Disney's Most Notorious Film (10 page)

Such stereotypes had existed since the beginning of cinema itself. Donald Bogle writes in his landmark study of African Americans in Holly wood that “the five basic types [of stereotypes] . . . that were to dominate black characters for the next half-century were first introduced” during this time. These stereotypes thrived in part because of preexisting antecedents in theater and literature. Bogle’s five categories are well-known: the “Tom,” the “coon,” the “tragic mulatto,” the “mammy,” and the “buck.” These categories often framed subsequent discussions on the subject, including responses to
Song of the South
during its first theatrical appearance. Postwar audiences immediately recognized the “Uncle Tom” figure in Uncle Remus. Taken from the
title
character of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, “Toms” are subservient and loyal to whites. “Always as toms are chased, harassed, hounded, flogged, enslaved, and insulted,” writes Bogle, “they keep the faith, n’er turn against their white massas, and remain hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind. Thus they endear themselves to white audiences and emerge as heroes of sorts.” Uncle Remus, meanwhile, was so distinctive a degrading stereotype that he merited his own subcategory. Bogle does not identify Remus so much as a Tom figure, but as a “coon,” since the Disney character’s primary function is to entertain rather than sacrifice his life. Instead of being noble and single-minded in purpose, as with the Tom, coons “appeared in a series of black films presenting the Negro as amusement object and black buffoon.” According to Bogle, the coon breaks down into two additional categories—the “pickaninny” and the “Uncle Remus.” The former is a silly and harmless child, while the latter a quaint, comical, and naïve variation on the Tom figure. “Before its death,” writes Bogle, “the coon developed into the most blatantly degrading of all black stereotypes. The pure coons emerged as no-account niggers, those unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creatures good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting crap, or butchering the English language.”
¹³

In
Song of the South
, we see both of these “coon” stereotypes at work, along with McDaniel’s “mammy”—the often-overweight maid, who is “distinguished [from coons] by her sex and her fierce independence.”
¹⁴
Such autonomy is limited, however, to either keeping good-for-nothing husbands in line, or offering advice, solicited or otherwise, to the white women whom they often serve. As detailed through primary sources in the next chapter, resistant audiences during
Song of the South
’s first release were well aware of these stereotypes, and often framed their reception to the film through them. “Increasingly,” wrote Wolfe in 1949, “Negroes themselves reject the mediating smile of Remus, the indirection of the Rabbit. . . . The grin is faltering, especially since the war.”
¹⁵
Such resistance was countered by reactionary audiences, who sought reassurance in conservative representations of blacks as a means to offset perceived racial and cultural instability. The rejection by African Americans of these stereotypes, according to Wolfe, was “one of the reasons why, once more, the beaming Negro butler and Pullman porter are making their amiable way across our billboards, food labels and magazine ads—and Uncle Remus, ‘fetching a grin from year to year,’ is in the bigtime again.”
¹⁶

World War II was a significant moment in the civil rights struggle, as
the
United States touted the propagandistic “Double V” strategy. This meant both an Allied victory over Fascism in Europe and Asia, and the victory over racism and other forms of discrimination at home. Because the United States needed the support of black workers and soldiers, Hollywood, the NAACP, and the OWI collaborated to produce more empowering images of African Americans, ones that broke free of those older stereotypes that Bogle described. This was seen in both fictional films (
Bataan
, 1943) and documentaries (
Henry Browne, Farmer
, 1942;
The Negro Soldier
, 1944). The modest progressive movement was followed again in the late ’40s by a rash of “social consciousness” films—
Pinky
(1949),
Lost Boundaries
(1949), and
Home of the Brave
(1949) among them—that addressed issues of racism directly. Such an approach was modestly successful but ultimately short-lived. Most of the ’40s may be viewed as one of the few progressive periods in Hollywood’s representation of African Americans, even if the films were compromised in various ways and the advances largely driven by world events.

This larger wartime struggle for change was complicated by what Cripps, in
Making Movies Black
, has labeled the theory of “thermidor”—the notion that any tentative progress in representation is always offset by a conservative backlash. The term denotes a cooling-off period, which is by default conservative, following a moment of social rupture. This postwar mind-set, argues Cripps, is a “period of adjustment . . . the cooling of ardor that has followed every era of disquiet since from the French Revolution onward, the moment when order seems to matter more than liberty, sameness more than novelty.”
¹⁷
While also citing economic reasons, the reluctant activism of black actors, and the HUAC situation, Cripps argues that after the war Hollywood went back to making safe films for general audiences that did not challenge cultural norms. The social accomplishments of this period were also complicated, as Cripps notes, by the fact that Hollywood’s move toward more inclusive depictions of blacks essentially ended the decades-long alternate trajectory of “race films.” Products themselves of segregation, race films were low-budget, independently produced movies (such as those of Oscar Micheaux) that featured, and were marketed explicitly to, African Americans.

The ambivalent implications of thermidor problematize other scholars’ historiographic work on the period. Thomas Doherty recently suggested that the war effort to increase cinematic visibility of African Americans resulted in “a portent of progress and the forward marches to come.”
¹⁸
His book
Projections of War
attempts to both excavate and articulate World War II’s depiction in American film during the period
of
U.S. involvement in the conflict itself (1941–1945). His argument depends heavily on the assumption that the social progress and cinematic legacy of World War II have since been distorted by the passage of time and by critical arrogance. While the work of the OWI and the NAACP did have a modestly positive effect, this increased visibility created as much a backlash (i.e., thermidor) as it did an improvement. Moreover, the backlash began
during
the war, not after. As
Ebony
magazine reported, as soon as victory overseas seemed certain, Hollywood regressed: “The only significant improvement [in representation] came early in the war when all America was changing its mind” about black people because of the white supremacist rhetoric of the Nazis.
¹⁹
As Ray also noted about the period, “the matched conservatism of the period’s politics and films suggest, as film historian Eric Rhode observes, that a great deal had been swept under the rug”
²⁰
in the rush to victory.

Such work on World War II and other contemporary representations creates the impression of a
linear
history of forward progress. It neglects to account for the conservative backlash after the war and in the early days of television (which first featured equally regressive stereotypes like
Amos ’n’ Andy
and
Beulah
, the happy mammy). Such reactionary texts should instead generate a sense of ambivalence, which ultimately tempers the extent to which cinematic representations are able to affect any kind of true social change. The history of
Song of the South
reminds us of the importance of resisting such linear narratives of film history, and the claims of social progress that often accompany them. Both as an object for reception during the last sixty years, and as a product of the post–World War II United States, meanings attached to Disney’s film have been anything but stable. The reception history of
Song of the South
is not one of linear progress (or regression), but rather one of repetition and redundancy, of possible changes for the worse within racial ideologies slowly generated therein. At its very inception, the film’s own position within the dynamics of thermidor, as it attempted to offset the modest racial progress of World War II, should remind us of that.

DISNEY’S EARLY MARKETING OF APOLITICAL POPULISM

Another important historical context for
Song of the South
was Disney’s careful negotiations with both the ideology and cultural reception of its own texts. The company’s box office successes were often
the
result of outside factors, such as the Great Depression. These external influences would eventually work against Disney when
Song of the South
was released. Before
Fantasia
and the studio strike in the early 1940s, Disney had considerable luck with critics and audiences. The success of these early films, especially the Oscar-winning
Three Little Pigs
, provides an alternate trajectory for understanding why
Song of the South
later tried, and at first failed, to re-create a similar connection with audiences. Steven Watts has referred to the 1930s as Disney’s “golden age.” With Mickey Mouse, the
Silly Symphonies
shorts, and
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937), the company first attained stable financial success and considerable artistic recognition. Watts claims that the company’s early success at tapping into a larger cultural and historical zeitgeist was mostly “unintentional.”
²¹
He avoids giving too much authorial agency to Walt Disney himself, as well as credit to the people who worked under him, for anticipating national moods. Similarly, the most recent work on Disney, such as the studies by Douglas Gomery and Janet Wasko, moves away from the “great man” myth—the idea that Disney himself was solely, or even primarily, responsible for both the studio’s output and its commercial fortunes.
²²

Less the result of artistic genius,
Three Little Pigs
tapped into preexisting conditions of possibility during the 1930s. A short animated film that became an instant sensation in the United States,
Three Little Pigs
and its hit song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” benefited tremendously from the conditions of the Great Depression. Watts notes that everyone from Marxists to cultural elites to psychologists found much to explore in the film’s aggressively ambiguous allegory.
²³
Many saw in the Three Little Pigs’ resistance to the Big Bad Wolf a hopeful message about resiliency, hard work, and solidarity during the Great Depression. Similarly, very different audiences read the film as an allegory of resistance to Fascism’s rise in Europe.

The film’s ideological success was thus largely derived from external factors. As the public face of the company, Walt and his studio were reluctant to offer political readings of the movie or its equally popular song. He preferred to present publicly a careful naïveté on the subject. Yet Disney eventually embraced a populist message regarding the film that simultaneously denied any explicit politics. Reacting favorably to the political climate would help sell both the product and the “common man” appeal of the Disney brand. Such constructed populism and ambivalence set the stage for the production and reception of
Song of the South
during the subsequent decade. The latter film would attempt
to
both deny and activate existing political postwar ideologies, though with a different outcome. Moreover, the failures of
Song of the South
in 1946 would reiterate how Disney’s artistic ambitions were dependent on cultural factors beyond its control. Despite its innovations in hybrid animation, the film failed to capture the political climate of the time.

Disney’s apolitical facade, so crucial to its success in the 1930s, was always an illusion. The animators’ strike in 1941—about which Walt was still upset during the casting of
Song of the South
years later—foregrounded how the carefully apolitical persona that Disney crafted was highly deceptive. First evident in the success of
Three Little Pigs
, Disney’s seeming populism was a conservative form of politics that derived its power from pretending to ignore political concerns. His inability to even comprehend the concerns of his striking workers in Burbank revealed a deeply conservative, antiunion impulse that had been there all along. Workers were upset over inconsistent pay, excessive overtime hours, a lack of credit for work performed, and the hoarding of profits made from hits such as
Snow White
and
Dumbo
(1941). Ironically, Walt was able to get away with such exploitation because of the rampant unemployment created during the Great Depression. As the studio achieved greater fortune, Disney did not revise his own bureaucracy accordingly, having grown complacent overseeing a professional milieu in which such working conditions previously went unquestioned. Progressives who were anxious to read positive messages into the studio’s films during the 1930s realized after the strike that Disney was hardly concerned with the plight of the average person.

But the economic and ideological realities of the Depression were not the only factors in Disney’s early success. The 1930s were the only time in the history of Disney’s company when nostalgia did not play a central role in its popularity. Other historical factors besides the fallout from the 1929 Stock Market Crash warrant closer scrutiny. Disney’s emergent success can be traced, for instance, to child-rearing studies in behaviorism. Nicholas Sammond’s book
Babes in Tomorrowland
explores how Disney constructed its early productions in relation to discourses on the generic (implicitly white, Protestant, and middle-class) concept of the “child.” While some early critics of the first motion pictures believed they could have harmful effects on women, children, and immigrants, the child eventually emerged as the one category most in need of protection from the cinema. As Sammond argues, however, the “child” was largely a social construction used to regulate media content and stifle discussion of other social factors, such as race and class. As a result, Disney positioned
its
products as correctives to perceived ills, offering films intended to have positive effects on children. This mode of film marketing, meanwhile, spread into advertising campaigns for other company products. Disney did not create the child as a marketing niche—yet, as the reception history of
Song of the South
later reveals, the studio did capitalize on and refine its possibilities through later years.