Disney's Most Notorious Film (39 page)

The article highlighted particularly well the importance of whiteness as the dominant discourse that frames discussions of
Song of the South
today. It rhetorically set Boyd and Page’s respective views against each other, as though dividing imagined opposition to the film against itself. The implicit logic suggests that since not all blacks are opposed to the film, it is not really offensive to African Americans. This assumes that only black people’s opinions on
Song of the South
were influenced by
their
racial background. Yet Willis’s status as a white person does not play any less of a role in his love of
Song of the South
than Boyd’s blackness does in his great dislike. Willis’s personal identification as a white child in the 1980s, when he first saw the film, would most naturally be with little white Johnny (thus making it difficult for him to see or appreciate Uncle Remus’s demeaning social status). That these important distinctions are ignored testifies to the very same issues of institutional racism and white privilege that the film is accused of reactivating by its presence. As Richard Dyer has noted, “There is no greater power than to be ‘just’ human”
²³
—that is, there is no greater power than to be a white fan of
Song of the South
who does not need to acknowledge the central role one’s own race and cultural background may play in one’s own warm reception of the film.

THE AFFECT OF PLEASURE

As tracking the elusiveness of whiteness shows, just listing off the reasons why
Song of the South
is a racist film doesn’t move us closer to thinking about why fans defend the film so passionately. Susan Miller and Greg Rode have argued for an Althusserian understanding of such fan behavior. Disney was an outwardly neutral pedagogue, they write, who persuaded his audience to reproduce deeply rooted cultural prejudices of which they may or may not be conscious. Disney hails “us into subject positions from which we
freely
reproduce a certain sort of discriminatory culture.”
²⁴
Under this logic, for example, fans defend a film’s racism because society and Disney have trained them to see the racial inequalities as the natural order of life. Indeed, one
Song of the South
defender on
Topix.net
summarizes his or her post simply with the statement “Life is what it is and was.” Undoubtedly, there is a certain truth there about how some people (do not) see race in culturally or historically meaningful ways. As Richard Dyer in
Only Entertainment
has argued, “Class, race and sexual caste are denied validity as problems by the dominant (bourgeois, white, male) ideology of society. We should not expect show business to be markedly different.”
²⁵

It is difficult to specify how ideological indoctrination works. The kind of framework proposed by Miller and Rode doesn’t sufficiently take into account the role that other factors, such as pleasure, play in affecting fan reactions. “I didn’t then nor do I now look at”
Song of the South
, writes a fan on Topix, “in any other way but for pure pleasure and
enjoyment.”
Such a response certainly doesn’t protect the film as only “pure pleasure and enjoyment.” Yet it does crucially point toward other influences and mechanisms in the maintenance of racist ideology. “As a relatively autonomous mode of cultural production,” adds Dyer, show business “does not simply reproduce unproblematically patriarchal capitalist ideology.”
²⁶
For audiences in Dyer’s formulation, and fans of
Song of the South
, such beliefs are embedded within, and in conflict with, the feelings of enjoyment the film also generates. Moreover, fans often privilege these feelings—and not politics—when conceptualizing their ideas about the film.

Thinking of Disney fandom in Althusserian terms is not so much inaccurate as indeterminate; it doesn’t move us closer to understanding why fans think what they think. In some cases, fans aren’t thinking, but instead are engaging on an affective level. As Hills notes, a fan’s affective attachment to a particularly beloved text is the deepest part of the relationship between the two. Yet to approach this through interpellation is almost literally to speak a different language. Consider one telling comment on Topix from a fan in Palm Bay, Florida: “How in the world can you in anyway determine this film is derogatory?!?!?! And, please, tell me, how can you not love Zip A De Do Da, Zip A De Day, Wonderful Feeling, Wonderful Day! What’s wrong with that? You guys are not making sense—what specifically is wrong with this movie?” [
sic
]. Failing to comprehend the debate at a cognitive level of politics, this particular fan seems
genuinely
confused in light of the film’s positive emotions. Fans do not defend
Song of the South
because they think the film is not racist. Rather, they defend it because they love the film, because it reminds them of a “Wonderful Feeling, Wonderful Day.” Remus, writes another fan at the Internet Movie Database, “possesses a praeternatural [
sic
] wisdom, sagacity, compassion and love. . . . Would that we could all open our hearts to learn from him.” Many fans operate from a real position of pleasure—as in,
the feeling is real
. Only subsequent to that do they defend the politics.

If fans did not love the film already, they would not care either way what was said about it. This may seem obvious, but it’s easily overlooked when focusing so closely on just the racial politics of a film such as
Song of the South
. My argument is that real positions of pleasure be more strongly considered for their own sake,
and
for how they affect reactions to, and reflections on, the political. Such tension echoes what Susan Willis has labeled previously “the problem with pleasure” when dealing with Disney.
²⁷
How does one analyze it critically without ignoring that the
experiences
are sometimes genuinely enjoyable? Some
Song of the South
fans, meanwhile, directly negotiate this permeable opposition between pleasure and politics. One poster writes at Topix, “Perhaps because I was a child, I failed to associate anything negative with it. I didn’t stereotype anyone, I just loved the story for what it was, and that is magical entertainment in stellar Disney style.” One cannot understand fans’ cultural defenses without first understanding the affective power that otherwise complicates any notion of ideological complicity. Distinctions between affect and politics are crucial and should be carefully considered.

To a point, it’s important to concede emotional attachment to racist texts as a primarily
affective
activity, rather than dismiss it as a kind of false consciousness that only serves the fan’s implicit allegiance with its ideology. At best a kind of misguided musical utopia for many,
Song of the South
attempts to depict positive emotional bonds, especially between Remus and Johnny. Copresently, there is no doubt that
Song of the South
perpetuates stereotypes that strengthen culturally destructive notions of “institutional racism” and “white privilege.” The film errs by presenting blacks with no identity outside white culture; by denying awareness of that life’s hardships; and by offering white culture (whiteness itself) as the natural, unquestioned order of life. Although there certainly were white-run plantations historically, any depiction (such as
Song of the South
) that uncritically accepts and reinforces such relationships (as scholars such as James Snead
²⁸
have noted) only perpetuates the problem. Dismissing the film’s politics as “a product of its time” doesn’t take into consideration what effect past “time” has today in reinforcing prejudices when the film is seen again. And one crucial component to convergence culture today is the lingering presence of older nostalgic texts such as
Song of the South
.

NEW MEDIA AND NOSTALGIA

Nostalgia is as important as pleasure in complicating fandom’s relationship to problematic artifacts from Hollywood’s past. When new media reproduces the past, it also generates contradictory affects, both of which interpret time in seemingly opposed ways—nostalgia and the
unsightly
. While nostalgia presumes a warm, childlike attachment to the past, the unsightly presents the aspect of the past that has been otherwise concealed. As I develop more in the conclusion, Bill Vaughn’s
autobiographical
essay revealed how the film was always coexistent with a more complicated relationship to his own past. While such connections are often nostalgic, they are not exclusively so. Or if they are, it suggests a more ambivalent understanding of the term. What is particularly intriguing about Vaughn’s essay is how deeply
fearful
it is of the past, or of that past which the bootleg presence of
Song of the South
activates. Nostalgia is unquestionably a central factor in the appeal of the film, especially throughout the last forty years. But nostalgia is not simply a derogatory term for an unhealthy obsession with the past (although it can often be exactly that). The concept, in relation to the perceived newness of participatory culture, can be further problematized.

Nostalgia, according to Svetlana Boym, is “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed . . . a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” Nostalgia is always an ironic by-product, an unintended consequence, of advances in technology (e.g., new media). In her study of twentieth-century modernity,
The Future of Nostalgia
, Boym argues that “nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: alter egos.” Modernity produced nostalgia. As technological advances created future-oriented opportunities, people resisted with a heightened longing for what was left behind. The more “progress” pulls us toward the future, the stronger some react by trying to return to the past. Thus it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Internet is as often a repository for reactive memories as it is a platform for utopian advances. Nostalgia “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism,” writes Boym, “in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”
²⁹
The instability of the Internet’s technological possibilities always coexists with the reassurance of nostalgia.

Of course, lost pasts are crucial to the larger Disney brand of white, upper-middle-class utopia. In the specific case of
Song of the South
, there are at least two “lost” pasts operating—the historical pasts (not) represented in the film, and the personal pasts of fans remembering all or part of
Song of the South
as an experience from their childhoods. Matthew Bernstein previously noted the importance of nostalgia for post-Reconstruction that affected 1940s Southern audiences of the film.
³⁰
But
Song of the South
’s nostalgia today has come to acquire an additional layer. The need for fans to see the film as an innocent product of its time (thus defending it against charges of racism) echoes the need to hold on to their own childhoods. The film’s perceived racial utopia speaks to a larger ideal—the problematic but no less powerful belief that life was
easier,
or simpler, as a child. Thus the film’s possible availability also triggers a return to childhood. Or, as one fan writes on IMDb, trying to avoid the political debate, “I would just like to see it again.”

On Internet forums, many focus on
Song of the South
because they themselves remember watching it as a kid. “I can’t believe it’s been so long,” writes one at
SliceofSciFi.com
, “that people still remember ‘Zip-pidy-doo-dah’ [
sic
] but don’t remember the film it came from.” Several begin with direct references to their own youth. “As a child I loved
Song of the South
,” writes one at Topix, while another adds that the film “was a part of my childhood and brings back fond memories.” Over at IMDb, meanwhile, several fans write from the same shared background: “I haven’t seen the film since I was very young”; “I remember seeing this movie when I was six years old”; “I have just seen
Song of the South
for the first time in 35 years”; “I saw
Song of the South
as a small child.” Several mention the exact time frame, further heightening an awareness of time’s passing. Even Miller and Rode start their essay from the premise that they themselves are mindful of how Disney films affected them as children. Moreover, they acknowledge the continued presence of this “kid in me,” a concept through which people of all ages constitute a sense of self.
³¹
For Miller and Rode, studying kid-oriented Disney films is important because such memories remain with the adult, affecting their behavior and ideological dispositions. Of course, fans also discuss
Song of the South
in relation to kids as a defense based on its intended innocence. This evokes Nicholas Sammond’s discussion of Disney and the “American child” as a social construction. Adults claim to protect the “child” from media’s effects more to regulate cultural norms than to shield children.
³²
Responses to
Song of the South
make that explicit when they note having seen it as a child, or wishing to show it to their children or grandchildren, as a defense against charges of racism.

The affect of nostalgia generates defenses just as passionately as do the feelings of joy and pleasure. Fans try to protect not only Disney, but their own memories of the past as well.
Song of the South
is itself a nostalgic view of the American South, generating
that
nostalgia for audiences past and present, alongside a different nostalgia for fans today trying to relive their own childhood. Indeed, a desire to return to childhood may be what provokes the most satisfaction for fans. For them,
Song of the South
improves over time by intensifying childhood memories, along with its musical and emotional powers. Moreover, its official absence plays to the heightened sense of loss necessary for nostalgia.