Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (11 page)

Much as the “illusion of life” helps naturalize discourse in Disney animation, labeling these films as documentaries essentializes their representations of sexuality and gender. Through clever editing, manipulative musical cues and especially paternal narration written and voiced by Winston Hibler, the True Life series consistently uses the spectacular footage shot by filmmakers to reinforce hegemonic norms, representing such norms as having their equivalent in “nature.” As Derek Bouse points out in his analysis of Disney’s animal films, Nature . . . emerges as a profoundly
moral
place, a seat of the kind of

“values” which are the foundation of families and communities. In nature there are virtuous, brave and resourceful heroes, damsels for them to rescue or to win by their deeds, and villains who always pay the price of their transgressions. There is good and evil, right and wrong, punishment and forgiveness.115

Bouse concludes his argument quite succinctly: “Culture is ‘naturalized’ in the purest sense: by locating its source in nature.”116

The Vanishing Prairie,
the second full-length feature in this series, offers a perfect example of such naturalization of the hegemonic order. The narration professes in the opening that the film will represent the American prairie of “an earlier time. A time without record or remembrance, when nature alone held dominion over the prairie realm.” In eliminating human society from the depiction of the prairie, the film attempts to place itself “outside of history as we know it. . . . Ultimately, the True-Life Adventures were not concerned 44

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with exploring real places or documenting real events, but with creating mythic places that conformed to the Disney style.”117 Yet, even as the narrator supposedly absents man from the environment, his voice-over continually posits animal behavior in distinctly human terms. For example, as various water fowl converge on a pond during the spring migration, Winston Hibler intones that they “all join in a lighthearted hubbub of gossip and chatter.”

It does not take long for the birds to begin exhibiting (according to the film) desires for domesticity. A montage of bird couples scooting across the water is accompanied by an explanation that the viewer is witnessing a humorous mating ritual. Even though it seems in some of the shots that the birds are actually hunting for fish, the musical score emphasizes the courtship angle by playing Wagner’s opening to Act III of
Lohengrin,
conventionally played during wedding recessionals. After this sequence comes “homemaking,” as the male and female build their nest and care for their young. Hibler points out how the chores are split:

“While mother sits on the nest, father takes care of the food supply.”

When he is forced to admit that sometimes the male sits on the nest, the film goes out of its way to laugh at the absurdity of such an occurrence:

“Like most males, he’s careless about domestic chores.”

A running motif in the film associates the female with the raising of the young, usually with the male never even acknowledged. A mountain lion teaches her kittens, a mother coyote searches for food for her pups, and, in a stunning scene, the film shows the birth of a buffalo calf.

(It is interesting to note that although the Production Code Administration never showed the slightest aversion to the rampant violence in this series—various predators stalking and running down deer and zebra—

the PCA
did
monitor quite carefully how the public reacted to the birth of the calf, probably wondering if they should have been stricter in their job.)118 The film repeatedly emphasizes the “natural” role of the female as nurturer. As the buffalo calf struggles to stand up, Hibler turns all the other buffalo into females as he describes that “all the mothers in the neighborhood seem eager to help the baby.”

The prairie also often takes on the characteristics of an American suburb of the 1950s. This is nowhere more apparent than in the lengthy section that comprises most of the second half of the film on prairie dogs. The dogs are shown living in a little community, each with their own split-level burrows, with additions and repair work constantly going on. They are shown taking their children out on “picnics,” arguM I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY

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ing with their rowdy neighbors (owl and buffalo) and even harmoniz-ing to the musical score as it plays “Home on the Range!” The box-office for these films shows that postwar America paid repeatedly to see animals recreate the hegemonic family ideal (no matter what tricks of music, narration, editing or artificial staging were required), and the studio would continue to turn out these documentary shorts and features throughout the 1950s.

The return to a fairy-tale format in animation and the expansion into documentary filmmaking in the 1950s helped solidify the company’s success. Walt continued his expansion into new areas by being one of the first studio heads in Hollywood to embrace rather than fear the prospect of television. The studio also began to produce a number of live-action features, such as
Treasure Island
(1950),
20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea
(1954) and
The Shaggy Dog
(1959). The most important event in the company’s expansion occurred when the theme park Disneyland opened in the summer of 1955, providing a regular source of income for the company no matter what the annual success rate of feature film production might be.

Walt himself figured in the coalescing of the kindly paternal image of the studio and its products since, during the 1950s and 1960s, Walt would become one of the most familiar faces in popular culture. With the studio’s expansion into television, Walt acted as emcee for the weekly anthology program initially called
Disneyland
(1955–57), then significantly
Walt Disney Presents
(1958–61). Known informally as

“Uncle Walt,” Disney presented the image of a soft-spoken, friendly older man who explained in a simple, entertaining fashion how animation was created, why man was destined to go into outer space or how animals lived their lives. In 1955, coinciding with the phenomenal popularity of the “Davy Crockett” episodes that appeared on his anthology series, Walt was honored at the Hollywood Bowl as a leader “who has blazed a new trail in American folklore.”119 The project of making Walt into a father-figure that had begun during the 1930s press barrage was completed with his appearances on television. In Walt’s role as host for the series, viewers grew to associate him more intimately with a kindly paternal image that both parents and children could trust to provide both entertainment and education. Walt Disney was no longer a savvy businessman to most people in the United States—he was a member of the family. No one questioned his or the studio’s integrity for the next three decades.

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The creation of Disneyland opened up an entire “world” for Disney to make actual and physical the lessons that he and the studio were promoting on television and in films—a space that was highly controlled but gave visitors the illusion of freely roaming and exploring.

Frontierland preserved a specific vision of the American West, Tomorrowland promoted “better living through chemistry,” often with pavilions sponsored by various corporations, and Main Street created an ideal image of an America that never truly existed. Millions came out to the park, thrilling at and generally accepting everything that Disney put before them. By 1964, Disney’s reputation as an educator of the American public had become so great that a number of various corporate sponsors employed the studio to create pavilions for the New York World’s Fair. Amongst these attractions was the ultimate in control of the human body—“Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.” The development of an “audio-animatronic” robot that responded in movement to the soundwaves of a prerecorded speech was a perfect extension of the

“illusion of life” philosophy. “Mr. Lincoln” would perform in exactly the same fashion every single show, amazing patrons as the sixteenth president stood and spoke a speech edited together from fragments of Lincoln’s writings.120 Somehow, this was “living history.” By 1965, Dr.

Max Rafferty would be able to declare in a
Los Angeles Times
article that Walt Disney was “The Greatest Pedagogue of All.”121

Although the Disney studio was securely in the black from this point on, Walt and his company rarely veered from where they had evolved by 1950. There were no more experiments with how to represent sexuality and the body. On occasion, an errant live-action feature, such as
Bon Voyage
(1961), would alarm some parents with mildly risqué situations. In 1961,
101 Dalmatians
introduced a less realistic animation style (while maintaining the “naturalness” of the suburban heterosexual family through the corollary of a dog family who liked to sit at home and watch Disney cartoons on TV!). Still, the image of wholesome entertainment produced by a company dedicated to the cultural uplift of children would be maintained consistently for the next thirty years. Disney’s reputation was so carved in stone within American culture that, at least once, the studio was able to transgress the Production Code during this period without anyone in the PCA, the Legion of Decency or any media watch group blinking an eye: the studio’s version of
Pollyanna
(1960) opens with a shot of a young boy’s rear end as he swings naked into a swimming hole. While such an image in, say,
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denly Last Summer
(1959) would have aroused ire from any number of groups, Disney’s reputation signaled to audiences that this scene was only wholesome nostalgia for small-town American life.

By the time of Walt’s death in 1966, he and the studio had perfected what they had learned about fashioning a “wholesome” image.122 The company had quite consciously taken on the mantle of upholding traditional American values and was encouraged to find popularity and profit (from other studio executives, from consumers and from the United States government) through teaching these values to others.

Even after the death of Walt Disney, the “Disney mystique” continued apace. For the next twenty years, the company maintained roughly the same critical and popular regard as before. Although Walt Disney was certainly not the only person in Hollywood to have espoused a white middle-class patriarchal heterosexual paradigm, for doing so he was often heralded in a manner that went beyond the accolades given to any other studio mogul at the time.

2

“Mickey Mouse—Always Gay!”

Reading Disney Queerly during Walt’s Reign

I N T H E M I D S T of
The Celluloid Closet,
Vito Russo’s groundbreaking work on representations of homosexuals in American film, there appears a poster advertising Mickey Mouse cartoons. As a joyous Mickey plucks out a tune on a harp, the poster proclaims, “Always Gay!” Underneath this picture, Russo writes the caption “When the word ‘gay’

meant happy and nothing else.”1 Although Russo separates Mickey’s personality from the modern connotations of the word “gay,” linking the word “gay” with “homosexual” had begun in various homosexual communities during the 1930s.2 The word “gay” was used in these circles as a method of code to let others know that someone was “a member of the community” without declaring it to those who would physically or legally threaten them. Furthermore, although Walt and most (if not all) of his employees probably would not have known this new meaning to the word when they created the aforementioned poster in the 1930s, it seems that certain audience members were watching and enjoying Mickey’s “gaiety” in all its connotations.

This dynamic becomes more apparent when certain historical evidence suggests that the phrase “Mickey Mouse” itself was bandied about by some homosexuals as a code phrase. Gay and lesbian historian Allan Berube found a photograph of a gay bar in Berlin during the 1930s called “Mickey Mouse.”3 A lesbian hobo of the 1930s who went by the name Box-Car Bertha related to Dr. Ben L. Reitman in 1937 that a group of wealthy Chicago lesbians threw soirees called “Mickey Mouse’s party.” Bertha maintained contact with these women in order to borrow money, introducing herself by saying “I met you at Mickey Mouse’s party.”4

With this evidence of the use of “Mickey Mouse” as a code phrase for homosexuality, seemingly benign uses of the name by homosexual 48

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figure take on heightened meaning. When openly gay songwriter Cole Porter wrote the lyrics for “You’re the Top” in the early 1930s, he included the line “You’re Mickey Mouse.”5 In
The Gay Divorcee
(1934), Betty Grable approaches Edward Everett Horton, who made a career out of playing the bumbling sissy in Hollywood films during the ’30s, and sings to him “You make me feel so Mickey Mousey.” Although what Grable’s character means by this is left open to interpretation, in context she seems to mean that Horton stirs some emotion within her.

Yet, “Mickey Mousey” might have had a sly double meaning—especially when a flustered Horton responds to Grable’s assertion, “Well, no wonder!”6

Disney’s animated shorts, feature films, documentaries and television series promoted a specific version of gender, sexuality and the body—“naturalizing” the heterosexual patriarchal family structure and replacing sex with romance. Yet, it stands to reason that not every viewer at all times accepted and endorsed Disney’s representations of the conventional norms. The above examples open the possibility that gay and lesbian subjects watched and enjoyed Disney product from a completely different standpoint than was usually discussed in popular journals and newspaper reviews. By delving into these alternative reading strategies, one can begin to understand what seems to be a contradiction: how a company heavily promoting the heterosexual family ideal can have homosexual fans.

Such divergent readings by certain homosexual viewers epitomize the complexity of discussing how texts are received, understood and appreciated. Michel de Certeau proposes that readers do not always follow the prescribed path laid out in the text. Rather, they choose their own way, enjoy certain parts more than others and sometimes enjoy these parts in diverse fashion. “Readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.”7 Similarly, Stuart Hall analyzes the ability of individual subjects to negotiate or resist the “preferred” position prescribed by the text.8 Taking from both de Certeau and Hall, Henry Jenkins’ work on media fan culture asserts that “Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media.”9