Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (39 page)

Again, since a large number of the homosexual employees working within the Walt Disney Company fit the “white, middle-class” description themselves, it is not surprising to see such a conception of the homosexual community emerging. As Richard Dyer points out when discussing
auteur
analysis, it is important to be aware of “the authors’ material social position in relation to discourse, the access to discourses they have on account of who they are.”57 In her interview for
Time,
DeGeneres said that having people like herself come out would help

“show the diversity, so it’s not just the extremes. Because unfortunately those are the people who get the most attention on the news. You know, when you see the parades and you see the dykes on bikes or these men dressed as women.”58 Granted, DeGeneres made certain to assert that she didn’t “want to judge them . . . the point of what I’m doing is acceptance of everybody’s differences,” and the interview was in no way 206

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controlled by Disney, so this is not necessarily Disney discourse.59 Yet, Touchstone Television chose to create a situation comedy around DeGeneres’ “normal” white middle-class persona instead of lesbian comic Lea DeLaria, a butch and burly Italian woman whose fashion sense takes more from urban punk culture than “lesbian chic.”

By marketing only to this select group of people within the homosexual community, advertising prizes this subgroup and holds them as representative—an ideal which the lesbian or gay subject is taught to measure him or herself by. Writers such as Mary Ann Doane have discussed how traditionally the female is constructed in economic terms as both consumer of commodities (subject) and as commodity herself (object), that “all consumerism involves the ideal of self-image.”60 In order to “be” a “true” woman, the female consumer is urged to buy cosmet-ics, clothes, perfume, etc., to transform the body, usually with the fetishized female body presented directly in the ad. Marketing thus works not only to describe and promote the product but to describe and promote a specific type of identity, one which will conform to the needs of modern industrial society—a “commodity self,” as Ewen terms it.

Yet, when Marchand notes the slippage between the selling of a product and the selling of the “human body itself . . . analogous to a lump of clay to be self-sculpted into a work of art,” one can easily expand this concept beyond the female body to images of masculinity, of sexuality, of race, of class, etc.61 For example, the ideal of a shaved, muscular, washboard-stomached young man with “blow-job” lips has become a standard within gay male culture that gay men are conditioned to as-pire to and are taught can be achieved through purchasing gym memberships, tanning beds and plastic surgery (or, conversely, by purchasing an escort).62 Danae Clark’s work gives an excellent account of how

“lesbian chic” fashion works to commodify the lesbian as well, idealiz-ing a certain body type and class level. In this way, even ads aimed at white, middle- or upper-middle-class gay male consumers have their effects on those outside the targeted group. By teaching them to admire this target group, these ads also send messages to non-white, working-class queer individuals that they are somehow “less valuable.” With this in mind, one can reinterpret the gay subject created by recent Disney product discussed in chapter 4 as supporting Foucault’s notion of various subject positions not being repressed but policed.

Of course, it is not necessarily true that such targeting completely and effectively limits definitions of identity. The development of target-YO U ’ V E N E V E R H A D A F R I E N D L I K E M E

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ing was an acknowledgement of the varying success of creating the desired “commodified” subject position. Even as targeting continually tries to account for various subcultures, the success rate varies. The connection between marketing and individuals is an ongoing power relation, as is the case between individuals and all media systems, as Sandra Ball-Rokeach and others have theorized.63 The wide reach of the media system to gather, process and disseminate information places it in a dominant position in this relationship, but the degree of dominance varies from moment to moment and is different for each individual. The variety of discourses that work to define and limit self-identity often create contradictions or unintended consequences, exposing the social construction of identity. An African-American lesbian is probably not going to “correctly” respond to ads that attempt to address homosexual consumers as white men. While this new Disney may appeal to a “gay market,” it may not necessarily appeal to a “queer market.”

Disney has begun to discover this diversity and complexity the hard way. Although their animated features have been extraordinarily successful (
Aladdin
was the first animated feature to make over $200

million domestically, and
The Lion King
has passed it to become, at this date, the sixth most successful film of all time), the studio has encountered protests from various individuals for its stereotypical portrayal of women and race/ethnicity. Women protested the image of Ariel’s dependency on men in
The Little Mermaid,
and some found that ultimately, the gay subtext of
The Little Mermaid
feels fragmentary and inconsistent, so that it does not necessarily promote progressive meanings . . . [T]he world to which Ariel longs to escape ultimately turns out to be so dull . . . [for] once Ariel’s transformation is complete, . . . she enters into a world shaped by the most standard human (read: heterosexual) courtship rituals and eventual marriage.64

The studio attempted to respond to these complaints when working on the character Belle in
Beauty and the Beast,
taking care to show her intelligence and independence, although the narrative still focuses on which man she will marry. The protests over
The Little Mermaid
probably had an effect on the studio’s hiring a woman (Linda Woolverton) to script
Beauty and the Beast.
The variety of reaction from women when the film was released points out that many of the problems women found in
The
Little Mermaid
were not solved. Consequently, while many gay men 208

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responded warmly to
Beauty and the Beast,
many lesbians might have had a hard time finding anything they could take from a film in which the female lead’s only duty is to choose whether she will marry an ego-tistical macho jerk or a male behemoth.

Even louder protests have arisen over representations of race in recent Disney animation, revealing their “gay appeal” may only extend to Euro-American homosexuals. Not taking kindly to
Aladdin
’s camp use of their culture and traditions, Arab Americans began to loudly voice their objections to the portrayal of Arabic culture in the cartoon almost immediately upon its theatrical release. Protesting the depiction of Arabs as “cruel, dim-witted sentinels . . . thieves and unscrupulous ven-dors,” the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee sought to change portions of the film.65 One request was to remove a scene which showed “a grotesque Arab, scabbard poised, about to remove Princess Jasmine’s hand, simply because she took an apple to feed a starving child.”66 Although this request went unheeded, the Disney studio agreed to another request. In a letter to the
Los Angeles Times,
Jay Goldsworthy and radio personality Casey Kasem requested a change in the lyrics to “Arabian Nights,” the song which opens the feature. In the film, the song describes Arabia as “a faraway place . . . where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face,” concluding that the environment is “barbaric.” Goldsworthy and Kasem revealed that lyricist Howard Ashman had written alternate, less offensive, lyrics.67 The altered lyrics replaced “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” with “Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense.” In this way, the word “barbaric” refers to the landscape rather than the culture.

After some discussion, the studio agreed to change the lyrics in time for the film’s release on video, announcing the new lyrics would appear in any subsequent re-release of the feature.68

The original lyrics of this song were part of Ashman’s initial vision of
Aladdin,
which composer Alan Menken described as being in keeping with “Hollywood’s treatment of Arabian themes.”69 The description seems to posit Ashman’s conception of Aladdin’s Arabia as an Arabia in quotes—a parody of Hollywood’s typical treatment of the “exotic”

Orient. As mentioned in the previous chapter, a recurrent motif in Euro-American gay culture is the setting of “Morocco” as a sexual playland.

Yet, although this “camping” of the Orient is used to create a text which challenges received norms about sexuality, it does not necessarily challenge Western received norms about the East. Ella Shohat has argued YO U ’ V E N E V E R H A D A F R I E N D L I K E M E

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how colonial discourse speaks even in sexually progressive texts: “Most texts about the ‘Empire’ . . . are pervaded by White homoeroticism. . . .

Exoticising and eroticising the Third World allowed the imperial imaginary to play out its own fantasies of sexual domination.”70 Ashman, it can be argued, is using the imagery of the Orient Shohat has described to imagine a setting capable of allowing a variety of sexual identities, but in doing so replays the colonial imagery thus reinstituting Western domination. Marketing this film to a gay audience then implies a conception that only Western Euro-American men fit the category, and, hence, won’t be bothered by the colonialist nature of the representation of Arabia.

This is not to say that the discourse between colonialism and sexuality is solely for consumption by gay culture. Jack Smith’s appropriation of the B-grade exotica of Universal’s Maria Montez movies displays the popularity of Arab-setting erotica in mainstream Western heterosexual culture as well. The creation of a literature commonly called

“Arabian Nights,” from which
Aladdin
is taken, is itself a product of colonial discourse, in which the Orient figures as a sexually “Other”

place. “Emerging from the oral folkloric tradition central to India, Per-sia, Iraq, Syria and Egypt . . . Frenchman Antoine Galland created a text,

. . . a circular narrative that portrayed an imaginary space of a thousand and one reveries.”71 The fabrication of Scheherezade in Galland’s 1704

publication
Les mille et une nuits
portrayed his understanding of Arabic culture as exotic and erotic, via his function as a French emissary in Constantinople. Various European Romantic writers adopted this conception of Arabian society and fleshed it out (so to speak).

If anything, the studio’s revision of Ashman’s initial concepts tried to play down this hyperstylized view of Arabia. The first draft of the story appears to have overemphasized racial stereotyping to burlesque typical ethnic clichés—including “a big black Genie with an earring”

modeled on Fats Waller and Cab Calloway.72 Disney animation chief Peter Schneider described how executives reacted to Ashman’s pitch:

“We were nervous because his version was much more Arabian.”73 Although the initial song would remain in the final production, as well as jokes about lying on beds of nails, sword swallowing, snake charming and fire eating, the ethnicity of the project was toned down considerably. The color of the Genie would become a non-ethnic-specific blue, Aladdin and Jasmine’s skin color was toned down to shades of tan and there were “a lot of discussions on the arc of the nose.”74

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Of course, one can also read Ashman’s initial concept of the project as one of the few instances of someone at the studio attempting to address a non-white homosexual viewer. Certainly, a big black genie with an earring mouthing off some of the dialogue found in the final film would certainly have given strong connotations of a “snap queen” who takes no guff from silly white boys and teaches Aladdin to have pride in himself for who he is instead of trying to be someone else. Seen in this light, Ashman’s version might have actually countered some of the notions of the “gay market” that late capitalist conglomerates like Disney have used to define homosexual identity.

Just as the feminist complaints about
The Little Mermaid
may have had a hand in the hiring of Linda Woolverton to script
Beauty and the
Beast,
the uproar by Arab Americans over
Aladdin
probably influenced the number of Native Americans involved in the production of
Pocahontas
(1995). Yet, the studio seemed to consider “gay issues” and

“race issues” separate aspects still, as was evident by the fact that the various Native American characters were given dignity and complexity while the villainous Governor Ratcliffe was a foppish gay stereotype (wearing pink outfits with ribbons in his hair) with hardly any personality whatsoever. Furthermore, the studio hired Mel Gibson to voice the lead male role of Captain John Smith, an actor often vilified in the gay press for making extremely homophobic remarks to reporters. While trying to placate Native Americans, this film was also driving away many gay customers—as if these were mutually exclusive categories of identity.75

The studio might have thought it would avoid the flack it received over
The Little Mermaid
and
Aladdin
when it began work on
The Lion
King,
an all-animal cartoon. Similar in strategy to
Pocahontas,
a number of African Americans were hired as voice artists for this story about animals in the African veldt. Yet, the film elicited protests from many groups. Even if Ariel was a problematic character for feminists, at least she was the focus of the narrative. In
The Lion King,
lionesses (not to mention females from other species) are barely present. Many African Americans were also disturbed that the film actively refused to show any existence of human African civilization. The use of actor Robert Guillaume to create a mystic baboon with an Uncle Tom accent and Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin as villainous (and boorish) hyenas who live in what constitutes the veldt’s ghetto did not help matters either.