Disney's Most Notorious Film (8 page)

Yet, as the film began to endure past its initial shelf life, this reemergence was also met with criticism and satire.
Chapter 4
, “A Past That Never Existed:
Coonskin
, Post-racial Whiteness, and Rewriting History in the Era of Reaganism,” more closely examines the political climate underlying
Song of the South
’s sudden popularity in the new anti–civil rights era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Disney film’s sudden appeal was deeply rooted in a conservative desire to undermine the political and cultural gains made by African Americans in the preceding three decades. Exploring a range of texts from the period, this chapter documents how both critics and supporters of
Song of the South
explicitly posited its continuing theatrical success as symptomatic of a new conservatism overtaking the country. I begin with a brief discussion of Ralph Bakshi’s
Coonskin
(1974), an explicit, adult-rated satire of both
Song of the South
and the subgenre of “blaxploitation.” Though it failed to find an audience,
Coonskin
visually demonstrated a scathing cultural critique of the conservative
appeal of
Song of the South
in the 1970s. Given its antagonistic style, however, Bakshi’s film raised more questions than answers about white racial consciousness and progressive activism, issues that became more acute as the Disney film endured into the next decade.

By 1980
Song of the South
’s popularity was explicitly tied to the election of Ronald Reagan. In contrast to the post–World War II activism of the 1940s, a new generation of Disney fans defended the film passionately. Criticism from Bakshi and activist groups such as the Anti-Racism Coalition was met by stronger counter-resistance, as younger audiences who had been raised on the film itself, and on Disney’s transmediated universe, came to its defense. Following the president’s lead, this generation saw its own personal memories, and Disney’s self-built heritage as family entertainment, as a substitute for objective accounts of collective historical events. Their own fond nostalgia for
Song of the South
became more important than any institutional history of racism or racial inequality. It is during this period that we see the emergence of a more resilient form of post-racial whiteness, what I have termed an “evasive whiteness,” that reinforces racial privilege by denying the existence of any racial categories. Thus any acknowledgment of
Song of the South
’s representation of institutional racism and white racist nostalgia is rejected, reframed as itself a racist take on an otherwise color-blind children’s film. Befitting the era of Reagan,
Song of the South
’s narrative becomes reappropriated by supporters as an image of racial utopia.

On the heels of the white backlash and the conservative culture of Reaganism,
Song of the South
was a potentially rewarding but tricky property to exploit, especially since “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” had since become an integral part of the Disney brand of white, middle-class family entertainment. Since
Song of the South
presented a long-term risk to a company now under the direction of Michael Eisner, Disney began to dissociate itself from the film by the late 1980s.
Chapter 5
, “On Tar Babies and Honey Pots: Splash Mountain, ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,’ and the Transmedia Dissipation of
Song of the South
,” documents how Disney strategically remediated its problematic intellectual property into other profitable media platforms—versions of
Song of the South
that played up the affective and animated portions of the film while downplaying its most overtly racist live action content. These include everything from VHS sing-along tapes (1986) to Xbox 360’s
Kinect Disneyland Adventures
(2011). Using material from the period and from Internet discussions of the ride today, this chapter focuses in particular on the many iterations of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” itself, as well as the theme park attraction
Splash
Mountain. Disney’s ambitious thrill ride rewrote the narrative of the film by replacing the “Tar Baby,” which ensnares Brer Rabbit, with a pot of honey. This water log ride reflected a revised version of an old film that the company otherwise had no interest in continuing to rerelease. Far from unconditionally embracing its catalog of socially constructed “classics,” Disney shrewdly maximized the film’s remaining market value through the company’s ubiquitous transmedia empire, while also keeping the overtly racist full-length version locked up in the proverbial Disney vault.

The final chapter, “Reassuring Convergence: New Media, Nostalgia, and the Internet Fandom of
Song of the South
,” documents Disney fandom’s recent online behavior in support of the film. Working off Boym’s theories on modernity and nostalgia, and Jenkins’s work on contemporary fandom and participatory culture, this section considers the racial and cultural implications of
Song of the South
’s continuing presence online. As a new century began, many of the older discourses of a Reaganist, post-racial whiteness persisted, even while Disney strategically remediated the old Uncle Remus film nearly out of existence. The official absence of
Song of the South
has only created a textual vacuum in the twenty-first century, which fans of the film have filled through the newer media platform of the Internet. I document fans’ actions online, where they contest any charges of
Song of the South
’s racism, circulate partial excerpts or whole copies of the movie through YouTube, file sharing, or bootleg DVDs, and actively advocate for the film’s official rerelease on home video formats. In many ways, Disney’s decision to shelve the nearly seventy-year-old
Song of the South
has only worked to intensify its notoriety.

In the conclusion, I answer the question most often asked of me at conferences while presenting parts of my research: What do
I
personally think of
Song of the South
? Specifically, do I think Disney should rerelease the film today? This book is a historical–materialist reception study of
Song of the South
, the Disney Corporation, its various paratexts, its alternatingly critical and supportive audiences, and its richly diverse historical contexts. As such, I made an effort to set aside my own personal thoughts in favor of articulating the historical and cultural contexts that explain why certain groups saw the film the way they did, on particular media platforms, and at particular moments in time. For reasons of access and dialogue, I personally feel that Disney should make
Song of the South
available—to generate focused discussion about why it’s offensive, to defuse both fan activism and obnoxious feelings of self-
righteous
indignation, and to bring the ugly text back out into the open. I have no interest in seeing Disney validate the politics of the notoriously racist film, even if they would profit further from it. Yet as the book will show, removing the film from circulation has not ever really achieved the intended effect either. In any event, based on the film’s varied history, whatever happens will not be the final word on the subject.

One

CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY

The Disney Studios, Postwar “Thermidor,” and the Ambivalent Origins of
Song of the South

The [literary] Remus stories are a monument to the South’s ambivalence. Harris, the archetypical Southerner, sought the Negro’s love, and pretended he had received it (Remus’s grin). But he sought the Negro’s hate too (Brer Rabbit). . . . Harris’s inner split—and the South’s, and white America’s—is mirrored in the fantastic disparity between Remus’s beaming face and Brer Rabbit’s acts. And such aggressive acts increasingly emanate from the grin, along with the hamburgers, the shoeshines, the “happifyin’
” pancakes.

BERNARD WOLFE, “UNCLE REMUS AND THE MALEVOLENT RABBIT”
(1949)

Among such sources today as conservative film criticism and general fan discourses, the most often repeated popular platitude regarding the film’s racism is that Walt Disney’s
Song of the South
was from a different time, and thus must be accepted within the historical context of the 1940s. But such assertions invariably distort the complicated and ambivalent contexts of the film’s first release. In a way,
Song of the South
was
always
“of a different time”—that is, it was anachronistic even when it was made. Writing at the end of the 1940s about the film and about Joel Chandler Harris’s original stories (first published in 1880), Bernard Wolfe argued that white interest in the stories of Brer Rabbit was always founded on a fundamental ambivalence.
¹
Uncle Remus reflected a fear of black anger regarding centuries of enslavement, coexisting with a need by whites to be accepted or even loved by African Americans to alleviate the guilt over that past. In the 1940s, this white ambivalence that had long accompanied Harris’s stories migrated with its cinematic adaptation. This time, however, the split between fear and love became
even
more acute for both white and black audiences—something that responses to the film at the time and over the next six decades would reflect. After World War II,
Song of the South
was immersed in a culture of ambivalence regarding racial progress in the United States. The notion that Disney’s film was just another work that reflected a “typically” racist environment is simply untrue.

Any single text reception study must begin with a detailed overview of the film itself—not a rigorous textual analysis, but an account of the complicated and contradictory contexts out of which it originally emerged. This chapter examines the ambivalent conditions of historical, technological, and ideological possibility surrounding
Song of the South
when it was first made and released in 1946. By “conditions of possibility,” I mean the various circumstances that potentially influenced both filmmakers and audiences of the time. Moreover, they also serve as a guide for scholars today attempting to map the subsequent accumulation and dissipation of ideological readings. Since films work within existing audience beliefs, it is problematic to talk of a text’s inherent a priori ideology. At the same time, as this chapter explores, a film can lay the foundation that, in the long term, helps activate, and account for, future readings. Any detailed reception history of a resilient classical Hollywood film such as
Song of the South
cannot offer a definitive linear narrative of racial progress or regression. Instead, the repetition, redundancy, and shifts in its recirculation offer only momentary, historically specific glimpses into how particular audiences saw a film whose meaning is always in flux.

This chapter begins by exploring the history of African American representation in Hollywood up to the 1940s, followed by a brief discussion of World War II’s impact on these stereotypes. Thanks to the efforts of the Office of War Information and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Hollywood moved briefly away from the plantation stereotypes that
Song of the South
would bring back. Such progress was offset by what Thomas Cripps has identified as a period of “thermidor.”
²
This refers to the conservative backlash, in which
Song of the South
had a visible presence, to the otherwise progressive wartime period. Next, this chapter examines the Disney company at this time—the early “ideological” success with
Three Little Pigs
(1933) during the Great Depression; the negotiation with scientific discourses on the American “child” (as discussed in the work of Nicholas Sammond); the economic woes experienced in the late 1930s and 1940s; and the learning experience of working extensively with live action as part of its propaganda
projects for the U.S. government (military training films,
Saludos Amigos
[1942],
Victory Through Air Power
[1943], etc.). Finally, I look briefly at
Song of the South
itself as a filmic text, an example of Disney’s early experimental work with feature-length “hybrid animation.” I hope to illuminate both its own grotesque
textual
incoherence, which reflects multiple production influences and contexts, and its
affective
potential as a colorful Hollywood musical.

My brief exploration of
Song of the South
’s various textual features here does not attempt to pin down the film’s true “meaning.” Quite the opposite, each quality complicates any simple attempt to read the film’s ideology then or now. As such, this chapter does not look at the film’s reception, as later chapters will in depth. Rather, it sorts out that which the passage of time has too easily distorted—namely, the massive web of historical, industrial, thematic, affective, and textual contexts directly related to the inception of
Song of the South
in the 1940s. This ambivalent environment laid the groundwork for often conflicting and varied responses to the film over the subsequent seven decades. At the heart of this convergence history stands an inherently conflicted and incoherent text.
Song of the South
’s reception history is not only a matter of how shrewd promotional strategies and devoted audiences both exploited and concealed a racist text across a wide range of rereleases and paratexts. It is also the story of how a classic Hollywood text lends itself to such ambiguity at the same time that it reinforces racist assumptions by virtue of its characters and setting. Thus such contradictions should not gloss over how
Song of the South
was also, as Cripps noted, an explicit product of post–World War II conservatism.

CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY AND THE DIFFICULTIES OF FILM “IDEOLOGY
”

Any account of the film’s history, and of the larger technological and cultural issues it activates, must begin by establishing a better sense of
Song of the South
’s origins. This understanding becomes muddled with the passing of decades, a fading awareness of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, and the intensification of various nostalgias—both personal and market-driven. The result today is populist defenses of the film that betray a deep distortion of the climate in which
Song of the South
was made. In
Multiculturalism and the
Mouse
, Douglas Brode recently attempted to offset decades of criticism for the film’s racial politics by insisting that
Song of the South
instead “be analyzed and understood in terms of the time in which [Disney’s] movie was made.”
³
The resulting argument is a familiar and problematic one—
Song of the South
was not any more offensive than most Hollywood films of the 1940s. It is a reassuring position, wrapped in a nostalgia that offers beneath its surface a strangely contradictory image of twentieth-century American history. Here, the past is both harmlessly naïve yet transparently racist.
Multiculturalism and the Mouse
goes further still, positing that
Song of the South
was one of many Disney films during this time that were actually highly progressive. They even anticipated, the argument goes, the subsequent 1960s civil rights movement. This overlooks how reactionary the film was in the wake of World War II and the war’s impact on Hollywood’s representation of African Americans. It also ignores how the civil rights movement began in the mid-1940s, before the film was made. If anything, the 1960s was marked by a conservative “white backlash,” as I discuss in the third chapter, as much as by racial progress. The time in which
Song of the South
was made helps us to better understand the film and its detrimental impact on racial relations in the United States, but it does not excuse the film itself.