Uncle Walt unmasked

With this lively collection of essays, editors Bell, Haas, and Sells aim to place the Walt Disney Company’s film legacy squarely inside the critical landscape, where it can be recognized and examined as the cultural juggernaut that it has become. For too long, the editors say, Disney films have been “the ugly stepsister unfit for the glass slipper of high theory” in both film scholarship and cultural criticism. Now the editors have engaged professors from women’s studies, communication, philosophy, education, and rhetoric to “read” Disney films and interpret them as representations of the “hegemonic and capitalistic urge.” Some of these readings are distinctly negative in their implications, others more forgiving, many are resistant and original. All call into question the innocent pose represented by Uncle Walt’s comment, “We just make the pictures, and let the professors tell us what they mean.”

The book is arranged in three sections. The first approaches Disney films as “cultural pedagogy,” a kind of media-saturated classroom where all that is dark or disturbing is expunged, ignored, or transformed. One essay skewers the racism of Song of the South and The Jungle Book; its authors argue that Disney films, by encouraging us to see social injustice as something outside ourselves, teach us to be passive. In another, Henry Giroux exposes the racism and colonialism that permeates Good Morning, Vietnam by showing how the film transforms the deep political and cultural conflicts that fueled that war into relatively simple clashes between children and adults, English speakers and non-English speakers, and Army brass and the media. A third essay explores Disney’s curious 1991 foray into gangster films, Billy Bathgate. Disney, this section of the book shows, is as great a sanitizer today as the company was in the 1940s.

The second and third sections focus more closely on gender and identity in Disney films, examining The Little Mermaid, Beauty and Beast, and 101 Dalmatians, as well as The Good Mother, The Joy Luck Club, Mary Poppins, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks from a feminist perspective. A leitmotif throughout these essays is the “New Male”—sensitive, family oriented, nonthreatening, the docile pupil of a schoolmarmish teapot or an Arnold Schwartzenegger teaching elementary school. Disney films, these essays show, encourage us to believe that a macho man is not responsible for what he is; a good woman (or a good teapot?) can, indeed must, show him how to change, and then gracefully accede to his patriarchy. Even when that good woman is “witchy,” she restores Disney’s version of a world put right: “Family created, Empire saved, Gender order reestablished” (221).

In a look at several films not usually discussed seriously, Brian Attebury reveals the emptiness of Disney’s attempts at science fiction by examining the displaced sexuality of the heroes of films such as Flight of the Navigator where they become cartoon characters, akin to Mickey and Goofy and are weirdly asexual. D. Soyini Madison’s African-American feminist critique of Pretty Woman is a wake-up call to anyone who engages in film or literary criticism. The essay asks us to acknowledge the erasure of the differences of race from most of our popular culture and to remember that a “woman’s” point of view may not necessarily be that of a black woman. The book ends with a wild ride through EPCOT as Ramona Fernandez recreates its male gaze, its somatic seductions, and the counterpoint of Michael Jackson’s film “Captain E/O.”

Throughout the book are interesting glimpses into filmmaking and animation which open new possibilities for interpretation. We learn that drag queen Divine was the animation model for Ursula in The Little Mermaid —creating the opportunity to see woman as a set of behavioral codes which Ariel adopts to seduce her man. Linda Haas enlarges on this interpretation by wondering whether the ability to “put on” or “take off,” gender empowers or entraps. Elizabeth Bell reveals that in the dominantly male Disney studios of the 1930s...