Disney as Mass Deception
- Authorized excerpt from “NEGATIVE ECSTASY: The Star Trek Seductions & other Mass Deceptions” -
“Reading Disney,” Dorfman and Mattlelart noted,” is like having one’s own exploited condition rammed with honey down one’s throat.”62 They were commenting on the Disney comic then. With the escalating production of Disney films this observation has become even more true. Disney films are considerably more cleverly honeyed than the printed comics. And their honeyed audiences are massive and growing. Disney films are prime household entertainment in the vast majority of North American homes. They form an integral part of child raising and family life. They are avidly consumed by millions, who, similar to the Star Trek audiences, consider them safe and good for family life. And the consumer hunger for them seems insatiable. What is it that so pleases these consumers?
The function of the consumer is to irrationally consume. The political economy of the excessive reproduction of sameness requires a particular mode of irrationality to have people believe that in the frenetic consumption of the same mass produced commodities, lies their fulfillment. This amounts to no less than the massive and systematic construction of consciousness where thinking is directed on to the surface of issues, very much like watching the flashing panoply of disconnected images on the telecomputer screen with little or no interest in understanding what is being signified beneath the surfaces of these techno-texts of graphic incoherence. Consumership hence is also a mode of thought which corresponds to the mode of commodity production through which the ideological production of compliant thinking is also produced and unrelentingly disseminated. It is one of the dimensions of contemporary reification where regressive thinking becomes normalized. To accept the name “consumer”, to be so industrially re-named, is to regressively collude in supplanting your name and your human uniqueness to the deification of problematic consumption. Regressive thinking instills negative ecstasy. It is the honeying of perception which takes pleasure in the consumption and reproduction of questionable values.
And in Disney films some of these have been found to be, “sexism, racism, conservatism, hetero-sexism, andro-centrism, imperialism (cultural), imperialism (economic), literary vandalism, jingoism, aberrant sexuality, censorship, propaganda, paranoia, homophobia, exploitation, ecological devastation, anti-union repression, FBI collaboration, corporate raiding, stereotyping.”63
The Lion King
Those who dwell in the regions of Africa and India where there are lions do not see this animal in the imperial nomenclature as being “the king.” Animal life in the jungle is not hierarchically ordered in terms of imperial ranking. The lion is considered one of the more dangerous among other dangerous animals. But in the western imperialist imaginary, particularly the British, it is telling that one of the most dangerous of animals is deemed the “king” of the beasts. There seems to be in this choice a relation-ship between the menacing quality of dangerousness and being a king. To be a “king”, it seems, one has to be the most dangerous of all other dangers, a far from endearing quality. But this is lost to those who have been so imperialistically educated that they admire kings and kingdoms, empires and conquest. In the Disney film there is an interplay between the concept of the lion as “king” of the beasts and the lion used as a symbol of regal British imperialism. Hence The Lion King, this tale, which I will argue, is also cultural imperialism and racism as household mass entertainment.
The film is set in “Pride Rock” which is situated in Africa. It is in Africa where the myth of British royal subterfuge, cunning and envy, as well as smug correctness, take place, and it is also against Africa and Africans. The use of Africa as the rightful dwelling place, the home and domain of British imperialism, is the legitimation of British imperialism which occupied and violated and underdeveloped Africa64 for centuries. But in this film the rightful British imperial presence magically makes every thing green and fecund, and the birds and beasts are happy and contented. Tranquility pervades. This is the direct opposite to the despoilation and devastation of Africa enacted by Euro-imperial greed.
There are two principal lions in the story, the blonde lion who is the rightful and good king, and his blackmaned evil conniving brother who wants to usurp the kingdom and be king. In the Euro-supremacist hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, “black” is equated with evil while “white” (blonde?) is associated with everything good. In the history of European violation of Africa and Africans, Africa has been deemed “the dark continent,” and its peoples have been derogatively coloured “black.” In racist cultural ideation a quality of evil was imputed in this coloration of perception, and Africans were Euro-renamed “blacks,” both uncivilized and untrustworthy at the same time. And this sentiment pertaining to blackness and evil is reproduced in The Lion King. Not only are African animals appropriated in the telling of this imperial story which is colonizingly set in Africa, the “black” lion epitomizes evil. Here blackness is treacherous, and in this manner of thinking those who are deemed “black” are also suspect. Mainstream American racism is in tact here.
The evil black lion collaborates with another set of African animals, the hyaenas who are deemed so dreadful that even lions, we are asked to believe, are terrified of them. These dreaded loud chortling garrulous hyaenas turn out to have African American voices and accents, one of which is the voice of Whoopy Goldberg, a popular African American woman celebrity and actor. The greatest source of terror, this infers, comes from Africans and their diasporic progeny who have been abusively relegated to hyaenas. This is a late 20th century American Disney entertainment production. In it there seems to have been little change in the racist vilification of Africa and Africans since the unholy era of the enslavement of these peoples in self-styled freedom-loving democratic America-the-Good.
Appropriations abound in this film. Indigenous African psychic power is used by a composite African-Trinidadian carricatured court servant who blesses the young king-to-be, Simba, and is the medium through which Simba later is allowed to see the living speaking reflection of his dead father in a pool in the African countryside. The African who is not dreaded is he who serves the imperial majestic occupying order, he who brings the indigenous ancient wisdom of his people to enhance royal British wellbeing. He is the colonized African, both servant and diviner, and hence useful - unlike the garrulous demanding conniving frightening hyaenas, the demonized natives. In the end when Simba boldly does what royal intrigues celebrate, when he wages battle with his conniving treacherous uncle, the black lion, and is victorious, the land which has been drought stricken bursts into fecund growth and bloom, and all is happy that Simba, the rightful heir to the throne, is crowned the imperial one, the king. This is an unadulterated grandiose imperialist fantasy, and deception. It is similar to the story the young Simba tells of the stars one night in his wanderings outside of the imperium, Pride Rock. Stars, Simba says, quoting from his father, are what kings become when they die. They look down on the world, keeping watch to make sure all is well for everyone on earth. A cosmic imperial order informs now the entire universe.
The loyal court is happy and they sing a chorus celebrating their good fortune. But the chorus, sung by the African Jamaican, Jimmy Cliff, is also an appropriation. It is lifted from a Swahili celebratory song which is sung when the oppressor and oppression have been removed: “Acuna ma tata, everything will be alright.” Here it is used to do just the opposite. Everything will be alright for British imperial interests. And this has never translated in the history of British-European imperialism in Africa to mean any good for Africa or Africans. It is the vulgar re-writing of history in praise of cultural imperialism and racism.
This is some of what is popularly consumed in the consumption mania of the consciousness industry. The reified mind sees no problems with these issues since the reified mind is an imperialist-racist construct. The eye which is blinded by the glitter of surface meanings looks approvingly at the play of images. Whether it is aware of what is really happening, or not, it finds no cause for concern since much of what it sees it has already inculcated as the way things are.
Pocahontas
In Pocahontas the disturbing absorption of negative ecstasy has also entertainingly enchained the perceptions of millions of consumer-viewers. The film is rife with appropriations and re-appropriations and racial and historical distortions. It works to re-write a sordid historical truth as a titillating inter-racial erotic romance, and successfully detracts attention from the horrible fact that the Native child, Pocahontas, was raped by the conquering adventuring military Englishman, Captain John Smith. Conquest and rape are problematically turned into a EuroAmerican love story - with the conqueror-rapist as the celebrated hero. For despite the name of the film, which is both the appropriation and the exploitation of the historical Pocahontas, it is the story of John Smith’s forays into the land and culture of Pocahontas’s peoples, and his phallic victory over Pocahontas.
The film begins with Pocahontas seeing John Smith and his gold-hungry cohorts disembarking, with Pocahontas falling in love at first sight with the reputedly handsome Englishman. In this way John Smith’s historical stalking and preying on her is written out, and it is his victim who now pursues him - in love. She flits from precarious limb to precarious limb among the trees and cliffs to just to look at the desirable wonder who has come upon her native shore. This is the eroticization of British expansionist imperialism. The mere sight of it, viewers are asked to accept, makes the native child, caricatured in the film as a maturing young woman, swoon with erotic desire. Not only is this the white-washing of pedophilia, it is also the abusive fabrication of the native woman as a desiring body, there to accommodate Euro-imperialism. This is also the sexualizing of conquest, the reformulation of domination into an item of mutual erotic interest, where the inferior indigenous woman serves the sexual comfort of the superior Englishman who returns to his imperial fatherland in the end.
Indigenous psychic wisdom is exploited to serve the agent of imperialism. The grandmother-spirit willow tree, is used to enhance the eroticization of Pocahontas’s domination. This supposedly wise grandmother-spirit agrees with Pocahontas that the young man from her own people who is in love with her and who her father wishes her to marry, is too serious and boring, and that the dashing Englishman is the one she should rightly be in love with. This is the violation of indigenous knowledge and wisdom as well as the undermining of indigenous cultural custom. It is highly unlikely that a wise grandmother-spirit would so advise her grandchild. But this film violates historical authenticity with honeyed impunity, and it colludes with its consumer-audience against the traditions and customs of these pre-American peoples which are seen as old fashioned and in-appropriate.
In their first encounter John Smith tells the love-smitten Pocahontas that he has killed many “Indians” before, and as a sop to contemporary political correctness he replaces the slur with the word “natives.” This ploy, however, does not change Smith’s or the audience’s perception that sees Pocahontas as an “Indian” - and that he has killed “Indians” in some of his noble deeds in other places. But such is the honeying of the tale that this killer of Native Peoples, this imperialist Englishman with the blood of Native Peoples in his hand, is depicted as being loved by the Native girl for his supposed courage and bravery. This is the shattering of rationality. In-stead of retreating in horror from this murderer of peoples like herself, she is presented as embracing him against the wishes of her whole tradition and culture. This is the double violation of the historical Pocahontas. The raped child of history ends up loving her rapist who has in the past used his courage and bravery to kill people like herself.
Her father is presented as a naive and peace-loving buffoon. He welcomes the wounded John Smith even after Smith’s accomplices opened fire on his people, killing one of them. And it is all, the viewers are told, because his daughter is in love with the adventurous Englishman who it turns out was not personally involved in the shooting death. This is the sanitization of the atrocity of imperial conquest and the further violation of the First Nation peoples of the land now Euro-conqueringly named America. Consumer happiness. Negative ecstasy.
Endnotes
- See Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, International General, New York, 1984.
- Byrne and McQuillan, Deconstructing Disney, Pluto Press, London, 1999, p.1.
- For more on the underdevelopment of Africa, see Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
NEGATIVE ECSTASY: The Star Trek Seductions & other Mass Deceptions
by A.H. Itwaru, from Other Eye Books, a division of the Other Eye Cultural Collective. 160 pages, ISBN 1-896887-01-5, Price: $22.
Negative Ecstasy is available in Toronto at York University Bookstore, A Different Booklist, Book City (Annex & Bloor West Village), Pages Books & Magazines, Dec Bookstore.
CONTENTS PAGE:
Foreword 6
Amidst Towers and the Towering 9
The CN Tower 14
Image Consumption in the Production of Meaning 25
The Rock Video 37
Live Aid and Incoherence 43
Lifestyle Advertising 54
Entertainment as Enchainment and Delirium unto Death 58
The Star Trek Seductions 61
Family values? 61
Racism 68
Sexism 75
Techno-militarism 78
Disney as Mass Deception 85
The Lion King 86
Pocahontas 90
Pornographic Imagination and Industrial Eroticism 94
Eroticized Production as De-eroticization 100
Free Speech as Farce and Information as Domination 105
Unbearable Delirium as Negative Ecstasy 135
The Critique Must Continue 138
Addendum:
Of Bondage and Blindness: an Inquiry into Language and Social Control 139
Endnotes 155
A.H. Itwaru lectures in the Social Sciences at York University and in Caribbean Studies at New College, University of Toronto.
Books by A.H. Itwaru
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Mass Communication and Mass Deception
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