NATCHEE BLU BARND
At first glance Oliver and Company (1988) presents an opportunity to discuss representations of economic class and the relationships between poverty, wealth, and homelessness in a capitalistic society. Adapted from Charles Dickens’ classic literary work Oliver Twist (1838), the story centers on the ascension of an orange kitten named Oliver from helpless orphan to member of a street family and finally to pampered pet for a lonely but wealthy girl living on New York City’s posh Fifth Avenue. Like most Disney films, however, and despite the film’s inspiration, Oliver and Company clearly sidesteps any direct questioning of inequality and poverty, instead pushing forward the much more palatable and marketable refrain of hope for eventual prosperity and recognition of one’s rightful place among the economically and morally elite (a salve also contained in Dickens’ version).
While Oliver and Company’s clichéd rags-to-riches journey provides the general storyline, the subtext of the film offers a rich opportunity to explore Disney’s narratives and representations of race and privilege during an era when multiculturalism was gaining widespread political and rhetorical support, as well as opposition.1 Not surprisingly, Disney presents its viewers with a thoroughly normative depiction. Although the majority of the film’s key characters are not human, the anthropomorphized dogs (and kitten) inevitably reflect dominant social constructions of race, sex, and sexual identity. Indeed, like most dominant narratives, the film constructs and presents its representations through a White male social lens, leaving the only treatment of difference to rhetorical questions of class and poverty; ostensibly asking, should the poor (characters) with self-initiative find success or wealth despite their downtrodden beginnings? In doing so, it centralizes men, assumes normative heterosexuality, and privileges Whiteness.
The story centers on male characters, with female characters as either the objects of male sexual desire, loyal sidekicks, or emotional and social wrecks.2 The film also offers troubling representations of race that specifically construct Latinos as emotionally charged, criminal foreigners, African Americans as violent urban thugs, and European Americans as unmarked, normative, and singularly important figures.
Throughout my analysis, therefore, I draw pointed attention to this film’s ability to convey and reproduce such social identities entirely through the deployment of animal characters. In particular, this essay examines how Oliver and Company’s main characters are constructed as representations of heterosexual White male identities, and how the overarching narratives necessarily privilege this already dominant intersection of social identity categories. I argue that the film’s question of class ultimately serves to elide any focus on other forms of difference or inequality, following a routine formula that leaves Whiteness un-interrogated. In addition, I outline how in order to reproduce dominant representations, this Disney production again relies on predictable representations of non-dominant identities that filmically reproduce and naturalize real world social inequalities.
The central story consists of the elevation of the kitten Oliver from helpless orphan to elite pet. Oliver’s journey is facilitated by a dog “gang” led by the savvy mutt Dodger.3 Dodger’s crew consists of a diverse collection of pedigrees, including his second-in-command Rita (an Afghan), an air-headed Great Dane named Einstein, and a pretentious bulldog named Francis.4 The smallest, but most over-the-top member of the gang is Tito, a feisty Chihuahua aptly characterized by having a proverbial bark that is bigger than his bite. After Oliver is adopted by a wealthy pre-teen girl, Jenny Foxworth, the crew is temporarily joined by Georgette, Jenny’s self-centered upper class show poodle who is determined to rid herself of Oliver. The story follows the crew’s efforts to eek out living alongside their human caretaker Fagin, a quasi-homeless scavenger and small-time thief. Fagin’s survival is threatened by his inability to repay debts owed a ruthless crime boss/shipping industrialist named Sykes, who is everywhere accompanied by two ferocious Doberman Pinschers, Roscoe and DeSoto. When Sykes kidnaps Oliver’s owner-to-be (Jenny) in order to pay off Fagin’s debt and garner substantial financial gain through her ransom, the dog crew sets into action to save the abducted child, free Fagin of his debt, secure Oliver’s “rightful” place with Jenny, and end Sykes’ tyranny of crime, intimidation, and violence.
While few of the characters are depicted in a fashion that explicitly references a racial or ethnic identity, all of the characters in Oliver and Company are nonetheless marked by the logic of racialization. Because the film mostly intends to construct “universal” characters, the filmmakers forge narratives that privilege dominant White, male, and heteronormative social perspectives, and thus render main characters that are—unless otherwise marked—effectively normative heterosexual White males.
My focus on the constructions of Whiteness in film reverses the “common sense” charge of examining race in film which usually focuses on representations of people of color. While attention to depictions of non–White images and narratives is necessary, it often excludes the “other side” of race and racism.5 This neglect can unintentionally allow Whiteness to escape notice, something which ultimately serves to further entrench its force and power. Veteran scholar of Whiteness Studies Richard Dyer rightly points to the epistemological damage done by allowing Whiteness to stand in as normative. “Looking, with such passion and single-mindedness, at non-dominant groups,” he reminds us, “has had the effect of reproducing the sense of the oddness, differentness, exceptionality of these groups, the feeling that they are departures from the norm. Meanwhile the norm has carried on as if it is the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human.”6 Taking active notice of Whiteness—noting its particularity and attendant privileges, as well as its modes of re-production—reduces its capacity to externalize difference. George Lipsitz precisely notes that, “as the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.”7 Thus, in order to deconstruct that fabricated invisibility, we must work to “see whiteness, see its power, its particularity and limitedness,” despite its construction as normative or universal.8 In Oliver and Company race is applied to clearly marked Others, while the central characters remain presumably free of marking, thus pointing to their presumed and invisible Whiteness. If we miss these constructions we also miss the implication of the power dynamics being naturalized through the character developments and narratives.
While Whiteness does not operate evenly for everyone and must be viewed through a matrix of privilege and power that accounts for class, sex, gender, sexuality, ability (among other factors), these intersections of identity do not negate the racially ordered material and social gains of those who may successfully benefit from Whiteness.9 In Oliver and Company, however, the film’s narrative framing around the lower class standing of the main characters threatens to undermine or overwhelm any productive attention to race and systems of privilege.
As one might expect, Disney regularly trades on the currency of Whiteness. In a recent study, Vincent Faherty found that more than forty seven percent of Disney’s animated human characters were explicitly European or European American (read: White), while animals or objects comprised another forty percent.10 Of the human characters, a full eighty-one percent are represented as White, a percentage that greatly increases when considering only the most substantial characters. The representations of animal or object characters, however, do not simply erase racial representations. Many characters are given clear ethnic and racial “markers,” while others can be inferred based on non-visual factors, like speech pattern, relationship, or action. When characters lack any explicit racial markings they should be carefully examined for their potential to re-construct, presume, and thereby privilege dominant White identities. Instead of simply delving into how Disney creates characters explicitly marked by race (read: non–White), sex (read: female), and sexuality (read: non-heterosexual), we must also attend to the ways that the main characters and narratives privilege dominant, and therefore only implicitly marked social identities.
The central characters in Oliver and Company exemplify the reproduction of dominant White identities in animated filmmaking. Indeed, Oliver and Dodger articulate two variations of normative White identity in a nation increasingly confronted by and self-conscious of its ethnic and racial complexity during the 1980s. Further, the construction and emphasis of the main characters as lower-class (homeless, in poverty) mirrors the troubling White backlash against multiculturalism that works to render all differences equal. According to such logic, race is no longer an issue, and thus an irrelevant marker of difference. This denial allows White-identified persons to ignore or reject non–White racialized experiences, and instead attempt to deal only with issues of economic disparity. Such solitary attention to class reproduces the invisibility of Whiteness and ignores the very modes of its construction precisely through other, “irrelevant” differences.
Oliver is crafted as unexposed to the diversity of the city (and nation), and represents a notion of cultural innocence and naivety. Dodger, on the other hand, is fashioned as the savvy urban resident, representing firsthand experience with and a command over such multiplicity. Both, however, encounter “difference” outside of themselves, signaling their construction along the contours of dominant social identities. In essence, Oliver and Dodger are straight White males (one man/dog, and one boy/kitten) negotiating their way through a cosmopolitan and fluid urban environment.
The Disney team, by default, constructs these characters through their interaction with a diverse city and in their juxtaposition with other explicitly racialized characters. According to the narrative, their challenges are not just economic, but also cultural and racial. We are introduced to Oliver (voiced by European American child-actor Joey Lawrence), for example, in the film’s opening scenes. He resides with a half-dozen siblings in a cardboard box being sold on the street by an anonymous character that is effectively depicted as White. By the end of the day the rest of the litter has been sold off, and only Oliver remains unclaimed, even after being offered for free. In effect, he becomes a homeless, unwanted child; an effective narrative tool for invoking audience sympathy for the cartoon kitten. Orphaned, Oliver struggles to find adequate shelter and safety from the dangers of the big city. Yet his abandonment is also shaped by his metaphorical expulsion from a safe White home, as his seller leaves him to fend for himself in a diverse city.
Oliver emerges from the traumatic night relatively unscathed, and awakens to find a bustling, vibrant urban street. Although the artists render most of the passing crowd of humans to appear White, the kitten’s first direct interactions occur with explicitly ethnic or racialized characters. He is caressed by an Asian American infant character, who is promptly pulled away by his mother. A stereotypically voiced Italian American street vendor (who is also an obese, unkempt, hairy, and animal-hating cigar-smoker) aggressively shoos the hungry kitten away from his hot dog cart. In perhaps the most telling moment, Oliver is drawn to the sound of hip hop music played from a Black passerby who dances along with his radio. The kitten becomes enthralled, and mimics the dancing passerby, only to reveal his inadequacy as an urban denizen and hip hopper. After just a few struts he trips over his own paws and tumbles to the ground. These initial human characters clearly drive home the point of a culturally and ethnically diverse New York. More significantly, they signal Oliver’s out-of-placeness, establishing the character’s urban innocence, and productively marking him through the “unmarked” status of a standard “cultureless” Whiteness.
Although the early character development scene for Oliver establishes his initial lack of “street credentials,” it also foreshadows his predictable overcoming of his “real,” economic obstacles. By the end of the story, the helpless kitten will master street life and find his place both literally in the form of a home, and figuratively in the form of social belonging. The prefigured accomplishments assigned to Oliver likewise manifest in the construction of another character, the kitten’s mentor to-be, Dodger. The story’s symbolic transfer of “heritage” from Dodger to Oliver partly signifies the inherited social and material capital of racial privilege. Indeed, at the end of the film, Oliver has made his way into the elite of the city, a level of success built through the “inheritance” of his canine father figure’s dominant racial, sexed, and sexualized identities.11
Where Oliver’s social identities are revealed by the character’s wide-eyed experience with a bustling New York City street, Dodger’s identities are crafted through a combination of character traits and musical delineation. He is described and drawn as a terrier mutt, a dog ostensibly without clear or “pure” lineage. By constructing Dodger as a mixed-breed, the writers and artists of Oliver and Company introduce the possibility of rendering the character’s “ethnicity” productively elusive. On the one hand, his ambiguous heritage is clearly intended to allow a wider segment of the audience to identify with the protagonist. Yet, the abstraction of his heritage actually draws upon the force of assimilation theory aimed at wiping away ethnic identities in the cause of formulating new “American” ones.
The fatal flaw in ethnic assimilation theory, of course, has always been the violent constraints placed on racialized populations by a White dominated society; populations that despite whatever level of acculturation and amalgamation remain marked by phenotypic differentiation. In other words, only those who can pass as White are able to effectively participate and benefit from shedding their “old” identities and becoming “just” Americans. All other groups either carry doubled identities as both American citizens and members of racialized populations, or are simply denied recognition as citizens at all and are constantly and repeatedly marked only as racialized peoples (consider the “forever foreign” standing commonly proscribed to Asian Americans and Latinos).12
The mixed background of Dodger (voiced by European American soft rock singer-songwriter Billy Joel) could have been an analogy for mixed-race, except that mixed-race individuals must constantly confront their ethnic “ambiguousness,” misrecognition, and the general discomfort their “elusive” identity causes for others. Harlon Dalton reminds us that “Whites who don’t identify strongly with any ethnic group tend to take race for granted or to view it as somehow irrelevant”; a luxury not available to those who cannot easily claim Whiteness.13 As SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs point out, multiraciality has long been “a mark of shame and ignominy” in an American society which historically worked to “establish and sustain firm categories of race as a way to maintain White dominance.”14 The legacy and logic of those efforts to simplify racial identities still subjects mixed-race individuals to “exclusion from ‘stable’ racial categories, the enduring ‘What are you?’ question, continual misrecognition, accusations of passing, and so forth” as they navigate a world that does not readily acknowledge multiplicity or tolerate the disruption of supposedly fixed categories.15
Most importantly, non–White mixed individuals do not escape the process of racialization, just temporarily confound its streamlined social implementation. As an “unmarked” pedigree then, Dodger must be translated as a mix of White ethnicities. While his (hetero)sexuality is easily conveyed by quick scenes that show him crudely ogling or smooching at female dogs, his racialization as White is effectively secured by its very dismissal, and the absence of any explicit racial/ethnic reference. Quite unlike the construction of the characters Roscoe, Rita and Tito, the writers and animators do not supply their central mutt character with any distinctive “ethnic” characteristics. In the end, the force of his abstracted identity, which is usually only available to mixtures comprised of European heritages and White phenotypes, overshadows Dodger’s potentially “racial” mixed-ness as a mutt.
By contrast, when the Imagineers turn their attention to creating Oliver and Company’s non–White characters, the result is much less ambiguous. Although not nearly as explicitly as Tito’s Latino construction (discussed below), the Disney production team effectively generate Roscoe and Rita as African American characters. These characters are crafted through visual and audio clues, by their contrast to Dodger and other characters, and through their curious relationship to one another. Let’s consider Roscoe first. Both Roscoe and his partner DeSoto are drawn as Doberman Pinschers, popularly noted as highly athletic, loyal, and potentially vicious pets. Roscoe is Sykes’ lead attack dog, and serves as proxy to his malevolence and ruthlessness. Indeed, the crime boss drives a large black sedan with a hood ornament of leaping chrome Dobermans, and personalized license plates reading “DOBRMAN.”
In the few scenes where the villainous dogs appear, the artists depict thick, well muscled and aggressive Pinschers in order to elicit the threat of violence, while Roscoe’s voice artist deploys African American–inflected speech and tones (African American actor Taurean Blacque voices the lead Doberman).16 The artists emphasize the dogs’ predominantly black fur, in striking contrast to the mutt Dodger’s predominantly white fur. In addition to their already dark fur color, the Dobermans always seem engulfed in shadow, an admittedly classic tactic for drawing animated villains, but also furthering the establishment of their uniquely dark “complexion.” Also of significance, Roscoe and DeSoto are the only dog characters in Oliver and Company which do not have unique pedigrees. Dodger’s five-dog crew consists of five distinct breeds, plus an interloping poodle (Georgette). All of the other dog “extras” drawn into the film are similarly unique. In contrast, Roscoe and DeSoto are indistinguishable. Their otherwise identical red (Roscoe) and blue (DeSoto) collars provide the only means by which the audience can differentiate between the two, in effect marking them with same kind of racially-coded “sameness” too often applied to Black males in accusations of criminal activity and during police lineups.
Rosina Lippi-Green’s study of language use covering fifty years of Disney feature films reveals that any character’s use of African American vernacular English (what Lippi-Green short hands as AAVE) or any other non-standard English dialect dramatically increases the chance the character will function as a villain, while only those characters that use mainstream US English serve as main characters or function as heroes. Her study documents that language consistently functions as a vehicle for conveying to audiences who is good and who is evil. The consequence is that the “overall representation of persons with foreign accents is far more negative than that of speakers of US or British English. About 20 percent of US English speakers are bad characters, while about 40 percent of non-native speakers of English are evil.”17 Further, using a limited data set she found that “all AAVE-speaking characters appear in animal rather than humanoid form,” rousing troubling historical associations between Blackness and beastliness. Although nearly all of the characters in Oliver and Company are animals, the degree to which Roscoe’s racialization is so readily apparent threatens to attach the character’s menace as much to his Blackness as to his animated presentation.
Beyond their appearance and voice attributes, the film’s narrative reproduces a troubling master-slave subtext which further suggests the two Dobermans are crafted through popular references to Blackness. Whereas Dodger and his crew are free to run the town and act in whatever manner they desire, Roscoe and DeSoto remain entirely under the control of their owner and “master” Sykes. During an initial encounter between Dodger’s crew and the attack dogs, a brutal fight is abruptly halted after Sykes calls the dogs to return. As the Dobermans retreat, still making threats and regretting their inability to finish the fight, Rita (voiced by African American actor Sheryl Lee Ralph) derisively taunts the adversaries: “Run along Roscoe, your master is callin’” (emphasis original to voice talent). Indeed, Sykes himself assures a kidnapped Jenny Foxworth that the growling dogs encircling her “only eat when I tell them to,” voicing the degree of command physically demonstrated by his finger snapping—which immediately sends them into attack mode, or instantly recalls them from their tasks.18
Rita, the sole female member of Dodger’s crew is more muted in her apparent Blackness than Roscoe, filling the role of level-headed yet subservient lieutenant. At least one reviewer clearly discerned the intended racial construction, however, referring to the character as a “Motown Afghan.”19 Rita’s linguistic racialization is most clearly noted when she inquires of Georgette about a framed picture of an anonymous male dog. Although referencing their shared heterosexual female-hood (straight “girl talk”), the writers also stake out Rita’s and Georgette’s racial distinctions through a subtle exploitation of dialectic Black English (or Lippi-Green’s AAVE). “Excuse me, uh sistah, who’s Rex?” Rita cautiously queries before being dismissed by the flabbergasted poodle. While the use of Black English is not nearly as pronounced as Br’er Rabbit’s “Yes I is!” in Disney’s 1946 Br’er, it clearly binds Roscoe and Rita together while also separating them from the other characters. Thus, another indicative scene that reveals both Roscoe’s and Rita’s implicit racialization occurs when Roscoe beckons Rita to leave Dodger’s side and partner with him. “You know Rita, I can’t figure out why you rather hang around a dump like this when you could be living uptown with a class act like myself.”20
Although the filmmakers turn little attention to Rita, in one of her few featured scenes, she is again racially cast by the musical selection chosen to represent her. She predictably bursts into a pop/Motown-esque song that lasts only one stanza before the writers’ abruptly interrupt the music and return the center of attention to Dodger and his ill-fated hit-and-run scheme. Just as Rita is about to launch into “Streets of Gold” she decides to help the fledgling Oliver gain some street smarts. In a stereotypical phrasing recalling the figure of the Black Mammy as childcare worker and house caretaker, the Afghan happily exclaims, “we gotta clean you up chile,’ and give you some on-the-job trainin’!” While the racial identity of Disney’s musical performers do not necessarily have to correspond to the animated characters purported identity, it seems compelling that European American recording artist Billy Joel sings Dodger’s songs, and Ruth Pointer (now Pointer-Sayles), eldest sister of the then-popular Pointer Sisters R&B group, sings Rita’s. Given that both of Rita’s voice talents (Pointer and Ralph) are African American women, it seems extremely unlikely the Disney team did not intend to construct Rita as Black.
The construction of the film’s most blatantly racialized and racist depiction—Tito—serves as the most indicative contrast with the main, White male protagonist Dodger. As the most clearly “ethnic” character, contemporary reviewers easily recognized the filmmakers’ construction of the “ethnic stereotype” (Maslin 1988), referring to it variously as the “hairless Hispanic mutt,”21 “peppery Chicano,”22 or simply “Hispanic Chihuahua.”23 “Ignacio Alonzo Julio Federico de Tito” (voiced by Chicano actor and comedian Cheech Marin) effortlessly dances to Latin-Caribbean music, plays “congas,” speaks with an unmistakable urban Chicano accent intermittently spliced with Spanish phrases, utters alarm at “aliens,” anticipates dangerous “gang wars,” rides on police cruisers, and assumes that any extraordinarily large home must naturally house “at least two hundred people.”
Tito is presented as an over-sexualized, Latino male without the ability to self-regulate, and in serious need of paternal supervision and cultural refinement. He is a fast-talking, violence-prone, sexually predatory, and criminally inclined Chihuahua who overestimates his own prowess in predictably dramatic fashion. Sadly, these identities and characteristics are all predetermined by dominant representations of Latinos. In this film, the trope of the “spicy” Latino signals both sexual and physical aggression. These connected characteristics also feed one another, as Tito’s oversexualization alludes to his propensity to excessively engage in criminal and violent behavior. In all, the film presents him as motivated entirely by passions and carnal desires, and thus incapable of self-restraint.
During the initial encounter between Dodger’s crew and Jenny’s show dog Georgette, for example, Dodger assures the poodle that he is not interested in her as sexual conquest/rape target after she immediately assumes such treatment from the “street” dogs. Referring to both the mission to recover Oliver and his genuine lack of interest in the coddled poodle, he reassures her that “You’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s not you I’m after.” Tito, however, quickly interjects that he is “very impressed” (emphasis original to the voiceover) by the kept dog, inappropriately suggesting his sexual interest in the poodle. Disney, like much of popular culture, has long linked hypersexuality with Latinos. In a recent analysis of the challenges that Disney faced when trying to manage cultural and social hybridity with filmic hybridity (fused animation and live action) during the 1940s, J.P Telotte points out that representations of Latin America were “alluring yet also elusive.”24 During that era particularly, the combination of desire for the Other with the inability to craft solid understandings of and relationships with the Other manifested in the sexualization of Latinos, as was done with “Brazilian Bombshell” Carmen Miranda, her sister Aurora, singer Dora Luz, and dancer Carmen Molina.25 In The Three Caballeros (1945), the embedded sexuality of Latinas is supposedly so great that it actually compels the animated Donald Duck into frantic although ultimately frustrated “romantic overtures” toward these real life women.26 The filmmakers for Oliver and Company offer the masculine version of this racialized sexuality by emphasizing Tito’s propensity to commit sexual assault. They craft the character forcing unwanted kisses upon the Georgette, and depict him having an erotic response after being slapped away: “Ooohh ... I think she likes me, man!”
When the Disney Imagineers are not depicting Tito as a sexual predator, they are featuring him as the main symbol of criminality.27 Although the entire dog crew is ostensibly poor, dirty, and criminal to the extent that they survive by stealing food and accumulating resources to pawn, only Tito is consistently depicted engaging in illegal activities. When the audience is first introduced to the members of Dodger’s crew, Tito extols the value of a shredded “primo” leather wallet he has contributed to the day’s loot. While he holds his contribution in his mouth, defending its quality to Francis (the “stately” bulldog), the rest of the goods remain secure in a trunk, unattached to the other characters who have presumably also committed theft to obtain their items. Only Einstein—the character Dave Smith characterizes as “slow moving” (in reference to the speed of his mental processes)—suggests that he has a contribution; a ruined tennis racket that clearly has no use value and was more likely to be scavenged than stolen.28
In this simple scene, the writers and artists effectively link Tito to pick-pocketing, burglary, or robbery, even if the thrashed wallet was simply found. The character’s subtle criminalization is further entrenched by its juxtaposition against the comparative normalization of Francis (voiced by African American actor, and noted voice artist, Roscoe Lee Browne). While Tito’s wallet tirade marks him as irrational, dangerous, and indiscriminate, the “British”-accented Francis passively watches a theatrical play on television while calmly reciting Shakespearean lines. Indeed, the next scene solidifies the contrasting characterizations, as it features the Chihuahua erupting into a frenzy and instigating a dogfight with his reserved bulldog colleague.
Tito’s wallet fight effectively introduces a defining character trait that will be re-visited in later scenes. In the crew’s first major caper, the dogs stage a fake hit-and-run with the wealthy Foxworth family car. When the family butler/chauffeur exits the vehicle to check on Francis, who is pretending to have been struck by the limousine (and practicing his “thespian” craft versus engaging in con-artistry), Dodger places Tito in charge of “electronics.” This euphemism directs Tito to enter the car where he attempts to steal the car stereo. While he is ultimately unsuccessful, Tito’s criminality is immediately punished, as he receives a massive jolt of electricity from biting into the stereo wires. Meanwhile, Oliver, who is bewildered as to how to be a “look out,” is quickly rewarded by being claimed by the wealthy young Jenny Foxworth. Although the writers and artists clearly intended the electrocution as comedy-relief, this scene relegates Tito’s character as the least morally upstanding member of a supposedly criminal dog crew. It clearly situates him as the most expendable and least worthy (animated) body in the crew, reflecting a national tradition of viewing Latinos as a necessary but undesirable, and thereby “throw-away” labor force. In later scenes, he again subjects himself to electrocution in order to benefit the crew’s goals, further reiterating Tito’s position and devaluing as “comedic” his constant subjection to physical punishment and pain.
Oliver and Company further deploys notions of Latino deficiency by suggesting Tito’s need for cultural interventions. Specifically, the upper-class poodle Georgette attempts to bathe and groom the feisty Chihuahua against his wishes, while Francis tries to introduce him to high culture (Shakespeare, ballet, poetry). Tito’s treatment recalls early twentieth century Americanization programs aimed at teaching European and Mexican immigrants (as well as many Mexican Americans), “proper” citizenship and cultural practices. In Los Angeles, for example, the programs presumed “Mexicans” culturally, morally, and racially deficient and therefore unapologetically sought to change how they ate, dressed, spoke, washed, worked, and played.29 The consequences of these efforts were deemed deadly serious, as one proponent adamantly proclaimed that tortillas and beans (instead of bread and lettuce) would lead Mexican Americans into a life of crime. To reformers, Mexican American life “with no milk or fruit to whet the appetite” would necessarily lead the children to “take food from the lunch boxes of more fortunate children” whereupon the “initial step in a life of thievery [would be] taken.”30 Clearly, Georgette and Francis must have recognized that Tito had never been fed bread and lettuce growing up.
Before concluding, I return to Disney’s construction of a normative White heterosexual male narrative. In addition to the construction of Dodger using assimilation theories that privilege and reproduce Whiteness, the Disney team skillfully defined their lead character through its trademark use of song. As discussed above, the opening scene uses hip hop music, racialization, and notions of Blackness to fundamentally frame this Disney story of urban 1980s New York. Yet none of these facets figure in the explicit narrative of the urban storyline. In fact, the song created to encapsulate Dodger’s character draws upon mainstream soft-rock and an outdated lyrical reference to 1950s bebop “cool” instead of the more unswerving, political messages of 1980s hip hop.31 Given that 1988 (the year this film debuted) marked a pinnacle moment in hip hop, with New York artists such as Run DMC, Public Enemy, and Boogie Down Productions enjoying national and international audiences for giving voice to urban Black New York experiences, such a musical decision appears dangerously reticent, and smacks of mainstream White cultural insularity.32
Where groups like Public Enemy brazenly tell of anti–Black violence, segregation, and institutional racism in songs like “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” Billy Joel’s performance of “Why Should I Worry?” articulates an understanding of social and spatial belonging clearly shaped by a dominant White experience. His only real obstacle remains an economic one. Thus, shortly after tricking Oliver into helping him steal food from the Italian American hot dog vendor, the Disney musical team launches Dodger into the film’s feature (and Golden Globe nominated) song. The refrain indicates that he is worry free because he has possession of “street savior faire,” which on the surface loosely translates into a kind of mastery of urban social life, and ease in relationships. Unlike the anger and angst in hip hop’s articulation of the limits and challenges of urban Blackness and Latinidad, Dodger’s soft-rock anthem celebrates individuality and casually dismisses social obstacles (read: class). According to the lyrics, no matter where this character travels in New York, he effectively fits in and succeeds. Indeed, despite the challenges posed by his proxy-homelessness (his owner Fagin squats in rickety boat) and economic standing, Dodger’s transiency is re-scripted as a broad ownership over the entire cityscape.
The writers and song makers fashion Dodger as being comfortable in a wide variety of locales and lifestyles, specifically mentioning Central Park, Delancey Street, “the Bow’ry,” St. Marks, Chelsea, and the Ritz. While much of this boast overtly focuses on class distinctions, it implicitly tell us about ethnic and racial difference as well. More pointedly, it highlights the unique spatial properties of heterosexual White maleness. As anti-racist, White activist-scholar Tim Wise points out, one of the key privileges of Whiteness is geographic freedom. It means “never being really out of place, about having access and, more to the point, the sense that wherever you are, you belong, and won’t be likely to encounter much resistance to your presence.”33 Similar arguments can be made for being male, to the extent that anti-female violence and predatory sexuality renders many places unsafe for women to travel; and for heterosexuality, to the extent that anti-gay violence regulates the public display of non-normative sexual identities.
Again, quite unlike the narratives crafted by 1980s hip hop (as well as by some Motown artists), the final lyrics of the song suggest that none of Dodger’s potential transgressions against the social order will impede the character’s freedoms. This underlying spatial component of White heterosexual male privilege positions Dodger to croon that his savoir faire will mediate his social violations, suggesting that possession of the “right” or privileged set of social identities offers him protection against serious consequence. In other words, as Black and Latino men are arrested, imprisoned, and sometimes shot for serious offenses like driving, walking, and talking, the Dodger character expects to “own” the town. While young racialized urban residents are fitted with handcuffs, this character is confident he will wear a “crown.”
Despite the limits on which racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies can safely navigate New York City, let alone the degree to which they might make such claims over the space of the city and its people, the filmmakers intend for Dodger’s song to become the mantra for the entire film, returning to close out the story with everyone invited to participate. “Why Should I Worry?, Why Should I Care?” begins exactly as before, with Dodger the sole performer and narrative subject. The lyrics abruptly and unexpectedly change as Rita leaps onto Dodger’s makeshift stage and joins in the singing. In this moment Disney’s multicultural dream of diverse characters romping around the nation in friendship and equality falls apart.
As Rita joins the closing song, the title lyrics are quickly modified from Dodger’s singular “I” to “we,” indicating a clear attempt to include all of the characters into the privileged position held thus far entirely by Dodger. Yet, as the “subordinate” dogs add their voices to the song the overall harmony and vocal skill quickly diminishes. Invoking the parody of off-key karaoke singers, the Frankie/bulldog character adds his brusque speak-sing contribution, before Tito interrupts everyone with his own scream-sing addition. As a quasi-parody, this revised song must remain a shadow of the original to the extent that it always references the original, and thus the original subject Dodger, or the heterosexual White male figure. The inequality of the singing fittingly mirrors the lesser character’s inability to fully inhabit a position of privilege. Indeed, the crew’s least memorable member, the “slow” Great Dane Einstein, is excluded altogether.
During an era of emergent and self-conscious multiculturalism, the Disney team clearly sought to generate an “inclusiveness” that spanned not just diverse personalities, but also diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and gender backgrounds. Yet this convergence proposes an equality not evident anywhere in the film narrative nor in the reality of urban New York. As soon as second-in-command Rita joins Dodger in the song, the force of dominant male heterosexuality quickly acts to undercut her “ascension” as Tito and Dodger turn their attention to crudely ogling two random female dogs. Rita pulls Dodger away from his sexual advances, but the damage has been done. Dodger has reclaimed center stage and reasserted his importance to the film’s narrative trajectory. As the new voices prove additive, this new version of the song re-centers the hetero-normative White male, who had traumatically lost his privileged position for all of one musical refrain. As it turns out, with Disney in command of the pen and ink, Dodger truly did not need worry, nor care.
Oliver and Company follows a narrative trajectory well established in Disney animated films. The central characters reflect dominant social identity categories, and thereby further privilege those already privileged perspectives. Even in a film which features mostly canine characters, the animators and writers effectively generated normative constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. Whereas even the most apologetic viewer might understand the dangers inherent in the film’s depiction of Tito, the feisty Chihuahua, the more subtle production of African American characters like Rita and Roscoe deserve equally critical attention. Moreover, the most powerful representations found in Oliver and Company draw on the unmarked, dominant categories of single White manhood which are effectively hidden through a discourse of economic struggle. It is only through careful delineation of these productions and their implications that we will ultimately begin to erase the social forces reflected and reinforced in Disney’s restricted imagination, and start drawing on imaginations better capable of envisioning social justice.
1. See Gordon and Newfield (1996).
2. Lippi-Green’s study of 371 characters across twenty-four Disney movies between 1938 and 1994 found that just under seventy percent (69.8) of speaking roles were granted to male characters (1997: 87).
3. In the film, the application of the term “gang” to Dodger’s crew clearly tends more toward the “group of friends” meaning than the “dangerous, organized crime group” definition. At one point in the film Dodger plainly states that “the gang means family.”
4. Although Rita is sometimes described as a Saluki in digital forums like Wikipedia, Dave Smith—founder and longtime archivist for Walt Disney Archives—lists the character as an Afghan Hound in the official Disney encyclopedia (1996: 419).
5. See Rothenberg (2002).
6. Dyer (1988: 44).
7. Lipsitz (1998: 1).
8. Dyer (2002: 12).
9. Henry A. Giroux (1997) offers an intriguing meditation on “rethinking the subversive possibility of ‘Whiteness’” (91) in such a way that is both responsive to the diversity and intersectionality of White identities and productive toward generating a new, oppositional definition. This perspective is especially helpful for avoiding a simplistic association of White with dominance, racism, and systems of privilege.
10. Faherty (2001: 4).
11. This narrative ultimately naturalizes and downplays the significance of the continually racially disparate accumulation of wealth available to families through inheritance. Consider Oliver and Shapiro’s Black Wealth/White Wealth (1995) for a thorough documentation of the depth of our current economic divide, especially in the important articulation of the distinction between income and wealth.
12. For more on the notion of “forever foreign,” see Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts.
13. Dalton (2002: 16).
14. Kwan and Speirs (2004: 1).
15. Ibid (2).
16. DeSoto is voice by European American actor Carl Weintraub.
17. Lippi-Green (1997: 92).
18. In the end, their blind aggression leads to early death. During the final fight/escape scene, the Dobermans each battle with Dodger, only to be shoved or forced to fall from Sykes’ car, whereupon they are electrocuted by a subway tunnel’s third rail.
19. Kemply (1988).
20. While this scene effectively neutralizes Rita’s sexuality (at least in relation to Roscoe), the official Disney encyclopedia nevertheless explicitly describes the character in sexual terms; as a “sensuous” Afghan (Smith 1996: 419).
21. See Ansen (1988).
22. See Kempley (1988).
23. See Culhane (1988).
24. Telotte (2007: 113).
25. Ibid (111).
26. Although Telotte’s focus is on the larger issues of cultural and political ambivalence and postmodern tension during an era of global uncertainty, the imposed sexuality serves as one of the key modes by which Disney represents this “dilemma” to Americans.
27. Dodger’s initial theft of hotdogs functions mostly to establish that characters “street credibility,” while Tito serves as primary actor in every major criminal or violent venture.
28. Smith (1996: 157).
29. Oliver and Company’s writers hint at the tensions over English–only efforts when Tito admonishes Francis for using an extensive, intentionally haughty, vocabulary. In Cheech Marin’s exaggerated Chicano accent, he demands that the “cultured” Francis “speak English.” The irony of Tito’s insistence on English also further marks him as foolish since it is clear that he is the most linguistically determined, non-standard character in the story.
30. Quoted in Sanchez (1993: 102). Although Americanization programs focused much of their attention on women—understood to be the bearers of culture and biggest influence on children and men—Tito’s treatment recalls efforts to target men. Many European Americans feared an inherent threat of diseases, since they believed that “sanitary, hygienic, and dietic measures [were] not easily learned by the Mexican” (Sanchez 1993: 102). Tito’s introductory scene depicts him scratching fleas, hair, and/or dirt off himself. He is the only dog explicitly marked as exceedingly dirty and unkempt, if not as an infested carrier of disease and parasites. Late in the film, the quasi-homeless, disheveled scavenger Fagin—at this point desperate and dejected—scrapes off similar-looking materials.
31. This should not be read to imply that bebop was not a critically-informed and reflective artistic form during the 1940s and early 1950s, only that it lacked such social force by the 1980s. Consider Amiri Baraka’s (1963) Blues People, Eric Lott’s (1988) “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style” in Callaloo 11(3), Eric Porter’s (1999) “’Dizzy Atmosphere’: The Challenge of Bebop” in American Music 17(4), and John Lowney’s (2000) “Langston Hughes and the ‘Nonsense’ of Bebop” in American Literature 72(2) for readings about the cultural and political force and potential of bebop during the World War II era.
32. In 1988, Run DMC released their fourth album, Tougher than Leather, Public Enemy dropped It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and Boogie Down productions unveiled By Any Means Necessary. The release of Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper in 1988 clearly signaled the widespread breakthrough of hip hop into suburban, White American life. This was also the year Los Angeles group Niggas With Attitude (NWA) garnered endless national controversy over the release of their album Straight Outta Compton and single “Fuck Tha Police.”
33. Wise (2008: 48).
Ansen, David. 1988. “Cats and Dogs and Dinosaurs.” Newsweek, 112 no. 22, 87.
Culhane, John. 1988. “Oliver and Company Gives Dickens a Disney Twist Urban Scene from an Appropriate Rooftop.” New York Times, November 13, 1988.
Dalton, Harlon. 2002. “Failing to See.” In White Privilege: Essays on the Other Side of Racism. Edited by Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth Publishers.
Dyer, Richard. 2002. “The Matter of Whiteness.” In White Privilege: Essays on the Other Side of Racism, edited by Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth Publishers.
Dyer, Richard. 1988. “White.” Screen 29 no. 4: 44–64.
Faherty, Vincent. 2001. “Is the Mouse Sensitive? A Study of Race, Gender, and Social Vulnerability in Disney Animated Films.” Studies in Media and Information Literacy Education 1 no. 3: 1–8.
Giroux, Henry A. 1997. “White Noise: Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Whiteness.” In Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth. New York: St. Martin’s Press,.
Gordon, Avery F., and Christopher Newfield, eds. 1996. Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kempley, Rita. 1988. “Oliver and Company.” Washington Post, November 18, 1988.
Kwan, SanSan, and Kenneth Speirs, eds. 2004. “Introduction.” In Mixing it Up: Multiracial Subjects. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. “Teaching Children How to Discriminate: What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf.” In English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.
Lipsitz, George. 1998. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Maslin, Janet. 1988. “In Today’s Animation, It’s Dog Eat Doggie.” New York Times, November 27, 1988.
Rothernberg, Paula S, ed. 2002. White Privilege: Essays on the Other Side of Racism. New York: Worth Publishers.
Sanchez, George J. 1993. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Dave. 1996. Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion.
Telotte, J.P. 2007. “Crossing Borders and Opening Boxes: Disney and Hybrid Animation.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 no. 2: 107–116.
Wise, Tim. 2008. White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press.