STEVEN WATTS investigates Walt Disney's entire Kingdom and its cultural resonance

Reviewed:
The Magic Kingdom
Steven Watts
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997

"The unfortunate Dumbo is quickly enveloped in a milieu of commercial exploitation." (89)

"Undercutting rationalization and its efficient engineering of experience, Disney nurtured a vibrant antimodern impulse that invested many of his films from this era with great emotional energy." (107)

"This primitivism had profound, complex implications. On the one hand, Sergei Einstein believed that Disney’s protean animism had emerged in part as a revolt against capitalist rationalization." (128) 

Note that this is as bad as it gets. But I wanted our readers to know that it does get this bad. But if you feel it wasn't a problem, then perhaps I should shut up and we can talk about Watts’ central thesis instead.

This is valid technique from a scholarly approach (make a statement then provide extensive proof) but it is boring from a narrative perspective. People do need to realize this isn't entirely a popular work, but more of a scholarly one.

As for narrative perspectives, I found that his typical approach to a story is this: He'll present a brief summary, give lots of quotes and research, and then tell the story in a narrative manner, and then - and this is the kicker - he reaches some sort of critical conclusion; something most authors in this field do not bother to do.

This is a perfect lead-in for my big point about this book, the one thing I hope our readers take away from the review: Watts, like all good humanities scholars, recognizes that the real interest here is "culture." He reaches cultural conclusions about Walt Disney, his studio, his employees, and even his theme parks. 

One example that leaps to mind would be his take on the True Life Adventure films of the 50's as representative of a Cold War America, where Nature was Americanized by Disney: They "seemed to affirm social competition as a natural process that enabled the best to emerge - an unspoken rejection of the hovering Communist specter of artificial government direction and centralized planning" (305).

But I think many people who read this book will feel that many of his interpretations are a bit overwrought. Won't many wonder if Watts is just imposing his own views on innocent works? Much like the early example Watts gives where a Disney work (I forget which one) is turned into a socialist manifesto by one commentator. 

While Watts shows how people interpreted Disney in many different ways, he never really shows how his interpretation is more valid than all the others.

I'm not sure how transparent it is, but he sets out to prove that Walt is a populist whose particular brand of populism morphs with time. He starts out as a simple populist, then becomes an anti-Communist (a sort of nationalist populist), then a libertarian populist (suspicion of big government, fostering of American myth), and finally turns into a technocratic populist (technology subsumed to service humans rather than vice versa; the case in point being EPCOT). 

At each turn, Watts points out that Walt's brand of populism morphs. I just love this thesis. I find it academic, yet accessible.

I just think many people are turned off when cultural commentators start interpreting cultural objects in any but the broadest of ways. I'm not saying that it is an invalid approach, but most people would prefer that Snow White was simply a fun movie, not a political, moral, or personal statement on the part of Disney.

Now let me ask you a question. In his broad strokes I think Watts is right on, Walt was always something of a libertarian populist (with occasional variations as to degree). However, when Watts gives specifics (such as the True Life Adventures section you mentioned) I just thought he was trying too hard to find significance. 

New question: Don't you think many of the micro-biographies (such as for Tytla or Bill Walsh) tended to distract from the focus on Walt and American culture? Interesting, yes, but not of much importance to the central themes.

I can, however, tell you one thing I found which annoyed me in terms of flow: because he deals with thematics rather than the progression of time, he proceeds in a quasi-chronological order (instead of a strict one), he frequently has to backtrack, with the result that he sometimes repeats himself. 

I got the impression, fair or not, that this came about because the book is so huge, he must have written it over long periods of time and simply missed the redundancy.

I agree with the quality of the biographies. They were very well written and informative (wouldn’t you agree that the 10 pages on Roy Disney were probably equal in value to the Thomas bio?).

I would still cling to the notion, however, that Watts is masterful when it comes to having a critical eye toward the studio and its cultural impact. I've mentioned this before but feel it so strongly that it bears repeating: Watts struggles through numbingly large libaries of texts and films, and is yet able to assign fresh and relevant categories for the studio output such as the package genre (Fun and Fancy Free, etc), nuclear family postwar dramas with happy endings (Pollyana, etc) or nostalgia films (Swiss Family Robinson), to name just a few. 

One gets a sense of the studio living and breathing, actually developing. This is an element usually missing in books about the studio.

In this period, Watts doesn't spend enough time talking about how Walt's attitudes match (or don't) with general America's attitude but rather spends all the time just talking about Walt. If during this period Walt and America were just working on different wavelengths, then perhaps he should have spent less time on the period.

I noticed a secondary, more hidden thesis that Watts returns to repeatedly throughout the book: that Walt struggled constantly with his status as an artist and acceptance by the critics. Am I grasping at straws here or did you notice this too?

Whereas in the twenties both could like the same things (though they thought the other liked it for the wrong reasons) by the sixties, if one liked something the other side had to automatically dislike it.

The separation of lowbrow and highbrow over these decades could be argued to proceed along the very same steps Watts traces in Walt's developing populism (nationalism, nostalgia, technocratic, etc)

One other thing I wanted to ask you before we wrap up. You felt that some of the stories in Bob Thomas's Roy Disney book were salacious, did you find many of the stories in this book to be even more so? For example, learning of Walt’s propensity to discuss turds, pg. 271-2.

The only exception might be his suggestion (on p.357) that Walt may have hated women slightly. On the whole, I'm still in love with this book and this analysis; I can forgive Watts this one bump in the road.