Disney's Most Notorious Film (5 page)

But 1964 was also important in the history of white America’s racial consciousness for other, less honorable reasons. In retrospect, it was the beginning of the end for largely sympathetic attitudes among whites toward the civil rights movement, leading to what sociologist Doug McAdam has called the “white backlash,” which was in full effect by the
end
of the decade.
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Most prominently, Southern and other conservative Democrats abandoned the party, believing that the Great Society betrayed their core beliefs about the lower social and economic status of African Americans, who should be left to take care of themselves. Republicans successfully played on a building sense of white lower- and middle-class resentment. They argued that the government treated blacks better than it treated whites—an astoundingly ignorant, but frighteningly effective, claim that conservatives continue to make to this day. Urban rebellions in the cities and increasing white flight to the suburbs widened the divide further. Even moderate and liberal Democrats who remained deeply sympathetic to the civil rights movement in the mid-to-late 1960s found their collective attention and energies quickly distracted by the more urgent, costly fiasco that was the Vietnam War. Thus, almost as soon as the Great Society was coming into effect, conservative politicians were already mobilizing a combination of active resentment and inattentive indifference among whites to seize power throughout the country. The Republican Ronald Reagan was elected governor of traditionally liberal California in 1966; two years later, Richard Nixon was elected president. By the 1980s, socially conservative Democrats were supporting Reagan for president in droves—the culmination of a decades-long, white conservative attempt to stop, and undo, the progress of the civil rights movement.

Not coincidently,
Song of the South
quietly began its resurgence during this period. Three equally important factors influenced the film’s resurrection from the dead during the 1960s. While Disney’s strategies of convergence and ambivalence among African American audiences were both key, the shifting attitudes among white Americans in the wake of the Great Society cannot be overstated. By the end of the 1960s, as support for the civil rights movement dissipated, Disney began floating the idea of rereleasing its most notorious film, which they claimed was now the “most requested” title in the vault.
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By 1972
Song of the South
was back in theaters and suddenly doing record business. As a nostalgic look back to a pre–civil rights utopia,
Song of the South
offered these audiences a reassuring image of harmless and content African Americans—back at the plantation, hard at work for their white masters, and completely uninterested in equality, let alone freedom. It is inaccurate to pin the film’s newfound popularity
only
on a white, anti–civil rights desire to return to the illusory era of white privilege that the film depicts. Yet this was undoubtedly one of the central reasons for its success, and it created an environment in which Disney could finally rerelease the film without
provoking
much controversy. By 1980, the film was back yet again, and continued to do strong box office throughout the conservative climate of the Reagan ’80s.
Song of the South
’s appeal was so prominent during this decade that critics and activists began to finally take note of the film again, explicitly tying its nostalgic, reactionary popularity to the larger political atmosphere created by the sitting U.S. president.

POST-RACIAL WHITENESS

Reaganism brought into relief a particularly potent form of whiteness that invariably shapes most defenses of
Song of the South
. “Whiteness” does not mean the same as “white people.” Rather, it evokes a hegemonic cultural logic that consciously and unconsciously reinforces white attitudes, beliefs, and positions as the dominant, unquestioned way of life. Regardless of his or her race, every American at some point or another negotiates the norms of whiteness—equally capable of either uncritically reproducing or self-reflexively questioning them. Neither attitude challenges this framework as the dominant way of seeing the world. After World War II, many people critical of
Song of the South
acknowledged their own subject position in relation to the dominant discourse of whiteness that had produced the film in the first place. Yet others, especially those sympathetic to Disney, became increasingly resistant over time to acknowledging racial categories. Instead, they embraced a post-racial attitude that claimed to do no less than deny racial difference altogether. This has been especially prevalent since the end of white support for the civil rights movement, but it can be seen in some of the earliest defenses of the film as well. Post-racial politics are really the most insidious and resilient type of whiteness, emerging largely unseen in the 1960s and continuing its destructive impulses to this very day.

On a superficial level, post-racial attitudes seem positive enough, since they mimic long-held liberal ideals of racial equality and tolerance. Indeed, it is a definite improvement from the days when lynching, rioting, and racial epithets were thought to be “acceptable” ways for many whites to interact with, and control, African Americans. But the reality is that post-racial mind-sets have done nothing to make people equal. Rather, they have been used to support conservative policies that inhibit progress toward social justice. By denying racial difference, one can deny the very possibility of racial discrimination, and thus undo the accomplishments of the civil rights movement. No U.S. politician mastered this
better
than did Reagan, who always appeared optimistic and carefully color-blind in his use of language, which appealed on the surface to the best of people’s ideals. Yet within his post-racial speeches, he also managed to include coded terms like “welfare queens,” which demonized minorities as lazy and undeserving, and stoked the anger of white voters who resented African American progress. Because the color of one’s skin shouldn’t matter, Reagan and his followers argued, there is no reason to help blacks or any other minority group, even though they continue to suffer the brunt of institutional, legal, and economic inequality.

This cuts to the core of the problem in any cultural defense of
Song of the South
that insists on seeing the movie as a color-blind celebration of a (rich) white boy’s seemingly positive friendship with a (poor) black man. Aside from being a patronizing white fantasy of racial relationships in the United States, this reading also avoids—and even reinforces through its evasion of the subject—a deep ignorance about the larger cultural, economic, and racial hierarchies being unquestionably perpetuated by a film with no grounding in historical fact. These post-racial attitudes support the hegemonic position of whiteness precisely by denying that racial differences exist. Just because Johnny doesn’t see Uncle Remus as a black person doesn’t mean that the latter ceases to live on a plantation, or ceases to be subservient to whites and their needs, or ceases to have no identity or opportunity outside white culture. At best, it represents what I have elsewhere called “evasive whiteness.”
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What are perhaps well-intended attempts at avoiding the often-incendiary topic of race nonetheless produce the side effect of maintaining the existing state of racial affairs. If society does not have to recognize the rights of minorities, then it also does not have to acknowledge the presence (and power) of the white majority.

STRATEGIC REMEDIATION AND TRANSMEDIA DISSIPATION

Such complicated racial climates play a key role in informing how a controversial text is historically received. The resiliency of such racist imagery is also dependent on the complex relationship between industry producers, paratexts, and media audiences. Hollywood’s racist past haunts the cultural politics of modern convergence media. “Convergence,” Henry Jenkins defined in
Convergence Culture
, refers broadly to “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation
between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”
³³
As a conceptual model, convergence emphasizes two historically interlocking influences regarding the analysis of media—the industry that produced the text(s) and the audiences who consume, interpret, resist, or casually notice them. Studies in convergence today see both sites of meaning production as increasingly intertwined and even interdependent. Thus studies in convergence have focused largely on contemporary issues, since technological developments in new media have both expanded, and streamlined, the ways that consumers and media institutions can directly interact. “Everything about the structure of the modern entertainment industry,” Jenkins writes, “was designed with this single idea in mind—the construction and enhancement of entertainment franchises” across multiple media platforms and ancillary markets.
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I see the various meanings attached to
Song of the South
and its para-texts through the years as grounded in a longer history of convergence. My research works through two interrelated concepts:
strategic remediation
and
transmedia dissipation
. As I will show, both offer theoretical frameworks for convergence that are more ambivalent. The former, strategic remediation, focuses on how companies often have had an active investment in
what
becomes remediated. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin defined “remediation” as a process whereby newer media re-represent and re-produce older media, and vice versa. Grusin and Bolter discuss how emergent media such as the Internet, digital photography, and video games fit within a history of media studies that goes back to television’s recycling of film, film’s adapting of literature, and so forth. In the age of convergence, newer media today are neither ahistorical nor unique to our current historical moment. Moreover, different media remain in tension with one another, regardless of which form they assume. “The new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized,” write Grusin and Bolter. “The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways.”
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Content migrates from platform to platform as various media appropriate and rearrange preexisting forms, while older media can in turn remediate newer ones (such as a short story about going to the movies, or a film about the Internet, and so forth). What results is a detailed web of remediation that stretches across the history of modern media
formations
and practices. And there remains the need for a closer look at the cultural implications of this otherwise-standard industrial and aesthetic practice.

Remediation is never a politically or culturally neutral act, any more than it is a purely aesthetic one. Any number of reasons influence why a major corporation repurposes older intellectual property the way that it does (or doesn’t). For instance, Disney found numerous profitable avenues for recycling
Song of the South
in ways that rarely ever recirculated the film uncritically, whether as a television episode, children’s book, or theme park ride. Instead, they strategically remediate only the least offensive parts of
Song of the South
for further profit, such as the recent pop star Miley Cyrus (aka “Hannah Montana”) doing a seemingly innocuous cover of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” The company, both embracing and resisting its valuable but problematic property, carefully reused selective parts of the film in other media platforms. The result is transmedia dissipation, where intellectual property diffuses across the dispersed texts of media convergence culture. Over the course of several decades, Disney’s corporate strategy scattered
Song of the South
in fragments as much as it expanded the film’s narrative universe.

The persistence of such images across platform transitions is a point often less examined by new media scholars and critical race theorists. The former’s focus on being technologically timely can create the effect of ahistoricism. Meanwhile, the latter offer detailed critiques of problematic texts and moments of reception, but they can miss a film’s resiliency through both remediation and recirculation. Since nostalgia is such a dominant feature in remediation, racist images from the past will often follow. Svetlana Boym noted that nostalgia “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”
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The comfort of appealing to the past, she argues, naturalizes the volatility of technological change in modern society. At the heart of shifts in newer media platforms, ironically, are often nostalgic appeals back to older existing properties, even racist ones, for a sense of aesthetic reassurance and creative stability within the new medium’s unfamiliarity. For example,
Amos ’n’ Andy
was a popular 1920s radio show featuring two laughably incompetent black characters (voiced by white men), who provided comic relief to large, white and black audiences. It reinforced the “coon” stereotype of African Americans as lazy and impossibly stupid. Yet, despite its notorious status, the program endured for decades through different media. The radio program’s popularity was so widespread that it culminated in a 1930 feature-length film,
Check and
Double
Check
, which featured the white performers appearing in black-face. The program ran well into the 1950s, during which time it also spun off into a short-lived television show. While activist protests forced this new televisual version off the air after only a few seasons, episodes continued to run in syndication well into the 1960s.
Amos ’n’ Andy
was the rule, not the exception, for representations of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Its resilience throughout the years and across several different media platforms testified to the racist ideologies within the audiences who supported it. But just as important, this survival spoke to the reassuring durability of old stereotypes during the upheaval of new technologies and new historical eras.