Disney's Most Notorious Film (9 page)

In a section titled “Nirvana in the New South,” Brode begins by suggesting that, at the time of
Song of the South
’s initial release, criticism of the movie was largely restricted to misguided white liberals, and that black audiences reacted quite positively. Brode quotes the noted film historian Thomas Cripps’s opinion of the film as being a mistimed but “otherwise admirable effort.”
⁴
In fact, Cripps’s attitude toward
Song of the South
was much more critical. As I discuss in the next chapter, Cripps offered a detailed description in
Making Movies Black
of the noble, if unsuccessful, attempts by several African Americans to boycott
Song of the South
in particular, and to establish it as indicative of Hollywood’s postwar failure to positively represent their community.
⁵
Brode implies that African Americans then (and now) do not really have a problem with the film. If anything, he argues, it is white liberals who have criticized the film out of existence.

Ultimately, Brode’s defense of
Song of the South
rests on the speculation that Walt himself intended Uncle Remus as a
subversion
of the Uncle Tom stereotype. “[Disney] sensed that to utterly abandon the Tom and Mammy icons would disorient a mainstream audience,” Brode asserts.
⁶
Yet even before then, Hollywood had already made an effort to
stop
reusing racist stereotypes during World War II, under pressure from the NAACP and the OWI. The U.S. government did not wish to see such subservient representations undermine civilian morale, or echo the white supremacist rhetoric of Nazis, during a war effort when every man and woman’s dedication was needed. Brode argues that Uncle Remus created a landmark image, one that “paved the way for future African American characters—and the actors playing them—to in time become the focus of Hollywood movies.”
⁷
Such an argument, about how subjectively “positive”
Song of the South
was as an image of racial relations in the 1940s, rests on an ironically ahistorical textual reading. There is little attempt to connect the film to other events in Hollywood and the United States at the time.
Song of the South
was not a cutting-edge subversion of the Uncle Tom stereotype in 1946. By 1940s standards, it was a shocking regression, a nostalgic appeal back to the racial attitudes and images represented in 1930s Hollywood plantation films.

Such basic textual readings of
Song of the South
thrive today because the film itself resists easy ideological categorization. Like many classic Hollywood films,
Song of the South
is structured as narratively, historically, and thematically ambiguous, even while depending on outdated stereotypes. What is both thoroughly offensive and maddeningly elusive about
Song of the South
is that it represents a mythical time in the American South that never existed. Instead of an accurate and coherent representation of pre–or post–Civil War Georgia, we have a consciously dehistoricized, conflict-free romanticization of idyllic plantation life. Over time, later audiences would come to see such images as an accurate, if unfortunate, depiction of American history precisely because they’d grown up with films such as
Song of the South
and
Gone with the Wind
as their only historical points of reference.
Song of the South
is rooted in easily identifiable stereotypes of African Americans. But the film also performs considerable affective work in the process of remaining symptomatically ambiguous.

In
A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema
, Robert Ray suggested that postwar Hollywood was marked in no small part by an increasing awareness of a more diversified audience in terms of politics, aesthetics, and ethnicity. The result was a largely conservative movement toward films that contained both progressive and reactionary impulses—at formal and ideological levels—designed to reach the largest possible audiences.
Song of the South
represents an early example of this shift. It is an ideologically conservative film meant to be “inoffensive,”
and
a modestly progressive
technological
achievement that mixed live action and animation, flouting Hollywood norms. Meanwhile, it was also wrapped around meekly liberal, if still problematic, images of harmonious racial relations that deliberately avoid their own historical context. At its core,
Song of the South
’s racial politics must be understood in relation to a larger Hollywood agenda wherein, according to Ray, “commercially acceptable filmmaking . . . dictated the conversion of all political, sociological, and economic dilemmas into personal melodramas.”
⁸

At a narrative level,
Song of the South
reduces the historical event of World War II to what Ray, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and other film scholars have called a “structuring absence.” Cultural anxiety in the United States over the fact that African Americans had gained a modicum of agency and visibility during the war is diminished in
Song of the South
. Disney’s film offered a nostalgic narrative that reaffirmed a black person’s dependence on the white community, by way of a mystifying, contradictory discourse of fear and affection. This echoes what Wolfe said in 1949 about the Remus literary tales: they reconciled white guilt over the legacy of slavery through the imagined approval and even love of the Uncle Tom figure. Yet analyzing the film itself, or its structuring absence, takes us only so far.

Highlighting its anachronistic, conservative subject matter does not fully account for what the film does textually that lends itself to irreconcilable readings, or for the complicated contexts in which it has appeared. This requires a more nuanced understanding of the various conditions of ideological, technological, affective, and historiographic possibilities that accompanied the film in the course of its circulation. “Conditions of possibility” speak to larger historical trends—the alternating accumulation and evaporation of potential ideologies and cultural contexts across years and decades. Ideology is never inherent in a text, nor is it directly “transmitted.” A film does not change single-handedly the ideological outlook of a particular person or a group of people, since audiences bring to the cinema a bottomless well of preexisting dispositions that influence their reaction. Yet this is not to suggest that films cannot activate those prior attitudes in complicated ways.

Conditions of possibility also refer to the potential coexistence of competing ideologies within the production of the text itself. While moving in a conservative direction overall (as most Hollywood films do),
Song of the South
is just ambiguous enough textually to lend itself to different cultural and political readings. Moreover, such lack of
a
consistent ideology is complicated by other historical, affective, and interpretative factors within the film’s discursive surround. Despite being uneventful upon its first release,
Song of the South
and its ideologies over time gained a considerable presence in American popular culture, to the point where today its offenses seem “natural” or “invisible” to some audiences. Ray argues that “Hollywood’s power (and need) to produce a steady flow of variations provided the [American] myth [of individualism] with the repetitive elaborations that it required to become convincing.”
⁹
The artificiality and arbitrariness of the classic Hollywood narrative structure—of which
Song of the South
is typical—came to
appear
seamless and invisible through continual redeployment. Moreover, as Ray notes, “by helping to create desires, by reinforcing ideological proclivities, by encouraging certain forms of action (or inaction), the movies worked to create the very same reality they then ‘reflected.’
”
¹⁰
Through the repetition and redundancy of its various forms of recirculation,
Song of the South
’s mythology of white privilege and institutional racism became
less
questioned and criticized over the years, because it had become its own reflected “reality.” In other words, people criticized
Song of the South
harshly in 1946 because its anachronisms were more jarring to an audience that had just experienced the movie for the first time. This contrasts sharply with those later audiences who had spent their whole lives growing up surrounded by the film and by other Brer Rabbit–themed paratexts. For them,
Song of the South
just always “was.”

Conditions of possibility define contemporary reading strategies—what was available to people (fans, writers, producers) in their time. It also refers to the media scholar’s potential options for charting multiple, irreducible histories of the film’s moments of circulation, and the thematic and discursive trajectories that accompany them. Whereas World War II provided conditions of possibility in the 1940s for audiences of
Song of the South
, the election of Ronald Reagan would offer very different ones in 1980. At the same time, while it is possible to focus on
Song of the South
as one post–World War II representation of race in the American South, it is also possible to chart an alternative trajectory. This is exactly what Ed Guerrero suggests doing with
The Foxes of Harrow
(1947).
¹¹
Ideologically contested material in the media, like images of race and racial relations, do not emerge as a “timeless” representation—good or bad, positive or negative.
Song of the South
is not merely an anachronistic ’40s Disney film, nor is it a positive statement containing elements of racial utopia. Those contradictory and irreducible ideologies
always
coexist within the film’s potential to affect a response. Single moments of reception work only as particular, historically contingent events that activate and perpetuate preexisting conditions of possibility.

New
ideological responses rely not on what message is transmitted, then, but on the activation of preexisting conditions established through
redundancy
. Even though
Song of the South
was criticized upon its first release, those various readings were slowly replaced through the decades with alternate conditions.
Song of the South
’s repeated recirculation and repurposing raised the film’s visibility, and subsequently created a more amendable environment for its
re
release. In later decades, different historical periods (white flight in the 1970s, Reaganism in the 1980s) emerged wherein such imaginary representations would find greater receptivity. Such responses always, in turn, create new possibilities. Audiences who grew up with the film in the 1980s, such as the network of
Song of the South
cult fans today, understand it only as a product of their own childhood nostalgia. This has nothing to do with the film’s original release in 1946. Nostalgia for the film itself
today
is a significant part of the film’s appeal. Yet these kinds of emotional responses were not possible in 1946, or even perhaps in 1956. Such nostalgia became a condition of possibility later through the film’s recirculation, and through Disney’s consistent promotion of it across several decades and media platforms.

Responses never just react to one preexisting condition, and never point back toward one isolated ideology. Understanding
Song of the South
’s long-term reception requires carefully balancing the conditions that led to a particular moment of interpretation: the dissipation of the film’s historical distortions and racial inequalities over decades; the legacy of the Disney company as it morphed from a small, desperate Hollywood studio into a “sacred” American institution; an intensified appeal to
Song of the South
’s affective qualities; and a heightened awareness of the nostalgia that the film can and often does generate. All the perceived qualities that Disney initially promoted about the film—a heartwarming, fun, musical spectacle—did eventually come to define it for some, but this process was not immediate. The conditions that would promote
Song of the South
’s eventual success increased throughout the years, in part because of Disney’s distribution persistence.
Song of the South
generally underwhelmed adults in 1946 and 1956. Yet the children who were watching the film with them were sometimes developing very different responses that would materialize discursively decades later. This creates a complicated dynamic whereby nostalgia benefits from that very same process—the continuing recirculation of
Song of the South
—which it
also
helps to sustain. And such nostalgia distorts the historical contexts at the origins of the text.

PREWAR CINEMATIC STEREOTYPES AND POSTWAR THERMIDOR

Representations of blacks in
Song of the South
should first be understood as a response to World War II and other cinematic representations of African Americans in the 1940s. This is a valuable correction to the position that the film was progressive just because it featured a few African Americans and whites interacting within an affectively positive setting. While far from racially diverse, Hollywood had changed after World War II. Film scholars such as Michael Dunne have noted that Disney was hardly alone in its sentimentalized, nostalgic depiction of a romanticized South.
¹²
What sometimes gets forgotten is that Disney was one of the few studios to produce a film of this kind
after
World War II. In that sense, the company was too slow in attempting to cash in on the success of David O. Selznick’s
Gone with the Wind
(1939), as it had originally hoped to do. The same propaganda effort that kept Disney financially afloat during the war also advocated in other venues for more visible and “positive” (non-stereotypical) representations of African Americans. This government activism ironically made the receptive cultural conditions for a conservative film like
Song of the South
even more difficult later on. With that precedent in mind, Disney was perhaps foolish to take on something like
Song of the South
. With the right sort of creative innovation (the addition of music and animation), however, the studio thought that such old representations could still work. But by 1946, the stereotypes, while far from gone, were outdated.