the show in 1997. When Jack and Kristina Wagner hosted the first three Weddings episodes in 1995 and 1996, Jack had already left his General Hospital role as Frisco Jones, but Kristina remained on contract to

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the soap as Felicia Jones, Frisco’s then ex-wife.4 In addition, regular mention of Jack’s character and his occasional guest appearances since his departure kept the actor very much identified with the ABC soap. Viewer crossover between the ABC soaps and Weddings was undoubtedly strong, given soap viewers’ high level of knowledge of the actors’ personal lives (the real-life marriages of the host couples) and professional work outside the soaps. In addition to these media industry synergies, Disney spent the mid1990s expanding its business in other areas of the marketplace. For example, a 5 million person drop in attendance at Disney World between 1990 and 1994 spurred the company to extend the theme park’s appeal beyond families with young children to include teens and childless adults. To these ends, Disney added new resort hotels, cruise ships, and a sports-training complex (DeGeorge and Grover 1994). The new Disney town of Celebration, located “just 15 miles south of Cinderella’s Castle and the Pirates of the Caribbean,” has attempted to extend the Disney experience through all ages and spheres of life, creating a utopian middle-class community where all public space is owned and controlled by Disney (Rothchild 1995).5 The new Wedding Pavilion, home of the Disney Fairy Tale Wedding, was another step in this direction, redrawing young adults into the Disney experience midway between their childhood visits and their trips as the parents of young children and potential Celebration homeowners. The creation of the Disney World Wedding Pavilion allowed Disney to capitalize on those aspects of its business that best exemplified late-twentiethcentury economic trends. Among these trends was a shift in consumption patterns from goods to services, a shift that has encouraged faster consumer turnover and repeat consumption and that, as a result, has helped to circumvent the more limited sales potential of durable material goods.6 Disney has long been as famous for selling experiences of intangible spectacle as it has been for selling goods, and the Disney World Fairy Tale Wedding Department opened in 1991 as yet another Disney service that trafficked in transient spectacle. Since couples regularly traveled to Disney World to get married anyway, the company found a way to profit even further from those couples’ patronage. When the Fairy Tale Wedding Department opened the Disney Wedding Pavilion in the Florida theme park in the summer of 1995, they were taking the next logical step of providing a setting specifically designated for an already thriving part of their business. At the time of Weddings of a Lifetime’s debut, Disney marketed its fairytale weddings in an elegantly designed promotional package sent to interested parties on request. An ivory-colored folder, embossed with tiny flowers and held together by a delicate piece of gold lame ribbon, opened to feature a personalized letter from the Fairy Tale Weddings senior sales manager on Cinderella stationary. A glossy brochure fit into a precut pocket

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and featured a couple in wedding attire gazing lovingly at each other as Cinderella’s castle glowed in the background and the long white train of the bride’s gown framed the bottom of the photo. Similarly romantic photos filled the brochure’s pages, along with text such as, “Where could you find a more memorable place to turn your wedding dreams into reality? [Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings will] create for you the memories of a lifetime!” The individual sheets with pricing information and other un-fairytale-like details were placed behind the brochure and contained such warnings as, “It is necessary that all of your guests stay in a Walt Disney World owned and operated resort during your wedding. This way each guest is able to participate in the ultimate Disney experience.” Seemingly, the $7,500 minimum wedding expenditure and the rental of Cinderella’s Glass Coach (including six white ponies and three costumed footmen) for $2,200 would not generate enough of the Disney experience—or enough Disney income—in and of themselves. In true Disney style, the entire family had to be immersed in the world of Disney, expanding the consumer base surrounding the wedding in the name of the “Disney experience” and the normalizing power of the heterosexual nuclear family. Although the spectacular dimensions of the Disney Fairy Tale Wedding experience logically assisted Disney’s attempts to expand its market to include more and more consumers, the focus on weddings instead of the company’s previous target of the family with children also functioned as a fragmentation or narrowing of the Disney market. As a promotion for the Fairy Tale Wedding Department, Weddings of a Lifetime contributed to this more fragmented marketing effort. When the series began in 1995, Lifetime held the enviable position of being the only cable network exclusively targeted to women. Lifetime’s positioning as the women’s network was particularly attractive to commercial sponsors because of its ability to offer the most sought-after audience demographic, women aged 18 to 49 with an average household income exceeding $40,000. In addition, the network had built up an aura of social responsibility due to well-received dramatic and nonfiction programming on women’s health concerns and social issues such as sexual harassment, which allowed advertisers to adopt the network’s “pro-woman” stance through association (Bronstein 1994). The network further emphasized its target audience to advertisers and viewers with its “Television for Women” promotional campaign, a campaign that led the network to an initial increase in prime-time ratings of 25 percent in the summer of 1995 (over the previous year) and 46 percent by November of that year (McConville 1995). Weddings contributed to the network’s positive numbers upon its debut—the June 1995 episode was the network’s “best performing special” (Haugsted 1995, 34). Each of the first two episodes drew more than 4.5 million viewers, and the series has remained the

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network’s highest-rated nonmovie special (Jim Hjelm Dresses 1996; Vejnoska 1999). In targeting the upscale, young to middle-aged segment of the women’s market, Lifetime provides Disney with a safe and successful niche to go along with the conglomerate’s more mass-targeted holdings. This is precisely the safe kind of niche market that Disney, or any media conglomerate, hopes to develop, as whenever the company has attempted to fragment its product to less mainstream markets, it has come under attack. For example, the Disney-produced and ABC-distributed sitcom Ellen came under the media spotlight as early as 1996 when rumors began circulating that the series’ lead character would come out as a lesbian. Disney was widely criticized for the impropriety of this move, particularly because of Ellen’s 8:00 p.m., “family hour” time slot. TV Guide chastised the company for airing a suggestive promotional spot for the series during ABC’s broadcast of Disney’s child-friendly feature, The Lion King (Cheers & Jeers 1996). Christian conservative Pat Robertson, one of the many voices soon to criticize the conglomerate, protested Ellen’s potential declaration by arguing, “Disney is trying to position itself as a family company. You can’t be a family company if that’s the kind of posture you have” (Battaglio 1996). Pressures such as these, along with disappointing ratings, uneven scripting, and halfhearted promotion, resulted in Ellen’s cancellation soon after the show’s eponymous main character did indeed come out (Becker 1998). Another mid-1990s’ Disney controversy centered on the company’s decision to offer health benefits to domestic partners of employees. As the last major Hollywood studio to provide these benefits, Disney had been under significant pressure to accommodate its gay and lesbian workers. According to one industry analyst, “There are a lot of talented people in Hollywood who happen to be gay, so Disney faces a lot of competition to get employees if they don’t offer benefits for partners” (Muller 1996, E1). In the face of these intraindustrial pressures, Disney’s new policy was attacked by groups such as the Southern Baptists, which called for a Disney boycott because “the Disney Company has given the appearance that the promotion of homosexuality is more important than its historic commitment to traditional family values” (SBC to Boycott Disney 1996, 81). Not only do such attacks on Disney suggest the problems the company has faced as it has expanded its operations and targeted new niche markets, but they also illustrate Disney’s heightened vulnerability when it comes to questions of sexuality and its relationship to family values. As gays and lesbians have gained greater voice in a culture that is increasingly tolerant of diversity, mainstream powers within the same culture have sought to sustain the hegemonic hold of heterosexual privilege. When Disney, longstanding advocate of the heterosexual nuclear family, institutes products

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and policies that question this cultural mainstay, anxieties about sexuality and the family intensify. Disney’s economic position, one that has used fragmented marketing as a profit-inflating corrective to its ever-expanding global reach, requires the kinds of products that might appeal to niche markets, such as a sitcom with a lesbian lead. But products like these represent cultural and economic threats to Disney’s mass-marketed profit base of “wholesome” family entertainment. For Disney, a profitable globalization/ fragmentation dialectic employing synergistic connections and targeting niche markets potentially endangers the ideological stronghold of its past success—the normalized sovereignty of the heterosexual nuclear family.

How to Live Happily Ever After: Disney and the Synergistic Media Text Given the industrial dialectic within which Disney is embroiled, and given the pertinence of issues of sexuality and family to the company’s cultural posture, a media text like Weddings of a Lifetime seems the ideal outlet for the conglomerate’s needs. Yet, because the program appears within a social climate brimming with such disruptive forces as divorce, domestic violence, gay and lesbian life-partnerships, and feminism, a context within which the idealized heterosexual nuclear family could seem more a fiction than a reality, Weddings of a Lifetime is also a text whose ideological foundation is under duress. Thus, in an intensified effort to assert believably the family ideal upon which the Disney empire (and much of Western culture, for that matter) depends, Weddings of a Lifetime has called upon real-life stories of “true love” and employed real-life married couples whose fame rests on the fairy-tale romances of their television characters to attest to the viability of the Disney image and of traditional heterosexual romance. In this section, I explore the features of the Weddings of a Lifetime text and focus on the series’ first three episodes. Two of these episodes were set at Disney World, and these opening installments established a pattern that the beginning years of the series followed. In addition, these initial episodes were hosted by married soap actors Jack and Kristina Wagner, a factor that allows for an in-depth analysis of the intertextual associations the celebrity hosts bring to the text. Through these intertextual associations, the program’s blurred generic boundaries, and its pretensions to reality, Weddings of a Lifetime asserts prescriptions for normative sexuality and its attendant gender and racial roles. At the same time, these textual features introduce a degree of ambiguity that has the potential to undermine the program’s prescriptive tendencies.7 Weddings of a Lifetime participates in the ongoing circulation of a Disney specialty, the traditional romance narrative. In the construction of the gendered, sexual, and racial identities of the series’ first three couples in

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particular, Disney-friendly romance and family values reign.8 The rigid inscription of gender roles within the couples’ relationships is one locus of these values. Although the program targets a women’s audience, the gender roles most explicitly identified are the men’s. All three grooms in the first episodes perfect the art of the romantic gesture, as David illustrates when he fashions a Cinderella-inspired proposal for Suzanne. The young men are constructed as creative, charming, romantic, and head over heels in love. The young women have less distinctive identities. Unlike their male partners, Suzanne, Anne, and Stacy become most active when selecting their wedding dresses and the other accouterments (e.g., invitations, flowers, bridesmaid dresses) associated with the wedding. The dress selection process features prominently in each episode, with the bride’s final choice revealed only as she walks down the aisle. The centrality of consumable goods to the wedding fantasy not only encourages the consumptive desires vital to Disney’s success but also locates those desires in the hearts of women. Constructed primarily as consumers, the Weddings of a Lifetime brides receive their bridegrooms’ romantic attentions much as they receive the trappings of their Disney-sponsored weddings. Disney is thus able to promote consumption alongside heterosexual romance, as if the two were naturally suited partners. In this portrayal, marriage and consumption are constructed as privileges rather than duties, the embrace of each allowing the women to enjoy more of the other. Such a fantasy sanctions Disney’s role as wedding provider both literally and figuratively (as the progenitor of fairy-tale romance). It also suggests a situation beneficial to women, freeing them from oppressive relationships to men and the market, offering the Lifetime target audience happiness in exchange for prescriptive gender roles and uninhibited spending. Another major function of gender roles within Weddings of a Lifetime is to assist the continuation of heterosexual hegemony through the creation of a new family unit. Although heterosexuality is such a deeply naturalized ideological construct that it is most strongly enforced by the program’s efforts to take it completely for granted, it is foregrounded at certain moments. In the first two episodes, at the Disney World weddings, heterosexuality is subsumed under ethereal romance; sex itself remains unspoken. However, in the third episode, set at Sandals Resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, the “sex” in heterosexuality becomes central to Jon and Stacy’s romance fantasy. Jon gleefully relates, “We’re saving ourselves for each other—waiting until our wedding night,” and describes the heart necklace Stacy wears to help them “stay strong” in this resolve. The episode heightens the sexual tension Jon and Stacy ostensibly experience as their wedding draws closer by featuring their scantily clad bodies reveling in the beaches of the Sandals resort, including a sexually suggestive kiss under a waterfall.

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In addition, the couple learns about the Jamaican custom of the groom drinking from a coconut to build strength for his wedding night. When Jon heartily imbibes, the episode reinforces myths of heterosexual male potency, even as it sustains those of premarital celibacy. This contradictory mix of myths remains Disney-appropriate because the episode is not set in Disney World but in Jamaica, an “exotic” foreign locale that allows for a franker discussion of sexuality. Because Jon and Stacy’s virginal pact preserves Disney identities even in Jamaica, the episode ultimately separates sexuality from romance, displacing the boldly sexual onto a foreign, and racialized, other. The Jamaican episode makes most evident the necessary whiteness of Disney’s fairy-tale couples, although their racial identities are significant in each of the first three episodes. Each wedding features an African American guest singer (Peabo Bryson, Patty Austin, and Bryan McKnight) who is briefly introduced early in the program, sings over a montage of photos of the couple, and then reappears in the middle of the wedding ceremony to perform a love song. With the song as a backdrop, the couples bring flowers to their mothers and hug and kiss their families before pausing to watch the singer. Juxtaposed with the visibly nonwhite singer and referencing the musical montages that have encapsulated many a white, on-screen romance, the moment affirms white familial solidarity in the presence of the hired entertainment. The Jamaican episode takes the affirmation of the white family even further, with its black hired help frequently hovering in the background as resort employees, wedding coordinator, and wedding officiator. These blacks, with the added weight of their national difference to their racial difference, distinctly mark Jon and Stacy’s American whiteness. The couple’s pronounced southern accents also set them apart from the Jamaicans who serve them. Racial identity, along with gender and sexual identity, works to instill Disney-appropriate images of romance and marriage in Weddings of a Lifetime, images that Disney needs to sustain its reputation as reliable provider of family entertainment and reliable supporter of family values. As I have suggested, however, Disney’s preferred meanings are far from assured in the Weddings of a Lifetime texts. The program’s attempts to mix reality with fantasy raise doubts about the believability of each and thus about the idealized family values the company represents. One aspect of Weddings of a Lifetime that at times fractures the narratives of the real-life couples and their fairy-tale romances is the intertextual associations evoked through the programs’ hosts, Jack and Kristina Wagner. The hosts’ real-life relationship and their behavior during the programs simultaneously work to reinscribe the unified identities represented by the real-life couples and to upset the authority of the romance fantasy. For example, the dialogue between the Wagners and the lines they address

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directly to the audience comment on the gender roles taken up by the featured couples. Kristina Wagner matches the brides’ roles in her enthusiasm for the wedding dresses and the romantic details of the weddings. She embodies the connection between the brides and the target audience of women by directly addressing that audience. For example, in the second episode, when Jack does not seem to understand the significance of the top designer who created the wedding party’s dresses, Kristina turns to the camera, winking in gender solidarity, “But we do, don’t we, ladies?” At the same time as Kristina’s role reinforces the prescriptive gender identities represented by the brides, her interactions with Jack suggest a different sort of romantic relationship than that experienced by the featured couples, one that might be read as a counterpoint to the fantasy romances. For instance, when she interviews the bridesmaids in the third episode, she tells them, “My husband and I, we have two little boys,” then calls to Jack, “Jack, can we have a baby girl?” His response, cutesy and dismissive, is, “No, honey. No. Sorry, Bryan,” as he returns to his interview with singer Bryan McKnight. While Kristina’s behavior here is appropriately feminine and maternal, her cajoling, even slightly nagging, tone suggests that fairytale romance has a limited shelf life; less romantic concerns will likely overtake the new marriages. Jack’s response to her behavior is an even more significant contributor to this fracturing of the romance fantasy. Instead of serving as the enthusiastic initiator of romance, as do the grooms he interviews, Jack takes on the more passive role of the wearily tolerant, detached husband. The Wagners’ interactions thus contribute to the program’s narrative of heterosexual family life in ways that both support the romance fantasy and begin to suggest its vulnerability. As attractive an example of heterosexual marital bliss as they are, the Wagners also embody the less glamorous role of the old married couple. For the Wagners, the fairy tale is seemingly over; reality has set in. This representation of married life offers no more fluidity in gender roles than does the fairy-tale romance narrative, but it does allow for a reading of fairy-tale romance as a fleeting fantasy, one far removed from reality, despite the evidence of the program’s “real-life” couples. Another aspect of the Wagners’ role that suggests the vulnerability of the romance fantasy is the complex intertextuality of the Wagners’ real-life relationship and their soap characters’ on-screen relationship. In real life, the Wagners had a child out of wedlock and lived together for several years before getting married in 1993.9 Such a nontraditional pattern of heterosexual romance presents a potential disruption of the fantasy wedding stories told in the Lifetime series. The Wagners’ relationship is inextricably bound up with their soap characters’ lives as well. Like many a soap opera couple, the characters of Frisco and Felicia Jones originally had a fairy-tale romance, complete with a fantasy wedding. Felicia even has royal blood; she is an

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Aztec princess. But Jack Wagner’s departure from the soap and subsequent short visits to revive his character have substantially changed the relationship between Frisco and Felicia. The couple divorced when Frisco chose his work as a secret agent over his family, and his periodic reappearances have emphasized Frisco’s need to continue his work and Felicia’s need to care for their daughters. Although this disruption to the fairy tale seemingly leaves intact traditional gender roles, Felicia’s long period as a single mother has led her to criticize these roles and their implications for her life. A December 1995 General Hospital scene, set in the middle of the night, featured Felicia pacing the floor with her screaming baby as she sarcastically muttered: It’s Mommy’s responsibility to deal with things like this, even if Daddy was here. . . . But he’s off, he’s off saving the free world from the threat of the month, which is what he does. . . . And this is what I do. Would I want to be off saving the free world from the threat of the month? No, I certainly wouldn’t.

Regular viewers well knew that the adventuresome Felicia would like to be off saving the world, as much as she loved her daughters, and that she deeply resented Frisco’s abdication of his responsibilities to his family. Thus, while certain moments in Frisco and Felicia’s on-screen relationship lived up to the fairy-tale romance ideal, the ongoing nature of soap storytelling had led to developments that questioned the desirability of that fairy tale and its gender-specific roles. When Jack and Kristina exchange gender-prescriptive dialogue during Weddings of a Lifetime, the intertextual associations between Weddings, the actors’ personal relationship, and their soap opera characters suggest not only the permeability of boundaries between fact and fiction but also the disputability of ideals like fairy-tale romance and marriage. In one sense, the Wagners and their soap character counterparts represent ideals of heterosexual romance and marriage, perfect, synergistic reflections of the fairy-tale romances featured on the show. In another sense, the Wagners’ unorthodox romance (an on-and-off relationship, a baby out of wedlock) and the disruption of Frisco and Felicia’s love story might suggest that heterosexual partnering is rarely as ideal as Disney makes it seem, that Disney’s fairy tales—even the real-life ones featured on Weddings—only exist in fantasy. An additional feature of the Weddings of a Lifetime texts that hints at the vulnerability of the Disney wedding fantasy is their use of genre. Weddings features a blend of genres, most prominently combining the two broad categories of fantasy (e.g., the Disney fairy tales) and reality (e.g., the realworld couples). Recent genre theorists have argued that generic combination is a regular feature of Hollywood film and television texts and a primary source of their polysemy.10 Weddings of a Lifetime supports such an

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understanding of genre mixing, for its combination of generic elements allows for a range of potential readings. More so than the average instance of genre blending in mainstream texts, however, Weddings’ amalgamation of genres multiplies even the typical range of readings available. In bringing together the fairy tale and nonfictional genres such as the live event, the tabloidized reality show (e.g., Cops), and the infomercial, Weddings fuses genres that are rarely fused. In crossing and recrossing the line between fantasy and reality, the series cross-promotes multiple Disney products, including the ideals of heterosexual family life on which the empire’s fortunes rest. At the same time, this generic mixing can be seen to challenge the believability of the fairy-tale fantasy and its Lifetime-documented reality. The program’s fairy-tale elements are the most predictable and the most Disney influenced of its generic parts and, as such, they rely most heavily on other Disney texts, particularly Cinderella. Heterosexuality pervades the 1950 Disney cartoon, from the birds that awaken Cinderella to the king’s obsessive desire for grandchildren. The king’s need for children produced within the heterosexual nuclear family matches Disney’s need for such families to sustain its empire, while Cinderella’s focus on goods such as her ball gown and her coach romanticizes the consumptive desires Disney hopes to instill in its young audiences. The Disney Fairy Tale Wedding department offers the lived experience of Cinderella’s trip to the ball for a substantial fee, and Weddings of a Lifetime featured real-life couples getting to play Cinderella. In the first episode, David proposes to Suzanne in an evening-long Cinderella fantasy, complete with a new dress, glass slipper, and bended-knee proposal in front of that Disney World trademark, Cinderella’s Castle. In the second episode, the “fairy godmother” who saw Michael propose to Anne on Sally Jesse Raphael’s talk show describes how she was moved to write to Disney to request a fairy-tale wedding for the couple. These intertextual references fulfill Disney’s synergistic promotional aims as well as assist its efforts in reifying heterosexual romance. The presence of the fairy tale within Weddings’ generic mix is perhaps Disney’s strongest push for its version of heterosexual romance. However, the intersection of these fairy-tale elements with elements of nonfictional programming, particularly the live event, the reality program, and the infomercial, complicate the program’s assertion of heterosexual marital bliss. In the first two episodes, Weddings of a Lifetime makes pretensions of “liveness” a central feature, one designed to authenticate the fairy tales as real. Jack and Kristina Wagner carry handheld microphones, using them to directly address the audience and to interview the wedding party and the guest singer. Other markers of the program’s liveness include flubbed lines, awkward performances by the couples and wedding parties during the ceremonies, and even a “Live” graphic in the corner of the screen. Such features of the live television event succeed in reinforcing the

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reality of the on-screen tale, analogizing it to breaking news and to sports programming, a likeness also assisted by the Wagners’ “play-by-play” analysis of the prewedding and postwedding rituals. However, because such genres are usually so unrelated to stories of fantasy romance, their invocation might also disrupt the seamlessness of the Disney fairy tale. The inclusion of live television as a generic element thus helps perpetuate the polysemy of the Weddings text. Like the elements of the live event, those of the tabloidized reality program also attempt to inject a sense of truth into the fairy-tale-like stories. Faithful to the reality genre, Weddings of a Lifetime features interviews with the couples and their families and reenactments of significant moments in the pairs’ romances. In the second episode, for example, Anne and Michael narrate the story of their initial meeting at (where else?) Disney World. A reenactment of their first encounter on the Disney monorail, followed by recreations of their day together throughout the theme park (including stops at Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Electric Light Parade), ends on a cable car, the young lovers kissing as fireworks light up the night sky. Like much of the program, this segment invokes the infomercial as much as any other genre, but its use of the reenactment is specific to the reality program. Although the genre’s title suggests an adherence to truth, the tabloidized reputation of reality television makes its brand of truth immediately suspect. Much as reality programs like Cops and Rescue 911 rely on past television images of police and emergency work to construct their images of real cops and paramedics, so, too, does Weddings of a Lifetime rely on past images of fairy-tale romance and marriage (like Cinderella) to construct its images of heterosexual happiness. In addition, the reality replayed on Weddings of a Lifetime is specifically created for the television event. Not only the reenactments, but also the wedding preparations and ceremonies themselves are Disney’s and Lifetime’s constructions, staged for the cameras even though they result in legally binding marriage contracts between the couples. The “reality” of the reality program, suspect in any case, works in particularly convoluted ways in Weddings of a Lifetime, attempting to authenticate the fairy-tale romances, but inevitably pointing to their constructedness. The other nonfiction genre that fractures the fairy-tale world of the Disney romances is the infomercial genre, present throughout the program. While the first two episodes openly hawk Disney and the Fairy Tale Wedding Pavilion, the third episode features Jon and Stacy frolicking around the Sandals Resort, another purveyor of fantasy “destination” weddings. Each of the first three episodes also includes plugs for the dress designers and tuxedo manufacturers. Yet the program’s infomercial tendencies are so overt as to be ironic at points. As Jack Wagner narrates over visuals of the reception room in the first episode:

Levine / Fractured Fairy Tales Guests will be taken through an enchanted forest to a replica of Cinderella’s castle by crossing a drawbridge over a moat past the armed guards into the courtyard with fountains, flowers, and endless greenery for a feast fit for kings and queens.

Reading like a game show announcer’s description of the sponsor’s prize, Wagner’s breathless delivery mocks the excessiveness of the arrangements while fulfilling a promotional role. Because the infomercial has become such a well-known television genre, and because it clashes so harshly with the idealized world of the fairy tale, Weddings of a Lifetime’s infomercial elements not only undercut its fairy-tale elements but undercut themselves too. Neither the reality nor the fantasy of the program are undisputed; its generic mix fractures the text’s meaning such that Disney’s reaffirmation of heterosexual romance and marriage is left in tenuous standing.

After “The End”: The Cultural Politics of Media Conglomeration Weddings of a Lifetime is a product low on the Walt Disney Company’s chain of significance and profitability. As a quarterly series of specials on a cable network the conglomerate half-owns, its fortunes rank nowhere close to those of feature film and merchandising bonanzas like Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin. Yet the very smallness of this product, its specificity as a niche-marketed offering from a media giant, allows it to represent the micro-instances of Disney’s hold on our wallets and our imaginations. In addition, Weddings’ organizing ideologies of heterosexual romance and family values foreground the significance of these issues for Disney’s image, an image that has been constitutive of its economic success. The deeply wedded connections between Disney’s industrial standing as a global conglomerate seeking to balance mass and niche markets while maximizing synergistic ties and its cultural standing as a bastion of family values and heterosexual hegemony come to the fore in Weddings of a Lifetime in ways that make this small-scale program a highly representative case study of late-twentieth-century media. At the center of Weddings’ significance, and of the late-twentieth-century media’s significance, are the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction, truth and falsity, which many claim earmark the cultural period of postmodernity.11 When these boundaries are blurred in Weddings of a Lifetime, it is possible to see the progressive potential of such cultural confusion, although this potential could be even more clearly delineated with evidence of actual audience readings of the program. Without such evidence, we can speculate that the influence of the tabloidized reality genre throws into doubt the authenticity of the featured couples’ fairy-tale romances and consequently throws into doubt the truth of sexual

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hierarchies that privilege the heterosexual nuclear family to the detriment of other human relationships of love and support. This is not to say that those hierarchies do not continue to hold great sway. Much of the success of Weddings of a Lifetime is due to the persistent appeal of fantasy images of heterosexual romance to many viewers. Just as appealing are the program’s pretensions to reality; the fantasy images are so compelling because they are supposed to be real. Perhaps what Weddings of a Lifetime most assuredly says about the cultural politics of media conglomeration is that, as powerful as synergistic ties can be, the multiplicity of meanings they contribute to a single text can keep that text from fully endorsing any one ideological stance, even one as deeply ingrained as that of heterosexual romance and marriage.

Notes 1. See McChesney (2000), Turow (1992), and Barber (1995) for examples of scholarship that justifiably denounces media conglomeration and its consequences for a media-saturated public sphere. 2. Wasko (1996) notes that the Disney empire is an ideal case for this sort of integrated analysis. 3. For details on these synergies and those throughout all arms of the Disney conglomerate, see Gloede et al. (1995). 4. When the episodes hosted by the Wagners aired, Jack Wagner was starring in the FOX series Melrose Place as the lying and womanizing Dr. Peter Burns. Thus, the intertextual associations generated through this role might be seen as disruptive to the fairy-tale romance represented in Weddings. 5. See Andrew Ross (1999) for an in-depth discussion of Celebration. 6. David Harvey’s (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity elaborates on these industrial shifts of the late twentieth century. 7. In what follows, I offer my own analysis of the polysemic potential of Weddings of a Lifetime. A study of actual audience responses to the show would tell us whether this resistant potential is realized by the program’s everyday viewers. 8. The gendered, racial, and sexual identities of the couples remained relatively consistent in all of the episodes aired before the series’ format change in 2000. The occasional aberrations, such as one episode that featured an Asian American couple, did not substantially change the formula or disrupt the Disney-friendly messages about traditional romance. 9. Although irrelevant at the time of the initial Weddings airings, the Wagners have since divorced, as have David and Suzanne Cobb, the couple married in the first Weddings episode. 10. On film genres, see Rick Altman (1999). On television genres, see Jason Mittell (2001). 11. For the purposes of this analysis, the characterization of postmodernity by theorist Jean Baudrillard may be most appropriate. Baudrillard (1983) points to

Levine / Fractured Fairy Tales Disney as the disturbing epitome of the hyperreal and often as an emblem of postmodern America itself. His argument that Disneyland—and, I would add, the entire Disney empire—is “a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real” understands the Disney theme park as the fulfillment of an imaginary world apart form the “real” world that thus helps to sustain a distinction between real and imaginary, truth and falsity that does not exist (p. 25). In Baudrillard’s thinking, Disney deters us from recognizing that reality and fiction have become one and, thus, that the truths we believe in are mere constructs.

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Elana Levine is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her book titled Wallowing in Sex: American Television and Everyday Life in the 1970s will be published by Duke University Press. E-mail: [email protected].