Mickey Marx

The dictator Augusto Pinochet had this book burned in the streets of Chile after the 1973 September 11th coup d’ état — a coup that was funded, planned, and encouraged in secret by the United States. Since then, a copy has been hard to find. The English translation took a long while to make it state-side, and if you’re familiar with Disney’s attitude towards intellectual property, it’s a miracle that How to Read Donald Duck was able to print Disney comics in its pages. After years of scarcity, OR Books has brought this critique of American cartoons as propaganda to English readers. Even if this is your first foray into Marxist criticism, Dorfman and Mattelart’s critique is fun, concise, and sharp as a knife.

How to Read Donald Duck is essentially a Marxist critique of children’s literature. Disney comics flooded Latin America alongside US influence throughout the twentieth century. During that time, Scrooge McDuck’s gold vault swimming pool was made to look like a modest savings compared to the exploitative practices of US companies aided by the US government. For Dorfman and Mattelart, the ideological groundwork for this imperialist exploitation is contained and represented within Donald Duck and the cast of Disney characters that compose Walt Disney’s comic book canon. How to Read Donald Duck is not addressing Disney movies overall, but the archetypes as they appeared in comic form.

With beautiful flourishes of language, it is difficult to convey what a rare perspective it is to get two authors collaborating to make a convincing case that everything evil about US imperialism is reflected in a three-panel comic about Jiminy Cricket chased by vultures named Marx and Hegel. It might seem silly, or absurd, to make such serious claims about Disney cartoons, but the authors defend their study with a mix of self-deprecation and serious psychology. Doesn’t it make sense that ideological propaganda would show itself plainly in childhood media? Disney cartoons often count as the first morality tales a child learns, so shouldn’t we investigate what they’re saying? Shouldn’t we be concerned if there an “iron fist beneath the Mouse’s glove?” One high-water mark of the book came when Donald’s nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, are revealed to be products of art in the age of mechanical reproduction; they are time-saving stamps. Each nephew is identical except for the colors of their caps. These colors change their being. Maybe that’s why Disney’s family tree is so full of twins and triplets, but according to Dorfman and Mattelart, this represents an affect that Disney wants us to receive; Disney wants us running on the treadmill. In the comics, everything needs to be in motion while having nothing ever really change. Fortunes won or lost, there is no class or social movement in Disney’s world. Each nephew is put in motion, but nothing really changes; technicolor printing allows one to become three like a Boy Scout duckling hydra.

How to Read Donald Duck uncovers a deeply conservative, patriarchal, agenda in the center of Micky Mouse’s heart; the female characters are always the girlfriends and bystanders of the male protagonists. All the characters are related indirectly; there are no mothers and fathers, only uncles and nephews. Therefore, the parental voice is absent and everywhere; it’s in the composition of the comics that we hear what the God of Disney wants to say.

I appreciated the take-down of Scrooge particularly. On the surface, Scrooge is a criticism of capitalism within Disney’s world. Scrooge never spends a dime; he lives a shallow life in service of inanimate wealth. He is just like the Dicken’s character of his namesake. But with How to Read Donald Duck, we come to see that Scrooge is a decoy; a prop meant to disarm the reader...