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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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The Disney film corporation dominates Hollywood with a budget which exceeds even some Third World countries. As yet another blockbuster, The Lion King, rakes in even more profits, Michael Rosen looks at the phenomenon |
In 1992 Michael Eisner, head of Disney, cashed in his company stock and took home $192 million. Whatever else you say about Disney, you have to begin by gawping at the dosh. That year Disney films, which includes Touchstone Pictures (Three Men and a Baby) and Hollywood Pictures (Pretty Woman), took 29 cents of every dollar spent at the US box office. We aren’t talking film companies here – it’s an outfit with an economy to match a developing world country.
If money seems too banal a way to think of Disney then think of it as brain food. Apart from the few thousand brave hunter-gatherers left on earth, there can hardly be anyone left in the world who hasn’t been spoken to by Disney. On a scale that no other company can imitate, Disney is able to come at us through every orifice. To do this it feeds firstly off the body of European story (the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson and the like) and then off itself: Micky Mouse toothbrushes, Lion King pyjamas or the live parade of Disney characters that is put on stage before showings of The Lion King.
What Disney has developed – and this was the case very early on with an America wide network of Mickey Mouse clubs in the 1930s – is a set of ‘sustaining practices’: a worldwide apparatus of habit forming consumption that keeps Disney front of brain.
This seems to make for an agreement between left and right – Disney is a Bad Thing. Cultural snobs and elitist Little Englanders hate Disney. I regularly hear people lamenting the frightful disaster that Disney gave our Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh American accents. These books are how a liberal English middle class defines itself. Alice is like a pre-suffragette, railing against arbitrary monarchy (‘Off with her head!’ said the queen) and stuffy old Oxbridge farts like the Mock Turtle. The Peter Pan story revels in an escape from the bourgeois necessity of turning into a boring city gent like Wendy’s father Mr Darling. Winnie the Pooh is an idyllic escape into Ashdown forest and characters like Rabbit and Owl are parodies of self important middle class adults.
These books are the first step towards reading the classic English self-mocking books like Three Men in a Boat, P.G. Wodehouse, a writer today like Nigel Williams or the television comedy of Fry and Lawrie. The American voice is connected in the English mind with gangster movies, westerns and GIs with too much money to spend. It’s seen as a violation. This critique continues: Disney is ‘sentimental’ – he injects moments of feel good and slush into the action, usually with a song like Some Day my Prince will Come. And he terrifies kids. Look at that whale scene in Pinocchio.
I have a hunch about all this. For many educated middle-class English people, the idea of ‘America’ is like a depth charge to the brain. The continuity of the English middle class is a truly amazing thing: many of their schools, their books, their houses, their hotels and pubs, their tastes in food stand unchanged for over 100 years. But during this time Britain’s world role has changed from top dog to flea. To produce a Disney cartoon takes a labour equivalent to the Manhattan project that built the first atom bomb: 2,000 workers, working three eight-hour shifts in 24 hours for two years. Which country can afford to put that kind of effort into the leisure industry? Only the new top dog in town.
When Disney sweeps aside little England leaving the English accent to take up the role of Shere Khan, the old wily tiger in The Jungle Book, or the wicked uncle who craves kingly power in The Lion King, those Yanks rub our noses in it. Moaning about sentimentality or terror is a smokescreen. The English middle classes have been feeding their children sentimentality and terror for hundreds of years. Take the crucifixion for a start. Hating Disney is really an expression of loss of world prestige.
But all this meets and merges with left critiques; the films are sexist and racist, Disney is the soft soap end of American imperialism, the all singing dancing accompaniment to the bombing of Vietnam. Indeed, why in The Lion King, we might ask, is the voice of an idiot, cowardly, sycophantic, dangerous gang leader hyena given to a black actor? Why, in the same film, does the future of a whole society have to rest on the survival of the male monarchic line? Lionesses are good at hunting and providing, aren’t they?
But the matter is more complicated than this. Nearly every major Disney movie begins with a disrupted, non-nuclear family set up: Bambi’s mother dies, Pinocchio is created and brought up by his grandfather, Snow White has a stepmother, Mowgli is an orphan and so on. There is a contradiction here – in providing wholesome family entertainment Disney digs into anxieties about how we organise to reproduce ourselves. The children of these non-standard families aren’t delinquent louts and pregnant teenagers, they are flawed but capable children who overcome all danger and threat. Yes these resolve themselves into a-handsome-prince-will-solve-everything solutions, but on the way Disney stirs up subversive feelings about how the weak can be strong if they combine with others, that people in power may be evil and that, like the warthog and his pal in The Lion King, singing, dancing, wisecracking and rollicking about is a great way to spend your time.
And sometimes the surface plot is so clear you can see right through it. I took eight 11-year-old girls to see Touchstone’s The Mask (Disney) where a mask enables people to become what they desire. Two men and a male dog get to wear it. The girls said, ‘I wonder what would have happened if the woman wore it ... why couldn’t she have worn it?’ Exactly! Why not? Disney movies wallow about in contradictory mud unleashing dangerous multicoloured desires. It’s partly why Tories have to invent Criminal Justice Acts.
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