Papeete-PolYNesian Disneyland and The Audacity of hYpe
Papeete, French Polynesia / World Cruise Reprint
Tahiti: Travels in Hyperreality
Less than twenty-four hours in port—and a paradise already performing its own mythology.
Field Note 01
Reprinted from the World Cruise 2011 post.
With less than twenty-four hours in port, the locals and the locale are living up to their stereotypes: Tiki-style roofs, tropical gardens, swaying palm trees—and the visual souvenir that, like the postman, always delivers.
The beautiful Tahitian women, with raven hair falling nearly to their knees, hand-weave leis effortlessly while wrapping themselves in watercolor-flowered sarongs. This is modern Papeete: a post-colonial suburb of Paris with a ukulele soundtrack.
Island Archive
Paradise, Framed for Arrival
The landscape is real. The presentation is choreographed. The camera sits somewhere between witness and participant.
Field Note 02
It’s a Small World After All
Marketing the definitive view of paradise.
As the ukulele plays in the background, I feel as though I am on safari. Polynesia cannot escape becoming a human zoo designed to contain and display the lives of its star attraction—its first and native people.
Playing the game of staged authenticity in Tahiti’s tourist spaces is not quite the McDonaldization of the South Pacific. It feels more like a Disney animated feature: polished, familiar and emotionally pre-scored.
I even feel strange participating in the rituals of sightseeing and picture-taking. At the Gauguin Museum, the paintings are reproductions because the originals cannot be preserved and curated there. I have seen many of them elsewhere in the world—most unexpectedly at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
The hyperreal world is the world of the “absolute fake,” where imitation does not merely reproduce reality but attempts to improve it. Gauguin’s obsession with French Polynesia is still working.