Disney's Most Notorious Film (7 page)

One of the main critiques often leveled at the Disney empire for decades has been its distortion of history.
⁴⁵
Disney’s romanticized view of
its
own past, as the self-appointed king of the golden age of Hollywood, is one thing. Yet more disturbing is its rewriting of American history in general. Whether it is Frontierland’s romanticizing of the American West,
Pocahontas
’s absurd representation of colonial America, or
Song of the South
’s mythologizing of the post–Civil War South, Disney has a long record of distorting the U.S. collective past in a way that troubles modern awareness of economic, gender, and racial struggles in American history. Disney’s fondness for rewriting American history, often to the benefit of white, middle-class consumers, came to a head in the 1990s, when cultural critics, historians, and political activists successfully pressured the company to abandon plans for a history-themed amusement park in Virginia, to be called “Disney’s America.” In questionable taste, this endeavor would have awkwardly mixed Disney’s own idealization and whitewashing of history with the uglier history of the surrounding areas, which feature countless institutionalized reminders of the country’s violent colonial and Civil War legacies. Aside from exploiting these tragedies for profit, Disney’s distortion of history could condition audiences to believe that its representations of the past are really “the way it was.” We see this appeal to history prominently in defenses of
Song of the South
—not only the nineteenth century inaccurately depicted in the film itself, but also in the separate history of the film’s exhibition, recirculation, and repurposing. Yet what is often referred to in this regard is not really history, but nostalgia.

FORMS OF DISNEY NOSTALGIA

Increasingly, in trying to analyze Disney’s relationship to the past, there emerges a blurry line between history and nostalgia. Nostalgia is a central component to the appeal and popularity of
Song of the South
, but it takes many different forms throughout the film’s history of recirculation. On a basic level, history is an attempt to truthfully document and represent the historical past to the best of one’s verifiable knowledge. Nostalgia, on the other hand, is a romantic idealization of the past that is more interested in the emotional needs and fantasies of the present. In her recent study on
Gone with the Wind
, Molly Haskell suggested that audiences’ investment in politically difficult texts are further complicated by a natural tendency to remember, or misremember, films in a way that privileges what people
wish
to remember about them. “How something so full of contradiction and dissonance appears
so
seamless and has proved so enduring,” she writes, “is a mystery made possible by our investment in the fantasy [the film evokes for its audience], often correcting or ‘improving’ on the book or movie.”
⁴⁶
Nostalgia is a simplifying, deeply affective attachment to a past time and place that is by its very definition an illusory utopia.

But there are many different types of nostalgia associated with
Song of the South
, which collectively suggest just how deeply nostalgic the film is. There is first the
representational
nostalgia in the film’s narrative itself—the idyllic presentation of plantation culture in the nineteenth-century U.S. South. What we see in the film is less a historically accurate portrait of the time in which it was set, and more the embodiment of white conservative nostalgia for the perception of that way of life. In 1946, audiences critically and uncritically focused on this aspect of
Song of the South
’s nostalgic impulses, because it seemed to cut to the core of the film’s problematic appeal to the return of a certain racial hierarchy.

Over time, other types of nostalgia began to enter the picture. As
Song of the South
migrated into the 1970s and beyond, a more
affective
nostalgia also emerged, which was less tied to the film’s representation of the past and more tied to audiences’ potential personal memories of the film. It is also tied to nostalgia for
Song of the South
–related ancillary materials, such as the Golden Books, which in turn deepened their affective connection to the primary film. By 1972 the film made some people nostalgic for various aspects of the 1940s and 1950s, just as today the continuing (bootleg) circulation of the film makes still others nostalgic for the 1970s and 1980s. There is a warm attachment to some aspect of their past—memories of a place, a person, or a moment—that
Song of the South
affectively triggers without being directly connected to it on a representational level. This is perhaps ultimately the most powerful form of nostalgia connected to this and many other Disney films. But we should not make the mistake of assuming that this nostalgia is automatically an idiosyncratic or natural phenomenon unique to particular individuals.

On the contrary, affective attachments to an older Disney film such as
Song of the South
are also deeply embedded in the larger form of
manufactured
nostalgia, which has been key to the company’s long-term success. Nostalgia was not always crucial to the company’s financial fortunes. In the 1930s, Disney distinguished its brand of animation through technological innovations such as three-strip Technicolor and use of the multi-plane camera. This product differentiation resulted in lifting Disney to the status of a cultural phenomenon by the time
Snow White
hit
theaters
in 1937. Since at least the 1950s, however, the company’s success has been consistently rooted in promoting nostalgia for its own products. The countless rereleases of its major feature-length films is only the most obvious example. The primary appeal of the
Disneyland
television show debuting in 1954, for instance, was not the chance to be sold on a new theme park being built in Anaheim. Rather, it was the opportunity to watch for free the old films and clips that nostalgic audiences had not seen in ten or twenty years. That was the hook to get people interested in the Disneyland theme park. With relatively mild variations, this is essentially the same business model Disney has used ever since—promote direct and indirect appeals to the company’s past in order to sell new stuff in the present. The Eisner-era Disney of the 1980s and 1990s was particularly shrewd in this regard.

Meanwhile, nostalgia also becomes important to shaping and sustaining ritualistic behaviors on the part of audiences. Whole families of Disney fans—which is also part of the company’s manufactured nostalgia—begin to emerge and reproduce, creating seemingly limitless waves of generational nostalgia, which the company can and will continue to foster and exploit. To a certain degree, fans who have felt nostalgic for
Song of the South
, and then worked through those feelings of nostalgia by re-watching the film, purchasing related official memorabilia, and so forth, are simply acting out a consumerist role the company has actively crafted for audiences in relation to countless Disney titles. And even though the film is out of official circulation now, Disney’s continuing use of parts such as “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” throughout its media empire also maintains nostalgia for the film and for the larger, Walt-era, “classic Hollywood” history of the company its memory now evokes.

The consumption practices of Disney audiences evoke a more basic distinction between
private
and
public
forms of nostalgia. Private includes one’s own personal attachment to the film, and the idiosyncratic reasons for the appeal. It can also involve a specific memory or a relationship to a particular family member that otherwise has nothing to do with Disney. On the other hand, Disney’s general promotion of its own past, and the ways it maximizes that for material and profit, is a public nostalgia not reducible to a single person or memory. Likewise, something such as
Song of the South
’s idyllic, illusory presentation of Southern history is another form of public nostalgia, as generations at different times embraced the plantation myth in Hollywood films. These are often interrelated, but not synonymous, forms of nostalgia. One can have a personal attachment to
Song of the South
that exists within a mutually
reaffirming relationship with the company’s promotion of a public, consumer-driven nostalgia. But one can also be nostalgic for the film in a way that contradicts the company’s official policies and practices. This is most prevalent, for instance, in the fan activities today where people circulate illegal versions of
Song of the South
online and through bootleg DVDs,
⁴⁷
since Disney refuses to release it officially. At the same time, any fan who insists now on having an unauthorized copy of the film just so that they can show it to their child or grandchild is still, knowingly or not, complicit in Disney’s larger strategies of manufactured nostalgia, which work to ensure a new generation of consumers. This final irony, along with their reluctance to call attention to the film, may help shed light on why Disney has been unusually lax in cracking down on copyright violations regarding
Song of the South
.

CHAPTERS

Disney’s Most Notorious Film
resists a linear history of the Disney film, instead using its habitual reappearances as focal points for layered, accumulative histories regarding transmedia properties, race relations, and participatory culture in the twentieth-century United States. I look at each moment of
Song of the South
’s interpretation and remediation in relation to what I am calling its fluid
conditions of possibility
—what any given complete or fragmented version, in various moments of reception, meant in relation to its own historical time and cultural contexts. I also include a consideration of what trajectories it then created (or creates) for future reception. In addition to analyzing various versions of
Song of the South
, my research draws heavily on periodicals, such as newspaper and magazine articles from the past, in order to articulate as complete a vision as possible of the specific historical moments in question. This means that my work often depends on the writings of columnists, critics, spokespersons, and other people in positions of power. While such critics and activists reveal a limited, even elitist, view of certain events, which risks marginalizing others, they nonetheless provide a valuable historical glimpse into particular cultural attitudes of the past. Moreover, they are balanced out, when possible, by a wider range of general audiences, who increasingly found effective venues for expression over the decades—from letters to the editor in the 1940s to Internet forums today.

The first chapter, “Conditions of Possibility: The Disney Studios,
Postwar
‘Thermidor,’ and the Ambivalent Origins of
Song of the South
,” articulates the historical conditions out of which the film originally emerged. Drawing on Neal Gabler’s archival work on Disney at the time, Thomas Cripps’s historical reading of Hollywood’s representations of African Americans, and Robert Ray’s theories on classic Hollywood ideologies, the first chapter examines the film’s ambivalent origins as the product of a struggling postwar studio (Disney) that was attempting to mix its own trademark animation and musical style with the 1930s cycle of Southern melodramas, most popularly realized in Selznick’s
Gone with the Wind
. Even after the film was made, some inside Disney doubted the wisdom of releasing a movie that would be seen as racially problematic, especially at a time when Hollywood and the U.S. federal government had made a conscious effort to empower African Americans by moving away from many of the old cinema stereotypes regarding race. But the film’s own textual negotiation of live action, animation, and an extensive musical soundtrack made
Song of the South
a problematically affective and self-contradictory text from the start. Hence I argue that the film’s inherent textual incoherence would lead to contradictory audience responses in subsequent decades.

Next, in “
‘Put Down the Mint Julep, Mr. Disney’: Postwar Racial Consciousness and Disney’s Critical Legacy in the 1946 Reception of
Song of the South
,” I closely examine 1940s periodicals, such as the
Washington Post
, the
Chicago Defender
, and the
New York Times
, to offer the first thorough historical account of the film’s harsh reception in 1946, which was shaped by not only disappointed film critics but also frustrated civil rights groups. I vehemently argue against any modern-day perception that
Song of the South
was ever “just a product of its time.” While the responses were not monolithic among any audience group,
Song of the South
was, overall, criticized at worst and dismissed at best. Film critics, such as Bosley Crowther, were disappointed on not only cultural but also aesthetic grounds, reading the partially animated
Song of the South
as a cheap imitation of what they saw as the usually innovative Disney visual style they had embraced in the 1930s and early 1940s. Cultural critics were even harsher, seeing
Song of the South
as a direct slap in the face to the emergent civil rights movement. Even general film audiences were sensitive to its offensive “Uncle Tom” representations in the immediate aftermath of U.S. racial progress and Nazi white supremacist rhetoric during World War II. Given this response,
Song of the South
was seemingly destined for the dustbin of Hollywood’s racist past by the 1950s. Yet by the early 1970s all that had shifted.

The
third chapter, “
‘Our Most Requested Movie’: Media Convergence, Black Ambivalence, and the Reconstruction of
Song of the South
,” offers a detailed historical explanation for why
Song of the South
was suddenly regarded as Disney’s “most requested” title by the 1970s. On the one hand, I discuss the decline of the civil rights movement’s institutional power, and the concurrent rise of the conservative white backlash and white flight trends, as documented by Doug McAdam. While white audiences were much more sympathetic to racial inequities right after the sobering Fascist rhetoric and actions of World War II, there was considerably less support by the 1960s. Meanwhile, Disney’s own rise institutionally was just as significant. This chapter offers a historical variation on Gray’s theory of the media paratext, and closely explores how Disney’s long history of media convergence—television shows, children’s books, musical records, and so forth—worked over subsequent decades to resuscitate
Song of the South
’s critical and cultural reputation. Many audiences, some of whom never even saw the film in theaters originally, grew up watching, listening to, and reading Disney’s version of the Brer Rabbit stories in their homes, schools, church youth groups, and so forth. This transmediated presence, throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, fundamentally altered some audiences’ general perception of the film, shifting from an anachronistic Uncle Tom Hollywood melodrama to the socially constructed perception of its status as a “beloved” Disney family institution. Thus, by the time it reappeared in 1972, especially on the heels of the white backlash,
Song of the South
was suddenly Disney’s biggest box office rerelease to that point.