Disney's Most Notorious Film (3 page)

Johnny (Bobby Driscoll), the young protagonist of
Song of the South
.

Despite the film’s groundbreaking technological innovation and Oscar-winning song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” (for which it is still most remembered today), many post–World War II audiences in 1946 found
Song of the South
not only aesthetically underwhelming but also troubling in its regressive depiction of race relations in the American South. Over time, the film’s reputation was complicated by having emerged from a studio that long privileged an overtly white view of the world. As Patricia Turner noted in 1994,
Song of the South
was the first and only Disney feature “in which an African-American actor played a prominent role,”
⁴
and as a happy-go-lucky former slave no less. In fact, until 2009’s
animated
The Princess and the Frog
, it was shockingly the only Disney theatrical film to feature a lead black character at all. Although initial reactions to
Song of the South
in 1946 were not unanimous for either white or black audiences,
⁵
the influential National Association for the Advancement of Colored People denounced the film as an idyllic presentation of racial relations in the post-Reconstruction South.
⁶
At best, the film stretches credibility in its depiction of contented servants in a position of obedience to Southern whites. For years, this aspect of the film renewed controversy with its subsequent (and sometimes just rumored) rereleases.

In 1946,
Song of the South
was an unsurprising critical and commercial disappointment. As Neal Gabler documented in his recent biography of Disney, the studio was underwhelmed by the initial performance of
Song of the South
, which it had hoped would be its big postwar smash.
⁷
Evidence from the time, as published in
Variety
, confirms his archival research.
Song of the South
earned $3.4 million in the United States and Canada in late 1946 and 1947, enough to rank only as high as twenty-third among all films for the same period.
⁸
In
Making Movies Black
, Thomas Cripps noted that several African American activists around this time actually abandoned their intended boycott of the film, in no small part because
Song of the South
did not prove the high-profile project they had anticipated.
⁹
As part of the postwar challenge to Hollywood to offer more positive representations of African Americans, cultural critics and activists had planned to make an example of the film because of Disney’s well-known brand name and the visibility that came with it, but they lost momentum when
Song of the South
underperformed. The film’s disappointing box office explains in part why it was not released for another ten years (in 1956), and then not for another sixteen years after that (in 1972). While the film was not pulled permanently until the late 1980s, rumors of its possible disappearance first circulated at least twenty years earlier.

As its popularity increased over time,
Song of the South
was considered a consistent moneymaker only much later in its theatrical life cycle. Its first big financial splash was during its
third
release, in the early 1970s—only a couple years, ironically, after it was rumored that the film would be shelved permanently because of its controversial status. Several months after
Song of the South
’s rerelease in 1972, the
Los Angeles Times
boldly proclaimed that the film was expected to earn over $7 million that same year, and become at that point the highest-grossing re issue in Disney history.
¹⁰
Peggy Russo went so far as to assert that the film
“grossed
twice as much [during that year] as it had in its two previous releases.”
¹¹
More modestly,
Variety
reported in early 1973 that
Song of the South
had earned nearly $6 million during that one reissue alone.
¹²
But even the slightly revised number was considerable. In 1972,
Song of the South
was the highest-grossing reissue from any company that year, ranking it sixteenth among all films. It more than
doubled
what
Variety
had reported just a year earlier as the film’s
total
gross in the previous twenty-six years ($5.4 million).
¹³
Disney released the film again eight years later, in late 1980. Between January 1981
¹⁴
and January 1982,
¹⁵
the film grossed another $8.6 million in the U.S.–Canadian market. By the time
Song of the South
completed its final theatrical appearance in 1986 and into 1987, the film had earned nearly another $8 million.
¹⁶
The old Uncle Remus film remained on
Variety
’s list for the “All-Time Film Rental Champs” well into the 1990s—a list on which it did not even first
appear
until three decades after its original theatrical debut. The trade paper, surprised by the film’s late resurgence, speculated in 1973 that
Song of the South
was “probably helped by a bit of racial stereotype dispute early in its run.”
¹⁷
Although it is very difficult to prove a direct causal relationship,
Song of the South
made more money
after
acquiring a sustained notoriety for racist images that caused it to disappear from circulation for nearly two decades.

But how? Why? Regardless of how one reads a controversial film such as
Song of the South
, such interpretation speaks to the limits of textual analysis. In addition to Russo and Turner, there have been other illuminating readings of
Song of the South
’s racist imagery—particularly those by James Snead and Donald Bogle.
¹⁸
They offer a partial picture of the ways the film’s representations have worked since 1946. At least as far back as Helen Taylor’s book on
Gone with the Wind
fans,
¹⁹
there has been a movement to shift away from universalized critics’ readings of racially controversial representations and toward a richer picture of how audiences have interpreted such content.
²⁰
In general, there has been more written about the political and cultural representations
²¹
in Disney texts than about the diverse range of audiences who have negotiated them.
²²
Any attempt at articulating a film’s ideologies over such an immense amount of time is better shaped by two larger questions: Why did the producers and distributors (i.e., Disney) do
what
they did
when
they did? And how and why did certain audiences at the time respond as they did? As my book will show, this approach offers a fuller historical account of the relationship between race and media convergence. Whether one reads the film as “positive” or “negative,” or “accurate” or “inaccurate,”
is
idiosyncratically rooted in a complex web of cultural, economic, and educational factors. But this is not to suggest false equivalence. Criticism of
Song of the South
over the years has outweighed support for the film. Rather, truly understanding what a film’s problematic representations do, and why, requires sustained attention to those contexts that invariably shape audiences’ ephemeral reactions. This approach focuses on reception contexts, then, but also on the constantly shifting technological platforms and industrial practices that affect how people can (and cannot) see, hear, and manipulate the film for themselves.

Several interlocking factors affect interpretation at any given moment. The wide range of meanings that have been attached to
Song of the South
through the years are often products of an idiosyncratic mix of issues. The simplest, if still complicated, approach is textual—looking at the film’s characters, themes, and plot. The critical task of analyzing Johnny, Uncle Remus, the plantation, and so forth may seem like straight forward narrative analysis. Yet even such images are steeped in complicated historical and industrial contexts, such as African American stereotypes, representations of the child, and the cultural logic of the Hollywood musical, to name only a few. Other important questions include: How do economic, educational, and racial backgrounds influence one’s preexisting attitudes? What were the larger racial climates in the United States when viewers saw the film? In what venue, and in what format, did they see it (or parts of it)? How did Disney’s socially constructed position as an American cultural institution, as a standard-bearer for notions of “family entertainment,” influence reactions? What familiarity, if any, did audiences have with the text (hearing the songs, reading the books, talking with family) before seeing the film? How often, over a particular period, did they see it? How much time passed from the moment they last saw it to the time they wrote about their reaction to it? How does nostalgia for Disney, for the film, for ancillary memories the film may incidentally evoke, affect interpretation? How do the intensely affective components of
Song of the South
—its bright colors, skillful animation, and lively music—intersect with more cognitive questions about the film’s representations? These questions highlight the difficulty in offering just one reading of the film. There is no one issue that overrides the others, and they all come into play at some point or another.

Of course, Disney often succeeded through this kind of ideological ambiguity. Like most Hollywood films,
Song of the South
’s “ideology” can be tricky to pin down, since its depiction of plantation life works through obscurities (such as which exact year it is set in). As a result,
by
1940s standards the film is careful to avoid overtly offending either liberals or conservatives, even while its choice of the magnolia myth setting—that of white plantation houses, chivalrous men, virtuous women, and second-class African American workers—submerses the film in a reactionary nostalgia. Disney often appealed to contradictory ideologies, making films that not only reflected their times, but also allowed diverse audiences to read their own favorable elements into the text. This is another way that basic textual readings ultimately offer little definitive evidence. In the 1930s, Disney had an unexpectedly huge hit in
Three Little Pigs
, which a range of audiences then read as symbolic of everything from the Great Depression in the United States to the rise of Fascism in Europe. In the 1950s, meanwhile,
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
offered a nostalgic allegory about the United States’ rising fear of nuclear technology; the film ultimately suggested that such power depended upon who had access to the technology and what their purpose was. A decade later, Disney’s rare live-action smash
The Love Bug
commented on the emergent countercultural movement in a way that offered potential laughs for both flummoxed conservatives and flattered hippies, resulting in the highest-grossing film of 1969.
²³
Even 1989’s
Little Mermaid
, the film that saved Disney feature-length animation, contained contradictory elements regarding U.S. attitudes toward post-feminism in the 1980s. This is not to defend any one film, but to emphasize the careful contradictions through which major entertainment companies work when investing heavily in high-profile projects that depend on acceptance with the widest possible audience. In each case, Disney consciously made the decision to avoid editorializing on what the “true” interpretation should be, so as to prevent any single segment of the paying public from feeling offended or marginalized. In short, it is impossible to reduce any problematic film to one reading, even when there is no shortage of contexts explaining why
Song of the South
is racist.

THE PLANTATION MYTH

At its narrative core,
Song of the South
’s representation of African Americans is quite problematic, perpetuating cinematic and literary stereotypes rooted in images of the magnolia myth. This cliché was common in Hollywood films early on, especially prior to World War II. These pictures often presented the nineteenth-century Southern plantation as an idyllic, racially harmonious utopia, and were mostly ambiguous
about whether they were set before the Civil War. Initially, the idea for
Song of the South
was motivated by Disney’s attempt to build off the phenomenal success seven years earlier of David O. Selznick’s
Gone with the Wind
, easily the highest-grossing film of the period. Disney originally obtained the rights to the Harris books in 1939, hoping to exploit
Gone with the Wind
’s popularity before the war, but financial issues and propaganda obligations during World War II pushed back the film’s production. Beyond the animated sequences, much of the film’s Southern imagery is a watered-down version of Selznick’s lavish spectacle.
Song of the South
, Taylor argues, recycled “
GWTW
’s worst clichés.”
²⁴
Within this nostalgic distortion of history, African Americans are depicted as subservient to, and dependent on, their white masters.