214 pages

English

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Pluto Press - Martin McQuillan , Eleanor Byrne

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214 pages

English

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Description

Demonising Disney is nothing new. Disney films have long been synonymous with a certain conservative, patriarchal, heterosexual ideology, occupying a centre-stage position at the heart of the evil empire. Deconstructing Disney takes issue with knee-jerk polarities, overturning classical oppositions and recognising that, just as the Disney 'text' has changed, so too must the terms of critical engagement.

This book is a sharply focused deconstruction of the political culture - and the cultural politics - of the Disney canon in the years since the emergence of the so-called New World Order. Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan offer a critical encounter with Disney which alternates between readings of individual texts and wider thematic concerns such as race, gender and sexuality, the broader context of American contemporary culture, and the global ambitions and insularity of the last great superpower. The movies discussed include The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Pocohontas, Snow White, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Dumbo, Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, Hercules and Mulan.
Acknowledgements

Introduction. Duckology: Political narrative in the age of deconstruction

1. A Specter is Haunting Europe: Disney Rides Again Inter-mission

2. Socialisme ou barbarie: Welcoming Disney

3. Domesticated Animus: Engendering Disney

4. Spectrographies: Conjuring Disney

5. You Can’t Lionise the Lion: Racing Disney

6. Its the Economy Stupid: Bill ‘n’ Disney

7. King of the Swingers: Queering Disney

8. Democracy Limited: Impeaching Disney

Epilogue: Disney Work

Filmography

Index

Sujets

Political Ideologies

Political Science

Democracy

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 octobre 1999
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849645294
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Deconstructing Disney

Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 1999 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 21066–2012, USA

The right of Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1456 2 hbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Byrne, Eleanor. Deconstructing Disney / Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–7453–1456–2 (hc.) 1. Walt Disney Company. I. McQuillan, Martin. II. Title. PN1999.W27 B97 1999 384'.8'6579494—dc21 99–34

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services, Chadlington OX7 3LN Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the EC by T.J. International, Padstow

635 CIP

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Duckology: Political Narrative in the Age of Deconstruction 1. A Spectre is Haunting Europe: Disney Rides Again Intermission 2.Socialisme ou barbarie: Welcoming Disney 3. Domesticated Animus: Engendering Disney 4. Spectrographies: Conjuring Disney 5. You Can’t Lionise the Lion: Racing Disney 6. It’s the Economy, Stupid: Bill ’n’ Disney 7. King of the Swingers: Queering Disney 8. Democracy Limited: Impeaching Disney Epilogue: Disney Work

Filmography Index

1 19 37 42 57 73 94 111 133

151 168 177 206

Acknowledgements

For their invaluable suggestions and unfailing good humour we would like to thank Peter Buse, Nuria Triana-Toribio, Adrian Plant (a star is born!), Jason Cleverly, Cathy Nicholls, Marq Smith, Joanne Morra, Phil Rothsfield, Eric Woehrling, Scott McCracken, Robert Eaglestone, Bryan Cheyette, Sharon Kivland, Giles Peaker, Kirsten Waechter, Nicholas Royle, Willy Maley, our friends and colleagues at University College Worcester and Staffordshire University, and our editor Anne Beech. We would also like to thank Jeremy Gilbert and Timothy Bewes for allowing us to present the introduction to this book at the conference ‘Cultural Politics/Political Cultures’ at the University of Sussex, 25 September 1998. Finally, we would like to thank the staff of Blockbuster Video in Chorlton, Manchester, for always smiling. This book is respectfully dedicated to Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart who first taught us how to read Donald Duck.

vii

Introduction

Duckology: Political Narrative in the Age of Deconstruction

Reading Disney is like having one’s own exploited condition rammed with honey down one’s throat. Dorfman and Mattelart

Reading for Socialism

At this late stage in the process of ‘Advanced’ Capitalism, the conditions of ‘postmodernity’, the construction of the Disney oeuvre, and the practice of ‘poststructuralist’ inquiry, what is there left to say about the feature-length animations of the Disney corporation? As early as 1971 Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart concluded in their seminal studyHow to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, that 1 ‘attacking Disney is no novelty’. Dorfman and Mattelart aside, works such as the biographies by Richard Schickel and Marc Eliot (published 25 years apart) or critical editions like Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells’sFrom Mouse to Mermaidhave consistently recorded, analysed and critiqued the right-wing agenda more or less implicit in Disney 2 films. The most frequent criticisms include sexism, racism, conservatism, heterosexism, andro-centricism, imperialism (cultural), imperialism (economic), literary vandalism, jingoism, aberrant sexuality, censorship, propaganda, paranoia, homophobia, exploitation, ecological devastation, anti-union repression, FBI collaboration, corporate raiding, and stereotyping. It would seem only a matter of time before conclusive proof is discovered linking Walt Disney to the assassination of J. F. Kennedy and the production of anti-personnel landmines. Even if such a baroque critical strategy as this were to be pursued it would have long since lost any power to surprise let alone illuminate. Disney has become synonymous with a certain conservative, patriarchal, 1

2Deconstructing Disney

heterosexual ideology which is loosely associated with American cultural imperialism. As such Disney films (never mind the merchandise, theme parks, and media conglomer-ate) might be thought of as not in need of ‘deconstruction’ because they are self-evidently reactionary parables of the American Right. Disney (man, films, or corporation) is therefore beyond the political pale, having been exposed by a series of devastating ideological incursions which have demolished Disney’s claims to political neutrality and to be a purveyor of mere innocent entertainment. At this late stage there ought to be nothing left to say. Disney has been well and truly ‘deconstructed’, there must be more urgent topics to address. And yet there is still much to say about Disney and the terms of such a criticism are as valid as ever even if they are now open to negotiation. Disney’s powerful hegemonic hold over children’s literature, family entertainment, mainstream taste, and Western popular culture remains intact and indeed continues to grow. Alongside Disneyland, Walt Disney World and the EPCOT centre (these sites are linked by Disney Cruises) it is now possible to visit Disney Safari World, Disneyland (Paris) and soon Disneyland (Tokyo) and Disneyland (Beijing). Not only can we watch Walt Disney Pictures (with six feature-length animations due to be released in the two years between 1999 and 2000) but we can also enjoy Touchstone, Hollywood, Caravan, Miramax, Henson, and Merchant Ivory Productions, as well as Buena Vista Television and the Disney Channel. This adds up to a production facility and media and entertainment group with 3 a truly global reach and an estimated worth of $4.7 billion. Despite consistent and clear denunciations of the ideological inscriptions of Disney the evil empire continues to grow and one must assume (the popularity of semiotics aside) continues to work its reactionary magic across the globe. In the face of Disney’s wilful refusal to lie down and allow itself to be analysed out of existence perhaps the self-knowing yawn of ‘postmodern’ criticism, bored with yet another ‘deconstruction’ of Disney, is an inappropriate response. Equally, another impassioned condemnation of Disney’s hetero-andro-conservatism might not cut the mustard either. Such criticism valuable as it may be merely occupies and

Introduction

unquestioningly reproduces a position allotted to it by the Disney text as a condition of that text’s existence. A Disney text (film, video, comic book, shop, theme park, cruise ship) only functions ideologically within the wider contextual frame of the entire Disney corporation, which in turn is rep-resentative of a set of overdetermined cultural values, as a result, in part, of the existence of critics prepared to question those values. In other words, if denunciations of Disney did not exist, Disney would have to invent them. They are precisely what keeps Disney going. Attacks on the religio-politico-socio-economic values of Disney have from the very beginning (whenever we might like to date this) enabled the corporation to construct and defend its ideological machinery. The fact that a Disney text is so open to the charge of ideological conservatism (as any child can see) allows it to exercise those very conservative values in the face of an imagined external ‘leftist’ critical agenda. The blatantness of Disney is what makes it so resistant to the challenge of ideological exposure. This is not to imply that a critical response to the determinate political effects of the Disney Corporation is a necessarily closed interpretation. Instead it is to point out that the so-called conservative and thereforeipso factoreactionary ideology of Disney (based as it seems to be around questions of nation, capital and race) is predicated on an opposition to a pre-existing and fixed set of ‘leftist’ values which it opposes. Disney is able to do what it does ideologically because it is a ‘justifiable’ bulwark against a caricatured (one might say ideo-logically determined) set of identifiably left-wing and thereforeipso factosubversive values. Disney’s critics pre-exist Disney (or at least occupy a necessary position for the continued successful functioning of Disney as an ideological event) and so legitimise its actions in the field of ideology. What is at stake in this configuration is the very serious question of whether we know what we mean when we attempt to criticise Disney from a left-wing point of view. As ana prioriof post-structuralist criticism (this term will need to be unpacked later) we accept that texts are radically indeterminate with respect to their meaning, therefore any reading of a text must be determined by factors not prescribed

Deconstructing Disney

by the text itself. These factors are, so the logic runs, political and it is therefore an obligation of those of us on the Left ‘to 4 read for socialism’. This implies, contrary to our initial suggestion, that the readings such a criticism produces are determinate with respect to their meaning: we know what it means to be on the Left, we know what we want and we know what socialism is. However, it is not disrespectful to either party to suggest that the historically rooted concerns of Dorfman and Mattelart (writing in 1971 as part of an educational programme sponsored by Allende’s Popular Unity government) and the anxieties of the liberal-left American academics of 1995 contributing toFrom Mouse to Mermaidare not one and the same. The Chilean revolutionary process is not reducible to the North American academic apparatus. The identification of this contradiction must open a way for a consideration of the terms of criticism as a prior respon-sibility to any analysis of the Disney text. This engagement with a ‘self-evidently’ reactionary text poses certain difficul-ties in relation to our understanding of the reading process and our appreciation of the political space. This is not to repeat a tired rhetoric about the current redundancy of terms such as Right and Left (which is itself a depoliticising gesture invoked in the name of various political interests) but rather to ask whether these terms have not in fact always been importantly undecidable sites of ideological contest, and what have been the political effects of their supposed stability? The ultimate stake in such an analysis might be a questioning of the ways in which terms such as ‘the Left’ or ‘socialism’ have been determined by the metaphysical sedimentation of his-torically constituted political discourses. To continue to say that we know what we want and that we want socialism will necessarily involve a displacement of the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘Left’ from the metaphysical discourse of politics. In other words these terms will have to resist the temptation to reassert themselves in a transcendental position in a reading strategy which denies the possibility of transcendentality altogether. As a first principle of this inquiry then, it will be necessary to assume that we might not be certain of what we mean by ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ or indeed that the meaning of the space denoted by the term ‘the political’ is fixed. The contextual

Introduction

operation of these terms is what is at stake in, and what will emerge as a result of, the encounter with the Disney text. Our analysis of Disney will only be able to make an effective inter-vention in the field of political oppositions it criticises by offering the double gesture of overturning the classical oppositions which surround Disney and displacing the conceptual order which predicates these oppositions. This conceptual order (‘Left’, ‘Right’, ‘socialist’, ‘imperialist’ etc.) is articulated through a non-conceptual order of non-discursive forces. This order must also be overturned and displaced and that finally is what has always been at stake in the deconstruction of Disney. It is equally important to start from a position of openness to the question of what we mean when we use the term ‘Disney’ itself. Walt Disney is a man who died in 1967. This man was a film-maker, FBI informant, strike breaker, propa-gandist, television presenter, before his death about to be proposed as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and according to urban myth, is cryogenically frozen in a vault under Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Disneyland. Disney is a studio system and a classically Fordian chain of filmic production. Disney is an entertainment and leisure complex with global interests from brand endorsement to satellite television. Disney is anoeuvreof audio-visual publications (including feature-length animation, short animation, pedagogical material, nature films, and live action films, not to mention home videos, CD-ROMs and computer games). Furthermore, the name ‘Disney’ is a signifier which has come to represent a set of contradictory and unstable ideological codes. This entire signifying complex (which incorporates all the anxieties and conflicts of national and international cultural development in the twentieth century) is inscribed in the signature ‘Walt Disney’ which accompanies every Disney product. This recognisable signature simultaneously implies the bodily non-presence of Walt Disney and establishes him as the origin of the text by suggesting he was present in some moment in the past. This moment of past-presence becomes a moment of future-presence when the signature is repeated after Disney’s death (as it was during his life) as a copyrighted trade-mark. Walt is always with us; he