Disney's Most Notorious Film (24 page)

Four

A PAST THAT NEVER EXISTED

Coonskin
, Post-racial Whiteness, and Rewriting History in the Era of Reaganism

How can anyone be so racial in his judgment of a Disney Movie that is pure fantasy and entertainment? The “Uncle Remus” stories are a part of black heritage as much as slavery and the Civil War. The stories were told to black children as well as white as a means to alleviate the burden of everyday life. In
Song of the South
the black people show a magic and a love for survival that whites envy. Uncle Remus is an all-knowing, magic man. Is there a problem with his being black?

MARY COATES, LETTER TO THE
LOS ANGELES TIMES,
JANUARY
10, 1981

We’re going back to the ’50s [with the election of Ronald Reagan], this person said, and it will be great.

HAYNES JOHNSON

Song of the South
found a second life after a long theatrical disappearance in the late 1950s and throughout the subsequent decade. By 1972, the film reappeared, this time to the kind of success that would continue for the next fifteen years. Despite being the last decade in which it appeared legally,
Song of the South
’s theatrical fortunes in the 1980s were undeniable—in fact, it was the only decade in which the film was rereleased twice. The relatively modest six-year span between appearances (1980 and 1986) easily marked the briefest hiatus in the film’s distribution history. The critical reconstruction of Disney’s legacy, and of
Song of the South
, were central factors in its prolonged resurgence thirty years after it was first made. By the mid-1980s, the Disney company itself was now at the dawn of another golden age under the guidance of
Michael
Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Song of the South
, like many “classic” Disney titles, was both a contributor to and benefactor of this environment. Disney’s corporate resurgence will be a central focus of the next chapter; other historical issues, as this chapter shows, also played a part in the film’s success.

Song of the South
’s consistent appeal in the 1980s spoke to, and reflected, the generally regressive political climate of the time. In the anti–civil rights era of racially conservative Reaganism,
Song of the South
’s perceived innocence and nonconfrontational style found renewed popularity with audiences looking for nostalgic films that offered utopian representations of race relations yet paradoxically denied any meaningful racial difference. Shorthand for a wide range of reactionary domestic and international policies, Reaganism also denoted regressive attitudes regarding race in the United States. In
Watching Race
, Herman Gray has argued that “race operated at the center of conservative Republican political discourse as the often unnamed sign of erosion, menace, threat, and permissiveness—(black) welfare cheats, the (liberal) welfare state (and its largely minority dependents), (black and latino) teenage pregnancy, rising crime (committed largely by black and latino urban male youth).”
¹
The term evokes what in theory was a self-identified color-blind logic, which explicitly denied racial difference but which was deeply racist at its unspoken core. In practice, Reaganism’s proponents demonized minorities for political gain through carefully coded language that avoided direct references to race. Yet the terms (e.g., “welfare cheats”) resonated with white voters frustrated by African American political gains. Thus discourses of Reaganism by default worked in support of policies that reinforced white privilege, such as cutting funding for public education and social programs. On a deeper level, they worked to restore the pre–civil rights status quo where African Americans were politically disenfranchised.

The contradictory cultural logic of a nostalgic color blindness that masked a deeper structure of racial inequality was a perfect match with Disney’s aged, but never more popular,
Song of the South
. Supporters appealed to the positive personal relationship between Johnny and Uncle Remus and to its narrative indifference to any direct acknowledgment of race. Yet this in no way remedied the film’s deeper mythology of troubling racial hierarchies.
Song of the South
envisioned a fantasy world wherein blacks returned to their subservient positions on the plantation. It offered a reassuring image for whites of (pre–civil rights) African Americans who had no need for equality or political agency. Thus critics
of
Song of the South
in the 1980s were particularly frustrated by its symbolic relationship to the new U.S. conservatism. Its expanding and vocal groups of defenders were increasingly enabled by both Disney’s reactionary corporate appeal and the restorative nostalgia of the era’s racially regressive political climate.

Song of the South
garnered significant opposition from many directions at the time, not just the progressive critiques after the election of Reagan in 1980. Most notable was Ralph Bakshi’s hybrid animation satire
Coonskin
(1974), which was made in the aftermath of
Song of the South
’s reappearance in 1972. More than anything else that decade,
Coonskin
’s very existence spoke volumes about the continuing presence of Disney’s anachronistic film. Moreover, Bakshi’s satirical impulse was by far the harshest indictment of the film’s sudden popularity. The X-rated film, from the maker of
Fritz the Cat
(1972), featured animated versions of Brer Rabbit (here called “Brother Rabbit”), Brer Fox, and Brer Bear, framed by an Uncle Remus–like, live action narrative.
Coonskin
’s invocation of
Song of the South
was unmistakable. While the film itself was aesthetically erratic, it explicitly negotiated
Song of the South
’s cinematic vision of a white imaginary space, working through assumptions about how African Americans had been represented in mainstream American films up to, and including, the 1970s.

Each film’s legacy was also telling. While
Song of the South
prospered,
Coonskin
was heavily criticized and quickly disappeared for good.
Song of the South
’s white-affirming racial utopia worked toward reassurance, while
Coonskin
’s shock value worked toward disruption. Aesthetically,
Coonskin
was new and different, a deconstruction of the institution of animation and representations of race. Like all classic Disney films, on the other hand,
Song of the South
was by the 1970s familiar, comforting, and powerfully
self-referential
.
Song of the South
was accepted because it had “always” been there for new generations raised on all things Disney. The ubiquity of Brer Rabbit children’s books,
Disneyland
episodes, and Uncle Remus records throughout the 1950s and 1960s had repositioned the film in popular consciousness from an offensive anachronism to a steadfast part of U.S. culture.
Coonskin
, on the other hand, simply offended some and then vanished. Bludgeoning audiences affectively with deliberately offensive representations of sex, violence, and racial imagery proved counterproductive to the intended cause of social equality.
Coonskin
, and its creator in various interviews, were both so overtly antagonistic that they alienated even potentially sympathetic audiences, thus
denying
the possibility for dialogue on racial inequality.
Coonskin
was an easy film for both progressives and conservatives to marginalize.

Yet its implications for
Song of the South
’s survival remained. As
Coonskin
’s controversies began to subside by the end of 1975, a subtler, but no less troubling, trend emerged. Conservative critics, such as Tom Shales, appropriated the controversy around
Coonskin
as another indictment of the state of the civil rights movement in the 1970s. The film’s offensive nature, and the circular firing squad of liberal critics around it, came to symbolize the failure of the movement’s progress on the eve of Reagan’s election in 1980, and the new era of anti–civil rights conservatism it ushered in. Moreover, defenders of
Song of the South
, such as Leonard Maltin and Arthur Cooper, were also quick to contrast the Disney film’s general lack of controversy in the 1970s with the negative attention paid to
Coonskin
. In both cases, the same disturbing tendency emerged: using the political intensity of the 1970s to suggest that an awareness of racial difference be abandoned altogether, in favor of a misguided, utopian color blindness that continues to shape racial discourse to this day.

Reactions to
Song of the South
in the late 1970s and 1980s are one way in which we see a new mobilization of “whiteness” in the United States. An emergent, deeply conservative form of racial consciousness largely denied race was an issue in society or even a valid category for identifying people. It was an “evasive” form of whiteness—not one that explicitly (or even knowingly) championed the rights of white people or the maintenance of white privilege. Instead, it avoided the categories and histories of race altogether. Discussions of
Song of the South
in the 1940s and 1950s focused mostly on the question of racial stereotypes. After the film’s success and Disney’s larger critical rebirth in the 1970s, this
evasive whiteness
reframed the 1946 film in a least two dramatic ways. For one,
Song of the South
was no longer seen as being “about race” at all, but rather a utopian, color-blind film that transcended racial categories. For another, the film’s reception history was rewritten as a movie that was
once
considered inoffensive in the time period in which it was originally made, and thus, supporters argued, it should be accepted as such now.

Audiences’ sudden dismissal of the cultural histories attached to
Song of the South
in the 1980s also reflects Disney’s corporate articulation of “history.” Writing in 1985, Michael Wallace argued that Disney systematically rewrote the United States’ past in only the most utopian of ideas, through theme park attractions such as the “American Adventure” in Epcot Center. Here, all forms of dissention, conflict, and ugliness
were written out of the company’s representation of U.S. history. Wallace quoted one Disney theme park designer as saying that “what we create is a ‘Disney Realism,’ sort of Utopian in nature, where we carefully program out all the negative, unwanted elements and program in the positive elements.”
²
Disney justifies such an abuse of history because the company considers the presentation to be reassuring entertainment rather than something that truthfully represents the complexities of the past. Even more troubling though, as Wallace discussed, was how the gaps in history “get louder the closer the show [American Adventure] gets to the present.”
³
The result, which is particularly relevant to my work, is that Disney’s institutional representation of American history “implies our problems are things of the past.” As I will show in this chapter and in the last one, on Internet fandom, audiences raised on Disney films, shows, and theme parks came to see U.S. history in just this way.
Song of the South
’s past troubles as a controversial film, and its own plantation mythology, became, at worst, distant problems that no longer needed to trouble contemporary audiences in the post-racial present. Disney reduced history to individual narratives of achievement, Wallace also noted, rather than “collective social movements.”
⁴
Unsurprisingly, defenders of
Song of the South
saw their own personal memories of the film and of the Disney way of life as more relevant than the larger legacy of white privilege and institutional racism that the film perpetuated. This was a perception of the American past that discourses of Reaganism further promoted.

During the 1980s reception of
Song of the South
, the cultural logic of Reaganism worked to create contradictory conditions. Race no longer mattered
on the surface
, even while such logic had powerful material effects on U.S. domestic policy regarding race relations. Likewise, the past no longer mattered (like the history of the civil rights movement), even while many had a heightened attachment to nostalgia for life before the 1960s.
Song of the South
’s own hostile reception in the 1940s, and the twentieth-century history of American racial consciousness more broadly defined, was rewritten favorably by audiences who now saw their own fond personal memories as more relevant to any discussion of the film’s offensiveness. In the first part of this chapter, I will begin by explaining the discourse of Reaganism a bit more, since it serves as the frame for the chapter. I then document in greater depth the controversies around
Coonskin
, and their implications for
Song of the South
’s subsequent reception.

This is followed by highlighting at length
Song of the South
’s explicitly
linked relationship with Reagan’s presidency. More than any other period in the film’s nearly seventy-year reception, it is here that
Song of the South
is directly tied to a major historical event. Several people, both favorably and unfavorably, connected the theatrical return of the nostalgic
Song of the South
in 1980 to the election of the conservative 1950s icon as president. Then I will more clearly explain how theories of whiteness appeared in discourses around
Song of the South
, and how they reflected a larger attitude toward the invisibility of race (which Reaganism promoted). Finally, I discuss the substitution of personal memory as history, on which both evasive forms of whiteness and Reagan’s individualistic appeal as an anti–civil rights conservative were largely dependent.

The rest of the chapter attempts to flesh out these discursive categories with close readings of sources from the period, such as the
Washington Post
and the
Los Angeles Times
. As with the second chapter, I focus mostly on various articles and letters to the editor within these periodicals. Whiteness, Reaganism, and personal memory as historical revisionism collectively created new conditions of possibility for subsequent generations. All three are central to understanding
Song of the South
’s influence and popularity over the last thirty years. As a result,
Song of the South
’s long-term legacy today is much more a product of Reagan’s United States in the 1980s than of the post–World War II United States. If anything, this makes its anachronisms all the more troubling.