Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (15 page)

Sir Giles and the dragon agree to stage a mock battle in order to please the town. The battle consists of hiding in caves or in smoke and dust—where the two hold tea and, at one point, waltz with each other, while yelping and howling for the benefit of the audience. Although the town has ostensibly hired the knight to kill the dragon, the townspeople watching the battle root for both sides as if it were a sporting event.

When the dragon pretends to be killed, it seems that the town is in on the ruse. The story ends with the narrator intoning, “Having reformed the dragon, the satisfied villagers welcomed him into society,” as the film shows the dragon being toasted to by the town.

There is no mistaking how the film makes fun of the dragon’s mincing manner and prissy pretensions. Yet, the film also makes it quite clear that the dragon does not believe in fighting, and the film doesn’t specifically make fun of him for that. Made just before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, many in the United States were also trying to keep from fighting and, consequently, would not quickly dismiss the dragon’s strongly held beliefs. Just as in
Ferdinand the Bull, The Reluctant
Dragon
presents an easily read gay character under the guise of fantasy and shows characters accepting him as he is.

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PRINCESS OR EVIL QUEEN? CAMPING

GENDER IDENTITY IN DISNEY

Although fantasy has held a place in gay culture for some time, the emphasis on the use of fantasy poses some potential problems. Medical texts of the twentieth century, particularly psychiatric texts patterned after Freud’s writings on the subject, often defined homosexuality as a

“phase” in normal human development that mentally healthy individuals would grow out of after a certain period in childhood.41 According to these texts, those that remained exclusively homosexual showed “evidence of immature sexuality and either arrested psychological development or regression.”42 As early as the late nineteenth century, Italian criminologist Cesar Lombroso argued that homosexuals were at a lower stage of human development than heterosexuals.43 Even in the 1970s, psychiatrist Charles Socarides theorized that homosexuality resulted from “massive childhood fears.”44 Although most psychiatrists now reject this notion (the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental diseases in 1973), the recurrent use of fairy tales or fantasy—kids’ stuff—in homosexual culture might reinforce for some this conception of homosexuals as “undeveloped” or “regressive.”

Yet, this equation of fantasy with childhood interest oversimplifies the relationship that gay culture has with fantasy. Just as Mickey Mouse cartoons were enjoyed on different levels by children and by the artistic elite, so, too, is it possible to differentiate how children engage with fantasy and how adult homosexuals use fantasy. Although Bruno Bettelheim spends most of
The Uses of Enchantment
“explaining” what various stories “really” mean, Bettelheim acknowledges in his introduction that as with all great art, the fairy tale’s deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments in his [
sic
] life. The child will extract different meaning from the same fairy tale, depending on his interests and needs of the moment. When given the chance, he will return to the same tale when he is ready to enlarge on old meanings, or replace them with new ones.45

This is not to say that adult homosexuals share nothing in common with how children enjoy fantasy.
Most
adults return to fantasy or fairy tales at some point “to master . . . psychological problems . . . overcoming 68

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narcissistic disappointments . . . becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies; gaining a feeling of selfhood and of self-worth.”46 Society has conditioned homosexuals to conceive of themselves as “bad objects.” Consequently, many homosexual individuals battle feelings of self-hatred and insecurity. The turn to fantasies that bolster one’s self-image as a defense against this situation makes good sense and is not an indication of further proof of “arrested development.”

But lesbians and gay men also come to fantasy with a knowledge that children, for the most part, have not acquired. At the same time that gay individuals revel in the affirmations and opened possibilities that fantasy creates, there is also an awareness and acceptance of the impossibility of fantasy—as well as the absurdity of it all. Cassandra Amesley’s concept of “double reading,” although written in regard to media fandom in general, also applies to a lesbian or gay subject position.

Amesley writes that a reader can “maintain and understand two divergent points of view at once, and use them to inform each other. In this way identification and distanciation may occur simultaneously.”47 In regards to lesbian/gay use of fantasy, an irony exists—a simultaneous indulgence in and distancing from the work being engaged—which is far more developed than the normal child’s response. A lesbian/gay individual can sit through
Snow White
and dream of being taken away from a drab life to a castle on a hill, but s/he can also enjoy the absurdity of Snow White’s grotesquely warbling contralto. Michael Bronski sees such a double reading in Barrie’s
Peter Pan.
While conventionally thought of as a children’s story, Bronski describes it as “a deeply disturbing meditation on the impossible desire for flight . . . not so much a fantasy of escape as it is a clear-eyed exposure of escape’s impossibil-ity.”48 The original 1904 play ends with Peter alone, and Barrie adds in the stage directions, “It has something to do with the riddle of his being.

If he could get the hang of the thing his cry might become ‘To live would be an awfully big adventure!’ but he can never quite get the hang of it, and so no one is as gay as he.”49

Fantasy often walks hand in hand with camp, one of the corner-stones of gay culture. Susan Sontag declared in her influential article

“Notes on ‘Camp’” that camp was “a way of looking at things . . . a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons.”50 Most importantly for this discussion, Sontag observes that “camp sees everything in quotation marks . . . to perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”51 Taking from this, but expressly

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tying “camp” to the homosexual subculture (which Sontag downplays in her analysis), Jack Babuscio asserts that “camp, by focusing on the outward appearances of role, implies that roles, and in particular, sex roles, are superficial—a matter of style.”52 Babuscio and others describe how camp was used as a communication device within homosexual culture, as well as a weapon to deconstruct the heterosexual essentialism of the dominant culture.

Gay camp appreciation of Disney usually centers specifically on

“Being-as-Playing-a-Role,” since animation renders drawings that im-personate gender and sexuality. Recent scholarly work on animation has begun to discuss how animation creates its “illusion of life” through the illusion of movement. Characters reveal their personality through the rhythm of their walk or the way they manipulate their facial expression. “Animation thus poses the very questions of life itself, movement itself and their relation . . . suggesting that the two . . . can only be thought through each other.”53 In this exploration of the importance of motion in the creation of identity, recent animation theory ties directly into current social constructionist arguments about sexual identity, that all genders and sexualities (not just homosexuality) are learned and performed. Eve Sedgwick’s “universalizing” view of sexuality defines it “as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities.”54 Sedgwick argues from a

“universalizing” standpoint, which forces not only homosexuality to come to terms with its construction but heterosexuality as well. If so, all renditions of heterosexuality in animated films are just as performative as any rendition of homosexuality. Mickey and Minnie’s repeated courtship rituals are carefully enacted performances of heterosexuality as much as the Reluctant Dragon’s sissified flouncings are portrayals of homosexuality.

With the tradition of metamorphosis in mind, the surface quality of Mickey Mouse’s gender suggests a deeper reason why certain gay and lesbian communities invoked his name as a code word. His masculine identity was accepted mainly because of his name. But, if one decided to think about it, a viewer could easily problematize Mickey’s gender.

First, Mickey’s voice was not a deep “manly” baritone but a high-pitched falsetto (and his voice for the first eighteen years would be sup-plied by Walt Disney himself!). If this wasn’t enough, it didn’t take much to see that there weren’t very many differences between Mickey and his girlfriend Minnie. The beauty of Mickey’s design was its 70

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simplicity, all circles and tubes. But Minnie was the
same
design. All animators did was put Mickey in pumps with a polka-dot skirt and three long eyelashes on each eye, and presto!—he was now a she. The obvious similarities between the two expose gender considerations as an issue of costume, revealing “masculinity” and “femininity” as somehow “Mickey Mouse.” Furthermore, these animals are never drawn with sexual organs. Many never wear clothing, and those that do tend to wear only tops (such as Donald Duck and his nephews). Yet, the sexual organs of the animals are not visible. Granted, such practices were instituted to keep parents and censors happy, but without these signifiers, the performativity of gender in animation is made even more acute. These cartoons must rely on voices and attire to assign gender.

Moving even farther, Mickey and most of his friends (excepting Pluto) are “in drag” as human beings. Although much early animation featured human characters such as Mutt and Jeff, Bobby Bumps or the Katzenjammer Kids, by the early 1920s, many of the stars of various cartoon series were anthropomorphized animals. (Even Betty Boop began her career as a humanized dog, complete with long floppy ears.) From Felix the Cat to Mickey Mouse and his friends to the menagerie of characters created at Warner Bros., these animals only rarely referred to the characteristics of their supposed species, acting instead as human. A mouse as large as Mickey or Minnie (standing taller than their dog Pluto) would belong in the Guiness Book of Records. Mickey and Minnie also walk upright rather than on all fours. Consequently, to see Mickey is to see a
drawing
of a
gender-neutral mouse
acting like a
human
male.
The levels of impersonation reach the sublime, to the point where boundaries seem impossible to nail down. This breakdown of categories is precisely what Sedgwick and others have attempted to promote through the reinvestment in the term “queer.”

Judith Butler’s deconstruction of the categories of identity in
Gender Trouble
proposes as an answer to the material oppression of sexuality not some imagined overthrow of the system or impossible “return”

to a pre-history that is itself a construction.55 Rather, Butler sees how the multiple discourses occurring within culture (which attempt to regulate, prohibit and generate certain hegemonic conceptions) often overlap, complicate and contradict each other. Hence, possibilities for resistance occur when the complications of these multiple discourses are revealed. The material discourses of power that define identity are subverted by playing them out in such a manner that the various levels

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reach absurd and parodic extremes, exposing the constructedness of gender and sexuality. I would argue that a perfect instance of multiple discourses swirling within one text, exposing the constructedness of gender and sexuality through parodic redeployment is the animated cartoon. Animation has conventionally been used for creating comic narratives, holding anything and everything up to the light of surreal ridicule, including gender and sexuality. Consequently, animation is usually ripe for camp reading.

Unlike the anarchic humor and celebration of metamorphosis that reigned at other studios, the Disney studio tried to present “believable”

humans and animals making “natural” movements. The “illusion of life” style would seem to solidify character identity, quell the animation tradition of identity as simply a role or costume and restrict the possibilities of a camp reading. The move toward an “illusion of life” focused specifically on drawing the human body—often the female body. In an attempt at greater realism, rotoscoping or tracing of actual human figures was employed in the drawing of Snow White and all of her suc-cessors—the Blue Fairy, Cinderella, Alice, Wendy, the Princess Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine.

Yet, rotoscoping was always “improved” upon to give the character more “appeal,” a term Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston list as one of the “principles of animation” that the studio developed to create the “illusion of life.”56 They contend that “your eye is drawn to the figure that has appeal, and, once there, it is held while you appreciate what you are seeing.”57 With this definition in mind, the concept of “appeal” emphasizes (
à la
Laura Mulvey) the process of fetishization at work in many instances when the female form is animated in Disney films.58 Grim Natwick’s rendition of Betty Boop for the Flieschers, and later his work at Disney drawing Snow White, emphasize heads larger than the scale of the rest of the bodies and smaller than normal torsos. As Natwick himself admitted, “Snow White was really only about five heads high. (A realistic human form is usually six). . . . She was not actually that real.”59 The concern with fetishistic “appeal” at the studio becomes more apparent when one remembers the anecdote in which Walt Disney felt more confident with the decision to make
Snow
White
after the success of the character of Jenny Wren in the short
Who
Killed Cock Robin?
(1935), a caricature of Mae West.