This month marks the 40th anniversary of Walt Disney's death from lung cancer, a long time by most measures and an eternity for figures in the popular culture.
To a surprising degree, however, he has managed to survive in the national consciousness, not just as a corporate logo but as a kind of cultural barometer. Ask just about anyone how he or she feels about Disney and you are likely to get either a beaming tribute from those who recall him fondly and enjoy his animations and theme parks or a scowling denunciation from those who see him as the great Satan of modern mass culture.
In fact, Disney seems always to have had that effect. When he burst on the national scene as the creator of Mickey Mouse in the late 1920s, he was widely regarded as an artistic naif - young (he was only 26 at Mickey's inception), uneducated (he had only a year of high school), informal, plainspoken and unpretentious. Although Mickey made his claim on the public's heart as a winning rascal who seemed blithe to the anxieties of the Depression, intellectuals embraced him, too, much as they had embraced Charlie Chaplin a decade earlier.
Still, for all the hosannas, there was a bit of condescension in the intellectual approbation. It was Disney's naivete the intellectuals loved, his lack of affectation.
The problem with this interpretation was that the intellectuals were wrong. Disney wasn't completely without affectation or pretense, and he certainly hoped that what he was making was art. By the time he released "Fantasia" late in 1940 - combining the music of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven and others with animation - the cat was out of the bag. The reviews were generally positive, but there was now for the first time griping about Disney among the intelligentsia - not least from Igor Stravinsky, who later insisted that Disney had butchered his "Rite of Spring."
Where Stravinsky led, many soon followed. By the postwar period Disney was no longer seen as a folk artist with an infallible instinct for touching the American heart and funny bone. He was seen as a kitschmeister, mechanically, even cynically, manufacturing mass products.
In some precincts, Disney became the poster boy for cultural imperialism: the great exporter of mindless American claptrap. And yet, even as Disney's artistic reputation plummeted in some quarters during the 1950s, his popularity with the general public was, if anything, soaring - not only because of such hugely successful feature animations as "Cinderella," "Peter Pan" and "Lady and the Tramp," or the Disneyland theme park or the new live-action films, but because of Disney's role as the avuncular host of the Sunday evening television broadcast and the avatar of conservative, mainstream values.
But these elements reinforced the intellectual contempt for him, thrusting Disney into the center of a debate about the direction of postwar American culture. Were Americans to become automatons benumbed by the soothing felicities of popular culture, or were they to be tough-minded realists? What seemed most to repulse many intellectuals was the sense that Disney infantilized America by refusing to confront reality.
The theme park was castigated for its neglect of tensions. Disney encouraged Americans to inhabit an imaginative universe not unlike that of a child, where reality had been transformed into fantasy and its harm expunged.
But, just as the earlier depiction of Disney as unpretentious and unaffected was misleading, the contemporary view does some injustice to Disney by shoehorning him into categories where he doesn't really fit. As University of Texas professor Douglas Brode has pointed out in his recent book, "From Walt to Woodstock," Disney's values, especially as evinced in his films, are much more complex and even contradictory than his either his fans or his enemies admit. Rather than displaying conservative values, Disney's films challenged authority, disdained the acquisition of money, abhorred hypocrisy, promoted tolerance and celebrated rebelliousness. (Note how Davy Crockett challenges Andrew Jackson in the 1950s TV programs.) He denounced "billboard patriotism" and looked askance at organized religion. It is in Disney's odd combination of libertarianism and liberalism, optimism and cynicism, nostalgia and futurism, faith and doubt that one finds the real man and the real America he represented.
After 40 years, Walt Disney is not the best or the worst. He is both the best and the worst - not the polarizing center of cultural warfare but a portent of truce between high and low.
