Disney's Most Notorious Film (6 page)

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

Nostalgic audiences play a crucial role in the survival of racist images across multiple media, a fact often marginalized within more utopian articulations of reception practices. One such conception is Jenkins’s notion of “participatory culture,” a cultural shift whereby “consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” as a result of these transmedia worlds.
Convergence Culture
presents one of the most recognized models for examining the relationship between media producers and audience behavior in an age of corporate horizontal integration and transmedia intellectual property. Working from Pierre Lévy’s theories on “collective intelligence,” Jenkins argues that the Internet, with its seemingly endless networks of blogs, forums, and forms of social media, provides an ideal platform for people with shared interests to go online and pool their accumulative knowledge of a given subject. Online communities, Jenkins believes, are “held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge.” Everyone can contribute pieces of information to the larger group and, in turn, share in the benefits of such accumulative comprehension. Collective intelligence, he writes, “refers to this ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members. What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now be able to do collectively.”
³⁷
Moreover, according to Jenkins, these online communities force media producers to stay honest in how they negotiate audience participation, for fear of organized rejection or reprisal.

Although digital participatory culture has simplified some forms of communication within various audience communities and with media
gatekeepers, it would be inaccurate to presume an equal, or even relatively democratic, power relationship between potential participants. Economic and cultural status invariably dictates which audiences can interact more easily. Meanwhile, media companies have become increasingly savvy about shaping, limiting, and controlling the relatively modest ways in which consumers can contribute. And especially with a major entertainment giant such as Disney, access and participation are often defined through purchasing power. It is difficult to accept unquestionably the idea that “the age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic, modes of reception.” Given how many platforms—literal and symbolic—each individual consumer has at her or his disposal these days, physical and intellectual isolation would seem a very real possibility. While Jenkins expresses a complicated view of these issues, he places critical approaches to convergence in a binary: critical pessimism and critical utopianism. One can choose to be either cynical or optimistic about the intentions of media conglomerates, and about the democratic potential of collective audiences. Much of
Convergence Culture
’s optimism is rooted in the belief that more media platforms will spell greater opportunities and interaction for producers and users to both expand and contest existing media content. The transmedia dispersion of content inspires a certain “epistemophilia,”
³⁸
a love for seeking out knowledge and reconnecting information that motivates fans, bloggers, and other users.

In the age of media convergence, knowledge not only expands—more often it
dissipates
, becoming less and less coherent. The vastness of new media just as easily reinforces ignorance when audiences seek out like-minded folks online and settle down in ideological echo chambers. It is true, as Jenkins notes, that “knowledge becomes power in the age of media convergence,”
³⁹
but willful
ignorance
can be just as potent. The recent online behavior of
Song of the South
fans, as I document in the final chapter, is testament to such a particularly ugly subdivision of participatory culture today. Various media content—their stories, images, and cultural histories—can just as often scatter across these transmediated landscapes as a result of the collective diligence of fans and media conglomerates, especially in the case of problematic works such as
Song of the South
. Meanwhile, particular, isolated ideas can momentarily intensify during their occasional reappearances. This is not to suggest that there are narrow truths to be maintained in the history of transmediated texts. Rather, I wish to emphasize that the inner workings and ambiguities of convergence culture hide as much as they reveal—a complicated,
contradictory
process in which both media producers and audiences play a key role.
Song of the South
’s transmediated ubiquity—as both a property for Disney to carefully exploit and repurpose, and a beloved text for fans to defend—has for the moment dissipated the immense cultural and racial legacies contained within it.

Does epistemophilia, the collective drive to learn ever more and share that knowledge with others, best describe audience behavior in the age of convergence? Or does the repetition and fragmentation of transmedia worlds allow fans and media producers to simplify interests in a particular text down to only that which matters the most to them? Many
Song of the South
fans go online not to expand their understanding of the film, but rather to have their own interpretation
reaffirmed
. In the process, they align themselves with other sympathizers to shut out anyone who expands comprehension of the film’s cultural histories and racial ideologies in
unsightly
directions. Such fans may be motivated at times by a desire to know more about the film—its production history, distribution practices, and so forth. Yet they are not always open-minded toward the wealth of knowledge that the Internet provides about their beloved cult object. Which approach (collective intelligence or transmedia dissipation) is more relevant to audiences and media corporations in the age of convergence culture? They seem equally valid, but also inadequate in isolation. A renewed emphasis on
ambivalence
for the convergence scholar—that newer media present both utopian and dystopian possibilities, that audience behavior is reactionary and indifferent as often as it is progressive—is required. In either case, such an evaporation of certain narrative and thematic content across platforms has considerable cultural and political implications, the historical and cultural gaps that new media theories have thus far been reluctant to approach. What I propose is transmedia storytelling’s more frequent, ambivalent side effect—transmedia dissipation.

DISNEY’S HISTORIES OF CONVERGENCE

As a company with a trailblazing history of convergence, Disney deserves renewed attention. They maximized the processes of media convergence several decades ago, building the “Disney universe” long before it became commonplace to talk about the interaction between media industries and platforms. They were particularly apt at
crafting
what Gray recently called media’s “paratextuality,”
⁴⁰
a film or television show’s ubiquitous presence throughout a universe of ancillary material (books, records, and so forth), which were traditionally seen as doing little more than highlighting and promoting a given text’s release. Since its inception in the early decades of the twentieth century, Disney carefully exploited ancillary markets and dedicated fan bases while shrewdly reusing old material. “An intrepid entrepreneur as well as a story teller,” observes Patricia Turner, “Disney delivered much more than the stories themselves. This dimension of his influence began in the 1930s, when he signed an agreement allowing a manufacturer to inscribe Mickey Mouse’s image on a note pad. Today the mouse reigns over a battalion of Disney-spawned items.”
⁴¹
Disney understood early on the power of expanding its media reach across every possible media platform available, as a means to both expand and exploit its rich vault of entertainment stories. Most famously, in the 1950s Disney was able to parlay its library of feature-length and short subject films into an agreement with ABC for
Disneyland
(1954), a television program that also paid for the famous theme park of the same name in Southern California. The ABC show was also one of the first venues the company used to recycle its wide variety of old content for a new audience (
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
,
Seal Island
, clips from feature-length films, and so forth)—another twist on Disney’s successively selective distribution practices. “Long after many of the major studios had sold TV rights to their films,” writes Anderson, “the Disneys boasted that they still owned every film they made.”
⁴²
With the exception of low-budget live action pieces such as the
Davy Crockett
phenomenon and “Uncle” Walt’s introductions, much of the show was repurposed archival material. These parks and TV shows pushed traditional boundaries of film studies “toward a more pervasive sense of textuality,” and offer an early glimpse into histories of convergence.

In particular, the media giant’s success since the 1920s has been based on two premises that are today the cornerstones of studies in convergence: technological innovation and extensive cross-promotion among numerous texts. On one trajectory, as J. P. Telotte most recently explored, Disney long positioned itself at the cutting edge of experimentation in film technologies. The company, “in order to survive in an increasingly competitive environment,” he writes, “repeatedly had to innovate or adopt new technologies or move into new media forms.”
⁴³
This included advances in music and sound synchronization (
Steamboat Willie
, 1928), three-strip Technicolor (
Flowers and Trees
, 1932), character animation (
Three Little Pigs
, 1933), the multi-plane camera (
The Old Mill
, 1937),
theatrical
exhibition surround sound (
Fantasia
, 1940), hybrid animation (
Song of the South
, 1946), widescreen CinemaScope (
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
, 1954), television synergy (
Disneyland
, 1954), computer-generated imagery, or CGI (
TRON
, 1982), subscription cable television (Disney Channel, 1983), and computer-aided animation production (
The Rescuers
, 1990). More important, even when the newness was overstated, such as with
Steamboat Willie
or
20,000 Leagues
, the company was aggressive in promoting itself and the perceived novelty of these various new technologies and multimedia advances. While the company is viewed today largely as a media empire built on nostalgia and conservatism, at its core is an impressive, if also often accidental, history of future-oriented technological and economic innovations.

At first, Disney relied on partnerships with other companies to help spread its brand and its merchandise, since its modest revenue allowed for little ambition beyond animated films. As early as the late 1920s, the company was licensing the rights to Mickey Mouse’s likeness to a variety of businesses—a move that was largely motivated by the need for money to offset Walt’s often-reckless investments in film production. The same economic logic motivated Disney’s agreement with ABC on
Disneyland
, as well as with Golden Books and others, in the 1950s. The goal was as much to pay the theme park’s spiraling costs as to spread the company’s brand recognition. Another key early business innovation involved Disney’s partnership with Capitol Records to circulate and promote its various film soundtracks and other kid-marketed records in the 1940s. This was a time when, as Jacob Smith has documented, “children’s records experienced a remarkable surge” in general.
⁴⁴
Notable as well was their subsequent collaboration with the NBC network and RCA Television in the 1960s to exploit Disney’s desire for color broadcasts, beginning the notable run of
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
(1961). By the time Disney was dominating the television landscape, the company had become self-sustaining enough to control its own ancillary revenue streams, operating its own distributor for theatrical exhibition (Buena Vista) and for books and records (Disneyland). This emergent ubiquity planted the seed early on for a U.S. cultural environment in which Disney was now perceived as having “always” been “everywhere”—a socially constructed logic of media consumption that paid off for the company in the long run, and continues to do so.

Through these ancillary channels, retrospectively, Disney increasingly promoted its own revised studio history as a landmark in the annals of classic Hollywood, further cementing its cultural status as an American
institution.
This prominence, plus its long history of cross-promotional ambitions, paid huge dividends by the time Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg took over in the 1980s. A central goal of “Team Disney” was to further exploit revenue streams such as home video platforms (VHS) and new theme parks and attractions (Tokyo Disneyland), and increase corporate partnerships with companies such as Delta Air Lines and McDonald’s. Another key business strategy in the 1980s was to idealize Disney’s own studio history, and the larger history of classic Hollywood that images of Uncle Walt and
Fantasia
Mickey inevitably evoked. There was perhaps no bigger embodiment of this strategy than the building of Disney-MGM Studios in Florida at the end of 1980s (now called “Disney’s Hollywood Studios”). The third Orlando theme park spatialized Disney’s desire to memorialize and idealize its own history, so crucial to the company’s nostalgic appeal. It also rewrote Hollywood’s heyday as being largely defined by the presence of Disney.

Ironically, the park’s depiction of the “golden age” of Hollywood is completely inaccurate. Disney mostly struggled to stay alive through the 1940s and early 1950s—the generic time period that becomes historical pastiche as the overall mise-en-scène of Disney’s Hollywood Studios. The 1940s was not a period of prosperity, but rather one of deep financial struggles, marked in particular by the terrible labor strike in the studio and the disastrous theatrical fortunes for
Fantasia
. There is no shortage of historical irony in the fact that a grotesquely large version of the Mickey sorcerer’s hat now serves as the central image of promotion for Disney’s classic Hollywood–themed amusement park. The cap evokes memories of Walt Disney’s biggest theatrical fiasco, the movie that—had it not been for government funding of the studio during World War II—would have bankrupted the Disney company and sent most of their work to the dustbin of film history. Even at the height of its early phenomenal success in the 1930s, Disney was never more than a minor studio—a cottage industry that specialized in state-of-the-art animation, but which was dependent on other, often-bigger companies for technological innovation, for repurposing, and for distribution. They did not hold a candle, in prestige, revenue, or sheer output, to Hollywood giants such as Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, and so forth. The name change in 2008 to “Disney’s Hollywood Studios” even more explicitly rewrites history to suggest that Disney’s golden age and the classic studio system’s golden age were one and the same.