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DEAN KISSICK

On Pleasure Island.Tumblr.Com

May 2011

In Band Of Outsiders, Arthur and Odile and Franz sprint through the Louvre, in 9 minutes 43 seconds. They are for an art that happens very fast. Their race is also recreated in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, when Matthew and Isabelle and Théo attempt to better their record. They are young and in love, in a rioting Paris in 1968 – sous les pavés, la plage – but they only really care about their own pleasures and their own thoughts. Narcissism and incest, indulgence and apathy, abound. And, while watching the black blocs sacking Topshop and the protestors occupying Fortnum & Mason, on News 24 on the internet, one finds oneself daydreaming about the models in the campaigns and the salt-caramels in the food hall, occasionally drifting away into blood-soaked fantasies of violence.

“No school, no pops, you can tear the place apart, and nobody says a word! Mope around, plenty to eat, plenty to drink...”

Walt Disney’s Pinocchio

Still, a lot of stories are about floating worlds, from castles in the sky through Jurassic Parks to treasure islands. In the original comic of Moomin’s Desert Island, a helicopter crash finds Tove Jansson’s hippopotamus-looking Finnish trolls falling out of the sky and onto a tropical atoll. Sniff, Snork Maiden, Snufkin, and so on, are out digging one day and find a secret hatch, which leads to a long-abandoned cave decorated with odd prophecies: “YEAR 1/ MOOMIN ERA/ THE FALSE BEACON/ WILL BE LIT ON/ TUESDAY AND FRIDAY/ THE WRECKERS.” All is confusion and they find themselves trapped, in a forest full of ghostly apparitions, far from Moominvalley. This same tale, in essence, is told in Lost – except the helicopter has transformed into Oceanic Flight 815, the Wreckers are become the Others, the writings on the walls underground are replaced with VHS recordings of the Dharma Initiative, and the woods are now haunted by a murdering smoke monster. Everyone is lost in, if not exactly purgatory, then a place after death... And these stories are echoed, again, on “The Island” of Charles Avery, except in his world everyone is trapped by their addiction to boiled eggs pickled in gin. In its darkest territories, islanders such as Mr. Impossible, an aristocratic and duck-billed platypus-looking hunter, search endlessly for the Noumenon, a mysterious monster. It cannot be seen or heard, but only conceived of and believed in.

Our Pleasure Island is a dying part of Disney World, Florida (all of its clubs were closed down in the winter, and it’s slowly transforming into a “Hyperion Wharf”) and, more to the point, a dark place in the movie adaptation of Pinocchio. Pleasure Island is a floating amusement park – in which mechanised Red Indian automata throw blunts to the crowds, and a dreamy rococo mansion is ripped asunder for jokes, and the Louvre’s paintings are drawn over and dashed open – and a snare for wayward boys, who are shuttered up within its walls by shadowy black monsters. And, like all islands, it’s cursed. As the party continues, the boys are slowly transmogrified into jackasses, with a donkey’s ears and tail, until one day they’re sent away to silver mines and circuses.

text by Dean Kissick
music by Alexis Chan

onpleasureisland.tumblr.com