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'All was to play for'
Book Review of:
Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde - London and New York: Verso, 2002, hard cover, viii + 344 pp., ISBN 1-85984-612-2
by Christopher Rollason, Ph.D., Metz, France
In academic milieux, the term 'Mickey Mouse course' is no doubt still in circulation as a synonym for an unacceptably 'easy', undemanding non-course, typically in the humanities or the social sciences. Some at least, then, will be surprised when confronted on the dust-jacket of Esther Leslie's handsome new volume with the figure of no less radical a film-maker than Sergei Eisenstein shaking hands with Walt Disney's populist cartoon creation. This is no montage, but an incident that actually occurred in Hollywood in 1930. One-third into the book, the reader also learns that Walter Benjamin not only mentioned Mickey Mouse in the first (1935) version of the famous essay best-known in English as 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', but also left among his papers a whole bundle of press-cuttings and notes on the very same rodent. With such intellectual heavyweights firmly on board, it is clear that Leslie, a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London and an accredited Benjamin expert, is asking the reader to take Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney with all seriousness.
Indeed, it emerges from Leslie's pages that, contrary to what stereotypes might suggest, Disney's work of the 20s and 30s actually had an excellent press among the intellectual and cultural luminaries of the time. Her dense, multi-layered analysis reveals how Disney was admired at a distance, and, indeed, courted in person, not only by Eisenstein but by other avant-garde figures such as Igor Stravinsky and Leni Riefensthal, and how his work was dissected and pored over by a host of cultural commentators (even if some, like Theodor Adorno, were less mouse-friendly than Benjamin).
Her thesis is that Disney's earlier work, in the first, silent animated cartoons (Mickey Mouse and others such as 'Skeleton Dance'), through even to some aspects of the 1940 extravaganza 'Fantasia', has formally and structurally radical characteristics that in many ways align it with the contemporaneous experimental productions of the high-cultural avant-garde; but that, alas, this radical promise was betrayed in the later Disney films, which, in a tendency starting with 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' in 1937 and 'Pinocchio' in 1940, and ever more accentuated with each succeeding feature, played it safe by converting animation into an unchallengingly naturalist and illusionist form. This assimilation of a potentially subversive form to conservative cultural norms culminated, she believes, in the creation of the first Disneyland theme park, at Anaheim (California) in 1955 - since which moment, a neo-conservative Disney corporation has never looked back - or, as our author would no doubt put it, never looked forward.
For Esther Leslie, then, the early Mickey Mouse shorts are to be considered significant cultural productions alongside the visual art of Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee or Marcel Duchamp, the music of Igor Stravinsky or Arnold Schoenberg, or the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein or Charlie Chaplin (the last-named, at least, being a case of an artist the reception of whose work has long straddled the high/popular cultural divide); while what she sees as the Disney studio's later inexorable artistic decline would then become a classic example of how radical tendencies in popular art end up cannibalised and neutralised by the dominant economic system.
Her position, substantiated through close argument and carefully accumulated detail and quotation, constitutes in theoretical terms an interrogation of the notion of an absolute divide between high and mass culture. In certain periods of political and cultural ferment, she argues, new forms appear that question that divide to the point of dissolving it. Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, while 'modernist theorists and artists were fascinated by cartoons' (v), the 'relationship between intellectuals and popular culture was **productive** in the sense that both intellectuals and mass culture producers recognised, in some way, that all was to play for, that transformation was a virtue, a motive and a motif, that dissolution of form, including the form of the mass itself, was on the social agenda' (vi-vii). She approvingly quotes Walter Benjamin's positive response (from 'Erfahrung und Armut' ['Experience and Poverty'], an essay of 1933) to the dissolution of form in early Mickey Mouse: 'The existence of Mickey Mouse is just such a dream of today's people. His existence is full of miracles, which not only outdo technical wonders, but make fun of them too a redemptive existence appears' (85-86). Unfortunately, Leslie argues, this 'redemptive' dimension of the formal anarchy of the first Disney cartoons was progressively squeezed out of the studios' later products, giving way to an increasingly safe, unthreatening, three-dimensional illusionism. She believes that 'where animation finds its own form, and not a borrowed form, when it concedes flatness not the fakery of depth', it can operate as an authentically radical popular art-mode (199): 'The function of cartoons is to mock photographable reality. Minnie Mouse uses her bloomers as a parachute; a skeleton uses a thighbone to play a ribcage as a xylophone' (202). Conversely, though, she sees the later Disney as a disaster: with the triumph of the 'ideology of naturalism, faithfulness to appearance', it becomes impossible to use cartoons 'to imagine the world - that is, ourselves, from the perspective of a future, liberated condition' (300). Animation, a once-revolutionary form that had burst on the scene as a manifestation of anarchic popular creativity, had, by the end of the Second World War, become just another means of perpetuating the political and cultural status quo.
Leslie's theory of the cartoon form is, then, essentially a theory of decline. However, it is clear enough that her book's tutelary genius is not Eisenstein or Chaplin or, indeed, Disney himself. It is, rather, Walter Benjamin, and, as we might expect, the two paradoxical sides of Benjamin's thought - the redemptive as well as the catastrophic - are both present. If for Leslie the decline of animated film is a counter-insurrectionary catastrophe, the alternative, redemptive dimension is still present across her text. The sense of interrelation, the illuminative vision that allows hidden connections to flare up unexpectedly, the commitment to bridge-building between high and popular culture, between the consecrated artefact and the discarded fragment - in short, the peculiar methodology that Benjamin made his own in The Arcades Project: all of this pervades Esther Leslie's pages, as her argument weaves from Stravinsky to Riefensthal, from Klee to Freud, from Goethe's theory of colour back to Mickey and Minnie, and captures the urgency of a time when 'all was to play for'. It is that utopian sense of the liberating force of connection and interrelation that shines forth, beneath the presiding spirit of Walter Benjamin, from the reading of this book. If for Benjamin the arcades of Paris lay at the heart of the Janus-faced collective dream of the nineteenth century, alienating and liberating at the same time, then for Esther Leslie and her attentive readers the early animated cartoons populate the collective dream-landscape of the twentieth century, and may yet have a redemptive message for the twenty-first.