the website of Mark S Bailen. . . writer, illustrator, and fake-nature photographer
I had never been to a Rainforest Cafe, but while walking through the Arizona Mills mall, I realized that the restaurant filled an entire bingo card of topics for my website. Fake nature, wildvertising, greenwashing, crapitalism, vaguely apocalyptic. . . all in the same place? Wuh? So my wife and I braved the lush plastic jungle and now I’m convinced. . . Rainforest Cafe is a portal to hell.
Rainforest Cafe is kid friendly, sort of? They have talking trees. Glitchy animatronics. Cartoon predators. And orange fake footprints that tell you where to go. And what happens if you stray off the footprints? You end up at a dark and creepy bar, sitting on stools with sheered-off animal-legs, beneath a giant magic mushroom. So there’s that.
At one time there were almost sixty Rainforest Cafes. Now there are sixteen? The one in Tempe is vaguely apocalyptic. The fish tanks are cloudy and contain no fish. The plastic vines are faded and dusty. Many of the animatronics only half work. One of the gorillas kept twitching and giving Nazi salutes. And the menu is full of food that you’d only order when drunk at 2AM at Denny’s.
It felt weird having animatronic elephants and gorillas watching me eat. I kept waiting for them to say things like, “are you gonna eat that?” and “please pass the ketchup.”
Somewhere in the depths of the Rainforest Cafe is this buff dude, painted in gold, rising out of a hot tub, and holding a neon globe that says, RESCUE THE RAINFOREST. Sure, why not.
The fake sky at the Rainforest Cafe looked like a screensaver from the nineties. And the stars looked like dead pixels. Perfect.
The motto of Rainforest Cafe was A WILD PLACE TO SHOP AND EAT. No argument there. The gift shop was bigger than the restaurant. While waiting for our drinks, I came up with some other mottos:
After ten minutes in Rainforest Cafe, the place went bananas. The sky darkened and lightning flashed. The animatronic animals started seizing. The air filled with howls, squawks, and trumpeting elephants. And I lost my shit.
I thought back to all the fake nature that I’ve visited, all the way back to the Enchanted Tiki Room. I wondered if these places were bad. Fake nature can be used for all kinds of things, right? Education. Art. Religion. Entertainment. Solace. Marketing. But how does it affect us? Does it hijack our primitive wiring? Hearken us back to original biomes? Remind us of places that no longer exist? That never existed? And why was the Rainforest Cafe trying to spook the fuck out of me?
I turned to my wife. “This place is a portal to hell. We gotta get out of here.”
When you exit Rainforest Cafe, you walk past Nile the Crocodile. . . weird. . . I could have sworn that there were four kids there a minute ago. Anyway, I felt lucky to escape.
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