Disney's Most Notorious Film (25 page)

THE ANTI–CIVIL RIGHTS DISCOURSES OF REAGANISM

A former movie and television actor, Reagan’s impact on the United States was always inseparable, though not reducible to, his mediated presence. He embodied the ways that 1980s images of the United States were staged, transmitted, and manipulated for their symbolic value in the media. For Susan Jeffords in
Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era
, visibility was a key component to Reaganism: “A nation exists . . . as something to be
seen
.”
⁵
Ideas of a Reagan America began with specific cinematic
images
of a Reagan America. The disillusioned Vietnam veteran turned cold warrior John Rambo, protagonist of Sylvester Stallone’s
Rambo
films, embodied this identity. This image inspired a larger cultural and historical vision of the nation, one of imperialistic dominance, physical strength, and whiteness as not only the norm but also a source of power. Importantly, Jeffords’s mediated
conception of Reagan was in no small measure about attempting to rewrite history to fit conservative ideology through its (often-fictional) mediation. Rambo went back to Vietnam to win the war on-screen after it had already been lost in history.

Hence these images of American strength and superiority were far from politically or racially neutral. As Gray noted in his study of television, discourses of Reaganism were structured “to take away from blacks the moral authority and claims on political entitlement won in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”
⁶
This ideology was reinforced by images of African Americans on the small screen in the 1980s, such as
The Cosby Show
. In
Framing Blackness
, Ed Guerrero adds that films played a similar role:

In the beginning of the 1980s and under the political impulse of Reaganism, blacks on the screen, in front of and behind the camera, found themselves confronted with the “recuperation” of many of the subordinations and inequalities they had struggled so hard to eradicate during the years of the civil rights movement and the emergence of Black Power consciousness that followed it. Thus the caricatures and stereotypes of Hollywood’s openly racist past proved to be resilient demons as they were subtly refashioned and resurfaced in a broad range of films.
⁷

It was also not uncommon for the “stereotypes of Hollywood’s openly racist past” to hide in plain sight. We see this literally with the consistently successful recirculation of older Hollywood films through theatrical and home video (including bootleg) markets:
Birth of a Nation
(1915),
King Kong
(1933),
Gone with the Wind
(1939), and
Song of the South
, as well as problematic Disney and Warner Bros. short-subject cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s. Even reruns of the controversial and quickly cancelled early television show
Amos ’n’ Andy
ran well into the late 1960s. Many of these films attempted to deflect criticism by appealing to the historical unavoidability of that openly racist past. At the same time, their respective appeal was draped, like Reaganism, in the seemingly innocuous veil of illusory nostalgia for a simpler time. Thus it is not surprising that
Song of the South
’s 1980 theatrical appearance was explicitly linked to the conservative Reagan’s electoral victory over the incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter, since Reagan’s campaign was itself
heavily
steeped in nostalgia for a certain conservative perception of the United States before the civil rights movement.

While not a Southerner himself, Reagan’s political ascendancy was tied to race-baiting in the anti–civil rights South throughout the 1970s. As early as 1973, the
Washington Post
identified the new Republican Party as one that embraced a “new
Song of the South
,” specifically citing an Atlanta meeting of the Southern Republican Conference in honor of then California Governor Reagan. At the event, Reagan reportedly said, “The nation is better off for the southern strategy.” He was referring to Richard Nixon’s successful electoral approach where Republicans manipulated racism among white Democrats to divide their opponents and take over elected representation of the American South.
⁸
After years of relatively quiet circulation,
Song of the South
in the 1980s would prove nearly as controversial as it had been in the 1940s. As I will show, both fans and critics linked the film to the hot-button racial issues surrounding Reaganism and Reagan’s presidency. Reaganism played on white resentment and anger by demonizing African Americans through attacks on progressive government programs such as the welfare system and affirmative action. In a short time, Reagan managed to undo most of the progress on racial relations achieved during the previous decade and a half. Such work was structured around what Gray has called “the unnamed category of race,”
⁹
as conservatives carefully manipulated a “color-blind” logic that was quite reactionary yet
sounded
progressive. On the contrary, Reaganism gained strength in the United States as a direct reaction against the era of civil rights and racial discourses that preceded it.

COONSKIN
AND THE “PERIOD OF ACUTE RACIAL SENSITIVITY”

If we have to stop making movies that offend anyone, we’ll all be making Disney movies.

ALBERT S. RUDDY, COONSKIN PRODUCER

Song of the South
had been largely uncontroversial in the 1970s. With a range of contemporary social issues still unresolved, detractors often saw its persistence as an unfortunate, but hardly surprising, annoyance from cinema’s racist past. Instead, the racially charged film that
was
controversial in the 1970s was
Song of the South
’s affectively intense satire:
Coonskin
. In addition to satirizing Disney, Bakshi’s deliberately shocking representation of life in the inner city was also a product of, and a subversive response to, Hollywood’s controversial “blaxploitation” period. These mostly studio films, released between 1969 and 1974, “featured black casts playing out various action-adventures in the ghetto.”
¹⁰
Often motivated more by financial ambitions than newfound social awareness, these films emerged in large measure from Hollywood’s growing desire to exploit profitable African American distribution markets.
¹¹
Films like
Shaft
(1971) and
Super Fly
(1972) offered new cinematic visions of strong, assertive anti–Sidney Poitiers. That is, they featured black protagonists who celebrated their race rather than minimized it. Although admirable to the extent that it offered more roles to African American actors and touched superficially on the concerns of urban life, blaxploitation also depended on degrading narratives of murder, drug trafficking, and prostitution. Thus, as Ed Guerrero has noted, blaxploitation had a contradictory appeal, since it reflected and perpetuated racist white assumptions about the general violence and criminality of black life in the inner city.
¹²
As a satire of both Disney and blaxploitation, Bakshi’s film directly negotiated this contradiction.

Song of the South
’s reception history is incomplete without looking at
Coonskin
. As one of the last blaxploitation films of the period,
Coonskin
told the story of Brother Rabbit’s journey from the American South to Harlem. There, he confronted an Italian gangster who was ruining the neighborhood. As Michael Gillespie argued, “
Coonskin
can be thought of as closer to the irrational and transgressive spirit of [the oral slave narrative] Brer Rabbit than has ever been previously imagined.”
¹³
The film restored Brother Rabbit as a signifier of the black experience (in keeping with its origins), highlighted the grotesqueness of blaxploitation as a genre, and critiqued the ignorant whiteness and sentimental nostalgia of
Song of the South
. Although Bakshi’s film was constructed as a critique of the Disney film, both
Song of the South
and
Coonskin
shared quite a bit in common. Both responded to Disney’s legacy and its impact on animation:
Song of the South
was its affirmation, while
Coonskin
was its rejection. Both reflected childhood memories—the audiences’ own nostalgia with Disney and
Song of the South
; Bakshi for his own childhood living in a predominately black neighborhood of Brooklyn and watching Disney cartoons. Both responded to the emergent popularity of blaxploitation and reflected white visions of the African American experience.
Both
worked within, and further perpetuated, cinematic stereotypes of that same experience.

Finally, both
Song of the South
and
Coonskin
were criticized upon first release for many of the same reasons. In the mid-1970s, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and other activist groups protested Bakshi’s film, ironically citing very similar criticisms to those that marred
Song of the South
three decades earlier. In both cases, detractors saw the film as an offensive white interpretation of African Americans that traded on grotesque and anachronistic (cinematic) stereotypes. While
Coonskin
’s cultural and aesthetic satire of
Song of the South
was valid, its X-rated approach and knowing deployment of racist imagery could certainly be seen as problematic. As a result of this controversy, Paramount dropped the film in late 1974; Bryanston Pictures eventually picked it up and distributed it as an “exploitation” picture. Despite an intense amount of media coverage of its controversies,
¹⁴
Coonskin
quickly faded from theaters and public consciousness within a year. Bakshi’s film has received little attention beyond obscure novelty screenings and uneventful VHS releases, in which it was tellingly retitled
Street Fight
.
Coonskin
’s affective power and grotesque images left audiences who finally did get a chance to see the film feeling generally confused and alienated.

Like other 1970s films, Bakshi’s work was responding to larger shifts in Hollywood toward more permissive images of sex and violence, in which “blaxploitation” features like
Coonskin
played only one part. Its grotesque mix of Disney and graphic (albeit drawn) imagery commented ironically on
Song of the South
’s reassuring dissimilarity from increasingly explicit representations in Hollywood films at the time. One 1973
Los Angeles Times
article directly suggested that
Song of the South
’s success was partly the result of a lack of quality family films in the marketplace.
¹⁵
That the success of
Song of the South
and other recycled Disney movies was as much a response to the lax regulations on sex and violence in general was also hinted at in a humorous 1972 letter written by an angry parent: “I think it is appalling that neighborhood theatres will charge a reduced rate ($1 in our area) to see ‘R’ or ‘X’ rated movies while a ‘G’ rated rerun ‘
Song of the South
’ goes for full price at the same theater. Our 3-year-old was charged $.75. Is our society so sick that working families must pay a premium to see a family movie while ‘adult’ movies are cheaply disseminated to our youngsters?”
¹⁶

Symptomatically, this also revealed the extent to which “family” fare and more “adult” films coexisted in the 1970s, even within the same
physical
space. The success of the former was in part a response to the latter. Perhaps no other single film of the time internalized these contradictions—between family and adult audiences, between innocence and graphic sex and violence—as acutely as Bakshi’s hybrid feature.

Coonskin
merged these two otherwise incongruent subgenres into one deliberately grotesque and incoherent text to show how both rested on racist, and
thoroughly cinematic
, stereotypes about African American identity in the twentieth century. By the 1970s, Disney’s nostalgic vision of the American South spoke to a “large, conservative white audience’s . . . desire to, at least on screen, suppress the black revolt in all its manifestations and the white liberal-left social and cultural agenda built during the 1960s.”
¹⁷
It was this audience that Guerrero identifies as making popular white reactionary vigilante fantasies like
Dirty Harry
(1972),
Walking Tall
(1973), and
Death Wish
(1974). These films often featured white cops cleaning up the same criminal urban spaces that blaxploitation glorified. While made for a different time, the reception of
Song of the South
was no less a response to the factors underlying blaxploitation as
Dirty Harry
was in 1972. Thus
Coonskin
’s appearance highlighted the superficially incoherent, but internally logical, cultural sense in which the early 1970s marked the sudden popularity of both blaxploitation and
Song of the South
.

Though hardly embraced by supporters of the civil rights movement,
Coonskin
’s aggressive, unapologetic style echoed the period’s climate of racial rebellion. Meanwhile, Disney’s nostalgic vision of pastoral simplicity and institutional racism appealed to audiences rediscovering open spaces via the American suburb.
Song of the South
’s successful reissue in the 1970s was the cinematic equivalent to the “white flight” that deeply affected American cities. As Guerrero notes about this time, “After years of urban riots and rebellions, shifting demographics accelerated as racial boundaries eroded, and most American cities found whites heading for the suburbs, abandoning city centers and their movie houses to inner-city blacks.”
¹⁸
Both versions of the Uncle Remus tales appeared within the context of blaxploitation’s niche popularity and the urban rebellion in the inner cities. The latter was provoked by years of racial tension and existing power structures sympathetic to white privilege. This urban decimation coexisted with the large-scale suburban migration of both white people and civic resources, which began with the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s. Likewise,
Song of the South
provided comfort in the form of outdated stereotypes to white people unsettled by the sudden power, authority, and autonomy that blacks had struggled to attain
in urban centers such as Harlem, Detroit, and the South Side of Chicago. These were centers of power that fifty years earlier would have been wiped out in white-instigated race riots (such as the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, had been). Bakshi’s satire tried to highlight many of these ugly truths.