Thomas Doherty: The Wonderful World of Disney Studies
[Thomas Doherty is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. His most recent book is Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2003).]
... When Disney died on December 15, 1966, according to his obituary in Variety, he had earned 31 Oscars, six Emmys, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was under serious consideration for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The first soot in the pixie dust was thrown by the film critic Richard Schickel in The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (Simon and Schuster, 1968). In Schickel's revisionist retelling, Disney was not the fairest of them all. The avuncular front concealed a miserly control freak whose capitalist pursuit usurped "the two most valuable things about childhood — its secrets and its silences."
Since Schickel, Disney criticism and scholarship has been more likely to ink a picture of Scrooge McDuck than Jiminy Cricket: Disney the plutocrat, who, during an acrimonious strike in 1941, busted a union of cartoonists unwilling to whistle while they worked; Disney the friendly witness at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1947, who not only named names but helpfully spelled them; and, of late, Disney the Ur-purveyor of American cultural imperialism, founder of an empire built on the backs of third-world laborers toiling in sweatshops where the rodents do not wear white gloves and shorts.
In the protean days of Disney studies in the 1970s, activist-intellectuals in the academy favored the guerrilla tactics of How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, originally published in Spanish, by the writers Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. A pioneering study, it earned serious street cred when the 1975 English translation was seized by U.S. Customs for copyright violation. Predictably, feminist scholars shuddered at the saucer-eyed vacuity of the studio's fairy-tale females and lectured Cinderella for inhibiting step-sisterly solidarity and encouraging comatose passivity until Mr. Right came along. Perhaps only the postmodernists were really happy with Disney. "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real," quipped Jean Baudrillard in the 1983 essay "Simulacra and Simulations."
The current wave of Disney studies — post-9/11, early 21st century — tends to be cast in the cultural-studies mode: global in outlook; socioeconomic in focus; and deeply hostile to the art, politics, and architecture of Disney, man and brand. When the Mouseketeers sing, "Why?," this chorus chants back, "Because we dislike you!"
A good barometer of the center of critical gravity is Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions (Wesleyan University Press, 2005), edited by two Florida Atlantic University professors, Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch. The collection brings together 11 essays mainly bent on queering the Disney brand, dissing Eisner, and trashing the theme parks. "Behind all those cute characters, that family fun, and that nearly impenetrable aura is another avaricious multinational corporation," warn the editors. The volume has more index references for "commodity fetishism" than for Mickey Mouse....
The title of another recent volume of Disney studies — Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment (University of Texas Press, 2005), by the media scholar Douglas Brode — seems to promise more vilification, but the author risks ostracism from his peers by being a bona fide fan. Disney "was the single member of Old Hollywood who set what would come to be called multiculturalism into motion," writes Brode. Far from embedding the white man's brand, "his works challenge all those societal norms and once-unquestioned values in a way that no other filmmaker of the studio era dared." Nothing if not consistent, Brode takes a stab at rehabilitating Disney's notorious Song of the South (1946), seeing in the unreconstructed confederacy of the Uncle Remus fables the demolition of class and race barriers when Uncle Remus (channeling Uncle Walt) brings together a diverse audience of children....
Perhaps even more than cracking open the studio vaults [to gain permission to reprint Disney characters and clips], the greatest challenge facing Disney scholars is to ponder the gulf between elite contempt and popular devotion....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
... When Disney died on December 15, 1966, according to his obituary in Variety, he had earned 31 Oscars, six Emmys, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was under serious consideration for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The first soot in the pixie dust was thrown by the film critic Richard Schickel in The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (Simon and Schuster, 1968). In Schickel's revisionist retelling, Disney was not the fairest of them all. The avuncular front concealed a miserly control freak whose capitalist pursuit usurped "the two most valuable things about childhood — its secrets and its silences."
Since Schickel, Disney criticism and scholarship has been more likely to ink a picture of Scrooge McDuck than Jiminy Cricket: Disney the plutocrat, who, during an acrimonious strike in 1941, busted a union of cartoonists unwilling to whistle while they worked; Disney the friendly witness at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1947, who not only named names but helpfully spelled them; and, of late, Disney the Ur-purveyor of American cultural imperialism, founder of an empire built on the backs of third-world laborers toiling in sweatshops where the rodents do not wear white gloves and shorts.
In the protean days of Disney studies in the 1970s, activist-intellectuals in the academy favored the guerrilla tactics of How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, originally published in Spanish, by the writers Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. A pioneering study, it earned serious street cred when the 1975 English translation was seized by U.S. Customs for copyright violation. Predictably, feminist scholars shuddered at the saucer-eyed vacuity of the studio's fairy-tale females and lectured Cinderella for inhibiting step-sisterly solidarity and encouraging comatose passivity until Mr. Right came along. Perhaps only the postmodernists were really happy with Disney. "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real," quipped Jean Baudrillard in the 1983 essay "Simulacra and Simulations."
The current wave of Disney studies — post-9/11, early 21st century — tends to be cast in the cultural-studies mode: global in outlook; socioeconomic in focus; and deeply hostile to the art, politics, and architecture of Disney, man and brand. When the Mouseketeers sing, "Why?," this chorus chants back, "Because we dislike you!"
A good barometer of the center of critical gravity is Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions (Wesleyan University Press, 2005), edited by two Florida Atlantic University professors, Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch. The collection brings together 11 essays mainly bent on queering the Disney brand, dissing Eisner, and trashing the theme parks. "Behind all those cute characters, that family fun, and that nearly impenetrable aura is another avaricious multinational corporation," warn the editors. The volume has more index references for "commodity fetishism" than for Mickey Mouse....
The title of another recent volume of Disney studies — Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment (University of Texas Press, 2005), by the media scholar Douglas Brode — seems to promise more vilification, but the author risks ostracism from his peers by being a bona fide fan. Disney "was the single member of Old Hollywood who set what would come to be called multiculturalism into motion," writes Brode. Far from embedding the white man's brand, "his works challenge all those societal norms and once-unquestioned values in a way that no other filmmaker of the studio era dared." Nothing if not consistent, Brode takes a stab at rehabilitating Disney's notorious Song of the South (1946), seeing in the unreconstructed confederacy of the Uncle Remus fables the demolition of class and race barriers when Uncle Remus (channeling Uncle Walt) brings together a diverse audience of children....
Perhaps even more than cracking open the studio vaults [to gain permission to reprint Disney characters and clips], the greatest challenge facing Disney scholars is to ponder the gulf between elite contempt and popular devotion....