Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (29 page)

“wish songs” that already existed in Disney’s canon (“Someday My Prince Will Come” from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
“When You Wish Upon a Star” from
Pinocchio,
“A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from
Cinderella,
amongst others) is a desire to specifically escape from the dull, conservative parochial values of the everyday. Ariel wants to get away from her father’s restrictions on her life; Belle wants 150

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to avoid the societal pressure to marry Gaston. Cynthia Erb notices how

“both
Mermaid
and
B and B
. . . deploy the fairy tale musical’s bicameral spatial scheme to map a gay dilemma of trying to choose between different worlds—one explicitly associated with family and marriage, the other configured along the lines of fantasy, escape, and forbidden romance.”46 Unlike the earlier “wish songs” in Disney’s catalogue that only desire to find happiness in everyday life, Ashman’s “wish songs”

specifically want to forsake the “normal” world and find happiness somewhere else.

Ashman makes this link (between the dysfunction of “real” families and the escape of Disney fantasy) in a song written by him and Marvin Hamlisch not for Disney but
about
Disney. For a stage musical adaption of the Michael Ritchie film
Smile
(1975), the two wrote a “wish song” entitled “Disneyland.” A young girl (much like Ariel and Belle) sings of lonely Sunday nights when she was eleven. With her folks “busy fighting” and her brother already out of the house, she was rescued from her surroundings by turning on the TV set and watching the weekly Disney anthology series. In the chorus, she relives the thrill of watching the show, closing her eyes and wishing hard for a magic carpet to carry her away to Disneyland.

Ashman specifically invokes the appeal of Disney as a method to

“get away” from the oppressiveness of the world (encapsulating the attitude that many lesbian and gay men have towards the theme park). In an interview for the PBS series,
In the Life,
Ashman’s partner Bill Lauch recalled a dream from Ashman’s childhood: “The Mouseketeers from the
Mickey Mouse Club
come to Howard’s bedroom window, and they say, ‘Howard, come with us. Come be part of our group.’ And he would run away with them. He finally did do that—when he was 35.” Such a sentiment seemed to be echoed by the predominantly gay male crowd at the
Aladdin
screening described in the Introduction. During the pre-show, many in the audience sang along with the mermaid Ariel as she dreamed of being “part of your world.”

Ashman’s “wish songs” in
The Little Mermaid
and
Beauty and the
Beast
are (respectively) “Part of Your World” and “Belle.” Both are sung by characters who feel out of place in the world in which they live. In
The Little Mermaid,
Ariel attempts to vicariously live in the human world by watching them covertly, as well as by collecting various artifacts left in sunken ships. Ariel sings “Part of Your World” amidst this secret collection, opining that (unlike her father) on land “they don’t

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reprimand their daughters” for thinking independently. Belle in her self-titled song longs for “something more than this provincial life,” because she wants “so much more than they’ve got planned.” The rest of the town joins in the song, describing her as “strange but special” and commenting that “she doesn’t quite fit in.” Erb points out that “in

‘Belle,’ the villagers’ lyrics repeat such words as ‘strange,’ ‘distracted,’

‘peculiar,’ ‘a puzzle,’ ‘different,’ and ‘funny,’ so that eventually this descriptive battery becomes connotative of the way straight people my-opically puzzle over the enigmas posed by gay desire.”47

Both Belle and Ariel in their “wish songs” voice feelings common amongst homosexuals, emotions of separation and longing for acceptance—particularly acceptance of the love they feel. Ariel falls in love with a man, although knowing this is the ultimate taboo in her society.

Singing wistfully to him from afar, Ariel seems willing to sacrifice just about anything to live with him, stay beside him and have him smile at her. Soon, the words move from plaintive to determined, as she vows that somehow, someway, “someday I’ll be part of your world!” Belle herself finds it “strange and a bit alarming” as she realizes her growing love for the Beast in “Something There,” but pleads for Gaston and the villagers to understand her love when they threaten the Beast’s life in

“The Mob Song.” Both films are structured around resolving this un-sanctioned love.

It is significant to see how Disney’s
The Little Mermaid
changes the original story. Andersen, living in a society that could never accept open same-sex attraction, ends his story tragically, with the death of the mermaid who cannot find comfort in either world. Of course, the Disney studio would never allow such a downbeat ending in its animated films, and Ariel does not die. Still, the acceptance of Ariel into the human world, and her marriage to the Prince with the approval of the undersea kingdom (as personified by her father), also shows an optimism in Ashman’s world view—that “just wait and see, someday I’ll be part of your world.”

In fact, the three animated features that Ashman worked on bear a stamp of reconciliation and acceptance: Ariel is accepted into the human world, Beauty and the Beast reconcile their differences and Aladdin and Princess Jasmine are able to deconstruct the class boundaries that separate them. In all three, Ashman’s vision acknowledges the fears and misdirected anger that both sides feel. In
The Little Mermaid
for example, the abuse of human society on the undersea world is 152

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repeatedly emphasized (and hilariously conveyed in the musical number “Les Poissons,” in which the Prince’s chef gleefully beheads and slices various fish). On the other hand, the prejudices and fears of the undersea world (specifically Ariel’s father King Triton) are also seen as a hurdle that must be overcome in order for the two worlds to co-exist.

Similarly, the townspeople in
Beauty and the Beast
form an angry mob to hunt down the Beast. But the Beast is no lovable victim, and his own fears and resentment carry their burden of the blame for keeping Belle from his side. In
Aladdin,
there is a marked class barrier that keeps street urchin Aladdin from marrying Princess Jasmine, but Aladdin’s own self-hatred and self-denial are posited as equally damaging to the potential relationship.

Ashman’s work then carries an overriding hope to erase the fear and hatred that each side has for the other. One can quickly translate this message to issues of sexuality in modern Western society. As homosexuality gains more and more public space, the homophobia of certain heterosexual individuals has increased exponentially. This message counsels not to fight irrational fear and hatred with more hatred but with an attempt to ease the fears on both sides. At the end of
The Little
Mermaid,
Triton fashions a symbol of the new ties between the two groups by creating a huge rainbow over the shipside wedding (and the rainbow has become a quite potent symbol of community within homosexual culture). It is the optimism that such an outcome is possible that Ashman brings to these three films through his lyrics and his story ideas. Erb notes, “The end result [of Ashman’s work] is that the so-called gay subtext actually seems to lie very near the text’s surface, so that it is virtually competitive with the meanings that might be construed as ‘dominant.’”48 Placing such easily read “gay-friendly” messages in Disney texts may have been Ashman’s own method of reaching across these socially imposed barriers in an attempt to ease the fear and hatred.

A WORLD OF QUEERS? HOMOSEXUALS IN

EISNER-ERA DISNEY FILMS

In 1992, the year that
Beauty and the Beast
would become the first animated feature film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, critics noticed a flash of small-budgeted yet stylized independent features made

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about and by openly gay filmmakers.
The Living End
(1992), directed by Gregg Araki, and
Swoon
(1992), directed by Tom Kalin, heralded a flurry of fiction films by lesbians and gay men. That same year, Jennie Livingston’s landmark documentary on the New York drag scene,
Paris Is
Burning,
broke through to enjoy national theatrical distribution, encouraging further documentaries with queer subject matter. Critics soon dubbed these films a full-fledged cinema movement: “New Queer Cinema.” Noting the profit that these independent films were making (due in part to their low cost of production), major studios began to take interest in making more “gay-themed” films. When Tom Hanks won the Best Picture Oscar in 1994 for playing a gay lawyer with AIDS in
Philadelphia
(1993), a film which took in over $70 million in domestic box office, studios began looking seriously at “Queer Cinema.”

Disney, trying to remain competitive with the major studios, also expressed interest. In 1993, Disney acquired a major independent label, Miramax, which had helped distribute a number of major titles during this “Queer Moment,” most famously Neil Jordan’s Oscar-nominated
The Crying Game
(1992). Maintaining the independence to choose which films it would purchase for distribution, one of Miramax’s first releases after Disney’s buyout was
Priest
(1994), a film about a Catholic priest coming to terms with his homosexuality.49 When Lauren Lloyd was recruited to become a film production executive for Hollywood Pictures, she remembers “a Disney exec who carefully pronounced the word ‘minority’ when pushed to explain her attractiveness to [the] studio.”50 As part of her job, Lloyd was given a discretionary fund that she could use to jump-start projects she considered worthy. Within the year, she had two films in development focusing on lesbian characters: an adaption of Elaine Hollimann’s documentary
Chicks in White Satin
and a project called
Story of Her Life.
The studio had also optioned to make a film version of the stage musical
Falsettos,
with a gay male lead character, and financed the making of a short film
Electra Lite,
starring renowned drag diva RuPaul.

Yet, the studio’s “flirtation” with openly homosexual subjects initially seemed to falter.
Electra Lite
never made it into theatrical release, and (to this date) the three feature films have died in development. Disney’s investment in “New Queer Cinema” seemed stillborn. Certainly, Disney seemed to be wary as to how associated it would become with open discussion of homosexuality. As was mentioned in chapter 3, Disney’s reticence in allowing domestic-partner benefits sprung from 154

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worries about its “family” image. In 1993, Sweden’s version of
The New
Mickey Mouse Club
had planned to have the rock group Erasure on one of its programs, but the company decided to drop the act when someone realized that singer Andy Bell was openly gay. In an ironic reversal of what would eventually happen in the United States, newspaper and magazine editorials in the Swedish press criticized this move and there were even calls for boycotts of Disney products.

Still, critiquing the failure to get these projects off the ground ignores that other work coming out of the studio was providing more manifest images of homosexuals. In fact, one of the most overt signs of a new age at the Disney studios was the denotative representation of homosexuality in some of their films. While critics and some audience members were finding it easier and easier to read the gay subtext of Disney’s animated musicals, the live-action films coming out of Disney (and their Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures labels) were occasionally providing characters with no subtext at all, characters who were quite simply homosexual.

In the feature that signaled the beginning of the Eisner-Wells-Katzenberg era,
Down and Out in Beverly Hills,
one of the main characters comes out of the closet during the narrative. Max (Evan Richards), the teenage son of David and Barbara Whiteman (Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler), is plainly trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation. Max’s father catches sight of him in a tutu flouncing around his bedroom, which is decorated with posters of Grace Jones and David Bowie. The father heads to his wife and announces, “I’m very worried about Max, he seems very confused.” Throughout the film, Max is obviously trying to tell his parents
something,
but can’t say the words so makes a number of experimental videos attempting to express to them what’s going on with him. Max finally finds someone he can talk to in Jerry (Nick Nolte), a homeless person the family has adopted. Jerry catches Max putting on lipstick, but in a different reaction than David’s to the tutu, Jerry suggests that orange may be a better color for him.

Later, as Jerry disrobes unself-consciously in front of Max after a dip in the pool, Max asks Jerry for advice on how to tell his parents. Jerry (and consequently, it seems, the film itself) tells him that he has no problem with “it”—“You gotta be what you gotta be”—and assures Max that his parents are very tolerant people.

Max finally decides to take this advice at the New Year’s Eve party that climaxes the film and shows up at the party in an outfit influenced

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by Culture Club, Adam Ant and the numerous other gender-bending

’80s New Wave bands that were popular at the time of the film’s release: an earring, orange lipstick, upswept and vaguely punk cut hair, purple eyeshadow and blush, a lime green sheer jacket with wide cuffs and an orange shirt underneath. Accompanying him is his “band,” all in similar gender-bending outfits, including an early screen appearance for underground drag diva Alexis Arquette. Max kisses his father on the cheek and tells him “he is who he is” and that he’s so glad that Dad accepts him and his friends.

Although the word “homosexuality” is never specifically uttered throughout the film, most viewers seemed to catch what was going on with Max. Keeping with the “saying-it-without-saying-it” attitude of the film, the
New York Times
described Max as “sexually confused” and
Variety
obviously thought it was being humorous in saying Evan Richards played “the son who’s not sure he wouldn’t rather be a daughter.”51 Released in the mid-1980s, just as radical gay rights activism was beginning to reorganize, it’s unsurprising to find such tiptoeing around the subject in both the film and in the press. Yet, the references in both reviews to Max’s “oddness” indicate an awareness nonetheless. There is evidence that gay males were also paying attention to the film’s messages. When Vito Russo updated
The Celluloid Closet,
he made certain to include mention of the film. Yet, Russo focused not on Max’s orientation but on one moment in the film that he considered to be extremely homophobic. When David rescues Jerry from drowning in their backyard pool by giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, David’s wife Barbara is aghast, screaming that David will get AIDS from putting “his lips on this man’s lips.”52 Russo’s critique reflects the anger in gay communities at the time which soon manifested itself in ACT UP. The statement itself
is
blatantly homophobic and misrepresentative of how AIDS