Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (48 page)

56. Mike Hammond, “The Historical and the Hysterical: Melodrama, War and Masculinity in
Dead Poets Society,
”
You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men,
Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumin, eds., (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 63.

57. After the suicide, the film cuts directly to Todd in his dorm room, being awakened by the other students who tell him of Neil’s death. Todd’s reaction is stunned shock as he walks out into the snowy grounds of Welton, kneels and vomits. When his friends rush to his side, he breaks free and runs chaotically while keening loudly until the end of the scene. Because reading Todd as a homosexual character is more “subtextual” than Neil, not all viewers would necessarily read a relationship between Todd and Neil, but clues can be found readily. The two have no female interests in the film, and, when one of their friends brings girls to a Dead Poets meeting, both seem somewhat annoyed. In fact, both Todd and Neil seem to eventually accept the presence of women in this previously all-male space when the film shows the two glancing at each other and smiling as if to indulge their friend. Certainly, Todd and Neil form the key friendship in the film if nothing else. When Todd receives a “desk set” from his parents in the mail for his birthday (which is what they gave him
last
year as well), it is Neil who comforts him and cheers him up with the idea of tossing the gift off the roof of the dorm. Lastly, Neil’s death seems to push Todd out of his shyness, to realize that silent acceptance of what others want of him will only kill him. When Keating is fired from Welton, Todd pays final tribute to him by standing on his desk and saluting “Oh captain, my captain!” While Welton’s dean attempts to quell the action, most of the rest of the class follows suit, and the final shot of the film is of a courageous Todd—provocatively shot through the legs of another student.

58. Joseph McBride, Review of
Newsies, Variety
(Apr. 6, 1992): 166.

59. Janet Maslin, Review of
Swing Kids, New York Times
(Mar. 5, 1993): C8.

60. Ibid.

61. Stephen Holden, Review of
Tombstone, New York Times
(Dec. 24, 1993): C6.

62. Ibid.

63. This is not to say that lesbian culture has no place for theatre or the musical genre. A number of female performers have become iconic figures in lesbian culture—for example, Pat Carroll, who voiced Ursula in
The Little Mermaid.

And listening to a lesbian chorus sing “Kiss the Girl” from
The Little Mermaid
shows that they can appropriate this “new” Disney as well as lesbians who had

“Mickey Mouse parties” in the 1930s did.

64. Amusingly, the series carried over the bright colors and
nouveau riche
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257

visual design that dominated the comedies released by Touchstone Pictures into Disney’s television production as well!

65. Mimi White, “Ideological Analysis and Television,”
Channels of Discourse,
Robert Allen, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 162.

66. Doty, 43.

67. Ibid.

68. Robert Dawidoff, “Gays Saw Between the Lines of ‘Ellen’; Now for an Open Act 2,”
Los Angeles Times
(Apr. 18, 1997): B9.

69. The storyline of this episode seems to have directly inspired Ellen DeGeneres’ first starring role in a theatrical feature film—
Mr. Wrong
(1996), distributed by Disney’s Hollywood Pictures.

70. According to some reports, the sparks that were generated in this episode were pointed out when DeGeneres and her allies argued that Morgan should “come out of the closet.”

71. Whether or not such rumors have any validity in fact is hard to know although, as it turned out, the final three episodes of the 1996–97 season did end having Ellen Morgan come out and, about a month after the season finale, reports surfaced that DeGeneres had expressed a desire to end the show then and there.

72. Doty, 48–51, discusses lesbian subtexts in
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
(1970–77).

73. Dawidoff, B9.

74. Reported in A. J. Jacobs, “Out?”
Entertainment Weekly
(Oct. 4, 1996): 20.

75. Jefferson Graham, “Ellen Happy with Women at Helm,”
USA Weekend
(Dec. 19, 1995): D3; and Bruce Fretts, “This Week,”
Entertainment Weekly
(Oct.

25, 1996): 102.

76. In fact, the same issue of
TV Guide
(42:35, Aug. 27, 1994) that mentions the possibility of DeGeneres’s wearing a dress for the Emmys (5) also contains an item bemoaning the loss of Holly Fulger from the series (6).

77. This attitude by critics towards the show is discussed by Ron Becker in

“Bringing Ellen Out of the Closet,” paper presented at Console-ing Passions, Concordia University, Montreal, 1997. Becker’s paper does a wonderful job describing the number of economic factors that might have helped explain the support for allowing Ellen Morgan to be lesbian.

78. “Returning Favorites,”
TV Guide
44:37 (Sept. 13, 1996): 46.

79. Quoted in A. J. Jacobs, 25.

80. Daniel Howard Cerone, “
Ellen
May Be Telling Even Though Not Asked,”
TV Guide
44:39 (Sept. 28, 1996): 59–60.

81. Howard Rosenberg, “The Outing of ‘Ellen’? It’s Got Me Hooked,”
Los
Angeles Times
(Sept. 30, 1996): F1.

82. A. J. Jacobs, 20.

258

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 4

83. Handy, 48.

84. Ibid.

85. The companies that decided to withdraw their sponsorship of the show included Wendy’s Restaurants, Chrysler, General Motors, JC Penney and Johnson & Johnson.

86. Hilary de Vries, “Ellen DeGeneres: Out and About,”
TV Guide
(Oct. 11, 1998): 22.

87. Ibid., 24.

88. Ibid.

89. Glenn Lovell, “‘Ellen’ Too Gay, Bono Chastises,”
Daily Variety
(Mar. 9, 1998): 87.

90. “Chastity on ‘Ellen’ Misleading,” NewsPlanet Staff internet posting on

“Planet Out” webpage, www.planetout.com/pno/newsplanet/article.html, March 10, 1998.

91. The concept of the homosexual as a “sexual outlaw” was popularized by John Rechy, who purportedly was one of those who was unhappy about Ellen Morgan declaring her lesbian status. The weekend after the “coming-out”

episode aired, the Console-ing Passions television conference was held in Montreal, and, in a panel/discussion about
Ellen,
a sizable number of those present preferred it when they could read Ellen Morgan as a lesbian, but most heterosexual viewers could not.

92. Walter Benjamin,
Illuminations
(New York: Shocken Books, 1969) was among the first to warn against this usurption of popular culture by mass culture. Many others have also studied and theorized this development in Western society, such as Frederic Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,”
Social Text
1:1 (1979): 134–138; William Fox, “Folklore and Fakelore: Some Sociological Considerations,”
Journal of the Folklore Institute,
17:2–3 (May/December 1980): 249–256; George Lipsitz,
Time Passages: Collective Memory and American
Popular Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

93. Quoted in de Vries, 22.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

1. Cerone, 59.

2. Cerone’s article in
TV Guide
suggests this analysis, which is also mentioned by Ron Becker, “Bringing Ellen Out of the Closet.”

3. Cerone, 60.

4. Quoted in Pamela Ellis-Simons, “Hi Ho, Hi Ho; It’s Off to Work He Goes as Michael Eisner Puts the Magic Back into the Walt Disney Co.,”
Marketing &
Media Decisions
(Sept. 1986), 52.

5. For example, Joe Flower refers often in his work about the Eisner era to the emphasis on Disney marketing, including describing how “In the first nine N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 5

259

months after he [Eisner] took charge, the company issued 40 press releases—

more than one a week” (163), the decision to market the theme parks by hiring the advertising firm Young and Rubicam (186) and Katzenberg’s aggressive push to publicize their film output (199–203).

6. D. A. Miller “Anal
Rope,
”
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories,
Diana Fuss, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 123–124.

7. For example, interview with John Musker and Ron Clemente, directors of
The Little Mermaid, Aladdin
and
Hercules,
University of Southern California (Nov. 19, 1992), USC Cinema Library; and Marcy Magiera, “‘Mermaid’ Aims to Reel in Adults,”
Advertising Age
60:45 (Oct. 16, 1989): 38.

8. Chon Noriega, “‘SOMETHING’S MISSING HERE!’ Homosexuality and Film Reviews during the Production Code Era, 1934–1962,”
Cinema Journal
30:1

(Fall 1990): 35.

9. Others who have pointed out this complication have included: Jody Berland, “Angels Dancing: Cultural Technologies and the Production of Space,”

Cultural Studies,
Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, Larry Grossberg, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1992): 38–51; Stephen Kline,
Out of the Garden: Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing
(London: Verso, 1993); and Cary Nelson, Paula A.

Treichler and Larry Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: An Introduction,”
Cultural
Studies,
1–22.

10. Cecil Munsey,
Disneyana: Walt Disney Collectibles
(New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974), 1. Unless otherwise noted, all other data from the Walt Disney era of the studio on merchandising is from this text.

11. According to collector/author Cecil Munsey, “At first his [Walt’s]

thoughts ran along the lines that such merchandise would provide valuable publicity for his characters and therefore make his films very popular. . . . Not only would character merchandise increase the popularity of their films but it would bring in additional revenue to the film which, in turn, would allow them to make better films” (32).

12. Mosley, 152. Munsey’s research does not provide as much detail of the financial relationship as Mosley’s does.

13. Harold D. Lasswell,
Propaganda Technique in the World War
(New York: Knopf, 1927) provides a good overview of the “magic bullet” theory that was promulgated at the time.

14. James E. Grunig, “Publics, Audiences and Market Segments: Segmentation Principles for Campaigns,”
Information Campaigns: Balancing Social Values
and Social Change,
Charles T. Salmon, ed. (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989), 201.

15. Amongst those who have analyzed
Mickey Mouse Club
and marketing towards children have been Kline, 166–167; and Lynn Spigel, “Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America,”
Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communications History,
William S. Solomon and 260

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 5

Robert W. McChesney, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 280–281.

16. An analysis of the company’s specific marketing strategies towards children with the “Disney Afternoon” can be found in Pamela C. O’Brien,

“Everybody’s Busy Bringing You a Disney Afternoon: The Creation of a Consumption Community,” paper presented at the Seventh Annual Society of Animation Studies Conference, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1995.

17. Kline’s work on TV marketing towards children also discusses how commercials for children are often bifurcated into specific gender reception.

18. My thanks to Joseph A. Boone for relating the
Aladdin
event to me, which is further detailed in the introduction to his essay “Rubbing Aladdin’s Lamp,” complete with a reproduction of an advertisement for the event on page 149.

19. Roland Marchand,
Advertising the American Dream
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), xxi.

20. Judith Williamson,
Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising
(New York: Marion Boyars, 1979), 77.

21. Karen Stabiner, “Tapping the Homosexual Market,”
New York Times
Magazine
(May 2, 1982): 80.

22. Ibid., 76.

23. Calvin Klein has also pushed up against the limits of coding with its 1996 underwear campaign. Featuring models that looked just under the “age of consent,” the TV spots were a pastiche of low-budget “nudie loops.” Although the campaign also featured female models, the ads mainly showed young men recreating scenes from the super-8 films sold by the Athletic Models Guild in the 1950s and 1960s that were targeted at homosexual men. Apparently, a number of straight viewers caught what was going on, and recognition of the appropriation of pornographic
mise-en-scène
led to talk of legal action against the company for a few months.

24. Miller, 125.

25. Boone, 149.

26. Steve Warren, “Deja View,”
Frontiers
11:20 (Jan. 29, 1992): 48. Isherwood, 85.

27. Tom Provenzano, “The Lion in Summer,”
The Advocate
(June 28, 1994): 66.

28. Ansen, et al.; Fox; Janet Maslin, Review of
Beauty and the Beast
; Review of
Beauty and the Beast, Variety.

29. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”
New Left Review
146 (July/August 1984): 78.

30. Bill Short, “Queers, Beers and Shopping,”
Gay Times
170 (Nov. 1992): 20.

31. Stuart Ewen,
Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of
Consumer Culture
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).

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261

32. Marchand, 162.

33. This trend in “lesbian chic” was the basis for Danae Clark’s influential article, “Commodity Lesbianism,”
Camera Obscura
25–26 (Jan./May 1991): 181–201.

34. Actress Catherine Deneuve eventually brought suit against this journal, and it subsequently changed its name to
Curve.

35. Ms. Beverly Hills, “Beat Reporter?”
Planet Homo
71 (Oct. 19, 1994): 6.

36. Bronski.

37. Jeffrey Weeks, “Inverts, Perverts and Mary-Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,”
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past,
Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey Jr., eds. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 202.