Disney's Most Notorious Film (29 page)

Yet this was also a Reagan “coalition” paradoxically centered on an individualism rooted in the substitution of positive personal memories for the uglier parts of history. Combs argued that Reagan’s political identity was structured around the belief “that only the personal and not the political past was relevant to the present and offered himself as a personal paragon who has forgotten or denied the all-too-real past” of civil rights advances in the 1960s and 1970s.
⁵⁷
As a result, some audiences lost sight of just how offensive
Song of the South
was in 1946. For example, Maltin downplayed any past controversy in
The Disney Films
, inaccurately stating that people “flocked to see the film and made it a major Disney moneymaker,
both in its initial release and on re-issue in 1956.”
⁵⁸
Supporters instead came to embrace the populist historical belief that all films from the golden age of Hollywood were racist to some degree or another. From this vantage point,
Song of the South
should be seen simply as a product of a different age. The past is both evaded and revised.

This, in turn, has a powerful impact on how nostalgia was mobilized to silence criticism of
Song of the South
in the 1980s. Personal, deeply nostalgic memories for a perceived simpler time became substitutes for a larger history of inequality that had originally framed discussions of the film. Defending the film against Finney in the
Los Angeles Times
, Coates also argued that any criticism of
Song of the South
was racially misguided: “How could anyone be so racial in his judgment of a Disney movie that is pure fantasy and entertainment?”
⁵⁹
In this reading, the country has evolved in its racial consciousness to the point where discussing Uncle Remus’s race at all was itself an act of bigotry. Following this logic, however, it is not clear how the country used to be less “narrow-minded” when the film first appeared. A key moment for evasive whiteness is when
any
mention of race becomes a racist act.

By the 1980s, the history of
Song of the South
becomes conflated with a range of sometimes-contradictory public and personal histories. In his
Los Angeles Times
article on the Venice controversy, Pleasure further defended the film with the following argument: “To charge that a film about the antebellum South is biased and racist goes without saying. What film of ’39 isn’t?”
⁶⁰
Quite possibly, Pleasure was confusing the Disney film with the movie its Southern melodramatic structure was emulating, Selznick’s
Gone with the Wind
(which
was
released in 1939). Writing about the film’s rerelease on the heels of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Haynes Johnson argued that both developments signaled a desire to return to the 1950s. That the film was technically from 1946 was just one more historical ambiguity, even for liberals. The past is both ignored and rewritten by reactionary influences, moving back to an imaginary period when conservatives saw race as a nonissue. Evasive forms of whiteness, often passively, work in support of such historical ignorance. By denying racial difference, whiteness also necessarily denies the long, ugly history of conflict with which such difference came. The reception of
Song of the South
in the 1980s draws out how the evasion of race always coexists with the evasion of history.

In November 1986, forty years after first appearing in Atlanta,
Song of the South
was released for its final theatrical run. Despite the fact it once
more
enjoyed box office success, grossing $16 million in American theaters,
⁶¹
the film’s controversy was becoming too much for Disney. Overall the critical reaction was more muted this time, just as the 1956 release had been more uneventful than the heated controversies of 1946. The
Los Angeles Times
film critic Charles Solomon wrote a review focused on the film’s landmark use of animation. He even repeated the
New York Times
film critic Bosley Crowther’s quip that the ratio of live action to cartoon was equivalent to “the ratio of its mediocrity to its charm,” which Solomon added was “a judgment that the intervening 40 years have only confirmed.” Solomon dedicated only one paragraph near the end to acknowledging the controversies surrounding the film. He observed that “even more dated are the depictions of the black characters: the film is very much a ’40s Hollywood vision of the Ole South. The field hands march to and from work in neatly pressed clothes, singing elaborate choral arrangements of spirituals. Although Uncle Remus is permitted to exchange a conspiratorial wink with the shrewd old grandmother, he and Toby remain passive characters who patiently endure scoldings for things that aren’t their fault.” Solomon did not make a distinction between “a ’40s Hollywood vision of the Ole South” and criticisms of that vision during the time
Song of the South
was made. This obscured the fact that the film’s “depiction of black characters” was not generally accepted in 1940s mainstream publications either. This also reinforced the belief that it was just an uncritical product of its time.
Song of the South
, Solomon summarized, was “essentially a nostalgic valentine to a past that never existed, and within those limits, it offers a pleasant, family diversion for holiday afternoons when the children get restless.”
⁶²

That
Song of the South
is “essentially a nostalgic valentine to a past that never existed” bears closer attention. The concept of nostalgia for “a past that never existed” is redundant. Feelings of nostalgia are always predicated on seeing the past as much more simplistic than it had been. By the mid-1980s, the idea of a past that never existed worked on at least two levels. On the one hand, nostalgic appeals to an illusory past were motivated by the film’s conception of the South in a post-Reconstruction United States. On the other, nostalgia for a nonexistent past just as easily applied to people in the 1980s who had not seen the film since its earlier appearances during their own childhood. Over the decades, it became increasingly common for people to preface their discussion of
Song of the South
with an anecdote of when they first saw the film. In the
Beachhead
’s controversial piece, the anonymous editorialist criticized
the
rerelease as follows: “Many of us grown-ups haven’t seen
Song of the South
for 20–30 years, and only remember a warm, happy film with live people and funny carton [
sic
] characters. Remember Br’er Rabbit and his thorny shelter, the Briar Patch, the beautiful singing Bluebird, the happy people working and singing who are never really dirty or tired? Well, only vaguely, and certainly not as a racist movie! But these happy people were slaves and the whites, whom they supposedly love so much, had the power of life and death over them.”
⁶³
This is one of the first instances in which a critical response to
Song of the South
also worked through the assumptions of its own nostalgic pull. In essence, the writer tried to make the point that one’s past impressions (the childlike innocence with which he or she first viewed
Song of the South
) might not be accurate. If they were, then other ideologies not easily noticed were at work as well. Tied into the concept of evasive whiteness is a slippery use of personal memory that lends itself to the rewriting of history.

Also at the time of
Song of the South
’s final theatrical release, the cultural and literary critic James Snead wrote a front-page op-ed against the film for the
Los Angeles Times
. Snead took seriously the question of historical distortion around the film’s circulation for the last forty years. The article is largely an attempt to remind readers of just how offensive the film and its history really were. He added that
Song of the South
was “already outdated when the film was released in 1946. Four decades of racial progress have seemingly gone unrecognized.”
⁶⁴
Snead focused on highlighting historical facts about the film: that it was (like Harris’s stories) an uneven mixture of oral slave tradition and white interpretation; that a vast majority of the film is actually live action, which is the most insulting part; that it was inappropriate after World War II, and thus offensive even at the time of its first release; that many criticized the film when it first premiered, including those who usually championed Disney’s artistic innovations; and that even Disney hesitated through the years to continue releasing the film because of its offensive representations. “In continuing to reissue
Song of the South
, however, Disney perpetuates myths of plantation life (kind master, contented servant, pastoral harmony) that had been convincingly exposed and rejected well before 1946,” wrote Snead. “The implicit and explicit untruths of
Song of the South
are made to seem both comforting and entertaining.” Snead’s exposure of “the implicit and explicit untruths” of the film more forcefully confronted how
Song of the South
’s past “never existed.” Snead reiterated how “the Africa-derived tales that Harris transcribed on his
Georgia
plantation in the 1880s allowed the real plantation blacks to escape the humiliation inflicted upon them by the plantation system.”
⁶⁵
Brer Rabbit’s stories were parables that represented the slave’s ability to outsmart his master and the other slaves. Snead’s point was all the more relevant at a time when Harris’s presence in American culture, as the scholar Hugh Keenan also noted around the same time,
⁶⁶
seemed to be rapidly fading compared to the Disney’s film’s growing popularity.

Soon after publication, Douglas Kermode wrote a response that contested Snead’s representation of history. Like many defenders of
Song of the South
since the 1980s, Kermode claimed to have seen the film as a child, thus appealing to his own perceived innocence. Rather than deny the film’s offensiveness, Kermode argued that Snead was simply substituting one myth for another. “Is it any more true to say that there were no benevolent whites and that all blacks suffered in the Old South,” he asked rhetorically, “than it is to claim that blacks were happy-go-lucky and massah was kindly? I don’t believe seeing
Song of the South
as a child warped my later views on slavery.”
⁶⁷
While noting that plantation history was perhaps more complicated than Snead suggested, Kermode overlooked how the larger concern with
Song of the South
was not how it distorted slavery in the past; rather, Snead was more concerned with the
present
issue of “psychological damage done by the racial stereotypes.” To a point, Kermode was refreshingly blunt as far as defenders went: “The truth is, the black man was dragged here in chains and has since been beaten with those chains just for being here. It is an ugly truth, and I am glad that I had Disney’s myth to enjoy as a child (I cannot remember how ‘truthful’ I thought the film was at the time).”
⁶⁸
While it may not be so novel for a fan to suggest that Disney’s entertaining “myth” offset the “psychological damage done,” more unusual is his willingness to grant validity to the racial and historical concerns raised by criticisms of the film, and to hold those in tension with its utopian affect. Such a balanced consideration by the film’s most passionate fans was rare. It still worked to deny that the film was a threat to race relations today, or even a truly racist depiction of African Americans, but it did not accuse the film’s critics of racism either.

A common paradox when defending
Song of the South
was that the film is both a representation of a harsh period of American history (the Southern plantation) and a harmless children’s fantasy. This was also revealed in Coates’s response to Finney in 1981.
Song of the South
is defended as “pure fantasy and entertainment,” and then, in the very next sentence, as
“part
of black heritage as much as slavery and the Civil War.”
⁶⁹
Song of the South
is acceptable, Coates reasoned, because slavery and the Civil War are historical facts. Yet she also argued that this background does not matter anyway, because the film is entirely a fantasy. This emphasis on the film as nothing more than whimsy was echoed throughout the other negative responses to Finney’s
Times
piece. “What Finney neglects to take into account . . . ,” wrote Rev. Sean Stewart, “is that
Song of the South
was not intended as an accurate historical documentary of the pre- or antebellum South; anymore than the outrageous ‘tall tales’ of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan are intended as accurate historical accounts of the settling of the West.” T. A. Heppenheimer, meanwhile, echoed this ontological defense of the film, implying that children are smart enough to recognize that cartoons are not real. “If we believe, with Finney, that children gain their images of reality from cartoons,” Heppenheimer argued, “then we must expect they believe rabbits can talk, road-runner birds can outrace a cannonball and coyotes can construct elaborate engineering works atop cliffs or in the middle of highways.”
⁷⁰
Yet these arguments ignored how Finney’s criticisms were directed not at the animated sequences in
Song of the South
but rather the live action ones featuring depictions of historical distortion and social inequities.

The question of memory, and its reliability, becomes a significant point of contention here. In one response defending
Song of the South
in relation to the controversial
Beachhead
incident, Fertik suggested that “if
Song of the South
is so dangerous, how did you guys manage to grow up to be the equalitarians you are? You admit in the article only ‘remembering the film as a warm happy film with live people and funny cartoon characters.’
”
⁷¹
When critics of the film confess to not noticing the racist elements when they were children, he argued, why would the film make racists of young people viewing
Song of the South
today? Fertik’s deeply nostalgic logic here implies that perhaps life is just as simple for a child as adults may wish to think. If children don’t notice the racism, he implied, then it doesn’t really matter. Fertik’s proposed position is problematic to be sure, but it also spoke to the power of nostalgia and memory in relation to the film’s presence in American theaters in the 1980s. The inherent nebulousness of time’s passage allowed for historical accounts of
Song of the South
’s controversies in the 1940s and 1950s to be brushed aside, substituted with personal memories. If I can remember the film so fondly from the past, such ahistorical logic suggests, then it could not have been so bad after all.