Disney's Most Notorious Film (41 page)

Film critic Roger Ebert seems to envision a future comprised of privileged elites who have special access to controversial films. . . . A slippery slope, Roger. And who makes that decision for everyone, your thumb? Should we keep children from knowing their own cultural history, their own chance to learn—to remember—to track society’s progress or mistakes—to keep injustice from happening again? As a
society,
we can’t progress honestly if we hide or forget or re-imagine our collective past to make it more easily digestible (ironically, one of the accusations made against the film). And who is to ultimately decide what the “common man” can or cannot see? Forced utopianism through suppression of intellectual works is potentially far more destructive—and dangerous—than open and constructive conversation. Keeping this film locked in a vault only suppresses potent fodder for debate—a positive early learning tool for cross-cultural understanding.
⁴³

Without considering the questionable assessment of
Song of the South
as an “intellectual work,” Jones’s own implicit call for a form of “collective intelligence” is hypocritical. A space for “open and constructive conversation” is exactly what Ebert and other critics were advocating in response to repeated calls that the film be rereleased. Meanwhile, fans such as Jones are the ones intent on keeping “children from knowing their own cultural history” by rejecting, sometimes harshly, legitimate criticisms of the film.

Moreover, no
Song of the South
fan has ever advocated rereleasing the film for its potential to enlighten children on social inequalities and offensive media representations. To do so would contradict their core belief—that the film is
not racist
to begin with. Such contradictions run throughout these defenses:
Song of the South
is a product of its time, “dated,” but also not offensive; the film shows how far society has evolved in race relations, yet somehow is not a negative portrayal of African Americans to begin with; the film creates constructive conversation about race and society, as long as no one criticizes it and just enjoys its entertainment value; and, finally, we can talk about representations of race in
Song of the South
, as long as—paradoxically—we all agree that race doesn’t really matter.

Not surprisingly then, Jones insists that
Song of the South
isn’t racist at all. Reiterating a common fan position, it is instead “a reaffirming story of the bond between two friends that refuse to be separated by race, class, age—a friendship that is forged and held against all odds.” Finally, Jones thus argued that fans of the film should have exclusive rights to
Song of the South
, since Disney has no intention of rereleasing it: “US copyright laws exist only to protect those commercial rights—if the copyright holder has truly abandoned the intent to exploit the property, rights should fall back into the public domain where we can all share the material
freely. ‘Use it or lose it’ should become our new copyright mantra.” Ironically, between bootlegs, file sharing, and YouTube, fans have essentially taken over the film’s copyright anyway. “Like it or not, for good or ill,
Song of the South
is art,” Jones wrote. “And art needs to be accessible to the people, no matter its rough (or well-polished) edges. . . . So we can talk it out together—not hide it. Otherwise our civil liberties—our collective freedoms of expression—are seriously threatened.” Such passages highlight how Jones’s argument is patently hypocritical and self-righteously over the top. Had many other
Song of the South
fans not reiterated it subsequently, it could just as easily pass for parody. Here, participatory appeals to dialogue online—“our collective freedoms of expression”—become reappropriated and mobilized to
silence dissent
, rather than to expand a communal base of knowledge.

AFFECT AND NOSTALGIA IN THE POLITICS OF ONLINE DISNEY FANDOM

Besides Jones, there is ample evidence of supporters gravitating increasingly to online forums to voice frustration. The IMDb discussion board for
Song of the South
contains several hundred comments, while another forum page on
DVD Talk Forum
, “
Song of the South
Anytime Ever?,” had nearly three hundred comments dating back to the fall of 2003.
⁴⁴
Almost all these comments in some way address its controversial status, or insist that Disney release the film on DVD. On Topix in March 2007, more than 170 comments were posted in just four days (not counting ones removed from the site for offensive content), following the rumor of the film’s DVD release. While some criticized the movie, most defended
Song of the South
and attacked those who criticized either the film’s message or the prospect of its rerelease.

This is where affect reemerges. When fans defend the film today, some on Topix consider it a “harmless entertaining” children’s film whose politics “means nothing to little kids.” This, too, is problematic, but it emphasizes how fans sidestep the politics by instead referencing the feelings that
Song of the South
evokes. “I just had the pleasure of watching this film,” posts one commentator at IMDb. “Remus is a natural, lovable black man,” writes another, “who cares about people and tells the Brer Rabbit stories with such warmth and joy. . . . Hattie McDaniel portrays a warm wonderful character.” Such sentiments embody the
present
reality of
Song of the South
for fans—not the political (or intellectual) discourses revealed by the film’s representation of the American South, or its championing of whiteness. “I still sing the song about Mr. Blue Bird on my shoulder to this day,” remarks one fan at Topix. “It is one of the happiest moments of my childhood.” Remus, writes another, “project[s] a positive, good harted [
sic
] attitude to the world.”
Song of the South
offers fans a vision of racial utopia where whites and blacks coexist peacefully—an
affective
utopia. “Utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies,” Dyer writes. “It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.”
⁴⁵
In his discussion of the nonrepresentational, emotional power of musicals, Dyer argues they work “at the level of sensibility, by which I mean an affective code that is characteristic of, and largely specific to, a given mode of cultural production.”
⁴⁶
While
Song of the South
doesn’t offer a convincing representation of harmonic racial relations, there is the affective
sense
of such a utopia generated for fans.

Rather than consider Disney fans as actively or passively promoting the racism of the film, we can see that it provokes a utopian feeling that for them transcends such issues. “Its [
sic
] very hard to see the image of a little white hand in that of an elderly black man,” writes one fan at
DVD Talk Forum
regarding the film’s climatic deathbed scene, “and view it as racist.” Because they enjoy the film, because
Song of the South
fills them with pleasure and even feelings of love, nasty political implications aren’t just overlooked. In fact, their very existence becomes impossible to comprehend when the movie itself is so unambiguously positive in its emotions. In other words, because the film doesn’t take a critical view toward former slaves (“All African Americans depicted are sympathetic characters,” notes a fan at IMDb), because it presents Remus as a positive figure for white children,
Song of the South
cannot be racist, they reason. Yet this sort of affection is how classic Hollywood often negotiated controversies not easily resolved. If
Song of the South
presents a view of racial tensions in the South, according to fans, it does so only to alleviate those tensions. In the conclusion of the film, blacks and whites are happy together; that nostalgic view of the past licenses a utopian view of the future. The film’s children, notes one fan on Topix, “could care less about race and actually are embracing diversity.” On IMDb, one poster argues that
Song of the South
is “a well-intentioned effort at promoting positive race relations.” The film’s concluding multicultural image of blacks and whites hand in hand, argues Douglas Brode, presents a vision where “total integration is achieved,” and “ought to be acknowledged as
idealism
of a liberal bent, highly progressive in its attitude for its time.”
⁴⁷
According to such logic, children and adults—black and white—singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” reassures the audience that racial tensions have been overcome in the film’s utopia.

The utopian shot, late in
Song of the South
, of Uncle Remus and Johnny holding hands. Fans of the film often cite this warmly affective image as proof that the movie is not racist. This is in keeping with a larger trend in the last thirty years to substitute personal memories of
Song of the South
for a collective understanding of the past—both the plantation history misrepresented in the film, and the reception history of the film’s controversies.

Hence, as these statements imply, some not only reject the racism but go so far as to suggest that the film is liberal-minded—something unthinkable sixty years ago. Brode posits in two recent books that Disney films were highly progressive for their time, and even helped inspire subsequent movements such as multiculturalism and the 1960s counterculture. Brode is first and foremost a self-described
fan
of Disney. For him, these films tap into visions of a color-blind society. The same image of Remus’s hand holding that of Johnny’s, which one fan above cited in particular as a rebuttal to accusations of
Song of the South
’s racism, serves as a perfect example of Brode’s reading: “In close-up, Johnny reaches out and takes Remus’s hand, black and white lovingly united. When twelve years later, such a scene concluded Stanley Kramer’s adult
drama
The Defiant Ones
, the image was hailed as a major breakthrough in socially conscious drama. Disney, as always, dared to go there first, if without proper recognition.”
⁴⁸

In addition to distorting Hollywood’s larger history of representing race, this reading of such moments is selective. While the image he mentions is potentially powerful (and should be acknowledged for its affective
possibility
), to examine it alone is to remove that moment, like the YouTube clips, from a larger narrative context of racial and historical deception. As with Kramer’s film, the image is potentially progressive insofar as black
merges
with, and thus reaffirms, white. Brode’s work presents itself as a corrective to what he sees as the usually cynical approaches to Disney. In particular, he twice cites as representative Henry Giroux’s focus on degenerative nostalgia and white culture.

But this unabashedly positive take often ends up as simplified as the work it seeks to critique. For example, the utopic ideal of community, he writes, “sustained us during the troubled postwar period when Americans were victims of anomie, each a fragment of the lonely crowd.”
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Brode argues that
Song of the South
’s vision of racial integration served as a model for uniting Americans in a postwar period often noted for its modernist and noirish emphasis on individual isolation. Yet this overlooks how politically regressive the film was in the wake of activism during World War II to end African American stereotypes in Hollywood. Moreover, his critique neglects to take into account how the film was criticized for its “Uncle Tom” representations as harshly during the 1940s as during any other period in the twentieth century. The film didn’t actually “unite” anyone upon its initial postwar release. This reading is, at best, rooted in fond and highly selective memories of
Song of the South
.

As Victor Burgin notes in
The Remembered Film
, recollection is fundamentally centered not on wholes, but on fragments.
⁵⁰
What results in memory are merely these particular excerpts—isolated sounds (such as the songs), images (the hands), and feelings—of what the film was. These fragments, moreover, come to stand for something other than its original narrative context. For Brode, the decontextualized emphasis on
Song of the South
’s powerfully affective black and white hands, “lovingly united,” comes to stand in as an early statement of multiculturalism, despite the fact that the image also depicts a former slave serving the (emotional) needs of a white child. Such a discussion appears dependent on foregrounding (and thus isolating) its most powerful utopian elements in excess of the narrative itself. As Burgin suggests, the passage of time in particular helps isolate such images as they take on a life of their own.
Song
of the South
’s notorious status—as a resilient film now nearly seventy years old, and as a text generally concealed from easy public viewing—has intensified the accumulation of such utopian fragments.