Disney's Most Notorious Film (12 page)

Thus, for all its narrative elusiveness,
Song of the South
is marred by a fundamentally regressive sense of race relations in the United States. The anecdote of Walt’s talk with Rapf does not support the idea that Disney was particularly sensitive to the delicate issue of representing African Americans. Gabler claims, though, that Disney never “made disparaging remarks about blacks or asserted white superiority”—a claim not even supported by Gabler’s own research.
⁴⁷
Not only is
Song of the South
a movie derogatory because of its “Uncle Tomism,” it was made by people who were well aware of the stereotype, who knew others would be offended, and who clearly felt that there was nothing wrong with that. However tempting it may be to see Johnny and Uncle Remus’s relationship as warm and positive, it cannot be overstated just how problematic some white attitudes toward African Americans were at the time
Song of the South
was made. According to the reporter Hilda See in 1954, it was “a matter of printed record but that for the insistence of Walt Disney James Baskett would not have been cast as ‘Uncle Remus’ in ‘Song of the South.’ It is well known that some of his official advisors were against having a Negro in the part. However Disney is said to have held out to the end.”
⁴⁸
It is not impossible that a role in a major Hollywood film in
the
post–World War II era could have been played unironically in black-face (especially when radio’s
Amos ’n’ Andy
protagonists were still being voiced by white men). As we have seen, the advances in racial representation achieved during World War II did not necessarily extend beyond wartime. And, as the next chapter shows, neither white nor black communities had consistent attitudes toward
Song of the South
, resulting in a convoluted environment out of and into which the film emerged.

People resisted the project even before it hit theaters. The studio did send the script out to African American activist groups for critique, but only after controversy had begun to develop.
⁴⁹
But it is unclear if the studio paid any attention to the feedback it received. Walt himself did not believe that the project offended African Americans. Instead, he was convinced that any controversy was the result of Communist agitation, which he had resented since the 1941 strike. He also believed it was the bitter retribution of the actor/writer Clarence Muse, whom Disney claimed was retaliating for not being offered the Uncle Remus part.
⁵⁰
Muse had earlier been affiliated with more progressive, if still problematic, films about race, appearing in
So Red the Rose
(1934) and cowriting
Way Down South
(1939). Disney may have rejected Muse (along with Robeson) for that reason.

AFFECTIVE FRAGMENTS

Despite its historical place as a thermidorian post–World War II film, then, the production of
Song of the South
was fundamentally incoherent, resulting in the inherent
potential
to affect conflicting responses. Richard Dyer’s work is instructive here, especially his discussion of the “nonrepresentational” signs in classical Hollywood cinema—particularly in musicals. These films concealed and complicated the reception of default conservative ideological assumptions about race, class, and gender through such cinematic devices as music, movement, and color. While denying the presence of real conflict, Dyer argues, musicals work to accommodate audiences’ desire for a more utopian arrangement of life’s cultural and economic struggles. This “utopian sensibility,” he writes, “has to take off from the real experiences of the audiences.”
⁵¹
The sets, colors, and sounds for audiences did not undermine the authentic feelings of reassurance that such artificiality often generated. The surreality and absurdity of what they saw on the screen, in other words, does not reflect the real emotions of escape and hope they may
feel
. Moreover,
such affective power—through nonrepresentational signs unlinked to the image itself—can run counter to the film’s overt narrative.

Song of the South
’s “utopian sensibility” works in similarly complicated ways. Focusing on affect, Catherine Gunther Kodat recently argued that
Song of the South
’s popularity cannot be explained only by its activation of existing racist attitudes in white audiences. She uses contemporary events in the late 1940s—such as President Truman’s biracial committee on civil rights (1946), Jackie Robinson’s major league baseball debut (1947), and the desegregation of the military (1948)—to suggest that
Song of the South
did not have a negative impact on race relations when it was first released. She argues instead that, while deeply racist itself, the film could operate as “a vague and flickering precursor of a shift in the racial attitudes of white Americans over the course of the Cold War years, a shift that led large numbers of white Americans to make common cause with African Americans in the fight to end racial injustice.”
⁵²
She focuses on the affective cultural work that
Song of the South
performed on white audiences, making them
feel
good about race relations (while acknowledging how African Americans did not necessarily feel the same way). Dyer and Kodat’s respective work highlights how audiences do not necessarily respond to, or identify directly with, surrealistic musical spaces or ideological indoctrination. They often connect with a film’s affect, which itself becomes increasingly complicated as nostalgia develops over subsequent decades.

Through the ambiguity of reconciliatory myths,
Song of the South
contains enough thematic and ideological uncertainty to lend itself to progressive (albeit misguided) readings. This is especially acute when questions of affect and memory are raised. Audiences do not necessarily think in terms of contexts and narrative structures, but often in fragments. In
The Remembered Film
, Victor Burgin discusses how audiences recall less and less of a film’s narrative as time passes from the initial viewing. “The more the film is distanced in memory, the more the binding effect of the narrative is loosened,” he writes. “The sequence breaks apart. The fragments go adrift and enter into new combinations, more or less transitory.”
⁵³
Even right after a first viewing, memories of a film are focused more on excerpts and particular moments than on the cohesive whole. For instance, just because the narrative of
Song of the South
supports racist attitudes doesn’t prevent audiences from remembering—or picking out—fragments that might have a separate meaning. Johnny’s deeply affective one-on-one bond with Uncle Remus reduces the film’s racial relations to a personal melodrama. It is also one example of a fragment
that comes to stand in for the whole. The music’s powerful affect—emphasizing “wonderful days” and “laughing places”—also suggests how audiences may respond more to isolated parts. Certainly the radio and record recirculation of this music assists the process of fragmentation.

Johnny’s parents (Ruth Warrick and Erik Rolf) are headed for a separation, as his father prepares to return to Atlanta. Fans and critics of the film often debate his vague role as a possible liberal activist.

Another important, and ambiguous, narrative development in
Song of the South
is the role of Johnny’s father, who leaves early in the film. This activates a discourse of divorce from the child’s point of view. Uncle Remus essentially replaces the father’s role until he returns. Some fans recently read the father’s absence as an inherently
progressive
aspect of the film. For example, the author and journalist Bill Vaughn wrote that “since the movie was set during Reconstruction it can be assumed that John Sr. was enraging reactionary Georgians by taking the forward-thinking position on rebuilding Dixie’s economy. (His character was probably based on the editor of the
Atlanta Constitution
, Henry Grady, who advocated a ‘New South’ with big Yankee-like cities and factories replacing the plantation system.)”
⁵⁴

Johnny’s father, by this reading, is a liberal activist who goes to Atlanta in the beginning of the film because he is a champion of African American rights. This reading is reinforced by the fact that the father in the film is supposedly the child from the original literary stories. It would
stand
to reason that the father might grow up to be sympathetic to African American causes. Yet to argue as much with any degree of certainty is problematic. Any such explicit narrative developments on that note are missing from the story.
Song of the South
itself does not offer such a “forward-thinking position” regarding the roles of African Americans in the economy. In the meantime,
Song of the South
confines the film’s most prominent African American, Uncle Remus, to a cabin behind the mansion. Almost every other African American is working happily either in the kitchen or out in the cotton fields—not exactly a progressive representation. I mean less to discount readings such as Vaughn’s than to suggest that such progressive interpretations of
Song of the South
are, at best, arbitrary. They are founded on selected fragments, utopian affective potential, and the film’s fundamental narrative ambiguity.

AGGRESSIVE AMBIGUITY

Although destined to offend many, and ultimately disappointing at the box office,
Song of the South
was hardly a bad
business
idea. Not only was the mixed-genre style more cost-efficient to produce, but feature-length films generated greater revenue than did animated shorts.
⁵⁵
This encouraged the studio to find creative ways to effectively funnel short subject cartoons into feature-length formats. Moreover, Walt himself could (as with the construction of Disneyland the following decade) reach into his own nostalgia for the Uncle Remus stories he had heard as a child. This would potentially explain why Johnny is so prominent and sympathetic a character, especially compared to the white adults. In theory,
Song of the South
could save on production costs, tap into the market created by
Gone with the Wind
’s success and by the cultural mood of thermidor, and create new types of family-friendly products for the company to promote. Yet what might get lost today, bracketing the racial implications of the film, was that such a low-cost aesthetic union between populist cinematic melodrama of the time and Disney’s own existing family brand created a formally and thematically uneven film.

Understanding the reception history of
Song of the South
begins with the economic, cultural, and textual awareness that the film itself is in many ways
aggressively ambiguous
. It is
not
innocent or inoffensive, but gives audiences so inclined just enough information to believe that it can be read sympathetically. Yet all these factors would shift and complicate
in the coming years as the film developed a greater illusion of cohesiveness through recirculation and nostalgia. Despite its own textual incoherence, the long-term reception of
Song of the South
is centered first and foremost on—as Ray said of the classical Hollywood style—“the repetitive elaborations that it required to become convincing.” Many audiences in the 1970s, 1980s, and even today still do not see the problems of racial representation that were obvious to so many in the 1940s, white and black. Continual theatrical reissue and transmedia repurposing eventually made the incoherent
Song of the South
“convincing” as a representation of race relations. Thermidor was of a different time. It is no longer a condition of possibility when looking at
Song of the South
today, other than for the historian trying to excavate the past.

Two

“PUT DOWN THE MINT JULEP, MR. DISNEY”

Postwar Racial Consciousness and Disney’s Critical Legacy in the 1946 Reception of
Song of the South

The picture, “Song of the South,” appears to give different people extremely different impressions.

R. E. BOWLES, LETTER TO EDITOR, WASHINGTON POST
,
DECEMBER
31, 1946

R. E. Bowles noted in a 1946 letter to the
Post
that
Song of the South
’s debut was generating heated responses in the pages of numerous newspapers. Despite the film’s own claims to “simple truths,”
Song of the South
, he or she wrote, was generating a wide range of critical reactions to its theatrical debut. As one of the earliest known audience responses to
Song of the South
, Bowles could not have imagined just how prescient this observation would ultimately prove. Disagreements over the film had only just begun. Yet, in one respect, Bowles’s observation was not quite accurate: the response to
Song of the South
then was primarily
negative
. While some people were less critical than were others, few were unconditionally positive. One such person was Bowles, whose enthusiastic interpretation of
Song of the South
attempted to create a space for contrarian opinions. Over subsequent decades, responses to the film would become much more complicated. Increasing nostalgic affective attachments, migration into other media formats, and changing historical contexts would further muddle its politics. Both critical perceptions and textual versions of
Song of the South
would later change. But none of this was an issue in 1946.