Disney's Most Notorious Film (2 page)

I feel, finally, that this book is symbolically indebted to Fredric Jameson. His work on postmodernism was perhaps the most influential reading I ever encountered in graduate school. And every time I return to it, I find even more to embrace. With age, however, I have found myself losing interest in my earlier theoretical ambitions, and instead have become much more interested in being a historian, as this book will show. As a result, a thinker like Jameson is perhaps not properly represented in a work such as this. At my dissertation defense in late 2009,
one
of my committee members said that she kept thinking of Fredric Jameson while reading the manuscript. I was quietly flattered, but also pleased. His theories have influenced me deeply throughout the last decade. And, no doubt, his theories on the economic and historical implications of the postmodern haunt every page of this book.

As always, I am most grateful to my beautiful wife, Maggie, for her endless love and support, and our daughter, Melina. This is very much a project about generations, and about traditions and possibilities passed from one to another. I dedicate this project to her, with the hope that she will create a better future than the one left to her.

INT
RODUCTION

They have kept
Song of the South
in a vault within a vault. I think there are three locks on it.

ROBERT SMIGEL

It is not true that we don’t see what is not on the screen. On the contrary, when the absence is repeated constantly, then we see
that
it is not there. Absence becomes reality.

JAMES SNEAD, WHITE SCREENS, BLACK IMAGES

Hollywood history is littered with racist artifacts. Yet not all have vanished for good, and their occasional endurance can tell us just as much about industry practices and racial relations in the present as in the since-forgotten time in which they were first made. Disney’s
Song of the South
(1946) is today one such film, another racist cinematic relic from a past filled with no shortage of anachronistic and offensive depictions.
Song of the South
depicts plantation life in the late nineteenth century—a time marked by unimaginable cruelty—as a white musical utopia. The name itself may not ring a bell at first. Yet mention Brer Rabbit, the “Tar Baby,” Uncle Remus (James Baskett), or “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and suddenly many people remember that they once were quite familiar with the film. If they do not quite remember seeing the full-length theatrical version itself, many might remember reading the Golden Book version, listening to the read-along record, watching an excerpt on Super 8mm, or humming along to the opening credits of the
Wonderful World of Disney
television show.

Based loosely on the nineteenth-century literary stories of Joel Chandler Harris,
Song of the South
mixed live-action footage of Uncle Remus,
the
kindly ex-slave, and his seemingly idyllic life on a Southern plantation, with animated sequences of Brer Rabbit outsmarting Brer Fox and Brer Bear. Despite being a landmark achievement in cost-cutting hybrid animation, early audiences rejected both its racial insensitivities, in the wake of World War II, and its low-budget aesthetic, on the heels of more polished full-length animation productions like
Snow White
(1937) and
Dumbo
(1941). Yet
Song of the South
hardly disappeared after modest releases in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, this offensive film was quite popular. In the wake of the “white backlash” against the civil rights movement, the subsequent rise of Reaganist conservatism in the United States, and Disney’s emergent status after the 1960s as a powerful “family institution,”
Song of the South
was a fixture of the American media landscape, forty years after it premiered in theaters.

Uncle Remus (James Baskett).

The first question one asks now is, Whatever happened to
Song of the South
? It’s tempting to speculate on the circumstances of its assumed demise. Even the ideologically conservative Disney Corporation—never one to pass up a chance at exploiting older properties in its vault—has refused to rerelease it to American audiences for nearly three decades. As such, it is equally tempting to toss
Song of the South
back into the dustbin of Hollywood history, and with it the disturbing histories its continued presence would evoke. The uglier truth, though, is that this especially problematic movie has not gone anywhere. Thanks to decades of
occasional
theatrical success, cult followings, and Disney’s own careful and extensive corporate remediation, the complicated histories of race and media convergence that
Song of the South
embodies are as present and relevant as ever. There is no shortage of infamously racist films from the so-called golden days of Hollywood—from well-known titles such as
The Birth of a Nation
(1915) or
The Littlest Rebel
(1935), to largely forgotten ones like
Check and Double Check
(1930) or
Stand Up and Cheer!
(1934). Yet
Song of the South
’s troublingly elusive, and resilient, survival may be the most distinctive. It articulates fascinating truths about the history of American media practices, its audiences, and the at-times mutually reinforcing negotiation of racist images between them. Beyond the limits of morbid curiosity, hidden here is a more fascinating history of the relationship between industries, consumers, and racial identities.

Song of the South
has been a quietly, but revealingly, persistent film for seven decades. Its existence nearly spans the entire lifetime of the more famous company that spawned, exploited, and eventually tossed it (officially) aside. Understanding the film’s role within a larger history of convergence culture and racial formations requires (1) documenting the ways that Disney recirculated, repurposed, and rewrote the film, (2) appreciating the diverse racial and political climates in which it appeared (or didn’t), and (3) articulating how different audiences responded to the
fi
lm and its fragments via their own discursive production. This book employs a historical–materialist methodology that triangulates the cult history of
Song of the South
within all three contexts in order to move closer to answering several interrelated questions: How have the textual and extratextual dynamics of “media convergence” historically intersected with larger cultural negotiations regarding racial identity in the twentieth century? How have industry strategies of remediation and forms of participatory culture affected socially constructed notions of whiteness as mediated through, and in the reception of, representations of African Americans in classical Hollywood films? How does the subsequent repurposing of these films in ancillary venues complicate its (and its audiences’) relationship to the “original” text? How do issues such as the larger political climates in the United States; personal, public, and commercial forms of nostalgia; and affective formations further problematize these questions? More specifically, in what ways do both a powerful media institution (Disney) and its considerable, and shifting, set of audiences play a sometimes-mutual role in embracing, ignoring, and exploiting the continued presence of its racist past?

Song of the South
ends on an image of utopia, as young and old, black and white, animated and real, all walk off together into the sunset. Yet its long history is hardly so simple or positive.

Embodying a range of contexts central to understanding these questions,
Song of the South
offers a fascinatingly unfortunate cult status as a notoriously racist film at the (hidden) heart of a particularly image-conscious entertainment media empire. Disney’s film has appeared prominently in moments of technological change and media platform transitions, and in periods of cultural upheaval and racial tension. As some older Hollywood films migrated—all or in part—across newer media and ancillary market channels, Disney repeatedly returned to
Song of the South
as a source for revenue and repurposed material despite its troubled origins and problematic history. Alternately, the film’s theatrical appearances and reception over the last several decades often closely reflected white America’s racial consciousness, and lack thereof. Not surprisingly, then, fragments of the old Brer Rabbit film still exist in a variety of forms to this day. The future-oriented, vaguely utopian logic of both convergence culture and post-racial whiteness imply, or insist, that audiences forget the larger history of media practices underlining both. Yet
Disney’s Most Notorious Film
instead seeks to illuminate the powerful ways that the history of media convergence has alternatingly intensified, shifted, and dissipated representations of racism and constructions of whiteness.

My analysis also suggests the possibility that any thorough understanding of the political implications of a given film or television show
requires
sustained attention to its many ancillary reiterations and adaptations. “Given their extended presence,” writes Jonathan Gray in
Show Sold Separately
, “any filmic or televisual text and its cultural impact, value, and meaning cannot be adequately analyzed without taking into account the film or televisual program’s many proliferations” into supplementary media texts.
¹
This attention to the “paratexts”
²
—the additional texts and contexts surrounding a primary text—becomes especially acute when focused on a Disney film that has benefited from its parent company’s noted success in exploiting its theatrical properties across numerous forms of cross-media promotion and synergy.
Song of the South
is another beneficiary of what Christopher Anderson has dubbed Disney’s “centrifugal force . . . one that encouraged the consumption of further Disney texts, further Disney products, further Disney experiences.”
³
In the seventy years since its debut,
Song of the South
footage, stories, music, and characters have reappeared in comic strips, spoken records, children’s books, television shows, toys, board games, musical albums, theme park attractions, VHS and DVD compilations, and even video games (including Xbox 360’s recent
Kinect Disneyland Adventures
, 2011). By conditioning the reception of the main text, these paratexts are fundamentally intertwined with it, thus problematizing the hierarchical distinction between the two. What I hope to add to this discussion is the powerful and often unconsidered role that paratexts have played
historically
and
generationally
in shifting perceptions of the fulllength theatrical version. Thus, looking primarily at the many histories of a single text, such as
Song of the South
, is not merely adequate to the complex task of articulating how media industries and consumers negotiated both racist imagery and its attendant cultural histories—given the historical unimaginability of any particular film’s textual ubiquity, let alone its many possible interpretations and meanings, such a focused, sustained approach might even be necessary.

SONG OF THE SOUTH

Disney originally released
Song of the South
in 1946, and then reissued it in 1956, 1972, 1980, and 1986.
Song of the South
is the story of a white woman, Sally (Ruth Warrick), and her son, Johnny (Bobby Driscoll), who go to live with her mother on a Georgia plantation. There Johnny befriends Uncle Remus, who lives in a cabin behind the mansion and teaches the children parables about life. For instance,
when
Johnny wants to run away to reunite with his father, Uncle Remus intervenes to let him know, “You can’t run away from trouble. Ain’t no place that far.” The parables are visualized through striking animated sequences, featuring such characters as Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and Brer Rabbit (two of which were also voiced by Baskett). Merging animation and live action was cutting edge for its time, though the decision—as with many such choices in the early decades of Disney—was made largely to save money. Owing to the logistical and financial limitations caused by World War II, theatrical revenue was scarce and studio output tied up with government propaganda and training films. Under these conditions, a partially animated feature-length film was much cheaper to produce than a fully animated one.