Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (26 page)

LEAGUE has not had a specific hand in making suggestions or organizing protests regarding Disney’s production decisions and has been granted existence in part upon the specific provision that it
not
engage in such activism. Yet, the employee group has tried to do what little it can. Although some members disagreed with co-chair Hicks’

granting an interview to the
Los Angeles Times
about the Disney-owned Los Angeles television station KCAL’s airing of Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated series, the members
did
agree to register their displeasure in an interoffice letter. LEAGUE also met with filmmaker Elaine Hollimann as a sign of support when the studio optioned the rights to turn
Chicks
in White Satin
(1992), her Oscar-nominated documentary on a lesbian wedding, into a feature film. Furthermore, open homosexuals working 133

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for the studio have at times expressed the importance of their sexuality in the work they do, indicating that they have expressed outlooks and opinions about sexuality in their work for Disney.1

Greater visibility of homosexuality in American culture, and overt announcements and awards that attempt to draw attention to how lesbians and gay men appreciate films and television, has brought the hidden “coded-ness” of lesbian/gay culture more and more into the light.

“Camp,” to use one example, is no longer exclusively understood by a secret homosexual subculture. Now audiences from numerous backgrounds appreciate “camp.”2 Consequently, reading Disney texts from a “gay sensibility” has gotten “easier” and less “subaltern” since the mid-1980s.

In fact, one doesn’t now necessarily need to identify as homosexual in order to find a subtext. CBS anchorman Dan Rather, in a special column for the
Los Angeles Times
in early 1992, noticed an AIDS allegory going on within Disney’s film version of the fairy tale
Beauty and the
Beast
(1991):

Think of the spell [the Beast is under] as AIDS, with the same arbitrary and harshly abbreviated limitations on time, and you feel the Beast’s loneliness and desperation a little more deeply. He’s just a guy trying as hard as he can to find a little meaning—a little love, a little
beauty
—

while he’s still got a little life left.3

Cynthia Erb, writing for a more academic audience, agrees with Rather’s interpretation of the film:

The visual contrast made between the deteriorated form of the Beast and the painting of him as a beautiful young man possibly sets up a stereotypical opposition between ugliness and beauty reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
but in this context the ugliness/beauty dyad also supports a tension, crucial to the film’s AIDS

allegory, between the issue of having health or not having it.4

Certainly, the lyrics written for “The Mob Song,” in which the villagers set out to attack the Beast, add to this method of interpretation. In the song, the villagers state, “We don’t like what we don’t understand, in fact it scares us,” and thus they must save their families and their lives by killing the Beast. The quotation reverberates strongly as a parallel to

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AIDS panic that many individuals, as well as religious and political groups, expressed during the spread of the disease. As Harry Benshoff notes, many “recent critical essays on the mass media have demonstrated how the representational codes and narrative tropes of the monster movie . . . have been grafted onto much television and newspaper coverage of AIDS.”5 “The Mob Song” taps into this demonization of persons with AIDS (PWAs) but its placement in the film definitely sides with the demonized rather than the lynchers speaking.

The Beast is given the life span of a magical rose to find a cure to his curse (someone to love that will love him in return), and although missing the deadline means only that he’ll remain a Beast permanently, the narrative contrives to have him on the brink of death just as the last petal falls from the flower. Also, the Beast goes through many of the

“five stages” of emotional reaction to impending death: anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The Beast is definitely an angry creature, and his initial attempts to woo Belle are blatant bargaining, done simply to remove the curse without necessarily feeling any actual love towards her. When he allows Belle to leave his domain, he enters a state of depression that makes him unwilling to defend himself against the mob that arrives to string him up. Most touchingly, the Beast reaches acceptance just at the moment of his seeming death. As a soft rain falls around them, Belle caresses the dying Beast, and the Beast ventures that “Maybe it’s better this way.” Belle protests, but the Beast looks up at her with love, touches her face as he says “At least I got to see you one last time” and then lapses into unconsciousness. (Of course, the tale resurrects the Beast and cures the spell when she says “I love you” just as he seems to expire.)

PWAs “poached” from Disney texts long before
Beauty and the Beast.

Lesbian and gay employees of the theme parks remark on how many of their AIDS-infected friends desire to visit Disneyland and Walt Disney World, specifically seeing their trips as a way of dealing with their status. Also, many AIDS quilt panels include Disney imagery—mouse ears, Disney song lyrics and the like. Some panels commemorate Disney employees, but some pay tribute to a fan’s devotion to the studio’s products. While wrong to conceive that every Disney-influenced panel
must
refer to a homosexual (thus implying that AIDS is only a homosexual disease), certain panels make the sexual orientation of the remembered person quite clear. For example, one particularly colorful panel commemorating an adult male depicts an underwater scene and 136

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contains a number of lines from songs written for
The Little Mermaid
(1989), the animated musical Disney made just before
Beauty and the
Beast.
Amongst these are such quotes as “The men up there don’t like a lot of blather,” and “Don’t forget the importance of body language.”

The attention paid by television and print news to the displays of the AIDS Quilt might have made some, like Rather, more aware of the importance of Disney in these people’s lives, thus making it easier to understand the 1991 film as an AIDS allegory.

While not every audience member saw the feature and automatically thought, “Oh, this is all about AIDS,” Rather’s interpretation of the film was not looked on as a scandalous perversion of a cherished Disney film meant for family viewing. Instead of fearing accusations of having a “warped” mind or “reading too much into things,” Rather aptly wrote, “The AIDS metaphor is just one way, a valid way, of looking at
Beauty and the Beast.
”6 Just as it is mistaken to assume that all the panels on the AIDS quilt commemorate homosexuals, reading the film as an AIDS allegory does
not
automatically signal homosexuality. Yet, the acceptance of the AIDS allegory can be linked quite directly to homosexuality. Beyond a wealth of “gay-tinged” jokes that will be analyzed in this chapter, the main reason for a lack of hue and cry against Rather’s interpretation of the film was that most moviegoers knew that Howard Ashman, the film’s lyricist and producer, was gay and had recently died as a result of the AIDS virus. The quilt panel described above is one of two dedicated to Ashman. The other features stenciled images of the Little Mermaid, Ariel, and her father, Triton, with the caption, “Oh that he had one more song to sing, one more song.” Although Rather reports that those he talked with at the studio asserted that the project was already in the works before Ashman’s condition was known, mention of Ashman’s battle with the disease lends credence to reading the film in this manner.7

At this time, many film critics in the popular press were beginning to acknowledge more and more the “gay sensibility” of Disney’s product. A number of factors contributed to this higher mainstream awareness of reading Disney from a gay or lesbian standpoint. As stated before, many filmgoers had a greater awareness of lesbian/gay culture and reading strategies such as camp. Secondly, the societal and industrial changes mentioned in the previous chapter led (albeit slowly) to more manifest representations of homosexuality in films, television and other areas of popular culture. The output from the Walt Disney Com-

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pany in the Eisner era reflects the growth of homosexual representation throughout the entertainment industry and American society. Lastly, the openness of many artists regarding their sexual orientation (such as Howard Ashman) gave additional weight to reading “gay subtext” into certain cultural products.

This chapter will examine exactly what might have been present in various Disney films and television series since the mid-1980s that could be read through a “lesbian/gay sensibility” by numerous individuals—not just self-identified homosexuals. One of the main methods of doing this lies in analyzing exactly how the mainstream press expressed itself as it began to read homosexual subtexts into Disney.

While media critics cannot be held up as typical audience members, their reactions often indicate larger patterns of interpretation. Some reviews comment on the reactions of the audience that viewed the film with the critic; some reviews comment on what is considered the “intended audience” of a certain film; and some reviews specifically refer to the publicity surrounding a film, indicating a certain prevalence for many audience members to watch a film through a certain mindframe.

(Of course, critics’ reviews in the mainstream press are part of the barrage that affects how audiences are pre-situated to view a film—an issue to be more deeply analyzed in the final chapter.)

This chapter will also focus on how these “more obvious” readings differ from the reworked understandings of Disney analyzed in chapter 2. Individuals who appreciated Disney from a non-straight perspective from the ’30s to the ’70s were subversively “reading against the grain” of what the studio had intended. In contrast, some characters in Disney-produced films and television were overtly homosexual, and mainstream newspapers were pointing out the openly homosexual artists who were working on other Disney films and television. Reading Disney from a “lesbian/gay sensibility” cannot be considered “radical”

or all that subversive if the majority of the audience is also reading it that way.

The increasingly manifest nature of lesbian/gay characters or subjectivities in Disney texts is a major change from Walt’s era. Yet, just as the discussion of LEAGUE points out how a “more open” workplace still works to manage and control expressions of sexuality, these “more obvious” readings limit conceptions and representations of sexuality. In chapter 2, I pointed out that definitions of sexuality were still in contestation in the early part of the twentieth century, and certain reading 138

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strategies were consequently considered more “queer” than specifically

“lesbian” or “gay.” In contrast, the “openness” of these later texts often supplants a free-floating “queer” response with a more precisely “lesbian” or “gay” subject position. Earlier, the unique position of LEAGUE

members as part of the process of production was placed in contrast to potential non-straight consumers of Disney in terms of the company’s ability to regulate and control discourse about sexuality. As this chapter will begin to outline, the increased openness of Disney to homosexuality potentially affects these consumers as well.

THE WORK OF FAIRIES: NOTES ON SEXUALITY

AND
AUTEUR
ANALYSIS

As Rather’s analysis of
Beauty and the Beast
demonstrates, knowledge of an open homosexual working on a film seems to make a homosexual reading position acceptable—in effect “authorizing” it. Many critics, commentators and average moviegoers implicitly assume that a homosexual filmmaker will in some way input issues of sexuality into the work s/he is involved in making. The general acceptance of an AIDS

analogy in
Beauty and the Beast
was therefore legitimated by proposing that Howard Ashman was the film’s
auteur.
As originally described by François Truffaut in the mid-1950s in his landmark essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,”
la politique des auteurs
conceives (and promotes) the idea of an individual voice controlling and creating the filmic work.8 In this way, viewers can find stylistic and thematic motifs that recur and develop across an individual’s career much as an art critic can follow Pablo Picasso or Vincent Van Gogh through their different stages and periods. Truffaut (and Andrew Sarris, who popularized the theory in the United States with his book
The American Cinema:
Directors and Directions, 1929–1968)
posited the director as the
auteur
of a motion picture, especially one who “authored” as much as possible of his or her films (writing as well as directing).9 Yet,
auteur
critics also came to champion certain directors of the American studio system that seemed to “rise above” the constraints placed upon them by studio bosses, placing some sort of personal stamp on their work.

Since the 1960s,
auteur
theory has been pushed farther and farther to the sidelines in the academic study of film. By 1976, Bill Nichols was able to write, in his introduction to the “
Auteur
Criticism” section of

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Movies and Methods,
that “many argue that the debate about
auteur
criticism is passé.”10 The
auteur
theory in film studies has, by and large, been generally dismissed as a relic expressing romantic notions of individual achievement, ignoring both the collaborative structure of filmmaking and the sociohistorical circumstances that encode texts without necessarily the conscious design of the filmmakers. Furthermore, as reception studies gained greater importance in the academy, auteur analysis seemed to deny the power of the reader in favor of trying to understand what the filmmaker “really meant.”11