I know many know about this book and its been out for a few weeks, but its made front page news again. What an interesting review......
On MSN'S Homepage this morning:
If you’ve ever hankered for the real lowdown on Mickey Mouse’s creator and alter ego—it’s worth the hankering, since he was one of America’s most influential mythographers—Neal Gabler’s “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” has it, sort of. Don’t expect to feel, at last, that you know the man: nobody did. Still, its 800-odd pages (including more than 150 pages of notes) nudge at the limits of the knowable, or at least of the absorbable.
Everybody suspects Disney wasn’t a guy you’d want to work for or marry, and Gabler’s got the goods on Uncle Walt’s abusive relationship with his employees, his neglected wife and his right-wing politics. Yet Disney wasn’t as colorful a freak as he was rumored to be: not alcoholic, not adulterous, not frozen after death. Gabler, in one of his few flaky comments, argues that this last rumor suggests a subliminal “public unwillingness to let go of him, even to the point of mythologizing him as an immortal ...” Really? By the time he died (1966, lung cancer), Walt Disney had become a punch line for people raised among his coercively upbeat and calculatedly heartwarming creations; the name now suggested totalitarian kitsch. So of course the man himself had to be a grotesque.
And if you’re jaded enough to hanker for some metapleasures along with facts and analysis? Then you’ll have the cruel fun of watching a writer subvert what’s basically a thorough, judicious and illuminating book by means of the writing itself. Gabler, author of the best-selling “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” buries sharp insights under a sludge of clichés and barbarisms. For him, “enthused” is both an adjective and a synonym for “said.” At one point, a film executive “beams” something or other in a complimentary telegram; at another, Disney himself “bubbles” something or other to a reporter. But Gabler’s worst choice of words is a single one in his subtitle. Shouldn’t it be “The Triumph of an American Imagination”?
Even if you grant that imagination has a nationality, why should Walt Disney’s imagination be more essentially American than Jefferson’s, Emerson’s, Faulkner’s, Orson Welles’s, Francis Ford Coppola’s or Toni Morrison’s? Since in the book, Gabler clearly points out the limitations of Disney’s vision—in Disneyland, arguably its truest expression, idyllic, whites-only small-town life somehow leads straight to the space program—that subtitle seems no more than slipshod orotundity, meant to puff up the book’s importance. Still, it suggests that Gabler is placing Disney’s sensibility at the heart of all American experience—a silly notion that the book itself is too smart to advance. Gabler gives equal weight to Disney’s critics and admirers, and never puts his thumb on the scale. The most he argues is that Disney was a hugely important figure, and that “understanding him may ... enable one to understand the power of popular culture in shaping the national consciousness ... and the evolution of the American imagination in the twentieth century.” Except for the odd idea that hundreds of millions of people all share some cacophonous “consciousness,” who’d fight him on that?
Disney was Horatio Alger with a damaged spirit and no head for business. His older brother and partner, Roy, tried to keep that side of the enterprise together while Walt ran them into debt over and over with his ever more intense esthetic ambition and the sort of perfectionism that, at one point in the making of “Sleeping Beauty,” had his browbeaten staff completing animation at a rate of one second of screen time per month. Walt repaid the harried, loyal Roy with contempt. At a meeting during “Fantasia,” Roy asked if they could put in some music that “just the ordinary guy like me can like,” Walt kicked him out of the room and told him to “go back down and keep the books.” Why would Roy put up with such abuse—and why would Walt inflict it? Probably because they were raised by a cold, rigid, judgmental father, who ended up hating his sons for their success. When the old man died, Walt didn’t go to the funeral—and it’s one of the few anecdotes in the book where you admire the guy’s character, and not just his single-mindedness.
Disney’s very early animations—the original Mickey Mouse cartoons, for instance—had an anarchic, almost defiant edge, which he soon gentled down and confined to cute antics by, say, the dwarfs in “Snow White” (1937), his first animated feature.
After World War II—during which he mostly made training and propaganda films for the military—Disney deliberately sold out. The laborious, expensive “Pinocchio” (1939), arguably his best film, had lost money. And after “Fantasia” (1940), his high/low magnum opus, the Disney studio was $3 million in debt. (There went a planned collaboration with Salvador Dali.) So Disney began taking money-saving short cuts in the animation process, adopted a flatter, more minimal and modernist style, and surrendered unconditionally to his perennial tendency to pander to the audience with the cutesy-poo and the sentimental. “We’re making corn,” he told one employee. “Let’s make it the best we possibly can. We’re trying to please people.”
Naturally, he lost interest, let the studio crank out the product and fell into a depression—one symptom was his retreat into obsession with his model railroads—and never really recovered until he became an avuncular (sorry, but there’s no other word) TV star with his programs—all the same, really, but with ever-changing names: “Disneyland,” “Walt Disney Presents,” “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” These were synergistic promotional devices for his other TV shows (“Zorro,” “The Mickey Mouse Club”) and especially, as the original name suggests, for Disneyland—the amusement park as installation art, and a three-dimensional, almost life-sized tour of Disney’s obsessions. He patterned its Main Street after the favorite among his several hometowns, Marceline, Mo.; its castle suggested both his love of fairy tales and his not-so-splendid isolation; its Frontierland a stylized version of America’s history as a patriotic small-town guy might see it; its Tomorrowland a vision of the eerily orderly and sanitary lifeless future we could count on if we’d follow such techno-demigods as the recyled Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun. Von Braun collaborated on a cheerleading 1955 Disney miniseries called “Man in Space,” which helped build a consensus for NASA’s subsequent adventures.
Gabler is particularly smart on Disneyland. It had “no ambiguity, no contradictions and no dissonance ... The cleanliness, the efficiency with which crowds were queued up to wait for attractions ... all contributed to a sense of absolute well-being ... At Disneyland the guests were part of the overall atmosphere of happiness, and they reveled in their own manipulation because it was so well executed, because it was comfortable and reassuring, and perhaps most of all, because it was so empowering to know that someone could actually have achieved this.” He’s describing totalitarianism lite, where people actually enjoy being lined up and manipulated and gladly settle for a vicarious sense of power and autonomy. Well, it’s certainly one sector of America’s supposed imagination, and you see a lot of this vision being realized these days, from airports to fast-food restaurants. It’s good to know that Gabler, no matter what he seems to imply, isn’t lining up too.
On MSN'S Homepage this morning:
If you’ve ever hankered for the real lowdown on Mickey Mouse’s creator and alter ego—it’s worth the hankering, since he was one of America’s most influential mythographers—Neal Gabler’s “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” has it, sort of. Don’t expect to feel, at last, that you know the man: nobody did. Still, its 800-odd pages (including more than 150 pages of notes) nudge at the limits of the knowable, or at least of the absorbable.
Everybody suspects Disney wasn’t a guy you’d want to work for or marry, and Gabler’s got the goods on Uncle Walt’s abusive relationship with his employees, his neglected wife and his right-wing politics. Yet Disney wasn’t as colorful a freak as he was rumored to be: not alcoholic, not adulterous, not frozen after death. Gabler, in one of his few flaky comments, argues that this last rumor suggests a subliminal “public unwillingness to let go of him, even to the point of mythologizing him as an immortal ...” Really? By the time he died (1966, lung cancer), Walt Disney had become a punch line for people raised among his coercively upbeat and calculatedly heartwarming creations; the name now suggested totalitarian kitsch. So of course the man himself had to be a grotesque.
And if you’re jaded enough to hanker for some metapleasures along with facts and analysis? Then you’ll have the cruel fun of watching a writer subvert what’s basically a thorough, judicious and illuminating book by means of the writing itself. Gabler, author of the best-selling “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” buries sharp insights under a sludge of clichés and barbarisms. For him, “enthused” is both an adjective and a synonym for “said.” At one point, a film executive “beams” something or other in a complimentary telegram; at another, Disney himself “bubbles” something or other to a reporter. But Gabler’s worst choice of words is a single one in his subtitle. Shouldn’t it be “The Triumph of an American Imagination”?
Even if you grant that imagination has a nationality, why should Walt Disney’s imagination be more essentially American than Jefferson’s, Emerson’s, Faulkner’s, Orson Welles’s, Francis Ford Coppola’s or Toni Morrison’s? Since in the book, Gabler clearly points out the limitations of Disney’s vision—in Disneyland, arguably its truest expression, idyllic, whites-only small-town life somehow leads straight to the space program—that subtitle seems no more than slipshod orotundity, meant to puff up the book’s importance. Still, it suggests that Gabler is placing Disney’s sensibility at the heart of all American experience—a silly notion that the book itself is too smart to advance. Gabler gives equal weight to Disney’s critics and admirers, and never puts his thumb on the scale. The most he argues is that Disney was a hugely important figure, and that “understanding him may ... enable one to understand the power of popular culture in shaping the national consciousness ... and the evolution of the American imagination in the twentieth century.” Except for the odd idea that hundreds of millions of people all share some cacophonous “consciousness,” who’d fight him on that?
Disney was Horatio Alger with a damaged spirit and no head for business. His older brother and partner, Roy, tried to keep that side of the enterprise together while Walt ran them into debt over and over with his ever more intense esthetic ambition and the sort of perfectionism that, at one point in the making of “Sleeping Beauty,” had his browbeaten staff completing animation at a rate of one second of screen time per month. Walt repaid the harried, loyal Roy with contempt. At a meeting during “Fantasia,” Roy asked if they could put in some music that “just the ordinary guy like me can like,” Walt kicked him out of the room and told him to “go back down and keep the books.” Why would Roy put up with such abuse—and why would Walt inflict it? Probably because they were raised by a cold, rigid, judgmental father, who ended up hating his sons for their success. When the old man died, Walt didn’t go to the funeral—and it’s one of the few anecdotes in the book where you admire the guy’s character, and not just his single-mindedness.
Disney’s very early animations—the original Mickey Mouse cartoons, for instance—had an anarchic, almost defiant edge, which he soon gentled down and confined to cute antics by, say, the dwarfs in “Snow White” (1937), his first animated feature.
After World War II—during which he mostly made training and propaganda films for the military—Disney deliberately sold out. The laborious, expensive “Pinocchio” (1939), arguably his best film, had lost money. And after “Fantasia” (1940), his high/low magnum opus, the Disney studio was $3 million in debt. (There went a planned collaboration with Salvador Dali.) So Disney began taking money-saving short cuts in the animation process, adopted a flatter, more minimal and modernist style, and surrendered unconditionally to his perennial tendency to pander to the audience with the cutesy-poo and the sentimental. “We’re making corn,” he told one employee. “Let’s make it the best we possibly can. We’re trying to please people.”
Naturally, he lost interest, let the studio crank out the product and fell into a depression—one symptom was his retreat into obsession with his model railroads—and never really recovered until he became an avuncular (sorry, but there’s no other word) TV star with his programs—all the same, really, but with ever-changing names: “Disneyland,” “Walt Disney Presents,” “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” These were synergistic promotional devices for his other TV shows (“Zorro,” “The Mickey Mouse Club”) and especially, as the original name suggests, for Disneyland—the amusement park as installation art, and a three-dimensional, almost life-sized tour of Disney’s obsessions. He patterned its Main Street after the favorite among his several hometowns, Marceline, Mo.; its castle suggested both his love of fairy tales and his not-so-splendid isolation; its Frontierland a stylized version of America’s history as a patriotic small-town guy might see it; its Tomorrowland a vision of the eerily orderly and sanitary lifeless future we could count on if we’d follow such techno-demigods as the recyled Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun. Von Braun collaborated on a cheerleading 1955 Disney miniseries called “Man in Space,” which helped build a consensus for NASA’s subsequent adventures.
Gabler is particularly smart on Disneyland. It had “no ambiguity, no contradictions and no dissonance ... The cleanliness, the efficiency with which crowds were queued up to wait for attractions ... all contributed to a sense of absolute well-being ... At Disneyland the guests were part of the overall atmosphere of happiness, and they reveled in their own manipulation because it was so well executed, because it was comfortable and reassuring, and perhaps most of all, because it was so empowering to know that someone could actually have achieved this.” He’s describing totalitarianism lite, where people actually enjoy being lined up and manipulated and gladly settle for a vicarious sense of power and autonomy. Well, it’s certainly one sector of America’s supposed imagination, and you see a lot of this vision being realized these days, from airports to fast-food restaurants. It’s good to know that Gabler, no matter what he seems to imply, isn’t lining up too.
