Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment
Douglas Brode
Language: English
Pages: 312
ISBN: 0292709609
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In his latest iconoclastic work, Douglas Brode—the only academic author/scholar who dares to defend Disney entertainment—argues that "Uncle Walt's" output of films, television shows, theme parks, and spin-off items promoted diversity decades before such a concept gained popular currency in the 1990s. Fully understood, It's a Small World—one of the most popular attractions at the Disney theme parks—encapsulates Disney's prophetic vision of an appealingly varied world, each race respecting the uniqueness of all the others while simultaneously celebrating a common human core. In this pioneering volume, Brode makes a compelling case that Disney's consistently positive presentation of "difference"—whether it be race, gender, sexual orientation, ideology, or spirituality—provided the key paradigm for an eventual emergence of multiculturalism in our society.
Using examples from dozens of films and TV programs, Brode demonstrates that Disney entertainment has consistently portrayed Native Americans, African Americans, women, gays, individual acceptance of one's sexual orientation, and alternatives to Judeo-Christian religious values in a highly positive light. Assuming a contrarian stance, Brode refutes the overwhelming body of "serious" criticism that dismisses Disney entertainment as racist and sexist. Instead, he reveals through close textual analysis how Disney introduced audiences to such politically correct principles as mainstream feminism. In so doing, Brode challenges the popular perception of Disney fare as a bland diet of programming that people around the world either uncritically deem acceptable for their children or angrily revile as reactionary pabulum for the masses.
Providing a long overdue and thoroughly detailed alternative, Brode makes a highly convincing argument that with an unwavering commitment to racial diversity and sexual difference, coupled with a vast global popularity, Disney entertainment enabled those successive generations of impressionable youth who experienced it to create today's aura of multiculturalism and our politically correct value system.
Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?)
The War of the Worlds (BFI Modern Classics)
intelligence, Powell gradually wins over most of his companions, even if they do early on deride him by using the “c” word indiscriminately. Those capable of an ethical education cease laughing and fall in behind Powell as they come to appreciate his greatness. When the endangered party eventually splits in two, several men follow a far more likely savior: Big Bill Dunn (Brian Keith), a rough and rowdy mountain man with two good arms and a weapon in each hand. Based on his previous 86
the filmmaker never approved of casual abandonment to the pleasure principle. In the context of the Disney canon, Fantasia’s orgy sequence served less as a suggestion of what we ought to emulate, in place of Puritanical posturing, than a necessary corrective to the opposite extreme. Long overdue was a healthy, sensible Golden Mean. This represented precisely what all great thinkers, beginning with the ancient Greeks, had proposed and what Disney always conveyed. Like Shakespeare’s Romeo and
plays Cupid, the kiss she now hopes to engineer between Aunt Polly and Edmond is, then, not exclusively sexual. A better term would be “sensuous,” alive with a pantheist’s cognition that the physical (natural) best conveys the religious (spiritual). This essential truth, Pollyanna instinctively senses, knowing also it is what her aunt desperately needs. On some repressed level, at least, Aunt Polly knows it, too, though she has given herself over too fully to rationalism to ever admit this
enough by the blatant chauvinism there that they staged a walk-out. Hippiedom’s retro masculine point of view was vividly articulated in Getting Straight (1970). Playing an edgy college professor living with a 164 Multiculturalism and the Mouse flower-power grad student (Candice Bergen), Elliott Gould at one point angrily rails at her for daring to disagree with him on some minor issue. “We shouldn’t be burning our draft cards,” he screeches. “We should be burning women’s library cards!” More
title “artist” automatically accompanied a university degree—then every graduate of New York University, the University of Southern California, and Northwestern University who headed for Hollywood would swiftly prove more influential than Spielberg. For he spent approximately two years at Long Beach Community College, eventually leaving sans degree. Certainly, Disney did have a sense of the vast American middle, as Shakespeare did for the audience of his time, Spielberg and Lucas in our day. The