If Comcast’s takeover of the Disney Corporation goes ahead, the world’s biggest media conglomeration will be built around one of humankind’s most ancient practices. Investing animals with human characteristics is something we’ve been doing since we first applied charcoal to the walls of a cave. Ten thousand years later, as the $500-million we have just spent watching Finding Nemo suggests, we still see ourselves as animals and animals as ourselves.
However much we assert our independence from nature, our consciousness remains in its thrall. Our minds were shaped when nothing was more real to us than the fear of being eaten and the fear of not eating. Though our engagement with the world is supposed to have been governed by a detachment from the objects of our curiosity ever since the Enlightenment, our tendency to project our minds into animals, plants and inanimate objects is undiminished. Anthropomorphism is an irredeemable human characteristic.
But while there is something very old about Disney, there is, or was, something very new about it too. It welded commercial, cultural and political power in a way the world had never seen.
I remember being struck in the 1980s by the conjunction of two images: a photograph of the May Day parades in Moscow, with rockets looming over the heads of the marching soldiers, and, six weeks earlier, a photo of a St Patrick’s Day parade in New York, with giant Goofys and Donald Ducks. The St Patrick’s Day iconography seemed to me almost as sinister as the May Day manoeuvres.
Was it because Disney characters symbolised the crass and trivial aspects of American culture? Which other country, after all, constructs its national image around cartoon animals? In the ubiquity of the Disney characters we encounter hegemony represented by an infantilised mouse and an infantilised duck. I find this deeply frightening.
Today we know that the world’s favourite uncle was a wife-beating, union-busting employer of Nazi war criminals, who denounced Hollywood dissidents to the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee and made mendacious propaganda films such as Our Friend the Atom.
Disney has repeatedly been exposed for contracting its toy- and clothes-making work to sweatshops. In 1996, the year in which chief executive Michael Eisner made $565-million, the workers stitching Disney’s branded clothes in Haiti were earning as little as a dollar a day. In China today, according to the United States National Labour Committee, a factory producing Disney toys enforces 130-hour weeks, with a day off every two months. But my fear of the dominance of Disney’s magic kingdom is about more than this.
A paradox of our times is that, as Western societies age, their culture is infantilised. Just as the number of elderly people in the US and Europe begins to tip the scales against the young, youth culture is exalted as never before. And the youths we celebrate are getting younger.
There’s a simple reason for this. It is easier to get inexperienced people to part with their money (or to persuade their parents to part with their money) than to deceive the elderly. Money chases youth and culture chases money. Advertisers determine the content of TV shows and newspaper features, which in turn shape our cultural consciousness.
As Eric Schlosser has shown, it was Walt Disney who ”perfected the art of selling things to children”. He developed a vertically integrated business in which his TV programmes sold his films, and his films sold his theme parks and toys.
The Mickey Mouse Club he established in 1930 helped to pioneer a new form of brand loyalty, and to extract the names, addresses and preferences of its members. Only one company — McDonald’s — has captured children as effectively, and for the past eight years McDonald’s and Disney have enjoyed an exclusive global marketing agreement. In both cases, a hard hegemonic will is exercised through the commercialisation of ”happiness” and ”fun”. Disney’s creation and domination of the youth market represents the triumph of the empire of commerce.
So perhaps we should not be surprised to see, in that St Patrick’s Day parade and in so many other events over the past 60 years, people marching behind the mouse and the duck. ”Hollywood conquered the world,” the US critic Michael Medved told the Daily Telegraph last year, ”long before America had conquered it economically or militarily … Its films were our advance legions.”
In the 1940s the Motion Picture Export Association used to call itself ”the little State Department”. One Hollywood producer described ”the meshing of Donald Duck and diplomacy” as ”a Marshall Plan for ideas”. The US, he said, needed Hollywood more than it needed the H-bomb.
Walt Disney’s characters are sinister because they encourage us, like those marchers, to promote the hegemony of the corporations. He captured a deep stream of human consciousness, branded it and, when we were too young to understand the implications, sold it back to us.
Comcast’s hostile takeover bid suggests that the power of his company to seize our imaginations is declining. A giant media corporation may be about to become even bigger, but if the attack means that Disney is losing its ability to shape the minds of the world’s children, this is something to celebrate. — Â