Fluent Essays

- Please careful read the instruction I upload, I expected the paper proposal include the research question and thesis, check those example I gave- The paper proposal must include:1. a central research question that frames what you want to explore about this particular subject through scholarly media criticism2. the rationale for your choice of media/figure/scholar that makes it ideal for your critical work3. an annotated bibliography of at least three sources (2 of which must be critical) project_muse___disney_and_the_imagineering_of_histories.pdf .pdf pp_require.docx Unformatted Attachment Preview Postmodern Culture Postmodern Culture Volume 6, Number 3, May 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press Article Viewed Saved to MyMUSE library View Citation Additional Information Disney and the Imagineering of Histories Recently, the Walt Disney Company abandoned its plans to develop an American history theme park near Manassas, Virginia, the site of a major battle during the American Civil War. Part of the reason for this decision, according to the company, was that the citizens of Manassas and surrounding areas had fought the development of the theme park, claiming that the “true” history of not only the Civil War, but also of all of America, would not be told there. At the same time, The Globe and Mail reviewed Disney’s new live-action film, Squanto, stating that it was historically inaccurate; however, as the Globe notes, “history is written by the winners, and you can’t get much more victorious than Daddy Disney” (5 November 1994, p. C14). It is surprising that these are some of the first public, i.e. non-academic, protests against Disney’s perversion of local histories in the creation of its products, as this process is the entire basis of the Disney Company’s corporate production. That is, the Walt Disney Company coopts local histories, without their corresponding local social and political geographies, reconstitutes them as the Company’s own, and sells them to Disney’s customers as markers of American political, cultural, and imperial attitudes. This co-optation and perversion of local histories in the creation of the Disney Company’s products not only removes and rewrites these histories from their specific contexts, but also reduces the corresponding social geographies to terrains that can be colonized and brought within the “Small World” of the / Disney theme park, and can then be sold over and over again to new generations of children, thereby perpetuating the Disney Company’s transmission to new generations of the stereotypes created to justify American imperial power. The first section of this paper will explore how the animated films of the Walt Disney Company (WDC) treat local stories and histories as fodder for “’the rapacious strip-miner’ in the goldmine of legend and myth,’” (Kunzle, in Dorfman and Mattelart 1971:18) and attempt to sell those who have their stories taken a perception that they are supposed to have of themselves — that of the cultural Other of America. To do this, I argue that WDC appropriates local stories, reinscribes them in the discourse of American imperialism, be it political, economic, or cultural, and sells the stories to all as portrayals of American cultural and political Others, revising old stereotypes in the current terms of American imperial expansion. I then argue, in the second section, that this reinscription process deprives the stories of their particular local geographies, and allows them to therefore be coopted and placed in ahistorical, ageographical ways in the creation of the Disney theme parks. This, in e ect, allows WDC to set up representations of the world in the way that Disney would have wanted to see it — as an allegorical representation of the power of the United States. Hence, the guiding metaphor for the Disney theme parks is the ride, “It’s a Small World,” where all the “children” of the world are brought together in one place to sing the annoying song of cultural imperialism, all brought to you by Bank of America. In the third section of this paper, I turn to the way in which this cultural hegemony produced by the animated films and the theme parks maintains and perpetuates itself through marketing strategies designed to make these products seem timeless, and therefore the story they tell of American greatness seem to last for all time. In all, I would argue that the United States government no longer has the monopoly on the touting of America’s conquest of the world; Mickey Mouse and the other Disney characters do it for them, making imperialism that much cuter. American “Distory” Through Film: Creating Disney’s World Order Making the conceptual stretch from examining Disney’s animated features to talking about the inscription of American cultural imperialist discourse seems to be nothing more than a senseless attack on one of America’s — and the world’s — most loved cultural icons. However, exploring those “myths” — and here I use myth in the sense of cultural stories that provide a structure by which society and narratives for social action can be constructed (Lincoln 1989:25) — is important, and especially for the Walt Disney Company’s (WDC) myths, because WDC is ideologically bound up with the American governmental apparatus, and has been since before World War Two. O icially, WDC became involved with the American government as a matter of finances, due to the near bankruptcy of WDC, thanks to Walt’s mishandling of funds and the war in Europe, which cut o quite a large market (and a popular one — King George apparently refused to go to a film unless a Mickey Mouse short was being shown, and Disney himself was received by Benito Mussolini during a visit to Italy in 1937). The Disney studios in / Burbank, California, became “the most extensive ‘war plant’ in Hollywood, housing mountains of munitions, quartering antiaircra troops, providing overflow o ice space for Lockheed personnel. By 1943, fully 94\% of the footage produced at the studios was war-related. Disney had become a government contractor on a massive scale” (Burton 1992:33). In addition, WDC was hired by Nelson Rockefeller, who was then (1940) director of the O ice of the Coordinator of Inter-American A airs, to produce a series of documentaries and motion pictures about the Latin and South American regions, providing a way for the United States to “ease any remaining tensions with South American governments in order to maintain hemispheric unity as a bulwark against foreign invasion,” as well as to “show the truth about the American Way” to those who lived below the Rio Grande (Burton 1992:25). As well, WDC prodded the government of the state of Florida to allow it to set up two cities that encapsulate the Walt Disney World theme park so that it would have the ability to manage its own governmental a airs as well as have more clout with the Florida government when trying to get permits, development funding, and the like. Ideologically, WDC portrayed itself as being the bearer of true American values to the world; as one piece of Disney publicity circa the opening of Disneyland (1955) put it, Disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world. Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys, the hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our lives (in Sorkin 1992:206). And, metaphorically, WDC sees itself as interchangeable — or at least exchangeable — with the US government; its Disney Dollars, available from the theme parks, are exchangeable currency with the US dollar at a one-to-one ratio. As a way of looking at the films and theme parks of the Disney Company as agents of legitimation for American imperialism, I would like to start with a simple premise: that the media works to a ect and e ect what Fromm called the “social character” of a society. In Fromm’s conception, the social character is formed by the educational and cultural apparatuses of a society. There is also another level of the character of society, the social unconscious, which Fromm says functions as a “socially conditioned filter,” through which “experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter” (Fromm 1994: 74). I would argue that within American society, the social character, formed as it is through the surface-level political discourses of liberty, equality, and freedom, is counteracted in some sense by the need on the part of the social unconscious for an Other — not in the Levinasian sense of a Face to Face encounter, but rather as in the sense that Durkheim refers to the / deviant — as the defining moment of membership. This is not uncommon or unnoted: Hegel claims that the recognition of the self by another is the defining moment of humanity (The Phenomenology of Mind), and I would, following Bauman’s discussion of exclusionary strategies of social group membership (1994:237), extend this into the realm of the larger social order as well. In other words, at the level of the social unconscious, the Self (namely, the American society) can only be defined in terms of denoting the boundary between itself and Others that it interacts with in the world system at large. Disney plays a part in this boundary denotation, in that it allows for the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes that portray, albeit in a “cute” way, the Otherness of the areas of the world that the United States has come to dominate, be they politically, culturally, or economically. It does this by utilizing stories from the past — from traditions, generally those of other countries — in such a way as to reinforce the values and cultural practices of America. Disney’s intention as a corporation is to portray life in the places that it depicts in its products in the way in which America either was like or should have been like, regardless of the historical specificity of the situation it attempts to portray. My analysis here focuses upon this use of tradition as a mechanism for social boundary maintenance, and I analyze the products of the Disney company in such a way so as to highlight the imputation of these boundary maintenance mechanisms into the original stories that are depicted.1 As Bauman notes, “Rejection of strangers may shy away from expressing itself in racial terms, but it cannot a ord admitting being arbitrary lest it should abandon all hope of success; it verbalizes itself therefore in terms of . . . the self-defence of a form of life bequeathed by tradition” (Bauman 1994: 235). While the Disney films do not explicitly argue for neo-tribalism in their content, I would argue that their past history as propagandists for the United States during World War Two, as well as the messages of their films and theme parks, combined with their marketing strategy regarding the recycling of films and the recontextualization of their contstructed geographies in the theme parks, provide su icient reason to claim that their function vis-à-vis the social character is to construct a boundary between America/”Americans” and the rest of the world and its citizenry, even within the United States. One might argue that this analysis is one-sided, that there may be a critical distance between the constructed messages behind the Disney parks and films and the reception of them by the “guests” of the parks or the viewers of the film. While I do not dispute the possible existence of this critical distance (if I did, this paper would be impossible, for example), I would argue that these subtle messages have the potential to work their way into the social character of the United States. The Disney products function as cultural legitimations, which serve to make normal conceptions of the di erences in access to power (Fjellman 1992:30). Following Fanon, I would argue that the products of the Walt Disney Company provide American society with a collective catharsis, a way of having all of the internal contradictions and aggression, both within its members and within the social order, externalized and played out before and away from them (Fanon 1967:145). Problematically, though, Disney’s catharsis marks out its / aggressions from the perspective of the American hegemon. That is, its portrayals of the stories that it takes from the world rewrite them from the point of view of what Fanon would call the “neurosis of the colonizer”; in other words, I would argue that the master/slave dialectic that Fanon observes in colonial Africa in regard to the relationship between colonizer and colonized reappears, though in a much cuter guise, in Disneyland and in terms more appropriate for American society. In doing so, the Disney Company’s products serve to construct a “white” (or, in other terms, an American imperialistic) pathway for its consumers from which to perceive the world and themselves. As Itwaru notes, in regards to the “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, It is assumed in this premise that our thinking must necessarily be realized within the Occupier’s frame of references, that these perspectives should govern the ways we reflect on our condition. And in so doing to not pay heed to the fundamental di erences in the circumstances in which we are deemed subordinate, our realities subservient to the principals as well as the principles of the super-ordinating imperial order. (Itwaru and Ksonzek 1994:23) Put another way, cultural products naturalize the political and economic conditions within which they were created, and in the construction of cultural messages or legitimations presume a point of view that does not necessarily coincide with the place of the consumer and in fact, as Itwaru puts it, makes the consumer “faceless” and placed under the control, at least at the level of the political unconscious, of the creator of the cultural product. In doing so, imperialist discourse can ingrain themselves not at the level of normalcy, but at the level of the political unconscious (Itwaru and Ksonzek 1994: 59, 94), making critical reflection upon the messages embedded in cultural commodities even more di icult. Having made clear the impetus for the critical examination of Disney animated features and theme parks for their depiction of American cultural and political imperialism, I turn now first to the films themselves. The Three Caballeros: The Monroe Doctrine’s Piñata The Three Caballeros, produced in 1945, was the direct result of a request by the American government to produce films that would represent the goodwill of America towards the Latin American region, as well as depict the American Way to them. Combined with an extensive comic book production, The Three Caballeros and its two predecessors, South of the Border with Disney and Saludos Amigos, were intended to ensure the solidarity of the Western Hemisphere against the possibility of enemy attack during World War Two by portraying Americans not as colonizers (as they had been since the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century), but rather as compañeros, joined in the enterprise of enjoying life. / The Three Caballeros is a three-part cartoon, presented as a birthday “package” that arrives for Donald Duck. This package is designed to represent all of the best elements of Latin American culture and geography, and does so in the form of the “travel book” — the kind of book that is designed to give the entire experience of “being there” surrogately without ever having to leave one’s home. It tells three of these “travel stories”: one of Pablo Penguin, who decides that the cold of the South Pole is no longer tolerable, and decides to move north to warmer climes; another of Joe Cariota, a Brasilian parrot, who takes Donald to Baía, Brazil; and the last of Panchito, a Mexican parrot who escorts Donald and Joe Cariota to the resort cities of Mexico. In all of these stories, the underlying theme is domination: Pablo ends up enlisting a turtle in his service while lounging on the sands of a Pacific island; Donald attempts to dominate the women of South America, but is foiled by the “potency” of the local men2; and the portrayal of these scenes in the form of “travel books” dominates the locales in the sense of showing only what is commodifiable about the locations (i.e. the fiesta aspect of life in these areas). While originally contracted for and touted as a true representation of what Latin America and Latin Americans were “all about,” The Three Caballeros ends up becoming what I see as the standard pattern of Disney animated features3 — a legitimation, or the “Distorifying” (taking o from Fjellman’s concept of Distory, or Disney’s history), of the political, economic, and cultural hegemony of the United States. The intention of the film was to show the American movie-going public what life was like in Latin America, much in the same way that Disney’s nature films showed what “wildlife” was like. As well, as Burton points out, it was to convey the idea of the American Way to Latin Americans, and to show that the US was not solely out to colonize their neighbours to the south. However, this is precisely what happens in The Three Caballeros: the di erent mediums by which Donald Duck (and us, the viewers) is shown the way of life in Latin and South America (a film, two books, and a piñata) are all easily commodifiable forms in which the story can be consumed and the life can be colonized in the same sense that Mitchell outlines; I will return to this later. The film, which tells the story of Pablo Penguin moving north from the South Pole, introduces Donald to the allure of the exotic “other” of the islands o of the Pacific coast of Latin America, and sparks Donald’s desire to “live the life” of Latin Americans. The story then moves to Joe Cariota’s transportation of Donald to Baía, where Donald meets the stereotypical Brasilians: partying men and women, dancing and enjoying life, seemingly without worry. A er partaking of the life of Brazil, Donald and Joe are then joined by Panchito, who transports them to old Mexico, where Donald partakes of the life of Christmas and fiesta, wanders with hombres who are barefooted, wear serapes and sleep under their sombreros; and falls in love with conquistadoras who appear from cactus fields. In the cases of both Baía and Mexico, Donald’s participation in the festivities is only possible when the local music and dance begins to sound like American traditional (i.e. Broadway musical genre or Dixieland music); that is, Donald the American’s participation is only possible when there are American elements dominating the cultural practice. For example, Donald can only join in the fiesta when the mariachi band begins playing Dixieland- / style jazz. Hence, like a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing, The Three Caballeros privileges the flattening-out of local cultures and their Americanization, making it possible for something this “foreign” in these strange places to be consumed. The Jungle Book: The Bare Necessities, Made in India The Jungle Book, released in 1967, is a most problematic film in terms of deciphering its unique colonial content, as separate from that of the story upon which it was based. Unlike Pinocchio, which was a local traditional story (whose perversion by Disney was litigated against by Collodi’s grandson; Forgacs 1992:371–72) and The Three Caballeros (an original Disney story), The Jungle Book originally comes out of a highly imperialistic context. Kipling wrote the original book during the height of the British rule of India, and many have commented on the colonizing aspects of this novel.4 I would argue that the use of this story by Disney allowed for its translation from one imperialistic context — the British rule of India — to another, the American war against Viet Nam. The Jungle Book was released in 1967, well into the so-called postcolonial era; however, some of its earlier, more British colonial tinges remain ... Purchase answer to see full attachment