Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (16 page)

With its mixture of “appeal” and “realism,” Disney’s tradition of animated human forms consistently creates performances of gender.60

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Consequently, a camp reading of these animated texts strongly emphasizes the “illusion” side of the equation—reveling in the constructedness of “life.” If anything, the attempt by studio animators to stress the

“lifelikeness” of their animation style makes camp readings of Disney all the more enjoyable, because the reading is so contradictory to the supposed intent of the text.61 These are not men or women but drawings configured and filmed to construct an enactment of a man or woman. The fabulously false femininity of Walt Disney’s fairy-tale heroines almost screams out for a camp reading, especially when live performers at the theme parks are stuffed into real-life versions of the characters’ dresses and outfitted with wigs that have been shellacked into duplicating the hair styles in the cartoons. Frank Browning, in
The
Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today,
describes Ggreg Taylor, a member of the activist group Boys with Arms Akimbo, visiting Disneyland:

Resplendent in his white quilted leisure suit and blue mirror plat-forms—an up-to-date parody of the now-thrift-shop-available seventies—Ggreg walks up to Alice. The shameless Orange County sun bounces off her soft golden tresses, illuminates her pleated, puff-shouldered blouse. Beside her stands Cinderella, whose golden hair is arranged in a tight bun, not a single strand dangling loose.

“Are you from Wonderland?” Alice asks Ggreg. . . .

“N-o-o-h,” Ggreg answers with a verbal dip. “I’m from San Francisco. Can’t you tell?”

“Well, we simply must talk later,” Alice answers, floating off across the asphalt with Cinderella. . . .

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s really queer,” Ggreg observes, adjusting his leather biker’s cap.62

A female employee trying to glide her arms and legs smoothly and gracefully overemphasizes the masquerade of gender identity. For all intents and purposes, these are women in female drag.

Usually, the most obvious impersonations of gender in Disney’s animated features are the villains—and gay culture seems to have a special fondness for Disney villainy. In fact, a whole subculture of Disney fandom has grown up over Disney’s villains and villainesses. In the 1990s, stores opened within the Disney theme parks devoted exclusively to “villain merchandise.” Although the fandom is too amorphous

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and unorganized to gain data about percentages, the number of gay men who dress in drag as Disney villains for costume parties or for Halloween testifies to the attraction that these characters have in gay culture.

Tied into camp, much of recent gay and lesbian studies has focused on drag culture. Subjects enact female or leather (or whatever) personae, becoming subject and object simultaneously, consciously “performing” subjectivity. Consequently, drag embodies Mary Ann Doane’s theory of “masquerade” in which subjects “put on” different personae rather than having one stable subject position.63 Drag is thus easily equated with the notion of simultaneous identification and distanciation posited by Amesley’s definition of “double reading.” Judith Butler describes the gay culture of drag as that which “constitutes the mun-dane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn and done: it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation . . . gender is a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core.”64

The fascination that many gay men have with Disney villains is precisely over how they theatrically perform their gender roles, to the point where the “naturalness” of their gender can be called into question. Although the vengeful Queen in
Snow White
and the evil sorceress Maleficent in
Sleeping Beauty
(1959) are ostensibly gendered female, they both wear clothing that completely covers almost every inch of their bodies, including cowls or hoods that cover their heads. Only the hands and face are exposed, leaving the rest of the body cloaked. Their faces both have highly defined features (etched cheekbones, thin sharp noses, strongly set jaws) in contrast to the softer designs of the heroines, and they also seem to have access to makeup, especially mascara and eye shadow. Although Cruella de Vil in
101 Dalmatians
(1961) is not clothed like these two characters, her facial design fits perfectly into this description. In other words, these villainesses look like drag queens. Jon Adams, in his reading of Disney villains as queer figures, writes: Never does the storyline lead the viewer to believe that Cruella is actually a man in drag. However, her masculine attributes could not be more exaggerated, as Leonard Maltin notes in his book
The Disney
Films.
Maltin states that Cruella “revels in the stylistic exaggeration of reality” with a “bony and angular” face. He calls her design a “caricature.” But a caricature of what? A stylistic exaggeration of what real-74

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ity? Certainly not the ideal of femininity. Perfectly flat-chested, Cruella struts around in two-tone hair, drives a mile long convertible like a bat out of hell. Her voice, wonderfully performed by Betty Lou Gerson, is one of booming tones and terrific accent as she rolls through “Anita Dahlings” and “Mahvelous, Mahvelous’” that put Billy Crystal’s to shame.65

Traditionally, Disney’s animated villains move and speak with enormous style and panache—so much so that they often “steal” the scenes from the supposed leading characters in the stories. In this way, they more overtly “overperform” their gender roles and readily become the targets of camp readings. Like the evil Queen in
Snow White
and the wicked stepmother in
Cinderella
before her, Maleficent moves with grand sweeps of her cape and long-flowing gown, and strikes magnifi-cent “diva”-like poses. It should also be mentioned that all her movements and poses are timed to the highly emotive melodies and rhythms of Tchaikowsky’s version of
Sleeping Beauty
—a homosexual composer of the “romantic” school. She also gets a number of well-placed pithy lines of dialogue. She makes a stunning entrance into the celebration of Aurora’s birth, then regards the royal pageant as if it were a soiree at the Hotel Algonquin in New York City. “Well, quite a glittering assem-blage, King Stephan,” she observes coldly. “Royalty, nobility, the gentry, and . . . ,” she says, pausing to notice the three “good” fairies before adding with a low throaty chuckle, “Oh, how quaint—even the rabble.”

Cruella de Vil similarly sweeps into every scene like a grand dame making a stage entrance for an enthusiastic crowd. Constantly carrying an absurdly long cigarette holder, she uses it repeatedly to further overemphasize every gesture and inflection. No movement or line of dialogue is subtle or underplayed. Instead, her every moment is “played to the cheap seats.” Whether trying to write out a check for the Dalmatian puppies or driving her roadster down a mountain road, Cruella overdoes everything. All these inflections seem to be attempts by the character to show her astounding chic and cultured femininity. Yet, in her attempts to be the epitome of feminine glamour (which is why she wants the Dalmatian coat that spurs the narrative), she consistently and quite hilariously points out the concept of gender-as-role-playing.

As described in chapter 1, Disney’s films increasingly emphasized heterosexual courtship as the studio moved more heavily into narrative and character animation. Fairy tales like “Snow White,” “Cinderella”

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and “Sleeping Beauty” lent themselves quite easily to this celebration and promotion of heterosexuality. Consequently, on a more basic level, gay culture’s appreciation of Disney villains is a humorous cheering on of those forces within the narrative that disrupt and frustrate heterosexuality’s dominance.
Sleeping Beauty
’s Maleficent actively works to spoil two generations of heterosexual coupling. The film begins with the convention of a book opening to announce “Once upon a time. . . .”

During this overtly narrated introduction, strong emphasis is placed on procreation, particularly on the king and queen’s difficulties in having a child. The story proper begins with the countrywide celebration of the birth of the princess Aurora. When Maleficent arrives, she is informed quite bluntly that she is “not wanted.” Maleficent retaliates by placing a death sentence on the child to be fulfilled on her sixteenth birthday. In this way, she attempts to take away the procreative success of the king and queen and kill the princess just at the moment when she herself would be about to explore heterosexual courtship.

Of course, villains regularly disrupt and frustrate heterosexual courtship in conventional Hollywood narrative. But usually, the villain attempts to break up the hero and heroine because he desires the girl for himself (or, conversely, the villainess wants the hero for herself). This rarely occurs with Disney’s villains. In fact, there are often a number of signifiers that make it easier for homosexual viewers to read the villains not only as “anti-couple” but specifically as “queer” figures. Their attempts to break up the couple is never based upon a desire to “steal” a partner. The evil Queen is jealous of Snow White’s beauty, not because the Queen loves Prince Charming herself. Maleficent causes chaos throughout the land seemingly because of her ostracization from Aurora’s birth celebration. As one of the “good” fairies describes Maleficent, she “doesn’t know anything about love or kindness or helping others. Sometimes I think she’s not really happy.” Cruella de Vil kidnaps puppies not through some desire to be a mother but because she wants a coat!66

Although Disney’s animated features lean heavily towards female villains, this is not to say that the few male villains do not fit into this paradigm of “queerness.” On the contrary, the foppishness of Honest John the fox and Figaro the cat in
Pinocchio
makes them easily read as a gay couple, as Vito Russo did in
The Celluloid Closet.
67 Another possible gay couple would be Smee and Captain Hook in
Peter Pan.
As with Honest John, Hook attempts to hide his deviant villainy behind the 76

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refined airs commonly associated with the English dandy. Voiced by Hans Conreid, Hook speaks and moves floridly, as if every action was high melodrama. He also dresses the part of a dandy: introduced holding two cigars in a long gold cigarette holder, he wears a lavender blouse with ruffles. Later, as he prepares for battle, his companion Smee helps him don a purplish plumed hat and a deep red velvet coat and provides Hook with a lavender handkerchief to stuff in his shirt sleeve.

Though cutthroat, the pirates under Hook’s command are not above singing about the pleasures of being a pirate while doing minuets and then waving tiny pirate flags while they wiggle their hips in precision like chorus girls.68

Smee is constantly at Hook’s side, and, although Hook is the gruff maniacal master in the relationship, Smee is obviously the steady emotional rock that keeps Hook balanced. Whenever Hook encounters the crocodile that took his hand, he wails like a banshee for Smee. While Hook battles with Peter, Smee loads up the lifeboat in anticipation of defeat. In a most revelatory scene, Smee advises Hook to hoist anchor and head to sea, because there’s “women trouble on the island” and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Both Honest John and Captain Hook are represented as using their cultured dandyism to hide their evil designs, and both are focused on a young boy. Similarly, the tiger Shere Khan in
The Jungle Book
(1967) also moves and speaks in an “overcivilized” manner, yet again with the intention of luring a young boy from “safety.”69 Voiced with exceptional archness by English actor George Sanders, Shere Khan is introduced stalking a young deer, and, when he is interrupted, he merely mutters

“Beastly luck.” His prospects brighten, though, when he overhears of a

“young man cub” who is wandering alone in the jungle. He whispers to himself, “How delightful,” and vows to arrange “a rendezvous” with the boy. As he searches through the jungle, he plays the total gentle-man—although Kaa the snake bitterly points out, “Who does he think he’s fooling?”

Unlike Honest John and Hook, though, Shere Khan does exude serious menace. He is not an underling for a more threatening villain (as Honest John is). Although witty, he is never portrayed as a buffoon (as Hook invariably is). Rather, even the most whimsical of the tiger’s lines contains an underlying threat. By 1967, when the film was released, Walt had already had his discussion with the FBI about the possibilities of making educational films to warn children about homosexual pe-

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dophiles. While it is impossible to draw direct correlation between this meeting and the villainy of Shere Khan, the character’s threat might have some connection to the changes that were beginning to occur in American society—changes that seemed to be drawing the younger generation away from traditional values and morals. When Mowgli tries to escape from having to be brought to civilization, he encounters a beach bum bear, a quartet of Liverpudlian vultures and an African-American orangutan (who resides in an ancient city that plainly needs some urban assistance).70 Mirroring the breakdown of societal conventions that was occurring during the late 1960s, it is unsurprising, then, to find a predatory male with a clipped British accent more frightening than he had been years before.

SPIN AND MARTY AND JET AND JODIE:

GROWING UP GAY WITH DISNEY

Although adult homosexuals are capable of reading Disney texts (and much of “straight” popular culture) through the eyes of “camp” or other doubled positions, this is not to claim that only lesbian and gay male adults appreciate and understand the “queerness” of Disney’s work. It is impossible to determine just when an individual begins to self-identify with the term “homosexual.” Some claim that they “always” knew, others say they knew they had “those feelings” at an early age, others don’t “realize” until fairly late in their adolescence, or even far into adulthood. Whether one subscribes to a strictly biological determinism or a more socially learned causality for sexual identity, an individual’s exposure to culture in some fashion shapes how sexuality is conceived and expressed. Young people come into contact with medi-ated images almost from the moment they are born and use those images to help make sense of the world. Henry Jenkins, in his study of children watching Pee-Wee Herman, describes how “children draw upon . . . characters and situations of popular culture . . . reworking them to satisfy their own needs and desires.”71 Children, in other words, “poach” from culture just like any other group that is marginalized from power.