The many approaches to analyzing Disney cited in this 1995 article hit on some of the most eggregious symptoms but fail to accurately diagnose the disease, that Disney is CIA For Kidz using gender role models to get military recruits and social cohesion around male authority while also creating counterpropaganda using inoculation and interference theory.
...Ariel Dorfman came closest back in 1971 when he identified Disney's underlying imperialism in his 'How to Read Donald Duck,' a book banned in Chile at the time.
...Worth reading and noting how many have grappled with this detestable psyops entity targeting children.
-HMW
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/fullarticle/1G1-18257190.html
Beyond the mouse-ear gates: the wonderful world of Disney studies.
by Cynthia Chris
November 1, 1995
Walt Disney's theme parks, cartoons, feature films, TV programs, business practices and marketing approaches invite critical analysis by left-leaning cultural critics, offering as they do a view of American mass culture and the politics of race, gender and class. 'Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World' by The Project on Disney examines every aspect of the park by observing visitor behaviors and through their own experiences inside the Walt Disney World in Florida. It aimed at analyzing why mass culture is popular and recommends further studies of the Disney ideology.
The names of the Presidents change; that of Disney remains. Sixty-two years after the birth of Mickey Mouse, twenty-four years after the death of his master, Disney's may be the most widely known North American name in the world. He is, arguably, the century's most important figure in bourgeois popular culture. He has done more than any single person to disseminate around the world certain myths upon which that culture has thrived, notably that of an "innocence" supposedly universal, beyond place, beyond time - and beyond criticism.(1)
So wrote David Kunzle in his 1991 introduction to Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's daring How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1968).
Kunzle found that little serious analysis of Disney's innumerable and far-reaching cultural productions had been undertaken, save for this work, and a critical but somewhat less contentious volume, also published in 1968, Richard Schickel's The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney.
How things have changed. In the mere half-decade since Kunzle's challenge to cultural critics, at least five books and countless essays and reviews have been published with the intent of unraveling the mythic stature of this man-and-mouse team. This is not to mention Disney theme park travel guides, coffee table books on Disney animation, trivia books and biographies of Wait Disney.
Disney does appear to be in vogue among left-leaning cultural critics. Without a doubt, there is sufficient fodder for critical analysis. Disney's theme parks, cartoons, feature films, television programs, business practices and marketing strategies provide a curious lens through which to view American popular culture and the politics of gender, race and class. Currently there is no sign that the field of study is yet exhausted. In the publications discussed here, one finds little overlap in the essayists' choice of subject matter. There remain many films not yet selected for study, and Disney's television programs, encompassing both animation and live-action, aimed at children and adults, have hardly been touched on.
There is no sign that the steady stream of Disney output will slacken. Although it has not always enjoyed commercial success (and its live-action division is notoriously uneven), the Walt Disney Company has become perhaps the most successful producer of entertainment worldwide. Its film distribution arm, Buena Vista, dominates the feature market with the largest share of box office receipts; Walt Disney Studios' animated movies account for four of the top five best-selling video cassettes; and four of its theme parks rank in the top five in attendance.(3) Disney's recent $19 billion acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC (which includes the ABC Television Network, several local TV stations, the cable sports channels ESPN and ESPN2, half of Lifetime Television and over a third of the Arts and Entertainment Network) has elevated it from a solid force to an absolute leader in broadcast and cable television, and additionally provided footholds in other media (radio, daily newspapers and periodicals including Women's Wear Daily) to Disney's holdings.(4)
In New York City the magnitude of Disney's impact on urban culture is just beginning to be felt. Disney (along with other interests ranging from Madame Tussaud to Mariott International) are deeply involved in the city's plans to redevelop Times Square. In 1978 Mayor Ed Koch called for "an urban theme park" to revitalize Times Square, but rejected the earliest proposals as too ahistorical and "white bread." The 1987 stock market and real estate crash delayed revitalization plans until recently. Disney has already claimed central control of Times Square with a long-running live musical version of Beauty and the Beast at the Palace Theatre.
With a renovated New Amsterdam Theater as Disney's linchpin, the new project will encompass a huge entertainment complex, a nearly 1000-room hotel, a 29-screen Sony cineplex, enormous new studios for MTV and Home Box Office and miles of retail space. During negotiations, Mayor Rudy Giuliani's administration turned Central Park over to Disney for its premiere of Pocahantas (1995, by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg), and the timing of his subsequent attack on Times Square's sex establishments is no coincidence: the rezoning that promises to push porn stores and strip clubs to industrial parks in the outer boroughs is rumored to have been part of the city's deal with Disney.(5)
Despite its enormous power, Disney productions are vulnerable on many fronts. Although it is well known that Disney fiercely protects its copyrights, suing everyone from a day-care center to a man tattooed with Disney characters for unlicensed use of their images, the company is not invincible. Opposition to Song of the South's ( 1947, by Harve Foster) depiction of post-emancipation slaves content with serving their masters prevents the film's current distribution in the United States (although the subtitled Japanese version is not impossible to find). In one of the most publicized and at least partially successful campaigns against Disney, activists waged a campaign against the racist portrayal of Arab characters in Aladdin (1992, by John Musker and Ron Clements) ultimately succeeding in getting a portion of the lyrics in the film's opening song changed.(6) Although the accents and physical traits of the characters remained controversial (Aladdin and Jasmine seem "all-American," in a Ken and Barbie sort of way, whereas the evil Jafar has a heavy foreign accent, dark skin and exaggerated features), the lyric change represents a small victory against Disney's blatant perpetuation of stereotypes.
In Disney we find many such contradictions. Its vast power is not immune to criticism - Disney produces huge flops alongside megahits and even productions that warrant fantastic popularity and praise for artistic merit are marred by reprehensible messages. Apart from the myth of innocence cited by Kunzle, the clearest message of Disney's varied creations is what Patrick D. Murphy has called a "consistent, if incoherent, worldview on nature and women that is escapist and androcentric."(7) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, by David Hand) is a tailor-made example. Nature is benign (except when, for the sake of the narrative, it turns temporarily nasty) and even a strange, positive force (little forest animals lead Snow White to the Dwarfs' cottage and help her clean it). It is also not surprising that the female protagonist is witnessed cooking and cleaning for the Dwarfs before she has even met them. While Disney heroines have gotten "pluckier," similar stereotypes of female behavior and character remain in Disney films to this day. The heroine of Pocahantas again has a special relationship to nature - a raccoon and a hummingbird are her companions, a talking tree her advisor and surrogate mother.
For many cultural critics, myself included, it is difficult to approach Disney's subject matter with an open and objective mind. We bring to such investigations a lifetime of preconceptions that may be rooted in childhood memories, both positive and negative, as easily as they may be based on a litmus test of political correctness. Laura Sells wonders, in the context of an essay on The Little Mermaid (1989, by John Musker and Ron Clements), the film that marked Disney's return to the fairy tale genre and its first successful animated feature since Walt's death almost two decades ago:
Perhaps I'm guilty of Tania Modleski's charge that feminist critics often label a text feminist simply because we enjoyed it. Maybe I am in "danger of forgetting the crucial fact that like the rest of the world even the cultural analyst may sometimes be a cultural dupe" ... Yet maybe Modleski's implied charge of my own duplicity is, itself, a bit too easy. I am as much a product of the contradictions and tensions of contemporary feminisms as I am a dupe of dominant culture.(8)
I come to this project in the same predicament as Sells. In June 1995 I visited Disneyland for the first time. When I was a child, my family's vacation destinations tended toward the educational - our nation's capital, for example. Because my father refused to wait in line for anything, we saw the Capitol Building, the White House and the Washington Monument through the car window or from the outside only. We never travelled anywhere for the sheer fun of it. I was in college before I boarded an airplane or saw the ocean, and a Disney virgin until the age of 33. My partner, in contrast, grew up near Anaheim, California and as a child, teenager and young adult, she thought of Disneyland as her personal Magic Kingdom.
We had a ball at Disneyland and returned the following day. My fear of roller coasters evaporated. How could anything bad happen in a place where people seem so nice and everything so safe? When, instead of merely bouncing you around and spitting you out, the roller coaster actually rewards you after each twist and turn with an amusing tableaux of warm fuzzy audio-animatronic figures? Likewise, how could anything so pretty - here I am thinking of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - impose on anyone a negative self-image? How could anything as fun as Aladdin, featuring Robin Williams's mesmerizing improvisation as the genie and flying carpets with personalities, embrace racism?
It can and it does. After the trip, curious about these contradictions, I picked up Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995) by The Project on Disney, which includes articles by academics Jane Kuenz, Shelton Waldrep and Susan Willis, and photographer Karen Klugman. Inside the Mouse is an interesting, often chatty plunge into the culture of the other North American Disney theme park. Members of this team visited Walt Disney World in Florida alone and as a group, working collaboratively on the book's concepts while claiming single authorship of chapters. They observed behaviors and conducted research inside and outside the park, without Disney cooperation. Making extensive use of empirical evidence, these authors relate their own (and their children's) experiences in the Walt Disney World motels, at food stalls and souvenir stands and waiting in line for rides. They examine every aspect of the park, from the Magic Kingdom to EPCOT Center to the Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park, from its "ideology of global capitalism, for which the duties of citizenship are equated with the practice of shopping,"(9) to narrative tropes of Walt Disney World's postmodern architecture, such as its Swan and Dolphin Hotels designed by Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern's Casting Center (the Disney personnel office), and Arata Isozaki's Team Disney building (a corporate headquarters), entered through a "series of mouse-ear gates."(10)
The best "read" in the book is the chapter "Working at the Rat" by Kuenz, that explores the underbelly that most park visitors never see or give a thought to. We learn about sordid incidents and oppressive conditions not recorded in travel brochures. For instance, according to Kuenz, workers dressed in Mickey and Minnie Mouse costumes have been caught having sex in the park's underground tunnels. Anyone playing a costumed character can be fired immediately for taking the head off in view of park visitors, even if they have passed out or vomited, which they do occasionally, due to the weight of the costumes, the intense Florida heat and excessive use of recreational drugs encouraged by split shifts and overtime hours during peak seasons. Kidnappings, fatal accidents and suicides are regular occurrences but deft security teams are trained to sweep such unseemly events out of the public eye - and out of the Orlando Sentinel. According to Kuenz and her anonymous sources, "no one actually dies on Disney property": life support is used until the victim of an accident, crime or heart attack can be removed from the park. (A highly publicized drowning in November 1995 in the lagoon of the park's adult nightlife center "Pleasure Island" was the exception that proves the rule.)(11)
Unfortunately, Kuenz does not, or cannot, substantiate many of these forays into the dark side of Walt Disney World. According to the employees she interviewed, Disney, in collusion with local authorities and media, insures that its image remains untarnished. Undoubtedly many of these incidents are the unexaggerated truth; others may be merely legend. Since her study is devoted exclusively to the experiences and observations of current and former Disney employees, some enamored of the organization and others quite disgruntled, their reports are not corroborated with local sources such as crime and medical reports and obituaries.
The methodology behind Inside the Mouse, and its anecdotal nature are both engaging and troubling. As writers of personal narratives, the authors are often compelling and close observers of the comic and tragic ironies that comprise Walt Disney World and American vacation travel on the whole. However, one cannot help but question some of the assumptions about visitors and what constitutes enjoyment - and, in some instances, an admitted prejudice against all things Disney prior to conducting fieldwork, coupled with an arrogant pride in this disdain. For example, Kuenz writes that in the process of recognizing and identifying with ideological and social formations realized and repeated throughout the park,
out of that identification or - sometimes, though perhaps only rarely and even then unconsciously - against it, Disney produces a feeling we find pleasurable. This has required some work and a stretch of the imagination for me; I've never found Walt Disney World all that enjoyable, though living in Orlando and visiting the park has made it abundantly clear that others do.(12)
Kuenz also discusses the level of enjoyment experienced by park visitors, based on her observations of their facial expressions:
Perhaps one of the bigger shocks at Disney for the uninitiated is how few people actually appear to be having a good time. While either patiently waiting in line, methodically making their way between lands, or staring stony faced at one extravaganza or another, many people just look anxious or bored.(13)
Here, observation alone may not be good enough science. Unfortunately, there is not much data indicating whether or not facial expressions reflected what Kuenz thinks they did. Are her interpretations of the expressions reliable? Or, if the writer isn't having a good time, could she be projecting some of her feelings onto them? Kuenz may be right - visitors may fault Disney for failing to provide constant exhilaration. Others may find that the occasional momentary thrill is worth the wait. During my visit to Disneyland, I stood in line for 45 minutes for the new and much hyped Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ride. My facial expression was probably similar to those of other visitors Kuenz observed. The ride lasted four minutes and was so enjoyable that I stood in line again to repeat the experience - and did so twice more the next day. Some visitors may agree that "fun" must be earned: that waiting for one's turn is simply part of the cost of enjoyment when demand exceeds supply. Given a choice between entering It's a Small World without waiting in line, or taking in an hour's worth of people-watching while waiting in line for Indy, to this consumer, there's no contest.
Like Kuenz, Klugman makes judgments based on appearances. Attending a party, she is engaged in conversation with a "heavy" man, "sweating profusely" in his wool sports jacket. She tries to explain to him her involvement in The Disney Project, having concluded from his appearance that he was the type "who, if he had been to Disney World, would answer, 'Yes, three times now,' or 'Yes, isn't it great?'"(14) Instead, he pegs a Disney vacation as too passive for his taste with a humorous turn of phrase. Surprised, Klugman fantasizes a response: she won't think unkindly of him for being "anti-Disney . . . I might even think you're deep."(15) The implication - that an over-dressed conventioneer, and anyone who actually has fun at the park - is necessarily "shallow" mars the ostensibly class-conscious analysis of the book.
Klugman, while contributing to Inside the Mouse as a writer, is primarily a photographer. She devoted one trip to Walt Disney World to taking pictures, some of which appear in the book, and exploring the camera culture that makes every moment in the park a "Kodak moment" (Kodak being the only brand of film Disney sells). In the chapter "Reality Revisited," she chronicles, often quite comically, some of the trip's exploits and the obsession of other visitors, armed with photography and video equipment, to document their vacations. Wandering the park alone and obviously handy with a camera, many families asked Klugman to use their cameras to take a picture that included everyone together in one shot; for her, their gratitude is touching. Inside the Mouse differs from the bulk of books critical of Disney in that it contains such pictures. Most books on Disney avoid potential copyright problems by omitting any representations of Disney property, including its characters.(16) Klugman's portraits of families decked out in Disney attire speak to the temptations of consumer culture as manifested in the park's omnipresent souvenir stands.
Inside the Mouse shed some light on my experience at Disneyland, but I often found myself seeking an oppositional stance in order to preserve without guilt, or even to justify, the pleasure I had experienced. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin (1994) in the American Film Institute Film Readers series, provided another perspective that reflected nearly the opposite of Inside the Mouse. Inside the Mouse's writers immersed themselves in only one of Disney's many ventures - Walt Disney World - whereas Disney Discourse surveys many Disney productions and practices, from Disney's animated feature films, cartoon shorts and Depression-era merchandising strategies to Tokyo Disneyland.
As editor, Smoodin refuses to succumb to the temptation to prove one thing or another about Disney. The writings collected here, for the most part, do not approach "Disney" as a monolithic entity possessing a singular ideology, but they never ignore the fact that Disney products are influential conveyors of ideology. According to Smoodin:
Just a quick look at the history of the company and its famous founder shows how Disney has had its corporate finger in more sociocultural pies than perhaps any other twentieth century producer of mass entertainment. Moreover, and despite the received wisdom that Disney's politics were and remain simply conservative, a more detailed analysis shows how Disney is ideologically - and just like the various theme parks - all over the map.(17)
In a clever move, Disney Discourse opens with a section called "A Disney Archaeology" containing four essays reprinted from popular journals, giving the reader unfiltered glimpses into Disney's past. Two short essays by Walter Wanger, for example, originally published in 1943 issues of the Saturday Review of Literature, wax eloquent with admiration for Disney's wartime efforts, specifically, training films for the military and the department of agriculture, and propaganda films such as Victory Through Air Power (1943), which promoted the development of planes capable of long-range flight for use in bombing missions. "The Magic of Disney" by Robert De Roos, taken from a 1963 National Geographic, applauds the advanced techniques used in Disney's "True-Life Adventure" nature films, its architectural simulations of natural phenomena such as the Matterhorn, the realistic movement of audio-animatronic figures, and, not surprisingly, the use of National Geographic magazines by Disney cartoonists for designing costumes and studying animals.
A more up-to-date look at Disney's history as a corporation is found in the essay "Disney's Business History: A Reinterpretation" by Douglas Gomery. Concisely and matter-of-factly, Gomery covers seven decades of Disney's financial ups and downs, beginning with the success Walt Disney originally achieved in filmmaking through his pioneering use of sound, color and tie-in merchandising. The history continues through the company's financial belly flops after Walt's death in 1966, to Disney's second "golden age," 1984-90, with the reign of Michael Eisner, the late Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg, when Disney launched Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures, which found large audiences for PG and R-rated movies (Three Men and a Baby [1987, by Leonard Nimoy], Down and Out in Beverly Hills [1986, by Paul Mazursky] and Ruthless People [1986, by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker]); revived theme park attendance with new attractions produced in collaboration with George Lucas; and regained some stature on television with Golden Girls and At the Movies, with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Disney continues to thrive in TV with Live with Regis and Kathie Lee and Home Improvement, both of which it produces for ABC.
In "Painting a Plausible World: Disney's Color Prototypes," Richard Neupert examines the synergy between the early Disney Studios and Technicolor. The first three-strip color process so increased costs that Technicolor was unable to secure Hollywood clients and turned to animators. Most cartoons before Disney's were not in color due to the prohibitive cost and the brief shelf life of the film. Banking that product differentiation was the key to success, Disney became the first studio to use the Technicolor process commercially. Neupert, while touching on technical and economic factors, focuses primarily on the aesthetic impact of color in Disney cartoons, and the relevance of guidelines set in 1935 by Nancy Kalmus, director of Technicolor's Advisory Service. Her theories required that "color should be naturalized; color should follow established conventional standards of harmony, contrast and cultural connotations; and color should be narrativized to add to the story without distracting the audience" (emphasis mine).(18)
Three essays in Disney Discourse tackle Disney's World War II-era "Good neighbor" projects. Nelson Rockefeller, heading the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, hired Walt Disney to make a series of films that promoted "good will" toward Central and South American neighbors of the U.S. Rockefeller was aiming to minimize potential Nazi influence in South America,(19) and felt that earlier U.S. films had damaged inter-American relations by employing derogatory stereotypes.(20) Cultivating new U.S. trade markets was also on the agenda. In "Surprise Package: Looking Southward with Disney," Julianne Burton-Carvajal provides an overview of the films, mainly the documentary travelog South of the Border with Disney (1941), Saludos Amigos (1943), a travelogue incorporating cartoon characters and The Three Caballeros (1945, by Norman Ferguson), under-appreciated upon release as a state-of-the art blend of animation and live-action, but widely praised for its cultural authenticity. Much negative reaction to the film was based on the portrayal of Donald Duck as having sexual desires and mingling with live-action women. Jose Piedra's "Pato Donald's Gender Ducking" continues Burton-Carvajal's analysis, elaborately tracing the interrelated psycho-sexual and political implications of a colonialist text dependent on polymorphous sexuality to impart its message. "Cultural Contagion: Disney's Health Education Films for Latin America," by Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb, focuses on the project's hygiene films such as Cleanliness Brings Health (1944) and Water: Friend or Enemy (1943). Although there is some repetition among the essays, for the most part they complement one another, and tackle their subjects brilliantly and thoroughly.
Disney Discourse is likely to remain useful for Disney scholars not only as a reference but as a textbook. Its historical perspective and thoughtful organization, starting with chatty and informative essays and closing with more dense, theoretical and contentious entries, suggest that Smoodin designed the book with the classroom in mind.
From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Sells, takes a form similar to that of Disney Discourse, but narrows its focus to animated and live-action feature films. Because Disney Discourse avoids the less readily identifiable as Disney live-action films, especially those created recently under the Touchstone or Hollywood Pictures names, the two volumes are far from redundant and complement each other. From Mouse to Mermaid's scope is broad, encompassing Disney's pre-World War II animated fairy tales and the return to this genre in the late 1980s, Disney's early live-action films such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954, by Richard Fleischer) and The Shaggy Dog (1959, by Charles Barton), and contemporary adult-themed films. Like Disney Discourse, From Mouse to Mermaid is divided into thematic sections, though sometimes without building momentum to underscore the book's major themes, "Cultural Pedagogy," "Gender Construction," "Identity Politics." In the first section, "Sanitations/Disney Film as Cultural Pedagogy," the order of the essays seems arbitrary. The reader bounces from Jack Zipes's discussion of the fairy tale in pre-Disney forms and the impact of Disney's versions, to Henry Giroux's essay on Good Morning, Vietnam (1987, by Barry Levinson), to Claudia Card's essay on Pinocchio (1940, by Ben Sharpstein and Hamilton Luske), to Robert Haas's analysis of the Disneyfication of E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate (1991, by Rober Benton), to Susan Miller and Greg Rode's essay on how messages on race and gender are imbedded and imparted in Song of the South and The Jungle Book (1967, by Wolfgang Reitherman). Whether chronological or by genre, a clearer organizational strategy might have allowed the essays to play off one another more successfully.
As Smoodin has suggested, ideological consistency is not necessarily among Disney's strong points - in fact, Disney films are a rich site of mixed messages aimed at children. Pinocchio repeatedly disobeys Geppetto's instructions to go straight to school, and terrible things happen to him as a result. In Mary Poppins (1964, by Robert Stevenson), on the other hand, the ideal nanny encourages the children in her charge to behave in ways their father would disapprove of (even to fib to cover their tracks) and everything works out for the best. However, recurrent themes can be traced in Disney films. Among the essays in From Mouse to Mermaid that offer the most to consider are those that offer comparisons between the ideological and structural premises of Disney's live-action and animated films. "The Curse of Masculinity: Disney's Beauty and the Beast" by Susan Jeffords examines Kindergarten Cop, a 1990 comedy directed by Ivan Reitman starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a brutal, unhappy policeman who gives up his life of action to become a nurturing kindergarten teacher, from the perspective of Disney's Beauty anti the Beast (1991, by Gary Trousdale), in which the animated beast learns to love and win another's love in order to break the curse and become human again.
"'Eighty-Six the Mother': Murder, Matricide, and Good Mothers," by Haas, traces a Disney legacy of missing mothers (Aladdin), mothers that get killed off (Bambi, 1942, by David Hand), ineffectual mothers (the socialite/suffragette of Mary Poppins), and evil stepmothers (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs),(21) that predate The Good Mother (1988, by Leonard Nimoy). Produced by Touchstone and based on Sue Miller's novel, The Good Mother stars Diane Keaton as a divorced woman who loses custody of her child because of a passionate relationship with a man other than her former husband. According to Haas, "The sheer fact that the mother is in the spotlight contests filmic norms"(22): what happens to her in this morality tale does not. Haas also pursues related themes in Stella (Touchstone, 1990, by John Erman) and The Joy Luck Club (Hollywood Pictures, 1993, by Wayne Wang). Most writers, from Richard Schickel on, have tended to explain the patterns of motherlessness and "bad" mothering as a reflection of Walt Disney's difficult childhood and unsatisfactory adult relationships with both of his parents, as well as discrepancies in legal documents that led to speculation that he was born to a mistress of his father.(23) That Haas examines this theme as a sociocultural issue rather than as the expression of an individual's neurosis is a significant contribution to the body of criticism on these films.
Not that Haas's approach is unprecedented: How to Read Donald Duck furthers such debate in its discussion of the motherless (and fatherless) family of Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, and a host of minor characters, including more uncles, aunts and cousins. Family members exploit each other's labor, covet one another's fortunes, practice blackmail and play tricks on each other. "It is not Disney's critics," Dorfman and Mattelart contend, "but Disney himself who is the worst enemy of family harmony."(24)
In "Memory and Pedagogy in the 'Wonderful World of Disney,'" Giroux raises a charge to which Disney has always been vulnerable: that the corporation/organization replaces fact with whimsy, sanitizes reality for its own nationalistic or narrative ends, and, in the words of Stephen Fjellman, rewrites history as "Distory." Good Morning, Vietnam was directed by Levinson for Touchstone as a star vehicle for Robin Williams, who plays a semifictional army radio disk jockey. All signs of opposition to the Vietnam War are erased, the war's colonialist and racist implications are ignored, and even the potential political message in a plotline about censorship of the news is buried. According to Giroux, what "might have emerged as an illuminating insight into the roles of the media, government and army in distorting publicly disseminated information about the war emerges instead as a narrative of personal anguish and self-pitying disillusionment."(25) Similar complaints about historical distortion have been made about another Disney film set in Vietnam, Operation Dumbo Drop (1995, by Simon Wincer), a comedy about war reparations in the form of an elephant that must be delivered by Green Berets to a Vietnamese village.
Giroux's essay raises another issue: factual consistency in Disney texts can be elusive. In addition, it is well known that use of the Disney archives is guarded quite closely. Unofficial biographers and researchers not handpicked by the Walt Disney Company complain that access is strictly limited or altogether denied.(26) And, of course, anything unpleasant in Walt or the company's history is sufficiently whitewashed so that the public may never know the real story. Take this example from Giroux's essay:
According to Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times, "from 1940 until his death in 1966 . . . [Disney served] as a secret informer for the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation" (1993, B1). . . . Most disturbingly, Disney allowed J. Edgar Hoover, then Director of the FBI, to censor and modify scripts of Disney films such as That Darn Cat [1965, by Robert Stevenson] and Moon Pilot [1962, by James Neilson] so as to portray Bureau agents in a favorable light.(27)
Giroux's second observation about Disney and the FBI is not footnoted, and whether it is an example of less than careful scholarship or conflicting sources is unclear. Marc Eliot's Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince (1993) may be a pot-boiler, but Eliot seems to have done his homework to root out evidence of Disney's anti-labor practices and FBI connections. According to Eliot, Disney was forced to make 21 changes in four 10-minute Mickey Mouse Club newsreels in which a child was shown touring FBI Headquarters. Resentful of any interference in his creative process, Disney stopped filing reports with the FBI in 1957. Further, Eliot claims that Disney altered a character in That Darn Cat from FBI agent to "generic government security agent" when Hoover himself made the request, but resisted any changes to Moon Pilot. In retaliation, the FBI refused to clear Disney when President Eisenhower considered naming him to the National Cultural Center's Advisory Committee on the Arts.(28) Nothing about Disney's long relationships with the FBI and Hoover is mentioned in Bob Thomas's Walt Disney: An American Original, reissued by Hyperion in 1994. But then, Hyperion is owned by Disney.
Only one essay in From Mouse to Mermaid (and only Piedra's "Pato Donald's Gender Ducking" in Disney Discourse) suggests that some Disney films may contain queer subtexts. "Spinsters in Sensible Shoes: Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks" by Chris Cuomo scours these films for signs of lesbianism under the guise of spinsterhood. Fueling Cuomo's thesis, Mary Poppins, starring Julie Andrews, (a huge success both financially and artistically) features a nanny who possesses magical powers and enough charm to goad the children and even the stern patriarch George Banks iron good-natured behavior. Fun but not exactly nurturing, Mary has male friends (Bert the chimney sweep, played by Dick Van Dyke) but keeps her distance from romance; she is independent and uncompromising, but signals tacit disapproval of the mother's involvement with the suffragettes. She knows just about everything about the Banks family, but at the film's end, the audience still knows very little about her - where she came from, where she's going and how she gets all that stuff into her carpetbag. According to Cuomo, Mary "flies away in avoidance of the trappings of maternal love."
The character Eglantine Price of Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971, by Robert Stevenson), on the other hand, is "so strongly coded as a real lesbian, that her heterosexuality must eventually be firmly established."(29) Bedknobs, a vapid reworking of the Mary Poppins formula (women with supernatural powers caring for someone else's children; live-action mingled with animation), tells the story of a cranky nonconformist spinster, played by Angela Lansbury, who wears tailored suits, rides a motorcycle, is a vegetarian and has a secret: she studies witchcraft. Saddled with three orphans fleeing the bombing of London, she uses a spell to foil a Nazi reconnaissance mission on British soil, learns to love the children and keep them as her own and to accept the advances of the man who sells her witchcraft lessons. That a Disney film would bother to encode her so carefully as a stereotypical - and rather likable - Sapphist of her era, is a curiosity, but, regarding both Mary and Eglantine, Cuomo's point is well-taken that subversion can work both ways: "Disney's representations of decidedly unwomanly women serve as vehicles for the validation of traditional values and images of woman and family."(30)
These small contradictions are part and parcel of Disney. Any attempt to consider the Disney empire as a monolith, as the purveyor of a coherent ideology of any stripe, promises only to become more difficult, especially given the growth of the company's size and scope since Walt's death. As its various interests continue to expand and diversify, the Disney signature may grow more faint; its corporate ideology - other than profit - may become indiscernible. Chairman Eisner, recently named president Michael Ovitz and Joe Roth, who heads Disney's live-action division, are formidable businessmen. But as visionaries, none compare to the notoriously hands-on Walt, who started production on Snow White by acting out the entire script, playing every character himself, for the staff.
Certainly this new regime at Disney has not shied away from - or at least has managed to sidestep - controversy. In 1993, Disney purchased Miramax, distributor of The Crying Game (1992, by Neil Jordan) and Pulp Fiction (1994, by Quentin Tarantino). Nudity, graphic violence, explicit sex and profanity in some Miramax films made them stand out like a sore thumb against the Disney oeuvre. Miramax's purchase of the distribution rights to Kids, Larry Clark's 1995 film chronicling a day in the life of a group of disaffected, sexually active and perpetually stoned New York City teens, prompted the formation of yet another division, Excalibur, to further distance the film from the Disney name.
Late in 1995, Hollywood Pictures released Powder, a story deservedly panned by the critics, about a teenage boy who is altogether different from his peers: albino, psychic and suggestive of bi-sexual desire. Disney was caught off-guard by publicity surrounding the director Victor Salva's conviction for molesting a boy in 1988. The victim staged a protest at the film's premiere.(31) Public response suggested that some potential audience members hold Disney, and the companies it spawns responsible, for producing the directorial debut of a convicted criminal and child molester as an affront to such values, despite the fact that the director had served his time. As Shelton Waldrep puts it, "The tension between Disney inhouse products and those that it - sometimes anonymously - supports is increasing."(32)
Or is it? And if so, how? Will audiences accept challenging, non escapist entertainment, such as Kids, under the Disney umbrella? Clark's morality tale contains at least a few shreds of the myth of innocence that may place it on a historical trajectory that can be traced back to Pinocchio. Given the scope of Disney's current level of production in virtually all forms of mass media, cultural critics will have their hands full teasing out themes that remain salient in Disney's product lines. The role of Disney (and other makers of mass culture) in influencing values, and its audiences' desire for escapist entertainment, are open to further study.
Drawing on my own experiences with Disney, I can suggest that such research take into account the complex relationship between pleasure and pedagogy. A captivating, "feel-good" formula - Disney's forte - is a sure-fire way to convey a lesson (as Mary Poppins sang, "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down"), but a sophisticated viewer/consumer can decide whether or not to swallow the message. The conventional wisdom is that Disney can do no wrong; that its products (especially its animated films) bear the mark of genius; that it upholds "family values" and promotes tolerance and understanding; that it is, as a socially acceptable cultural producer, inherently beyond criticism. The most useful counterpoint to this view is probably not The Disney Project, whose members so often refuse in Inside the Mouse to enjoy anything Disney, and even show disdain or disbelief if anyone else professes to do so. For cultural critics to continue this pursuit we must consider why popular culture is popular, even though it may repel rather than attract some consumers, or, more complexly, despite the fact that it may appall at the same time that it attracts. Disney studies - emerging from the efforts of cultural critics, and incorporating all of the "sociocultural pies" into which Disney has poked its enormous "corporate finger" - has only begun to unravel the conundrums that comprise Disney ideology, past and present. In the words of Marshall Berman, we must continue our studies in light of "our old rage against Disney, partly based on a true view of Walt Disney's racism and xenophobia, but also on prejudices of our own: prejudices of intellectuals against mass culture, of New York against middle America."(33) The task is huge, and as Disney's control over the entertainment industry and influence on mass culture continues to grow, becomes ever more significant.(34)
NOTES
1. David Kunzle,"Introduction to the English Edition," in How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (New York: International General, 1991), p. 11.
2. For every The Santa Clause (1994, by John Pasquin) with box office receipts of nearly $145 million, there is a Jefferson in Paris (1995, by James Ivory) which flopped with only $2.5 million. Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures have lost "as much as $150 million a year" for Disney until this year's turnaround. James Sterngold, "How Do You Top 'Pocahantas'? Joe Roth's Quest for Disney Live-Action Success," The New York Times (August 18, 1995), p. D5.
3. Bill Carter, "Suddenly, at ABC, the Future Is Now," and "How Disney Measures Up" (sidebar), The New York Times (August 1, 1995), pp. D1, D6.
4. "Disney in a Huge Deal for Capital Cities/ABC," The New York Times (August 1, 1995). Sidebar: "What Each Company Brings to the Merger," p. D6.
5. Marshall Berman,"Times Square," The Village Voice (July 18, 1995), pp. 22-26.
6. For a more detailed account of this incident and further references related to it see Erin Addison, "Saving Other Women from Other Men: Disney's Aladdin." Camera Obscura 31 (January-May 1993), pp. 5, 20-21.
7. Patrick Murphy, "'The Whole Wide World Was Scrubbed Clean': The Androcentric Animation of Denatured Disney" in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells, eds., (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 125.
8. Laura Sells, "Where Do the Mermaids Stand? Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid," in Bell et al., p. 186. Modleski is quoted in Feminism Without Women, (New York: Routledge, 1991).
9. Susan Willis, "The Family Vacation," in Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World by The Project on Disney, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 43.
10. Shelton Waldrep, "Monuments to Walt," in The Project on Disney, p. 216.
11. Jane Kuenz, "Working at the Rat," in The Project on Disney, p, 115.
12. Jane Kuenz, "It's a Small World After All," in The Project on Disney, p. 56.
13. Ibid, p. 76.
14. Karen Klugman, "Under the Influence," in The Project on Disney, p. 100.
15. Ibid, p. 108.
16. Even some tourist guides do not contain photographs of the parks due to Disney's well-known litigiousness. See, for example, B. Sehlinger, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, (New York: Prentice Hall, 1994). For contrast, see the illustrated Birnbaum's Disneyland: The Official Guide, Stephen Birnbaum and Wendy Lefkon, eds., (New York: Hyperion and Hearst Business Publishing, 1994). Because Hyperion is a Disney-owned publisher, permission to use photos of the parks and drawings of the characters is practically implicit.
17. Eric Smoodin, "Introduction: How to Read Walt Disney," in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, Eric Smoodin, ed., (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 2.
18. Richard Neupert, "Painting a Plausible World: Disney's Color Prototypes," in Smoodin, p. 111. An excellent companion for this essay is Patricia A. Turner's "Everything is Not Satisfactual," in Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture, (New York: Anchor, 1994). In one section of this article, Turner discusses the use of narrativized color in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
19. Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb, "Cultural Contagion: On Disney's Health Education Films for Latin America," in Smoodin, p. 172.
20. Julianne Burton-Carvajal, "Surprise Package: Looking Southward with Disney," in Smoodin, p. 132.
21. I have cited here as examples only a few of the titles listed by Haas; her more complete list is quite convincing. But not all Disney mothers are "bad." Haas includes a list of films, from Lady and the Tramp (1955, by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson) to Freaky Friday (1977, by Gary Nelson) to Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992, by Curtis Hanson) with so-called "good" mothers - "[who] exist primarily to nurture and encourage their children in benevolent ways, often sacrificing themselves to do so," raising another host of problems. Lynda Haas, "'Eighty-Six the Mother': Murder, Matricide, and Good Mothers," in Bell et al., pp. 196-197.
22. Lynda Haas, "'Eighty-Six the Mother': Murder, Matricide and Good Mothers," p. 197.
23. Marc Eliot, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince, (New York: Harper, 1993; revised edition 1994), pp. 329-330.
24. Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, p. 35.
25. Henry A. Giroux, "Memory and Pedagogy in the 'Wonderful World of Disney': Beyond the Politics of Innocence," in Bell et al., p. 53.
26. The editors of From Mouse to Mermaid were warned not to use the name "Disney" in the title of the book when they requested access to the Disney Archives (Bell et al., "Introduction: Walt's in the Movies," p. 1). Alan Bryman's request to visit the archives was "firmly rebuffed," "Preface," Disney and His Worlds, (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. xi.
27. Giroux, p. 47.
28. Marc Eliot, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince, pp. 264-266. In Chapter 5 of Eric Smoodin's Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), Smoodin paints Disney's relationship with the FBI as not always genial.
29. Chris Cuomo, "Spinsters in Sensible Shoes: Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks," in Bell et al., p. 222.
30. Ibid, p. 213.
31. Kenneth L. Woodward, "To Abuse Is Human, To Repent Is Rare," Newsweek (November 6, 1995), p. 78.
32. Shelton Waldrep, "Monuments to Walt," in The Project on Disney, pp. 241-242 (endnote 4).
33. Marshall Berman, "Times Square," The Village Voice (July 18, 1995), p. 26.
34. The author thanks Suzie Silver for taking her to The Happiest Place on Earth.
RESOURCES
BOOKS
Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells, eds. From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Reviewed in this article.
Bryman, Alan, Disney and His Worlds, (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). Bryman, a social scientist with a special interest in research methodology and quantitative data analysis, was inspired by his pleasure during a trip to Walt Disney World to examine how other writers have responded to Disney theme parks, especially in light of postmodern theory, which Bryman often finds irrelevant. Includes a biography of Walt Disney, an examination of the company's practices after his death and an extensive bibliography.
The Disney Project (Jane Kuenz, Karen Klugman, Shelton Waldrep and Susan Willis), Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Reviewed in this article.
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, (New York: International General, 1991, 4th printing). Translation and updated introduction by David Kunzle. (Originally published as Para Leer al Pato Donald, Valparaiso, Chile: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaiso, 1971). An original and piercing work about Disney comics, colonialism and children's culture, banned in Chile.
Stephen M. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). While this text is often cited as a reference, it can be difficult to locate. It is currently being reprinted.
Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Revised edition, London: Pavilion, 1986). Out of print as of this writing but a landmark biographical study of Disney and critical analysis of Disney's productions and business practices.
Eric Smoodin, ed., Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Reviewed in this article.
ESSAYS
Erin Addison, "Saving Other Women from Other Men: Disney's Aladdin." Camera Obscura, No. 31 (January-May 1993). A careful and illuminating analysis of the tropes of representation utilized in Aladdin, it focuses more than other writings about the film on the character of Jasmine and her relationships with Aladdin and her father the Sultan.
Scott Bukatman, "There's Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience," October 57 (Summer 1991). Bukatman examines visions of the future offered by Disney, including the Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) and the motion picture TRON (1982, by Steven Lisberger).
Alan Cholodenko, ed., The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, (Sydney: Power Publications, in association with the Australian Film Commission, 1995). Based on a 1988 conference, this anthology is meant to "bring the latest post-structuraiist and post-modernist approach to the theorizing of animation. Regarding Disney, Cholodenko tackles "Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or the Framing of Animation."
Henry A. Giroux, "Beyond the Politics of Innocence: Memory and Pedagogy in the 'Wonderful World of Disney," Socialist Review, Vol. 23, no. 2 (1993). Although the bulk of this essay appears in Bell et al., From Mouse to Mermaid, this version includes an analysis of the Touchstone film Pretty Woman (1990, by Garry Marshall).
Henry A. Giroux, "Animating Youth: The Disneyfication of Children's Culture," Socialist Review, Vol. 24, no. 3 (1994). Discussing Disney's animated features in the period from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King (1994), Giroux examines Disney's dangerous appeal, its pedagogical power and its role in transforming children's culture into consumer culture.
Dan Scapperotti, "40 Years of Disney Television," Visions: The Magazine of Fantasy TV, Home Video and New Media, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1995). Reviews of Disney productions in the same issue include "Disney's Return of Jafar. Direct-to-Video Watershed," also by Scapperotti, and two by Dan Persons: "Disney TV Gets Edgy with Shnookums & Meat" and "Disney's Lion King Goes Interactive."
James Snead, "Trimming Uncle Remus's Tales: Narrative Revisions in Walt Disney's Song of the South" in White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West, eds., (New York: Routledge, 1994). A thorough explication of Disney's problematic, revised version of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus.
Patricia A. Turner, "Everything is Not Satisfactual," in Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture, (New York: Anchor, 1994). An abbreviated version appeared in the Trotter Institute Review (Winter 1987). An illuminating look at four facets of Disney: "Disney idolatry;" Song of the South; reading Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as an allegory of race relations; and the use of color in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Mary Yoko Brennan, "'Bwana Mickey': Constructing Cultural Consumption at Tokyo Disneyland," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
Julianne Burton, "Don (Juanito) Duck and the Imperial-Patriarchal Unconscious: Disney Studios, the Good Neighbor Policy, and the Packaging of Latin America," in Nationalisms and Sexualities, Andrew Parker, Mary Russo and Patricia Yeager, eds., (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins, eds., Film Theory Goes to the Movies, (New York: Routledge, 1993). Includes "Reclaiming the Social: Pedagogy, Resistance, and Politics in Celluloid Culture" (on The Dead Poet's Society [1989, by Peter Weir]) by Henry A. Giroux; "Pretty Is as Pretty Does" (on Pretty Woman) by Hilary Radner, and "Split Skins: Female Agency and Bodily Mutilation in The Little Mermaid" by Susan White.
Richard deCordova, "Tracing the Child Audience: The Case of Disney, 1929-1933," in Prima del Codici 2: Alle porte de Hays, (La Biennale de Venezia, 1991).
David M. Johnson, "Disney World as Structure and Symbol: Re-Creation of the Disney Experience," Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 15, no. 1 (Summer 1981).
Margaret King, "Disneyland and Walt Disney World: Traditional Values in Futuristic Form," Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 15, no. 1 (Summer 1981).
Louis Marin, "Disneyland, a Degenerate Utopia," Glyph 1 (1977).
Stephen F. Mills, "Disney and the Promotions of Synthetic Worlds," American Studies International, Vol. XXVIII, no. 2 (October 1990).
Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age, (New York: Routledge, 1991). Includes an essay on Three Men and a Baby.
Jose Piedra, "Donald Duck Discovers America," Lusitania, Vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1991).
Aimee Rankin, "Dream Quest in the Magic Kingdom," Lusitania, Vol. 1, no. 3 (Fall 1990).
Eric Smoodin, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993).
Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). Sorkin's essay "See You in Disneyland" appears in this volume and in Design Quarterly (Winter 1992).
South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 92, no. 1 (Winter 1993). Special Issue: "The World According to Disney." Includes "Theme Park," by Arata Isozaki; "It's a Small World After All: Disney and the Pleasures of Identification," by Jane Kuenz; "Uncle Walt's Uncle Remus: Disney's Distortion of Harris's Hero," by Peggy Russo; and "Disney World: Public Use/Private Space," by Susan Willis.
Pauline Uchmanowicz, "Babes in Toyland: Disney Culture and Lifestyles of Over Consumption," Z Magazine, Vol. 8, no. 10 (October 1995).
Susan Willis, "Fantasia: Walt Disney's Los Angeles Suite," Diacritics 17 (1987).
Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). Wilson's essay "The Betrayal of the Future: Walt Disney's EPCOT Center" also appears in Socialist Review, Vol. 15, no. 6 (November-December 1985): also, in Disney Discourse.
CYNTHIA CHRIS, a frequent contributor to Afterimage, is a New York writer and artist.
