Disney's Most Notorious Film (42 page)

CONVERGENCE AND AMBIVALENT NOSTALGIA

Convergence culture presents a wealth of possible contradictory responses to the lingering presence of past media. Across the online fan responses examined, there is often resistance to questions of racism that participatory culture can ask; yet there is also occasionally an awareness that perceptions of the past may differ from what it really was. Moreover, in this rupture rests opportunities for new knowledge—enlightened relationships with the past. Reassurance is not as simple for the fan as ignoring social problems that remain in Disney texts, even if fans sometimes rationalize the film’s racist ideology in excess of its own narrative support. Seeing how these fans themselves respond requires first recognizing them as genuinely moved and mobilized by the emotions they experience, while also respecting that they are not ignorant masses oblivious to the ideological work these texts perform. And even issues of race in
Song of the South
are always complicated by other factors that fans or audiences may bring to the film. For Brode, Disney presents a particularly idyllic presentation of nostalgia, suggesting that it allows fans to “get back in touch with, if not a past reality, then some idea of who we once were—members of a generous, easygoing, positive community.”
⁵¹
This inadvertently affirms Boym’s claim that one is nostalgic more for what the past
could
have been. Such loss can set into motion the need to create a better present to come, whereby the opportunities lost in the past set goals to be realized in the future. This explains in part Boym’s distinction between “restorative” and “reflective” forms of nostalgia. The former attempts to preserve an idealized past, while the latter suggests learning from memories in the hopes of a better future. Bernstein argues that black Atlanta newspapers in the 1940s had hoped that “nostalgia could be an effective tool for raising white consciousness” among audiences at the time of the film’s debut.
⁵²
Song of the South
’s potential utopia suggests how the future could still be, as the
Atlanta Daily World
once hoped.

The irreducibility of these issues leaves one balancing the ambivalence of nostalgia, race, and Disney fandom in the modern age of convergence.
Today,
Song of the South
serves as a utopian narrative of reassurance for fans. Yet the ambivalence of convergence also
affects
reassurance, generating but also problematizing it. While affectively charged texts such as
Song of the South
make racial, class, and gender tensions
seem
to evaporate, much also can be changed by the temporal tensions that remain. Fans may rethink assumptions underlining those same otherwise unquestioned feelings. Such reassurance—along with the loss of ruptured childhoods—can point toward future possibilities. What might happen today if more open-minded fans of
Song of the South
—who hadn’t seen the film in thirty, forty, even fifty years—were to watch it again, with more critical eyes? Would all of them be so quick to dismiss the criticisms? (This is one key reason to advocate for the film’s release.)

There may be no better example of this today than Bill Vaughn’s online piece regarding his experiences with the film both as a child in 1956 and an adult in 2006.
⁵³
His article points to the ways in which a fan’s affective relationship to the past, even when negotiating representations of race, is never as simple as warm feelings of nostalgia. The sometimes-unsightly past can complicate the present as easily as it simplifies it. In some respects, Vaughn’s article is typical of contemporary fan reactions. Containing some historical inaccuracies, it recalls not so much the film itself but rather memories of seeing it long ago. Yet particularly fascinating is that his piece ultimately resists nostalgia—new technologies allow him to see the unsightly. In obtaining
Song of the South
, in returning to his childhood, he reveals a deep
fear
of the past.

One day, Vaughn decided that he finally wished to see the film again, a movie he watched four times in 1956. As usual, he opted to purchase an illegal bootleg through the Internet. Vaughn fought the desire to watch
Song of the South
again for so long because of a troubling moment it spoke to from childhood—his mother’s suicide. This is another way his article is distinctive from others online—it is about neither the warmth of nostalgia, nor
Song of the South
’s racism. Vaughn acknowledges the racial controversy thoughtfully, but his concern is not with Uncle Remus—rather, “Johnny’s story was everything.” Vaughn’s father cheated on his mother, which led to parental separation (a key narrative development in the film), and then to her suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage. But in
Song of the South
, Johnny’s parents reconcile and everybody lives happily ever after. He developed a deep affective attachment to the film because it helped him escape the pain of his own life. No doubt he was hardly alone among the countless children of broken homes in developing such feelings during the film’s respective theatrical
appearances over forty years.
⁵⁴
By 2006,
Song of the South
activated memories for Vaughn as troubling as they were reassuring. And when he ends the story without a “dry eye in the house,”
⁵⁵
it’s difficult to pinpoint that for which he weeps.

There is certainly something utopian, but not ignorant, in Vaughn’s moving remembrance. A danger, of course, exists here in reiterating affective and personal histories (thus marginalizing cultural politics) within such ideologically charged discourse.
Convergence Culture
supports approaching fandom with a sense of “critical utopianism”—embracing the potential of fandom, particularly online.
⁵⁶
There also remains a heightened, yet uncynical, awareness of how issues such as institutional power, corporate diversification, and conservative fandom might influence an otherwise-utopian conception of fan behavior. Anecdotes such as Vaughn’s accentuate the occasional presence of fandom’s
own
(self-) critical utopianism. His remembrance offers a momentary, nostalgic impulse to return affectively to a not-so-innocent time, copresent with an awareness of the various histories (racial, national, personal) that haunt that impulse. Likewise, we may follow his ambivalent lead and find critical approaches to digital participatory culture strongest when the criticism is applied equally to the sometimes hostile and often ambivalent fans, such as those of Disney and
Song of the South
. Only then would a utopian conception of fandom find its richest possibilities.

CONCLUS
ION

On Rereleasing
Song of the South

Prints are unavailable and a childhood memory is notoriously unreliable.

RICHARD SCHICKEL, THE DISNEY VERSION

At various conferences in the last six or seven years, I have given presentations that touched on different aspects of my research into the histories of Disney’s most notorious film. In each case, I was greeted with the same dawning awareness of
Song of the South
I mentioned in the introduction. Many people had forgotten that they remembered the film, or at least the Brer Rabbit books. But I was also always asked the same question, which I had studiously avoided addressing in my talks: What did
I
think about
Song of the South
? Specifically, did I personally feel the film should be rereleased officially? While my project here has been to document historically what
others
did with
Song of the South
(both Disney and the film’s various audiences), I have never claimed to be impartial. It should be clear throughout what I personally think of
Song of the South
. I have not tried to sugarcoat its racist connotations, nor have I defended the film or its supporters.

Since I will again be asked, I wish to end by stating clearly that I do not believe the film should be kept out of circulation either. While I am not sympathetic to its supporters, or to Disney’s bottom line, I do think
Song of the South
should be rereleased. This comes with at least two important qualifications. For one, audiences today need to understand how the film was not inoffensive even in 1946, or at any other point in time. Of all the myths surrounding it today, I am most troubled by the persistent claim that
Song of the South
is merely a “product of its time,” an assumption that is racially ignorant, culturally destructive, and just plain historically inaccurate. Second, detractors should be allowed equal space to criticize the film by calling attention to the various historical
and
cultural reasons why it was, and remains, so offensive. In many ways, these two ideas are what I have worked so aggressively to reinforce throughout this book. It is important to bring the film and its racial stereotypes out of the briar patch and back into the open. Once there, we can again make visible the series of larger cultural debates that
Song of the South
activates, instead of conceding them to a vocal minority that is empowered by critical (and corporate) silence.

DISNEY’S MOST NOTORIOUS FILM

Song of the South
has always coexisted with questions of its accessibility and discussions about its controversy. Within that dynamic is a particular history of race, media audiences, and technologies in the twentieth-century United States. This project was less about
Song of the South
and more about the issues it raises in circulation through repetition and difference. The coexistence of its presence and absence over nearly seventy years offers a uniquely illuminating history of affect, nostalgia, technology, and critical race theory. My book explored three interrelated issues: how questions of race have been negotiated through the media, how Disney emerged as the dominant media giant it is, and how changes in media technologies are inseparable from the cultural, political, and historical issues with which they intersect. The film’s first appearance in 1946 was met with criticism from both white and black audiences, and therefore Disney kept the work out of circulation for another ten years, and then another sixteen. In a way, limited access to the film today is nothing new. During many of those years, as with today, the film was less widely available in its full-length theatrical whole than it was in transmediated fragments (books, records, clips, etc.).

When
Song of the South
finally succeeded at the U.S. box office in the 1970s, it coexisted with the legacy of the film’s controversy—which, along with other factors, played a role in
Song of the South
’s success. That controversy most explicitly manifested itself in Ralph Bakshi’s
Coonskin
(1974), a blaxploitation satire based on the Disney film. When the film was released again in 1980 and 1986, it was met with criticism that was more direct. This was tied in no small part to
Song of the South
’s perceived affinity with the political ascendency of Ronald Reagan. Because of that enduring criticism, Disney began in the late 1980s and 1990s to rewrite and dissipate
Song of the South
across its transmedia universe. This strategy was most prominently featured in the Disney theme park
attraction
Splash Mountain. The film has now been in the vault for nearly thirty years. But fan advocacy, bootleg distribution, and other forms of Internet activity have kept the film as accessible in our current age of digital culture as it has ever been. Throughout all the decades and historical contexts, texts and paratexts, appearances and disappearances, the hidden histories of
Song of the South
offer a unique and telling glimpse into how nostalgia, whiteness, affect, and convergence affect the reception and ideologies of twentieth-century American media.

WHATEVER HAPPENED (HAPPENS) TO THAT FILM
. . .

Where is
Song of the South
today? In 2007 Jaime Weinman wrote in
Maclean’s
that the film was “one of the titles that fans most request from the fabled Disney Vault.”
¹
This eerily echoes rhetoric around the film from the 1970s. As recently as 2008, the
USA Today
film critic Mike Clark casually mentioned in an otherwise-unrelated article that
Song of the South
ranked alongside John Huston’s
African Queen
(1951) as the two films highest on “consumers’ DVD wish lists.”
²
Is it a sign of things to come that Huston’s safari masterpiece has since been released onto both DVD and Blu-ray Disc? The emergent sense with Disney is that eventually the film will be distributed on various home video formats for the primary reason that too much money stands to be made, even more so with the controversy surrounding it. Disney “has to look for potential bestsellers that aren’t on DVD yet,” writes Weinman. “And because scarcity increases value, no film has more potential value than
Song of the South
.”
³
Back in March 2007, Disney President Bob Iger (who took over after Michael Eisner stepped down) hinted at a shareholders’ meeting that the film might receive distribution. “Iger’s statement,” wrote Earl Hutchinson, “was a trial balloon to see what, if any, public reaction there is to that prospect.”
⁴
As in 1970, the studio initially announced
Song of the South
was to be permanently withdrawn, which only—intentionally or otherwise—increased demand for the film. On the heels of a sixteen-year withdrawal,
Song of the South
then opened to its biggest box office yet. Who knows how the film would perform now on the heels of an absence spanning nearly three decades?

The idea that Disney has “banned” its own film is misleading; in fact, the company has taken an extremely
passive
attitude. J. P. Telotte notes, “Disney’s uncharacteristic reluctance in this case [of
Song of the South
] to
profi
t from its past—or even to prosecute those who do.”
⁵
They have not rereleased it, yet they also do not aggressively pursue illegal appropriations of it either. Unlike in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the corporation does not need to promote the film’s absence. Disney fandom does the job already, making it easier for the studio to figuratively wash its hands of the film. If Disney were to begin cracking down on the bootlegs and websites, such behavior would only do exactly what the company does not want at the moment—to draw excessive attention back to
Song of the South
. It would also alienate those devoted followers who, knowingly or otherwise, participate in Disney’s default marketing strategy.