digital histories

In the rush of postseason accolades for Martin Scorsese's Hugo, I've recently thought more about Sean Cubitt's work in The Cinema Effect on the "Event Film"--his articulation of the modern special effects blockbuster. The next aspect of Haunted Nerves, a forthcoming project on time and digital cinema, will be focused on the role of nostalgia and franchising in the Event Film (which I probably won't get to until late next year). I haven't had a chance to see the movie yet, so take this with a grain of salt. But there's something about the film's popularity with cinephiles and critics that I find potentially distressing (and not just that it supposedly reinstates the myth that early cinema audiences were dupes).

I think it has to do with Cubitt's premonition that--as special effects become more sophisticated and other genres fail to retain a mass audience--one day all major Hollywood movies will be overt fantasy films--not just the work of Lucas, Spielberg, Jackson and Cameron. Even Scorsese is in on it now. More precisely, I think of this quote from Cinema Effect:

History is no longer intrinsic to films but extrinsic. The description of effects-driven movies as enclosed and enclosing worlds may seem to remove them from the political analyses of ideology critique. That, indeed, is their purpose: to abstract themselves from the temporal to grasp the eternal.

Are we celebrating a film which is the epitome of Hollywood's lack of "historical consciousness"--in every sense of the phrase?

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The Postmodern (U)Turn

Its about that time of year where I go through a fair amount of self-reflection that manifests itself in the form of a particular kind of intellectual autobiography. In the last several months, a number of contexts have forced me to return to one of my original scholarly interests: postmodernity. My first passion in graduate school—a decade ago now—was Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In retrospect, I didn’t understand it very well (and perhaps still don’t).

Yet there was something, generally speaking, that was very appealing to me about its attempts to reclaim a sense of historical consciousness within a capitalist culture engulfed in mindless consumption and simulacra. I worked through it in earnest in a few seminar papers between Oklahoma State and Wayne State, circa 2002-2004. This resulted in a couple of decent, if minor, publications on Ghost World and American Splendor, respectively, but little else. Then, when I transferred from WSU to Indiana in 2005, I also was making the conscious effort to “re-brand” myself as a film scholar instead of a critical theorist.

While at Indiana, I retained a passing interest in postmodernity, but there wasn’t a lot of room for it in my coursework, so try as I did to make something more of it, it didn’t take. I really didn’t know where to go with it beyond a certain kind of textual analysis, and such ambitions were further hampered by the fact that anything “postmodern” was toxic for upcoming, younger scholars. By the time I finished writing my dissertation, I had left Jameson’s theories behind—even though, symbolically, the cultural logic of late capitalism was all over the argument (the acknowledgements in Disney’s Most Notorious Film pays perhaps belated reference to Jameson’s influence).

My move to historical-materialist reception studies meant conceptualizing history in a more empirical, objective direction, which at the time seemed somewhat in tension with the more subjective, theoretical flourishes of the postmodern, drawn mostly (for me) from a rich and eclectic group of thinkers such as Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Researching the ugly history of Song of the South’s reception and the civil rights movement was more fascinating than dwelling on the absence of that history in the postmodern era—an argument I still bought, but which seemed somewhat superfluous in the big scheme of things. Like I said, I didn’t know where to go with it—methodologically or institutionally.

I guess another way to put that is highlighting the stigma that comes with even evoking the word “postmodern,” an academic cliché which elicits bemused dismissal at best and active hostility at worst. This is especially sensitive for someone on a job market which seems to prefer reductive labels above all else. There’s no point in bringing in a theoretical tradition—however valid—whose very name will make your academic life harder, not easier. It’s kind of like the cliché of referencing Freud or Lacan—maybe there’s something of substance there, but why bother? There’s got to be a simpler, less antagonistic, way to say it. So I wrote a whole book on Song of the South that’s very much a “postmodern” argument to me, but I don’t once mention that word, or even any theorists associated with it, in whole book (other than the acknowledgements) because I didn’t think it was necessary enough. Postmodernity was not worth the trouble.

Lately, though I’ve been coming back around to it in bits and pieces. For example, a similar issue of a not-postmodern postmodern argument came up in my forthcoming project on Paul Thomas Anderson. I always knew my reading of his body of work was drawing out the ways in which his films themselves articulated a vision of “postmodern” America, but I didn’t bother ever to use that term—let alone flesh out what it meant at length—because it was redundant to the more specific themes I was already highlighting (the social mediation of spectacle, consumer culture, the exchange value of celebrities) . . . . and especially problematic for a book that I always intended as much for a non-specialist reading audience, consisting of cinephiles and film buffs, as for fellow academics who’d put more stock in some form of high theory (even the postmodern) than in authorship.

But as I look ahead to revisions, this matter of the “big picture”—of how to make the book relevant beyond just the self-explanatory analytical framework of examining Anderson’s five feature-length films—the fact of the matter is that I have to do more with it than just another auteur study. Here’s one idea I’ve worked through so far:

“A product of postmodern America at the turn of the new millennium, Anderson’s body of work reveals an evolving, but also strikingly consistent, vision of fractured patriarchy and mediated social relations at the intersection of representation, commodity culture, and the ubiquity of celebrity. While each film speaks to the particular historical and economic exigencies of its production and reception, they accumulatively suggest the traces of an emergent authorship worth a second look.”

Frankly, I worry that this will alienate some of the intended readership for Blossoms & Blood—that some mainstream readers will see the word “postmodern” and immediately think “more academic bullshit.” I suppose that’s what I was fighting in the first place by not being more explicitly theoretical, especially in my introduction (and what I was resisting in the Disney book). But as an academic book, particularly as one rooted in something as academically maligned as theories of authorship, the turn to the postmodern is necessary to give it the intellectual heft required.

But, beyond that, I really do believe that Anderson’s films are about postmodern America in very distinctive ways—mass media’s self-reflexivity, the casting of movie stars, the diegetic role of celebrities, the use of salesmen, the deep sense of alienation, and so forth. I’m not focusing on that because I “have” to in order to make it acceptable to an academic press—I’m sure my initial interest in those films grew out of how they activated pre-existing issues of representation and American consumer culture that I gravitated to in the first place.

So the challenge with rewrites will be to draw out more the postmodern theoretical, cultural and historical contexts surrounding the emergence of Anderson’s films. It is particularly exciting in light of the fact that I’ve never really had occasion to articulate these issues in writing before—namely, the not-insignificant question of how I define a “postmodern” America, from approximately the 1980s on, and how Anderson’s films (as one part of the quasi-indie, “smart” film, movement during the 1990s) reflect a modest but consistently interesting aspect of it.

* * *

The more pressing issue with coming back to the postmodern as a scholar, however, is that I need to find a way to better define myself on the job market. On the surface, my work on Disney, Paul Thomas Anderson, cinephilia, Hawaii, and now digital cinema may not seem to have that much in common. This didn't concern me at first. I consciously fought the need for labels, as I’ve articulated before, but later I gave in and articulated an identity as a “historical-materialist reception studies scholar.” I still embrace that methodology, but the title only makes limited sense without a more explicit acknowledgement of the postmodern as constituting the larger set of cultural issues that I'm approaching through that methodology. In the past year, my tentative work on digital cinema—which didn’t seem to make sense at all without Jameson—and my teaching of basic film history and theory at MSU have really hit home for me how much I read film and media through the postmodern.

Long story short, I think the road through Indiana was a vital step towards fulfilling the intellectual goals I was originally invested in as an MA student--and not a shameful rebuttal to it, as I originally thought. I needed to be a "real" media historian--somebody who made a good faith effort to document past events within well-defined historical narratives, and not just a theorist who referenced history in a generic sense--before I could try to be the kind of postmodern scholar I wanted to be a decade ago. Everything I write comes back to postmodernity—and the next few months will be focused on exploring that more (again) and articulating its significance in my work and in my professional persona.

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projects and pubs

Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Vol. 2 is now available for pre-order through Columbia UP's site, which means the much-hyped (by me) Be Kind Rewind essay will finally see the light of day. Its not perfect, but I think its the best thing I have, and probably will ever have, written on cinephilia--a subject I look forward to leaving behind. Its slated for April, but I'll believe that when I see it. I thought my millions of loyal readers would like to know.

Also, the copy-edited pages--all 538--awaiting my comments for the Disney book with UT Press, now titled Disney's Most Notorious Film / Race, Convergence and Hidden Histories of Song of the South, have been sitting untouched on my office bookshelf for the last month or two. I hope to get to it as soon as this (endless) semester comes to a resolution. I'm loving my classes, but I miss working on my writing (I've done a lot more thinking than writing on the digital cinema project in the last few months).

On that note, I really, really hope to get good news on my Paul Thomas Anderson manuscript any day now . . . .

js

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Writing and Publishing a Dissertation; or, A Frown Upside Down is All Done

On Thursday morning, I sent off the final manuscript of the book, tentatively titled A Frown Upside / Race, Convergence and the Hidden Histories of Disney’s Song of the South, along with images and captions to the University of Texas Press. It was technically due a month ago, but they gave me an extension to work on proofreading, tightening up the writing, and putting the images together.



I feel like I should mark the occasion somehow (that and I have some time to blog now!). But I’m not sure what I want to say. I’ll have pages to proof later, editor queries to look over, etc., so it’s not quite the end, I suppose. But in terms of substance, it is now what it will be for the foreseeable future. The book itself is set to appear in the fall of 2012.



When it does appear, I will probably reflect more on what I think it has to say, and on how I expect it to be received. Then again, by the time I get to that moment, I may have entirely different thoughts. For now, I think I will offer a chronology of the project’s evolution and development. From a personal standpoint, it will be partly a “how did this book come about” post.



More professionally, it may also serve as a more general “this is what it’s like to write, revise and publish a dissertation” post. To that extent, it is, of course, localized and subjective. My experiences are not meant to represent anything universal. A hundred different newly-minted PhDs will give you a hundred different stories.



The idea



The book was a full ten years in the making. The idea began, of all places, with the movie Ghost World (2001), a film which has developed into one of my personal all-time favorites—even though with time I’ve increasingly become aware of the fact that there’s really no third act. This is only glaring because the first two-thirds are pretty much perfect. Anyway . . . Detour. In the movie, the young protagonist, Enid, discovers that the fast food franchise Cook’s Chicken used to be called “Coon’s Chicken,” which featured a racist image of an African-American as its logo. At a certain point, this was whitewashed by the corporation to remain viable. The film’s narrative is a mix of fact and fiction. There really was a Coon’s Chicken a long time ago, but it was never reinvented into another chain that I know of.



Enid’s fascination with how historical traces of racism permeated, unnoticed, throughout American postmodern consumer culture resonated with me. How racism remained hidden right out in the open. This plot point reminded me of another real-life equivalent: Disney’s Song of the South and Splash Mountain. Growing up in a “Disney household,” I knew a little bit secondhand about the old racist plantation movie. I was more captivated with how Disney had adapted it into a theme park ride with apparently little concern for any racial backlash. Its amazing how complicated books grow out of very simple moments.



As a kid, I was obsessed with the Disney theme parks. The other aspects of Disney, less so--and so I suppose this part of its corporate history resonated with me especially. Disneyland built a monument to its racist past; or more precisely, it knew it could use this permanent building as a way to both exploit, and erase, its racist past. I really thought somebody should do more with that history--what does it say about our collective understanding of the past? What does it say about capitalism's relationship to history? What does it say about dominant (white) society's negotiation race and to racism?



This idea came to me around the spring of my first year in graduate school. It coincided with my obsession with postmodern theory. I became convinced (and I suppose in a way still am) that Splash Mountain was the perfect embodiment of the simulacrum, and that Disney's project fit Fredric Jameson's theories on the economic, historical and cultural logic of the postmodern. I was so convinced of this that I knew I had to write something. I was already working on a Master's thesis on Stanley Kubrick, so I decided to shelve the idea for my dissertation. For a lot of reasons, that was the smart move. But I still didn't want to let go of the topic.



The result was this. I wrote it over a long Thanksgiving weekend, during a terrible Oklahoma ice storm in late 2002. It wasn't published for another three years. It is, like most things written during one's second year in grad school, thoroughly mediocre. Well-informed and promising, but nonetheless the product of someone who doesn't know what he's really doing yet. Although I kept (most) of the title in the end, because I still like it, and still feel it fits, the rest of it bears no resemble to the book. I cannot stress that enough--its apples and oranges. I don't now disagree with what I wrote then. I think within its own parameters, it works. But it just doesn't fit with where I ultimately choose to go (with this project and with my career). If there is a criticism, in retrospect, the article was guilty, I suppose, of exactly that which it criticized Disney and American society--being superficial.



So, anyway, I wrote that article as a placeholder--to stake out that ground before I went off and did other projects and topics for awhile. I was afraid that by the time I got back around to writing my dissertation too much time would have passed and my opening would have closed. I was partially right--I had no idea it would be another six years from when I wrote that before I started researching and writing my dissertation. Part of this was that I took longer to finish my MA at OSU than I had planned, and part of this was I went off to Wayne State for a year of doctoral courses before transferring to Indiana, a move which essentially meant starting over with coursework. But, I was also wrong in another respect--the idea was good, but it wasn't in danger of being overexposed as I'd feared. As I've gotten older, I've definitely gotten more patient with my writing. As Jim Naremore once told me, its not important to do it first; its important to do it right.



The prospectus



So, I arrived at Indiana University in the fall of 2005. I knew I wanted to do a dissertation on Song of the South, but the rest of it was still unformed. In the intervening three years between writing the JPC article and starting my doctoral program, two things had occurred. For one, I increasingly lost interest in postmodern theory, and perhaps theory in general. I still respected what it had to offer to film and media studies, but it wasn't what I wanted to define me as a scholar anymore. I had become much more interested in being a historian and in thinking about audiences.



A great deal of this, it must be noted, was due to the influence of Barb Klinger, my adviser. In graduate school, I had a tendency to gravitate to my biggest critics. I didn't come to IU to work with Barb per se, but by the end of my first year I knew I wanted her as my adviser; during two seminars that first year, she challenged my thinking and my writing in a way that always inspired me to work harder. Barb inspired me to see film studies in a new way, and as I began to research the exigencies of my own topic, I became a convert to her way of thinking. The real inspiration was not her books, but one of her more well-known essays: "Film History Terminable and Interminable." From that point on, the topic of Song of the South didn't make sense any other way.



Along those lines, the other thing that changed is, over time, I became less interested in Splash Mountain and theme parks as a scholar, as that JPC article indicates, and more fascinated by the history of Song of the South itself. Originally, my interest in the film didn't extend much beyond thinking about it as a reference point, a lost referent, in postmodern culture. But as I explored my topic more, I saw fascinating histories of race, media practices, and audience reception that were much more engaging than anything to do with Splash Mountain. In a sense, it started out as a dissertation about a theme park ride, and eventually became a book about Disney's most infamous film instead.



So, as I begin to put my committee together in 2006, I knew now what I wanted to write about. Instead of using Splash Mountain to challenge theories on postmodernity, I was going to write a reception history of Song of the South. Yet, even though it was a much better topic, this still presented a series of unexpected obstacles that I am still dealing with to this day, I suppose. Namely, why just Disney's Song of the South? This wasn't just a methodological question in terms of focusing on one text (at the time, I still saw myself as following the "total history" model called for in Barb's article). It was more personal than that--why did I choose this film, of all possible others?



The number one assumption people make is that you only write a whole book on a single film (or television show) if you are an obsessive fan of it. I am not a fan of Song of the South at all. In addition to finding it offensive, I also find it boring to watch. But I find its histories fascinating--I think because I grew up with Disney, and because I became obsessed with cinematic representations of race, discourses of whiteness, the general history of classic Hollywood, and the sort of textual ubiquity that today we call "convergence." I'm confident the book works through this challenge successfully. But to quick-glancing book editors and search chairs, it produces the same response, "why would this guy write a whole book about an old racist Disney movie?"



This is something I didn't really appreciate until it was too late to change the topic. My committee warned me while I was working on my prospectus, and I admit I failed to grasp the enormity of the situation at the time--to me, I was just working on what I felt was a great topic for a writing project. I didn't see that I was working on the only thing that would come to define me as a scholar and a person in the immediate years to come. This is a rather unfortunate side of academia--for all its occasional intellectual richness and nuance, it is just as quick as everyone else to seek out and embrace reductive labels. I thought then that my published work on a number of topics would distinguish me as someone who was both extremely productive and intellectually inquisitive. I've come to see now that the opposite is apparently true. Although that comes with a caveat--I'm glad I didn't realize it then, because I might have changed my topic and produced something less interesting and, dare I say, more generic than what I did.



Another detour--I have come to better appreciate the need to define one's self narrowly in academia (and to define one's self with the right label), but it is something I am still reluctant to embrace. I call myself--accurately and sincerely--a historical reception film scholar. But I resist the obsession with limiting one's self in favor of a healthy curiosity. I came to be a patient, focused scholar through years of hard work, practice and discipline; not because I bought into a particular dogma. The jury is still out on whether that was wise.



The Seminar Paper



I first wrote what would eventually become a part of my dissertation (and book) in the spring of 2007. My third and final seminar with Barb was on Fandom and Fan Cultures. In that course, I wrote a research paper on Song of the South fans. I was trying to accomplish two tasks with the first draft, one of which remained throughout the dissertation and another which eventually became sidelined. On the one hand, I was trying to work through how actual fans and other audience members worked through racist imagery in films (In general, the issue of race and racism remains under-explored in fan studies). With increasing nuance and historical context, this is basically what half the dissertation ended up focusing on.



The other part was affect--another carry over from my high theory days (thank you, Deleuze!), I was originally more interested in drawing out how film and media scholars don't put enough emphasis on the ways in which non-cognitive responses affect reception. This absence is especially ironic in fan studies (one notable exception is Matt Hills' work). This attention to affect was a huge contribution in the original seminar paper, but it largely faded to the background as I worked on the larger project. In fact, I think its the only major part of the original dissertation that I ended up not addressing in the book's introduction, which was the last major thing I wrote, as I discuss more below.



This seminar paper would eventually evolve into my Cinema Journal article. As that would suggest, I am very proud of the piece, but it was a long way from the seminar room to the pages of CJ. Moreover, it underwent a lot of further revision from journal article to book chapter. It was the first thing I ever wrote from the book and it was one of the very last things I ever heavily revised.



In a lot of ways, the essay on Disney internet fandom for a long time existed on its own plane, separate from the dissertation. In 2008, I submitted the article for review at Cinema Journal. I believed it was important to have an excerpt from my dissertation placed at a strong journal when I went on the job market. So I pushed ahead with publication, even as the larger dissertation was still only partially formed. As I waited to hear back from CJ editors, I pushed ahead with writing the dissertation.



I originally submitted the essay for publication in 2008. Around this time, I also presented the research at two separate conferences, including at SCMS's gathering in Philadelphia that year. In early 2009, I heard back from the journal that it would be published pending revisions. By then, I had finished a first draft of my dissertation, and as I waited to hear back from Barb on that, I began revising the article. Most of the changes had to do with fleshing out the larger context for my focus on Disney fans, which proved to be hugely helpful when I returned to the overall project.



Of course, I am very proud of that article. It was the product of a great class, it set me on the path to a good dissertation, and it was placed in an excellent journal. That said, when I return to it now, I feel it might have been rewritten one too many times (kind of like the original introduction to the dissertation, which I eventually discarded). Thus as recently as a couple weeks ago I will still heavily revising the first part of it in the book.



The Dissertation



I finished the last of graduate coursework in the fall of 2007, while also taking the reading hours for my PhD exams. I passed my qualifying exams in January of 2008--my four areas were Reception Studies, Postmodernity, Disney Studies and Critical Race Theory. By the end of the spring semester, I had finished a first draft of my prospectus, which I revised several times throughout that summer. During this time, I also started researching the topic more and working on sections of the dissertation. By the time I defended my prospectus in September of 2008, I had probably already written half the dissertation. By November, I had finished a first draft of the whole thing.



I admit in retrospect I was rushing. Part of it was finally diving into a topic I had been waiting to write for six years, and I just throw myself into the manuscript. I wanted to finish and I knew I was better with revising, a process I probably embrace too much, than with writing from scratch. I wanted to get it all down on paper and then worry about seeing what worked, what didn't, what belonged where, what needed to be trimmed or reworded, and so forth. So I guess looking back I don't regret the approach I took, though I did not have the appropriate context and big picture at the time.



In the spring of 2009, I was revising the CJ article (I did one final small batch of revisions in late summer). By the summer, I was working through the dissertation again, one chapter at a time as each one came back from my adviser. With the daunting weight and pressure of actually writing a whole dissertation now off my back, I was now free to work methodically on bringing each individual chapter into better focus, one by one.



To summarize, I wrote the first draft mostly between April and November of 2008 (not counting the prospectus-turned-introduction and the last chapter, i.e., the old seminar paper). I revised it between May and October of the following year. I spent Halloween weekend 2009 locked up in an old Indiana Holidome as I proofread the entire dissertation. I successfully defended on the first Friday of December. After my defense, Barb said that she felt the manuscript was already very near publication shape.



The Book



Looking back, I realize now the publishing process was probably the easiest part of the whole experience. After I defended, I spent the next few months focused on the job market and on being a new father. In the early summer of 2010, I returned to the dissertation. I revised the introduction, added a preface and trimmed the conclusion. I also tightened up some of the writing here and there, but nothing major in the body of the manuscript.



I sent out some initial proposals in early summer, but nothing came of it. Again, I was faced with the same issue as when I initially started--people didn't understand why anyone would write a book just on Song of the South. I admit this threw me for a loop at first--I thought the combination of Disney and the notoriety of this particular film would make the topic an easier sell--for better and for worse--than a lot of other more obscure topics that come out of academia.



I wish I had waited until the Cinema Journal article came out in late summer of 2010 before sending out proposals. It would have allowed more time to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the project. And because after it did, more editors suddenly were interested. Maybe it was a coincidence. The article had been in the pipeline for over a year, of course, but there was something about making reference to the latest issue that may have made it sound more timely.



Anyway, one of the presses that showed interest in the last summer was the University of Texas Press. Given their past experience with books on Disney and on race in the media, as well as UT's generally excellent reputation within film and media studies, I was thrilled at the opportunity. From there, everything moved pretty quickly, as these things go.



By September, UT was evaluating the complete manuscript. A month later, it was out to the first reader; within another month or so, it was out to the second. Both reports came back positive--the first in November, the second in January. There were specific recommendations for revision in each, but they both supported publication of the manuscript. By the middle of February 2011, UT's board has approved the project and a contract was issued for A Frown Upside Down.



The last, not insignificant, part was revising the manuscript. I wish I could say that I lovingly spent every working moment of the last six months pouring over the material, but teaching at Northwestern sucked up just about all my time. I worked on it here and there, including over spring break, free weekends and summer "break" between spring and summer teaching.



There were two major concerns that came up in both reports. There were smaller concerns in both that I also addressed, but two things in particular that needed some more work. Both felt, in different ways, that my chapter on Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin seemed out of place--methodologically as much as anything else. So I pulled that chapter out and put a newer section on the film in a subsequent chapter.



The other issue was the introduction. As I feared for years, it was just too bloated--not just too long per se, but lacking focus and organization. It was the result of just rewriting it one too many times. It was written and rewritten several times as a prospectus. And then another several times as a dissertation introduction, and then two more times as a book intro. So, in total, there were probably eight or more distinct versions of the introduction dating back to early 2008.



Revision is very important, and I've gotten better at it through the years. But there is such a thing as over-revising. An essay, or even just a section of an essay, gets tinkered constantly with here and there. Sentences are added, sentences are moved around. Emphases shift awkwardly from one idea to another. New sources are consulted. Old sources are taken out, or condensed. Different audiences are written to, at different times. And so forth. The end result is a bloated beast that maybe makes sense to the author who remembers every stage, but which is utterly incoherent to a new reader. And more to the point the only way to fix it is not to revise more and just make it worse.



Instead, its to wipe it all out and rewrite from scratch. That way the things you really want to say are said, and said in the way that you want them to be said. With none of the old junk blocking the way. I did this with several sections of the book ultimately, and I did this with the entire introduction.



Last spring break, I started with a blank sheet of paper and mapped out--just like I used to teach my Comp students--everything I wanted to touch on in my introduction. I wiped away all the old stuff so that nothing would distract me, or become a crutch. And then I started writing the new introduction--section by section by section. The result, I hope, is the strongest part of the entire book, something that actually "introduces" the project, instead of just reflecting all the different possible ideas I had in the course of writing the manuscript.



The last few weeks, finally, have been spent just proofreading the entire manuscript, while also polishing the prose (a fair concern of the second reader). It ended up taking longer than I anticipated because I really was trying to tighten the language, focusing the organization and clarity of the manuscript, cutting out redundancies and ambiguities, and not just checking for typos. Ironically, the final manuscript was over 13.5K words shorter than the original dissertation it was based on, even with several new sections added here and there. Half of it was cutting the whole chapter on Coonskin; the other half was just from cleaning up the writing.



This is the second book I've published. I did not think it would take another six years to finish another one. But I'm glad it did, and the experience with the first taught me to take everything about the last few months very seriously. I can assure you it will not take another six for the next. I don't even think its going to take much more than one.



Onward and upward.



js

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Our Most Requested Movie

The intro to Chapter 3:

In A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, Robert Ray noted the presence of a “right cycle” movement in the 1970s that saw newer conservative films, such as Dirty Harry (1971), enjoy box office success along with the recirculation of old films from Hollywood’s so-called “Golden Age” such as Disney’s Song of the South (re-released in 1972). Ray’s mention of the old Uncle Remus film in this context is crucial for two reasons. For one, it suggests that Song of the South was perceived as being even more conservative by 1972 than it was in the late 1940s and mid-1950s. Moreover, Ray’s comments also indicate that the re-appearance of a film can be as important, if not more so, as the first time it appeared—a fact film scholars sometimes ignore.

Whereas in the 1940s the cinematic “Old South” had been anachronistic, or at least tired, for many post-WWII audiences, such nostalgic texts suddenly came back into vogue, changing fundamentally how the film’s own history was later perceived. Indeed, it has been the re-releases of Song of the South over the last forty years in particular that is the most fascinating and revealing part of its reception history.

There is still another aspect of Ray’s argument that is important—seemingly out of the blue, Song of the South was now popular. After nearly thirty years uneventfully in and out of circulation, which included a harsh initial reception in 1946, an indifferent one in 1956, and an extended disappearance into the Disney Vault that was at least partially motivated by its controversy, Song of the South was suddenly more successful than it had ever been before. It would have made sense if Disney had left Song of the South for dead by the 1960s. Critics dismissed its lame live-action melodrama, while activists lamented its Uncle Tom representations.

Meanwhile, the film barely recouped Disney's considerable investment. The film had been the company's big Post-War hope for another Snow White-sized hit, but within a few years it was largely forgotten. The film had reappeared in 1956, but this was less because it was in demand per se. Rather, even before the 1950s, Disney had figured out that its biggest profits often came from re-releasing the same material to a new generation of children and, most importantly, parents. Song of the South was no different in that regard. Yet still the film underwhelmed again. Moreover, the film's racial politics made it even less worth the trouble.

As late as 1970, Disney announced through Variety that Song of the South would never be released again because of racial insensitivity, despite the fact that, they now claimed, it was the “most requested title” in the Disney Vault. One theatre owner, Jeff Begun, was even quoted as calling the film, quite inexplicably, a “classic.” Not surprisingly, then, within another two years, Disney finally re-released the film again and, this time, it proved to be the biggest re-release in the company history—despite never having been successful before, and even briefly “banned.”

In the span of three decades, the film literally went from being a black eye that the company was trying to move largely beyond to one of its most valuable assets. Song of the South earned over 6 million dollars in only a few months after its January 1972 re-release, more than doubling its total haul, and surpassing the 1969 re-release of Swiss Family Robinson (1960) as the highest-grossing Disney reissue at that point in the company’s history. Song of the South sat on Variety’s list of “Top-Grossing Films” from January 26th to April 5th that year, reaching as high as #5 on February 2nd. The film’s success was so pronounced that Disney then re-released it again for a limited engagement a little over a year later in June 1973.

Meanwhile, Song of the South’s business in the subsequent decade was similarly impressive—grossing nearly seventeen million more dollars during two additional reissues between late 1980 and 1987. As a result of this, I will argue throughout the next several chapters that, in relation to various historical factors, Song of the South is really a product of the 1970s and 1980s. Although produced in the 1940s, the film only became timely thirty years into its existence, and started its run as a successful cult text for the next twenty years. It is the 1972 reissue of Song of the South—more precisely, the myth that the film was always popular—that is remembered today.

Still the question remains—what did happen over the course of thirty years that shifted Song of the South from an anachronistic disappointment, to being seen as a highly sought-after “classic”? Answering that question—documenting what led up to the film’s eventual success in the 1970s—is the goal of the present chapter. It was not simply the decline of the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the White Backlash in the late 1960s, though that was one important factor. Even within African-American communities, there was often an ambivalent attitude towards Song of the South, especially after James Baskett won an honorary Oscar for his performance at the time, then passed away shortly thereafter. Through the subsequent decades, Baskett’s “historic” achievement—the first Black man to win an Academy Award—complicated some people’s attitudes towards the movie itself. Another factor explaining Song of the South’s re-emergence was that Disney itself was changing—both the corporation and its media offerings, and the cultural and critical assessments of the company among American audiences.

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Coonskin, Civil Rights, and the “Period of Acute Racial Sensitivity”

The most significant revision on A Frown Upside Down, aside from a new introduction, has been cutting my significant chapter on Bakshi's Coonskin. Instead, I've trimmed down my discussion of the film into a single section in the larger subsequent chapter on Song of the South in the 1980s and discourses of Reaganism. Understandably, going from forty-plus pages to fewer than ten hasn't been easy (actually, the original draft I submitted to my adviser two years ago was closer to 60 pages). But I think I successfully trimmed the discussion down to that which affects Song of the South the most. Anyway, here's the draft, which I've spent the last three days on fine-tuning:

“If we have to stop making movies that offend anyone, we’ll all be making Disney movies.”
—Coonskin Producer Albert S. Ruddy (1975)

Like many classic Hollywood re-releases, 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, at worst, as an unfortunate, but hardly surprising, continuing annoyance from cinema’s racist past. Instead, the racially-charged film that was controversial in the 1970s was the affectively intense satire of Song of the South: Bakshi’s 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. This consisted of the numerous studio films, released mostly between 1969 and 1974, that “featured black casts playing out various action-adventures in the ghetto.” Often motivated more by financial concerns than newfound social awareness, these films emerged in large measure from Hollywood’s growing desire to exploit profitable African-American distribution markets. Films like Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972) offered new cinematic visions of strong, assertive anti-Sidney Poitiers—black stars 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 upon degrading narratives of murder, drug trafficking and prostitution. Thus, as Ed Guerrero has noted, Blaxploitation also 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. 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 to take on 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.” 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 the latter was constructed as a critique of the former, 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 as its affirmation, Coonskin as its rejection). Both reflected childhood memories—the audiences’ own nostalgia with Song of the South and Disney more generally; 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 some of the same reasons. In the mid-1970s, the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and other activist groups protested Bakshi’s film, ironically citing very similar criticisms that marred Song of the South three decades earlier. In both cases, detractors saw the film as an offensive white interpretation of African-Americans which traded on grotesque and anachronistic (cinematic) stereotypes of the race. While Coonskin’s cultural and aesthetic satire of Song of the South was valid, its X-rated approach and knowing deployment of racist imagery was not necessarily unproblematic. As a result of this controversy, Paramount dropped the film in late 1974; it was eventually picked up by Bryanston Pictures and distributed as an “exploitation” picture.

Despite an intense amount of media coverage regarding its controversies, Coonskin quickly faded from theatres and public consciousness within a year. Its affective power and grotesque images left those few audiences who finally did get a chance, out of sometimes morbid curiosity, to see the film, feeling generally confused and alienated. Thus, one survived, and one didn’t.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Song of the South’s popularity was often dependent upon the same cultural appeal as Blaxploitation, the two traditions Coonskin brought together. Disney’s nostalgic vision of the American South spoke to the “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.” It was this audience that Guerrero identifies as making white reactionary vigilante fantasies like Dirty Harry (1972), Death Wish (1974) and Walking Tall (1974) popular—those films which often featured white cops cleaning up the same criminal urban spaces that Blaxploitation glorified.

Coonskin merged two otherwise incongruent subgenres (Disney animation and blaxploitation) into one deliberately grotesque and incoherent text to show how both rested on racist, and thoroughly cinematic, stereotypes about African-American identity in the 20th-Century. While made for a different time, the reception of Song of the South was no less a response to factors underlining Blaxploitation as Dirty Harry was in 1972. 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 the militant wing of the Civil Rights movement, Coonskin’s aggressive, unapologetic style echoed the racial rebellion of the period, while Disney’s nostalgic vision of pastoral simplicity and institutional racism appealed to audiences rediscovering open spaces via the American suburb. Thus, Song of the South’s successful reissue in the 1970s was a cinematic equivalent to the “white flight” which deeply affected American cities. As Guerrero notes, “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.”

Both versions of the Uncle Remus tales appeared within the context of Blaxploitation and urban rebellion in the inner-cities, the latter of which was provoked by years of racial tension and existing power structures sympathetic to white privilege. This coexisted with the large scale migration of both white people and civic resources to the suburbs that originally 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 who were unsettled by the sudden power, authority and autonomy blacks had struggled to attain in urban centers such as Harlem, Detroit, Los Angeles and the south side of Chicago. These were power centers that fifty years earlier (such as in the Greenwood district of Tulsa) would have been wiped out in a white-instigated race riot.

Yet Coonskin’s understanding of cultural politics and racial representations isn’t simple. Like all Blaxploitation texts, Bahski’s visually and aurally challenging X-rated film can be also read as a liberatory white fantasy of how hopelessly violent and chaotic US urban spaces had become in the aftermath of mass migration to the suburbs. Although the film itself did not appeal to those audiences, controversy around its aesthetic provocation symbolically reaffirmed for white audiences the need to leave the city, reasserting racial order and boundaries. Symbolizing the lack of direction within the Civil Rights movement, liberals and activists argued amongst themselves over the value of Coonskin.

Coonskin’s satirical logic may have shrewdly highlighted how the presence of Song of the South in the 1970s spoke, at least in part, to racist attitudes about American urban spaces. However, the same can be said for Bakshi’s film—Coonskin was made by a white Brooklyn native who had since moved to a trendy and wealthy section of Southern California at the start of his successful filmmaking career. While detractors such as CORE missed or ignored Coonskin’s attempt at satire, the larger concern about the use of racist stereotypes was not without merit.

Reactions to Coonskin’s controversial reception represent one of the earliest shifts in the increasingly revived perception of Song of the South itself. The confrontational presence of Bakshi’s film during 1974 and 1975, its provocative textuality and critical backlash, was eventually appropriated by proponents of Song of the South to deflect attention from, and even validate, the latter.

In nostalgic contrast to Disney’s old film, Coonskin became for fans an example of a truly “offensive” representation when it came to images of African-Americans in film. They contrasted the negative media attention and the verbal and visual intensity of Coonskin’s satire with the popular and politically uneventful appearance of Song of the South a couple years earlier to imply that Disney’s film was harmless, even morally positive, entertainment. Although Coonskin had been intended as a biting indictment of Disney animation, Song of the South and conservative audiences which embraced both, its reception took a much different shape in the long-run.

Writing in the guise of “Thumper” from Bambi (1942), Arthur Cooper addressed a 1975 review of Coonskin to a now-deceased Walt Disney in Newsweek. As with several reviews of the time, he criticized Bakshi’s film as narratively uneven and unfunny. More interesting was how Cooper also deflected attention back favorably to Song of the South. Bakshi, he wrote, has “made Coonskin. It’s got an R rating, which must stand for Ripoff because what he’s done is turn [Disney’s] Uncle Remus stories inside out.” Instead of analyzing Coonskin further, Cooper nostalgically evoked memories of what he saw as Disney’s more innocent version:

Last night I watched an old print of your “Song of the South,” with all those cute bluebirds and sharecroppers, and I think I’ll send it to Bakshi. Although there were protests about [Song of the South in the past], in this case CORE ought to just let sleeping dogs snore.

Cooper’s nostalgic lament highlighted how Coonskin had received harsher criticism in the 1970s than Song of the South had. It also foreshadowed how the negative reception of Bakshi’s film was later appropriated to even more conservative ends by supporters of Disney. Cooper’s review offered an early glimpse into how the intensity around Coonskin made the seeming simplicity of Song of the South more appealing to sympathetic critics and fans. In the long run, Coonskin’s reception unintentionally worked in support of the very same film it sought to criticize.

Similarly, film critic and historian Leonard Maltin highlighted the Coonskin controversy in an entry on Song of the South in the second edition of his widely-read book, The Disney Films (1984). Unapologetically reverent, his compilation offered detailed information on the production histories, plot summaries and critical receptions of every major Disney film ever made. For the second edition, Maltin added two sentences on Coonskin to his section on Song of the South:

There are still occasional protests [to Song of the South], though the worst of these seems mild compared to the reception given Ralph Bakshi’s live-action/animated Coonskin in 1975—a protest so fiery that the film was disowned by its distributor! Ironically, Coonskin was a modern-day satire based in part on Song of the South.

Maltin did not explain why Coonskin was “so fiery,” or how it was “a modern-day satire” of Song of the South. His reference to Bakshi’s film did little more than deflecting attention away from Song of the South’s past controversies. Disney’s conservative film on the surface is a mild, less overtly offensive, text than Coonskin’s abrasive satire. Yet what gets lost here is that Bakshi’s film was not meant for a child-friendly audience. In fact, Coonskin was meant to provoke.

The intersection of Coonskin, Disney and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement becomes increasingly entangled here. The effect is that these complicated histories become increasingly distorted through historical revisionism. Maltin’s second edition perpetuated and even solidified several myths about Song of the South—one being that it was always a huge box-office hit in its earlier releases. Another was that criticism of the film was muted overall in 1946, save for “some liberal reviewers and Negro organizations.” Maltin also suggested that:

It was only in the 1960s, when Civil Rights became a major concern of the entire United States, that it became clear that Song of the South and films of that kind would be touching sensitive spots if shown again. Even the reissue of Gone with the Wind in 1967 sparked some (relatively minor) protest among certain Negro groups who objected . . . .

However, this is the exact opposite of what happened—the film was most forcefully protested in the 1940s. Yet, in Maltin’s reconstructed timeline, Song of the South’s brief controversy in the “Civil Rights” era of 1960s had been successfully overcome and put to rest. In the 1984 edition, Maltin even reworded one sentence to seem less interested in the conceding the “Uncle Tom” criticism of Song of the South. In 1973, Maltin wrote, “it is difficult to condemn a film of this kind, Uncle Tom accusations notwithstanding, for in spite of its syrupy story line and occasional flaws, Song of the South has some of the most delightful moments ever captured on film.”

In 1984, however, Maltin rewrote this sentence to read, “Accusations of Uncle Tomisms and quibbles over its syrupy storyline are ultimately defeated by the film’s sheer entertainment value.” The difference is perhaps incidental, though no less noteworthy, given that most of the other pages on Song of the South are otherwise identical. Whereas the first edition appears to bracket off the consideration of “Uncle Tom accusations,” suggesting the concerns may have validity, the second edition collapses those criticisms with the other reservations about the film, hence creating the impression that every criticism of Song of the South was overcome by virtue of its affective entertainment. In the context of his second edition, Maltin positioned Song of the South as a happy corrective, as reassurance, to the perceived trauma caused by the controversies around Coonskin.

Just as white opposition increased steadily in the late 1960s and 1970s to the Civil Rights movement, there was another backlash against the backlash to Coonskin. As Maltin and Cooper’s reactions demonstrated, the backlash was not in defense of Coonskin. Rather the controversies around the film were used to deflect the question of racial difference altogether. In the void of liberal disagreements over Bakshi’s film grew an unchallenged conservatism. The criticism of Coonskin was used to implicitly discredit the larger Civil Rights movement for greater equality in cinematic representation. In a review of Daniel Leab’s book, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (1975), Tom Shales commented in passing on the CORE controversy. He noted that “one would think constructive forms of consciousness-raising, if such are possible, would be preferable to coercive tactics such as” CORE’s call for censorship with Coonskin.

He pointed out that around the same time “pressure groups in New York [had] blocked the airing of a public television documentary because they thought it offensive.” For Shales, these were examples of how counter-productive the protests were. He went further, arguing that the notorious radio and later television program, Amos `N` Andy (which was eventually taken off the air because of African-American protests), was “funny” and that “several black celebrities have said they did not find it objectionable.” Shales’ review criticized Leab’s book—which rightly criticized the history of African-American representations in Hollywood—for “righteous indignation” and for demanding too much progress too soon. By “asking a 1949 film to succeed at a 1975 level [. . .],” he wrote, “Leab apparently expects films to reform overnight.” Yet Shales also worked to undermine that same progress in representation by arguing that protest groups (such as CORE) had gone too far. The contradictions of an evasive whiteness begin to reemerge in Shales’ piece—a type of identity which does not proclaim the importance of being white, but rather denies the category of “race” altogether (in the service of white privilege).

Once devised as a particular kind of critique of Song of the South, Coonskin’s failure and de facto censorship became appropriated by Disney supporters as a vindication of the 1946 film’s innocence and entertainment value, and as a deflection from the controversies the earlier movie had incited. In the 1984 edition of The Disney Films, Maltin declared that “Song of the South has triumphed, and survived a period of acute racial sensitivity.”

As framed, “a period of acute racial sensitivity” conflated both the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s with the controversy around Coonskin in the 1970s. This conservative denial of race in the 1980s celebrated a triumphal environment in which many whites became less racially conscious, while Civil Rights groups and media critics failed to mount a coherent critique of films such as Song of the South and Coonskin like they had in the 1940s. That progressive failure served those who wished for Song of the South’s survival during “a period of acute racial sensitivity”—a confident assertion particularly appropriate to the anti-Civil Rights movement of the decade.

Subsequently, Song of the South’s racist depiction of the Plantation South, generally agreed upon since the 1940s, became increasingly rejected by fans of the film and supporters of Disney by the 1980s. Sympathizers were emboldened by the controversy around Bakshi’s film, by an increasingly conservative political climate, and by the continuing survival of the 1946 film. Although inaccurate to trace all of this back to the release of Coonskin, negative reactions to that film that also touched on Song of the South almost always invariably reinforced this twisted logic.

The reactions to both films in the 1970s served as sobering touchstones in relation to white America’s decreasingly racial consciousness. When Song of the South reappeared in the 1980s within this new condition of possibility, the film seemed tame, even harmless for many. The film was now as a nostalgic journey from a beloved institution’s past (Disney). Audiences during the emergent “color-blind” 1980s were suddenly quite anxious not to see race, or allow others to see race, in the Disney film. In retrospect, attacks on Coonskin were at least partially misplaced. As Bakshi’s film faded, Song of the South would continue to be far more resilient and insidious—the same sort of evasive whiteness that Coonskin had tried to deconstruct.

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A Few Thoughts on Tron's Blu-Ray Release

Tron: Legacy (2010) made its home video debut on blu-ray and DVD this week. Perhaps more notably, Disney also finally re-released the original Tron (1982) as well. They had earlier passed over the opportunity to re-release it in anticipation of the sequel’s otherwise much-hyped theatrical debut in IMAX and 3D last December. At the time, this led to understandable speculation that Disney was afraid of its own intellectual property. Of course, on the other hand, Disney is notorious for locking up its older titles into the proverbial “Disney Vault,” restricting them to very limited release windows, and ensuring their demand across decades and generations. This is a business model they’ve exploited as far back as WWII, after stumbling upon it out of economic desperation. As recently as two months ago, a second-hand copy of Tron’s first, since discontinued, DVD release (2002) was going for over $100 on Amazon.

Yet this makes Disney’s initial decision all the more curious; it lent further evidence to the idea that the company didn’t want people to actually see the original, for fear it would dampen, rather than heighten, interest in its sequel. While certainly a true cult classic, the original Tron did not connect with most moviegoers in 1982 and certainly has not aesthetically aged well since then, by any standard outside of nostalgia. The fact remains that Tron is one of the most important films ever made in the history of Computer-Generated Imagery, a milestone its knock-off sequel doesn’t come close to matching. Yet that, by itself, doesn’t equal blockbuster franchise material any more than Kubrick’s visually stunning but narratively-incidental 2001 would. This then prompted the even bigger question: why had Disney invested more than $200 million on a potential franchise that was built on the backs of a brand it seemed transparently ashamed of?

I am unabashedly a fan of the original Tron, but that comes with two important caveats. For one, I’m not exactly sure why. I find something truly sublime about the look and feel of the original. If I had to be more specific, I would probably focus on the film’s unintended evocation now of nostalgia for an earlier period—the dawn of digital imagery and the emergence of public arcade gaming, an era that came and went somewhere between the two Tron films. To wit, my favorite scene in the whole sequel has nothing to do with 3D or CGI—it’s the moment where Sam explores the eerily cavernous spaces of his father’s now-abandoned arcade. I think I also find the clean, cool surfaces of the Grid oddly reassuring in its simplicity, rather than alienating as many do.

There is another reservation to my Tron fandom. Even I was sitting in the IMAX theatre last winter and constantly asking myself, “Who was this movie made for?” Tron has a true base of followers, but not enough to justify such a lavish spectacle and considerable investment. Meanwhile, the story’s representation of computer technology was even more naïve and anachronistic than it had been three decades earlier. In every conceivable way, the new Tron surely felt completely nonsensical to anyone without familiarity to the original, which was in itself hardly a paragon of narrative and thematic logic to begin with. Tron: Legacy definitely made money, but relative to its costs and labor involved it probably did not fare much better than the original. Instead, the movie seemed to be another one of those properties that no one really loves, but which nonetheless coasts to decent numbers on the backs of massive hype, a popular soundtrack, and inflated ticket prices. And now that it’s available on home video formats, the most excited people seem to be Best Buy employees anxious for new material that’ll help move the latest High Definition televisions.

Nevertheless, the franchise seems to be moving forward all the same. In a way, Disney seems to be constructing a transmedia franchise in search of an audience. Marvel Comics released Tron: Betrayal in the fall of last year, the latest in several attempts to continue the narrative from the original. A new animated series is headed to the Disney XD cable channel next year. The property continues to lend itself to videogames on home gaming platforms, and rumors persist that a third film is in the works. Indeed, narratively, Tron: Legacy seemed more interested in the future of the franchise than the past.

But this still doesn’t answer the question: why? Why Tron? Why now? Disney’s attempt to build on the technological and theatrical success of James Cameron’s Avatar is one obvious enough reason (and that, ironically, makes it similar to the original’s attempt to tap into the explosion of interest in science fiction after Star Wars). Yet the new marketplace demand for IMAX and/or 3D films still doesn’t explain why Tron was chosen of all possibilities. The answer to this question, I feel, lies in Disney’s larger corporate history of repurposing, recirculation and cross-promotion.

By the end of the 2000s, Disney was moving away from its traditional interest in the Princess narrative, which had been there since almost the beginning (Snow White, Cinderella), but which really didn’t come to dominate the company until the Eisner era ushered in Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and so forth. Now, in retrospect, it’s impossible to see Disney without it. But this unquestionable stroke of business genius/luck came at a cost—all but the most die-hard of audiences have gradually tired of the same formula. The “Princess” imagery is more effective at selling merchandise than movie tickets. Another problem lays in the fact that this aspect of Disney had essentially alienated half the population—namely, adolescent and teenage boys, who were as lucrative a market as the next. Hence, it was not a coincidence, as others have noted, that Disney’s Tangled (2010) emphasized the male’s perspective, particularly in the promotion, about as much as film based on Rapunzel could.

This brings us back to Tron. In the entire history of the Disney company, very few remotely recognizable properties in the Vault could be realistically considered more favorable to the male demographic than Tron. This is especially true when you take Pixar’s recent innovations out of the equation, a brand that’s been as much in tension, as in collaboration, with Disney’s for the last two decades. The others, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Black Hole, are appropriately slated for remakes. This is significant because reusing existing theatrical properties is key to Disney’s success, and has been since Disneyland in the 1950s. It’s not that Disney couldn’t come up with new properties to attract boys, but the appeal of using Tron is that it could also triangulate the nostalgia of the father, just as princess films triangulate the nostalgia of the mother. Will it work? Who knows.

But Tron: Legacy, in retrospect, is really as much a traditional Disney film as something more self-evident, such as the fairy tale Tangled. Moreover, it’s better suited to Disney’s style than the (truly groundbreaking) original was. Since the “glory” days of Walt, nearly every one of their successful theatrical films has depended on 1) the shameless nostalgia of a pre-existing fan base (Tron fans from the 1980s); 2) the prominent exploitation of technological innovation (Disney 3D); 3) the presence of hit music which can thrive with, or without, the movie itself (the Daft Punk score); 4) the benefit and familiarity of transmedia ubiquity (videogames, comic books, TV shows); and 5) the white noise of endless cross-promotion. In this regard, Tron’s return—narrative incoherence and all—makes perfect sense. And while the new film may have few fans over the age of 18, we may wish to wait a generation or two before deciding whether Disney made the right choice to bring Flynn and Co. back out of the Vault.

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