DANIELLE GLASSMEYER
As Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) ends, Joker and his comrades, fresh from what Animal Mother has called “a slaughter,” sing the theme song from The Mickey Mouse Club. The Marines walk through a 1968 field with weapons at the ready, returned from quelling a sniper, and the first discernible lines of their song ironically celebrate scenes just transpired.
They have worked hard, played fair, and have reached harmony, perhaps regrettably. In the scene prior, Joker had removed the final barrier of difference between him and his fellows when in cold blood he shot—“wasted,” in the film’s parlance—the female sniper who had killed three of their number. Ostensibly, it was a desire to play fair that motivated Joker’s action—he didn’t want to leave her to the “mother-loving rats,” as did Animal Mother. Without doubt what they did—moving forward through a hostile bombed-out city—to come face to face with the sniper was hard work. Most significantly, shooting the sniper has made Joker “hard-core,” earning him membership in the killing club to which his helmet declares he was born. Now in harmony with his fellows, he sings the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, while in voice-over he daydreams about “Mary Jane Rottencrotch,” a fantasy woman created by Sgt. Hartmann earlier in the film. When the Sergeant’s vocabulary becomes Joker’s, viewers know that, finally, his training has worked. Singing The Mickey Mouse Club theme with his fellow Marines, Joker is no longer resistant, or dissident, but whole-heartedly a Marine.
I suppose one could read this song differently. It could be read as the singers’ or filmmaker’s self-irony: the song might beg the question how these boys went from daydreaming of Doreen, Darlene and Annette to becoming hardcore killers. Or the song may be read in a realist mode as a psychotic break—traumatized young men retreating into the safe place of childhood security. Read in light of one critic’s efforts to demonstrate Disney productions as the root of all positive impulses of the 1960s counter-culture, the shared anthem might even be construed as a sign that these Marines have miraculously resisted all the training and values that brought them to the dehumanized state that typifies the last third of Kubrick’s film.1 The interpretation that I find most provocative, however, is as an antecedent script: Kubrick’s choice, I suggest, entices viewers to consider The Mickey Mouse Club as productive of these hardcore men.
As testimony to the show’s power to shape a generation, Stephen Watt records the reminiscence of a former Mickey Mouse Club cast member. As she toured in Vietnam, Doreen Tracy “reported that without fail a soldier in the audience would stand and request that she lead them in singing the show’s theme song. Thousands of battle-hardened American troops would voluntarily rise to their feet and raise their voices in unison, bellowing out the lyrics.”2 As in Kubrick’s iteration, their motive for taking up the song may remain, ultimately, undecidable: we can never know what these troops felt or thought as they sang this “anthem.” We can be sure, however, that these soldiers, in a very real way, saw themselves within a discursive world shaped by Disney productions, including the The Mickey Mouse Club.3 Seen daily by millions of fans, it was a kid-hosted variety show that combined song and dance, with skits, newsreels, travelogues and cartoons.4 Hardly the kind of material that elicits bloodlust. But the concern of Full Metal Jacket is not the killing per se. The film suggests that these former living room Mouseketeers would do almost anything to conform to the ethos they imbibed from Disney.
Kubrick’s implicit suggestion that this iconic Disney production played a formative role in shaping the masculinity of the Vietnam generation may be reformulated to query an earlier generation: what Disney scripts contributed to the formation of the boys who became the Cold Warriors of the late 1950s? To answer this question, I turn to three of Disney’s “golden age”5 films: Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942). The differences between the films’ narratives are significant and noteworthy, but for the moment I will stress the commonalities. All three title characters are “born” on-screen and enjoy an apparently nurturing early home life; yet soon all three ambiguously gendered, under-mothered or motherless babies,6 bereft of family, are forced to make their own ways in the world. Each of these unlikely subjects reveals hidden qualities that fit him to be a leader. They don’t do so independently, as might be expected from the American instance of the bildungsroman—the autonomous individualism of the self-made man narrative within which Walt Disney’s own rise to fame is often read7—but with the help of others. That help, in all three cases, comes not from their “kind,” but from another species. The centrality of this mentoring relationship, no less than the fact that the relationship is construed across boundaries of species difference that would otherwise be thought to be unbridgeable, is the point on which my analysis turns.
The argument I would like to make about these three films is that the narrative they portray, sketched here, readied a small, but extremely influential portion of the Cold War American generation to embrace a new masculine identity on the global stage: that of mentor to emergent Asian nations. Members of the Vietnam Lobby, notably John Kennedy, Tom Dooley, and Mike Mansfield, with proponents of Eisenhower’s People-to-People program, and influential Cold War pundits like Ugly American authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, conjointly and singly eschewed a continuation of America’s role as authoritarian “world’s policemen” that some of them had so heartily enacted a half-generation earlier as veterans of World War II. These men who came to prominence in the Cold War saw themselves as potential nurturers of other men and, I would like to argue, the Disney films they saw just before shipping out to fight the good war provided the scripts that eventually helped them to see themselves this way—as, if you will, surrogate mothers to those demarcated as different by means of “racial” markers. I would like to make this argument, but I can’t, at least not in the space this essay affords. For one thing the time line is a little off (for instance, John Kennedy would have been near 20 when Pinocchio was released—folks of all ages saw Disney movies, but still...). For another, arguments about cultural impact of films on real viewers are infamously hard to prove.
What I can prove is that Tom Dooley, who would be celebrated as an exemplary American for his ideas and actions from 1955–1962,8 in the late-1950s found in Disney’s Golden Age films an ideal medium for demonstrating to Southeast Asians the meaning of America. I can also articulate how these films demonstrate a vision of a relationship between a fledgling entity and an experienced mentor that resonated with Dooley’s vision for the relationship between Southeast Asia and America. I’ll first briefly analyze the coherence of Dooley’s mission to Asia with his comments about Disney films and how he hopes to influence America’s consciousness about Asia, and Asia’s about America, through movies. I will close with a sustained reading of Pinocchio and how its text encourages pre-war and post-war readings that shift from a focus on creating a model American child, to articulating a role for Americans in relationship to “children” of other nations.
Thomas Anthony Dooley, Jr., would have been about 13 when Pinocchio was released in 1940. By 1956 (the time Dr. Tom Dooley shot into American consciousness with the publication of his first memoir, Deliver Us from Evil), Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi would have been well into their teens, if any of them succeeded in becoming “real boys.” The world Dooley writes about couldn’t have appeared further from the worlds of these three Disney creations. Deliver details his experiences as a Navy physician and refugee camp director during the 1954 evacuation of Vietnamese refugees from North to South Vietnam just before the partition of that country into communist and “free” halves in compliance with the Geneva Agreement.
The Navy doctor’s memoir, along with good looks and charm, captured American imaginations; for many readers, Dooley put Southeast Asia, a region better known at the time by its French colonial designation, Indochina, on the map. His goal in part was to make the strife in Vietnam, and throughout Southeast Asia, a reality to readers; singly and cumulatively, Dooley’s memoirs sought to make these countries targets for US concern by styling them as worthy recipients of American aid and affection. Aside from American involvement in the region for the twenty years that followed, sales and publicity of the volumes suggest that Dooley succeeded in his aims. Deliver, like his two subsequent memoirs, sold well and was picked up for publication in Reader’s Digest, and over the next 6 years, Dooley became a media darling, regionally, in the Catholic press, and across the nation, and his 1961 death from malignant melanoma at age 32 would only add to his fame and influence.9 He had parted from the Navy under ambiguous circumstances,10 but the exposure around Deliver and its media tour secured Dooley a platform from which to launch Medico, an international benevolence organization focused on bringing modern medicine and medical practice to Southeast Asia. His Navy sanctioned memoir was followed by The Edge of Tomorrow in 1958 and The Night They Burned the Mountain in 1960. An astute fundraiser, Dooley used the sales of the books to fund further missions to Asia.11
The Edge of Tomorrow details Dooley’s first Medico mission to Laos. The goal of that mission, Dooley explains, was to bring average Americans into contact on a person-to-person level with average Asians—in this case mountain Laos who perch precariously on the verge between Laos and communist China. Although there have been suggestions that Dooley’s mission may have been a cover for CIA activity,12 Dooley phrases the mission in the simplest of terms: his goal is to show “American face to a lot of Asians who had been told that American white-men didn’t give a damn.”13 The idea that white men did not give a damn, Dooley explicates, comes largely from the administrative practices of former colonial powers that governed Asia, who failed to recognize the inherent value of Asian natives and thus used them for their own gain. In his mission and in his memoirs, Dooley insistently shows how his ideal Americans differ from their colonial predecessors.
That difference is articulated through two main tenets. The first is that Americans are willing to meet Asians face-to-face—on a person-to-person basis that levels the relationship.14 In contrast to the colonialists that Dooley depicts, who are always on “platforms” and “pedestals” wearing “nice white suits” and looking down upon Asians, his Americans are always down “in the mud” pushing right alongside their Asian counterparts.15 The second tenet is that Americans will love and nurture Asians, who are constructed in his memoirs as children, out of the cultural immaturity that makes them susceptible to an array of vices, including superstitions, ignorance, and communism. While the preponderance of his mission focuses on showing Asians that American white-men do “give a damn” by giving medical care, training for native nurses, instruction in sanitation practices, and approaching the Asians without superiority, an equally significant task lies in modeling Americanness, and exposing Asians to American ideas. Through these methods, Dooley suggests, Americans will cultivate an American essence he feels is hidden within Asians.
Elsewhere I’ve written about Dooley’s sentimentalization of Southeast Asians and his rhetorical construction of these lands as bereft of adequate mothering, yet filled with children eager to love and be loved by Americans.16 Dooley assures readers that, like all children, Asian children respond with love when they are shown kindness: on the basis of affection, education will proceed and, later, international political bonds will be forged. Thus tales of American sailors’ kindness to refugee children and reciprocal love from the children dominate Deliver Us from Evil. Stories about adult refugees often lack the emotional wallop with which Dooley invests his recounting of the relationship between his “boys,” the sailors, and fortuitously orphaned children of Vietnam. When The Night They Burned the Mountain is published in Reader’s Digest in 1960, Dooley’s focus on Asian children has become a fixation on Asians as children. There, a photo caption informs readers that Laos is the “wonderful Kingdom of Kids”17; the rest of the photo spread is curiously deficient in images of adult Lao. If any Asian ever counted as an adult to Dooley, after five years of selling them to his U.S. audience, Dooley has emptied his textual Asia of its adult population. Indeed, as Teresa Gallagher and the Dooley fan club assemble “Dooley kits,” Gallagher’s audience comes to understand the Asia that Dooley’s readers envision. She describes a Dooley kit as “a small cloth draw-string bag, [which] contains a bar of soap, a face-cloth, a comb, a tube of toothpaste, some tissue, a balloon, a small light toy, a lollypop and some socks.”18 Americans like Gallagher imagine Dooley, and themselves by Dooley’s proxy, as a nurturing force caring for a continent filled with needy children.
Thus to Dooley, choosing from an array of strategies for reaching out to Asian charges and demonstrating Americanness to them, it seems quite natural to show Disney movies. Dooley lists the movies he has brought with him to Laos: “Bambi, Snow White, Fantasia, Popeye [sic] [and] Dumbo.”19 Given that the rest of Disney’s Golden Age films are present here, Popeye is more likely a mistake for Pinocchio than an interloper among the Disney canon, especially in light of the Dooley Foundation’s later mania for Disney productions. As Dooley and, after his death, the Dooley Foundation spread their efforts throughout Asia: “vehicles are named after Disney characters ‘Lady’ and ‘Tramp.’ The x-ray unit in Pakse is ‘Pluto’ and the pick-up truck in Khong is ‘Dopey’ ... ‘Pinocchio’ was shipped for An Lac, Saigon, and our jeep in India is ‘Mickey Mouse.’”20 For Dooley and his supporters, Disney is a perfect fit with Medico’s function as an American organization in Asia.
In 1958, Dooley celebrates Walt Disney cartoons as the ideal medium for teaching Asians about America while gathering knowledge about Asia to share with America. Having cajoled Walt Disney into donating a projector, generator, soundtrack and twenty films to his mission, Dooley shows the movies to his Lao audience. He comments to Teresa Gallagher, “When the sun sets on whatever village we are in, we show a movie.”21
Dooley’s commitment to nightly showings of Disney movies is not really comprehensible to me, even as I write these paragraphs.22 While creating a screen is done simply enough by hanging a sheet, the projector must be powered, which means that a fifty pound generator and fuel accompany them on every journey, many of which must be completed on foot. Already burdened with medical and personal supplies, carrying heavy film projection equipment up mountains and down valleys seems either folly or reflective of a belief in some intensely deeper value of the films. Yet that deeper value is not directly communicated to the Lao who see the films. As hundreds of Lao gather to see these Disney films, Dooley comments: “I remember how we had once considered dubbing in a Lao sound-track on these movies, and then abandoned the scheme as too costly. Now I was glad we had left them as they were. Walt Disney’s creations have a universal language of their own.”23
As they are available to many interpretations, Disney films are far from “universal”; nor do they fully elude interpretation by speaking “their own” special language; nor are they in any sense a pure medium.24 Thus, it is worth pausing to consider what message Dooley imagines Bambi might relay to the Lao, especially since Dooley speaks of the film not in terms of persuasion or entertainment, but in terms of conquest. He comments as an aside in a letter sent back home: “Needless to say, Bambi has conquered Laos.”25 On first glance, Bambi is about coming of age in a patriarchal society: Bambi leaves his mother’s world and joins his father, overseeing his people from a proud distance. Yet, Bambi may be a parable meant to promise American men at America’s entry into World War II that they, like Bambi, will prevail against enemies threatening their home. Yet again, it may be an ecological critique, for all disturbances to Bambi’s idyllic youth have one source: his mother is shot, and the dogs and fire that terrorize Bambi’s sweetheart are set by “man.”26 Reading Bambi allegorically, the deer could be taken to symbolize any native people, and “man” more specifically might be read as “white man”; this could be a story about white colonizers encroaching on native populations. If so, then Dooley, via Disney, threatens that “man” will kill Lao mothers and young natives will have to turn to a male figure, as Bambi turns to Thumper, to continue the nurturing education interrupted by their mothers’ deaths. Dooley’s endorsement of Bambi’s efficacy in Asia highlights the film’s narrative coincidences with Dooley’s intervention. Both Bambi and Dooley empty their narratives of embodied maternity to supplant it with nurturance practiced by a male figure of another “species.”
Bambi’s meditations on maternity are more disturbing in context with other Disney films shown by Dooley.27 When Dumbo’s (1941) mother, Mrs. Jumbo, is enraged when others mock her child’s appearance, she is locked away and Dumbo learns skills far beyond those of other elephants and becomes a great success in the care of Timothy Mouse. Pinocchio lives in a world where the only women are fairies, fish or puppets and with a cricket for a conscience. What’s more, in all three films, the innocence of the young protagonists invites the exploitive impulses of those around them. Thus, when the people of Laos are “conquered” by Disney, they internalize a threat to biological motherhood, an awareness of exploitive forces always ready to strike, and the promise of an alternative, masculine, nurturing presence that will ultimately be the source of rescue.
The Disney movies also reveal an inner truth about Asians to Dooley, which he shares with his readers. As the villagers gather in the yard facing the screen, Dooley studies their faces and reflects,
No matter how you try to point out to Americans that Asians cry and love, fear and hate, and react to the same stimuli the same way we do, you still hear the comments, “Well, the Asiatics can take it, they’ve always had poverty,” or “The yellow horde can take more pain than white men,” or “They are inscrutable, colder, more calculating,” or “You can’t trust a yellow man.”28
Dooley does not note that, quite possibly, Americans had learned some of these stereotypes from watching Disney short cartoons produced during World II: cartoons like Commando Duck (1944) show the Japanese enemy as alternately foolish and treacherous.29 Rather, watching the Lao villagers watch Disney, “I thought: How many times had I been told that the Lao were lazy people, ignorant, backward, indifferent to their own betterment?.... Here in Vang Vieng I had living proof of its falsity. Never have I seen people respond so readily to encouragement, or to make so much from so little help.”30 The Lao audience is enriched through bearing witness to the inner life of wooden boys, big-eared elephants, and deer; so, too, Dooley’s viewing of the Lao audience enables him to enrich his readers’ awareness of these others’ inner lives.31
One could say that, acting after Disney and counterintuitive as it may seem, Dooley anthropomorphizes Asians. Disney encourages viewers to see an inner “human essence” that lies within creatures that appear to be radically different from themselves. As the animals of the forest speak tendernesses and wisdoms to each other, as Timothy Mouse encourages Dumbo, and Jumbo and Dumbo speak love beyond measure through their intertwining trunks, so too even a block of wood can have feelings. Perhaps Dooley’s efforts parallel Disney’s as he attempts to show an inner humanity that his contemporary audience disbelieved. He explains, “Living in a village with them, being completely saturated with their life, their religion, their aches and pains, and joys and simple happinesses, yet still being Irish American at heart and in my reasoning, I am thrust in a peculiar position. I have to explain some of the churlish world to my Asians, and when I return I am going to try to explain something of Nam Tha to America.”32 Dooley envisions “ordinary people doing an extraordinary job in Asia.”33 Those ordinary people are distinctly American and are instrumental in bringing racial others to maturity, just in the way the script was written by Disney.
Progressive Era Protagonists; Cold War Mentors
In his study Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960, Nicholas Sammond traces the emergence and development of the Disney canon against the changing backdrop of child-rearing theory and practice that coincides with Disney’s rise to prominence, Disney’s celebration by child-care experts as positive media, and the company’s changing ethos in cold war America. Sammond’s charge is to trace how the early-century critique of the movies as potentially denigrating to children’s characters makes the obverse possible: one can also argue that movies can contribute to children’s moral growth. Disney, he demonstrates, built upon this possibility. Once identified as a positive influence, the company consciously cultivates that image.
Sammond’s second major focus is related to that cultivation. Sammond argues that Walt Disney himself—his past, his work ethic, and his status as a self-made man—is best understood as a prototype for the ideal “generic child,” the goal to which training of children attained in the late 30s and early 40s. Not only are Disney films lauded for their positive influence; Disney’s characters are assumed to embody Disney’s characteristics. Thus, the theory went, children who see Disney films imbibed the qualities that made Disney who he was.
The 1930s progressive scripts for reforming childcare practices, Sammond argues, stressed conformity, and parental regulation of needs and drives: supported by intense scrutiny of the child, these scripts promised eventual internalization of these privileged values. On the one hand were texts that stress fears of children unsupervised and improperly trained, and on the other were texts that exemplify positive outcomes when the child was properly raised. Sammond cautions, however, that norms by which such judgments were measured had been derived from white middle class children. Thus the normal child that cultural texts prized, sought and attempted to form was a white middle class child. As Sammond makes clear, for a 1940s audience primed on child-studies of the ’30s, the preoccupation of Pinocchio, Bambi, and Dumbo with regulating and normalizing children would be these films’ most significant theme.34
For Sammond, Pinocchio is the manifestation of that “normal” generic child and the social hopes and worries invested in him. Sammond argues that the values that the Blue Fairy charges Pinocchio with demonstrating—goodness, bravery and truth—are values of the white middle class, and the trials are also class-focused. Drawn to the stage, then lying about how he landed in Stromboli’s cage, Pinocchio is barely recovered when he falls prey to new temptations. During the trip to Pleasure Island, Pinocchio enjoys drink, tobacco, pool-playing and vandalism in the company of Landwick, a Bowery-accented wastrel who needn’t work too hard to seduce Pinocchio away from his unmarked accent and clean habits. The film threatens these boys, transformed into jackasses, with a life of hard labor, convincingly demonstrating Sammond’s theory. He argues that Depression-era parents and children learned that “indulgence in the pleasures of the working class ... led to a life as a beast of burden. Ultimately, one was either a manager or managed, and the choices one made determined the outcome.”35
The same audience that would focus on these points in Pinocchio would likely focus upon Dumbo’s quest for a function within the circus economy that will render him, not fame, but simple dignity and acceptance for who he really is, a real identity that is finally revealed when he learns he can fly, and upon the tests that Bambi endures before he can assume his place next to the Great Prince. “Becoming real” for Dumbo and Bambi resonates with gaining autonomous selfhood and Sammond explains that the 1940s audience would code this cultural pinnacle of maturation as “self-management.” These films, Sammond indicates, are shaped by 1930s cultural emphasis on the need to develop autonomy and self-management among a population enervated and made hopeless by the Depression. Sammond demonstrates that Disney’s films disseminated these values to a widespread cultural audience, acting as, if you will, surrogate training manuals for parents to use to measure the success of their child-rearing.
Sammond’s presentation of the issues and discourses through which 1940s viewers would watch Disney films convinces me that those viewers would focus upon the film’s representation of the fetishized “normal” child, even though, he allows, the films did not suggest they had to do it alone. For instance, Jiminy Cricket’s presence, Sammond posits, suggested to parents that they “needed help, a conscience to whisper to the child ... someone to steer him past the wrong pleasures” and towards “the rewards of hard work, deferred gratification, and self-control.”36 I suggest that figures like Dooley may be more interested in golden age films for the sake of mentor characters than for their discourse on the child—and perhaps that interest in mentors is justified by the Disney Company’s production choices and its subsequent marketing practices that increasingly focus upon the mentor characters.
I turn to Dumbo first; because it is wholly a Disney creation, without the source texts that inspired Bambi and Pinocchio, its production choices highlight the adaptive choices made in the other two. In particular, the film’s flirtation with a potential critique of class and race is contained through association with animal species that re-directs the narrative to its mentoring story. For example, the gossiping, affected tones of the female elephants starkly contrasts Timothy’s class-marked American accent, which in turn contrasts the African American accented hipster discourse of the crows. The accents help predict the narrative arc. One might expect that the female elephants would care for the baby elephant. Yet they are focused wholly on external beauty, and disturbingly aligned with a discourse of racial supremacy. They are, in the words of one of the elephants, a “proud race” and Dumbo’s ears alone are enough to make him a “disgrace” to that race. Dumbo is marginalized and then exiled from his kind. Having already earned him the moniker “Dumbo,” his ears cause him to bungle the “pyramid of pachyderms” and so to injure the others, and drive him to his desperate demeaning turn as a clown, from which Timothy, with the eventual help of the crows, rescues him. Thus the characters’ alignment with species and their class and race-marked accents underscore a story of dysfunction of racial affinity and underscore the need for cross-race mentoring.
Timothy Mouse is this film’s answer to Jiminy Cricket, with a similar worldly-wise exterior and a tender heart. Tiny in stature, dressed finely in a ringmaster’s hat and tailcoat, draped in gold braid, he’s as proud of his appearance as Jiminy, and a stark contrast to his mentee in how he is drawn. Timothy walks on two feet, in contrast to Dumbo’s four, and his characteristics are human; in contrast, silent Dumbo wears only a hat and acts like an elephant—most notably, Dumbo sways when standing still, and grasps Timothy tail in his trunk to follow him. Timothy initially seeks revenge upon the female elephants by scaring them on Dumbo’s behalf, but otherwise is content to help Dumbo find possible niches in the circus, and to comfort the little elephant when he is dejected. Indeed, the film is careful to echo Jumbo’s care for Dumbo in a reprise of the bath scene in which Timothy scrubs the clown makeup from Dumbo’s face, and dries his tears. Timothy Mouse, anathema to elephants, and feared by Dumbo on first contact, is the figure who truly cares for little Dumbo, helps him to make his way in the world, and helps him discover his hidden talents.
Disney’s Bambi reveals its focus on mentoring most strongly in its contrast to its source text. Where the film shows an Edenic commingling of forest life, Felix Salten’s 1928 novel is a dark story of a young deer growing up in a world of deer. Salten’s Bambi is set in a violent world in which animals fear each other. Bambi’s strong shaping influences are his extended family: his aunt’s children, some young bucks who eventually become Bambi’s rivals, and, occasionally, the Great Prince. Characters like Friend Owl and Thumper are based, if at all, upon the idea of an idea of an animal: Salten barely develops a nameless screech owl and one Mr. Hare who is violently killed by a fox. Thus it seems clearly a Disney innovation when Thumper physically manipulates Bambi’s form and shares words of wisdom about kindness and proper vegetable consumption.
Disney’s Pinocchio is created without a mother at all, of course—the child of Gepetto’s carving and painting skill—in a home where all generativity is man’s purview. The film lingers on Gepetto’s creations—clockworks constructed on a cricket’s scale, with tiny humanized dramas played out on the hour or at the turn of a key. In a sequence that moves from the natural world to violence, we see first clockwork ducks and birds, and soon a hunter shooting a bird, a drunkard lolling out a window, and finally a mother spanking her child. Shown following Gepetto’s song “Little Wooden Head,” this small survey of the darker human impulses seems a fitting counterpoint to the disturbing between-ness of the manipulated puppet, who alternately strokes and kicks Figaro; seen through the side of Cleo’s bowl, the puppet is revealed in its dissonant and distorted essence. Later, when Gepetto is awakened by Pinocchio, now alive but not yet human, falling from the work table, these clockworks are re-animated by Gepetto’s gunshot, but soon replaced by clockworks selected by Gepetto and Pinocchio with more positive scenarios—an angelic herald, a mother bird feeding her young, a stately couple dancing. There is something wrong with these creations, Pinocchio among them—a shallowness, a manipulability that is highlighted by a reprise of Gepetto’s puppetry when he controls the now-living Pinocchio by manipulating his suspenders—but of course that is story’s point: even the least malleable of creations can be manipulated by others unless they develop bravery, truthfulness and unselfishness sufficient to become “real.”
Pinocchio seems allegorical, of course, when his liederhosen and Bavarian hat, and Gepetto’s German accent are considered, of the dawning totalitarian commitment of both the Germany his clothes echo, and the Italy from whence his name comes. Those countries, to the American press, seemed to be little more than marionettes being operated at their leaders’ wills. Where, the press asked later, when faced with the Nuremberg defense, were their consciences? Perhaps, like Pinocchio’s they could fit inside the brain of a cricket.
Disney’s innovations in Pinocchio are most revealing of the ethos that may power the Cold War rereading of Disney’s Golden Age. For instance, in Collodi’s tale, Gepetto wants a child because his wife died, but she is never mentioned in Disney. But Collodi’s cricket is changed even more dramatically.37 Originally, Disney had envisioned a film without the cricket, but early in production, the staff worried that Pinocchio seemed cold and heartless. The cricket was added to house Pinocchio’s other half—the conscience that he would eventually internalize. Early story meetings dealt with the difficulty of drawing Jiminy—apparently crickets are pretty frightening in extreme close-up. Yet the commitment to retaining the character was firm. As sketching and scripting moved forward, Disney reputedly predicted “If only I could find someone who could see Jiminy the way he should be. If we can just get him right, he’ll become as immortal as Mickey Mouse.”38 Indeed. The film might better be called Jiminy Cricket when its final structure is considered.
If Pinocchio is still a wooden head—a tabula rasa—a complete vacuum, but with powers of locomotion and with the ability to choose but no moral or experiential register against which to measure his choices, we could be relieved to know that a conscience has been provided to him. Yet, we should, as viewers, be deeply worried about Pinocchio’s lack of preparation for his world, as should Gepetto when he blithely sends the puppet-boy to school. Jiminy Cricket’s value as Pinocchio’s conscience is preemptively undermined as he agrees to be a conscience because of attraction to the Blue Fairy. Preening over his own transformed appearance from vagabond to “Sir Jiminy Cricket,” Jiminy unsurprisingly “almost forgot about” “ol’ Pinocch.” Indeed, his instructions to “give a little whistle” when Pinocchio needs help are about the height of his effectiveness as conscience. Drawn as a womanizer and a scamming opportunist, for all the good he does Pinocchio one could almost wish for a reprise of Collodi’s choice in the original tale: there, the Cricket gets squashed.39
Yet, the film is given to Jiminy as the focalizing character. Through him we witness the story. The film opens on him, and purports to recount how he learned the lesson that, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” a person’s—or cricket’s—dreams may be realized. In the opening sequence, the camera even replicates his perspective, mimicking his hopping toward Gepetto’s house, and it closes on his thanks to the Blue Fairy and shows him rewarded with his badge. Structurally, we are privy to Gepetto and Pinocchio’s story only because Jiminy enters Gepetto’s home. While whole scenes do happen outside his vision, the film is consistent enough to be read as being told through his eyes. What’s more, Jiminy’s character is clearly an American type within an easily traced tradition of the tough-guy with a tender heart.40 He is streetsmart, wise-cracking, an improviser, world-wise yet quick to sympathize with the innocent and weak and just as quick to defend them. His American-ness is underscored in the context of those characters that tempt and exploit Pinocchio. Stromboli, Honest John and the Coachman, in practice and accent, are bastions of the old country and palpable threats to Pinocchio, and Jiminy is his only protection.
Just as the film insists on Jiminy’s centrality to the story, the importance of Jiminy to Disney as a corporation is also clear. His song, “When You Wish Upon a Star” is more endemic than “It’s a Small World”: “When You Wish Upon a Star” is played under the company logo at the start and finish of every Disney film, and sampled in most commercials for Disney products and theme parks even today. What’s more, in the 1950s Jiminy Cricket appeared regularly on the Mickey Mouse Club as the narrator of two segments that purported to teach children about their bodies and good behavior.41 For Disney, as for American audiences in the late 1950s, the significant character in these coming of age classics is not the innocent and naïve child, but the American mentor who guides him.
These three films, in their original moment, certainly lent themselves to a reading that meditates on the meaning of childhood in 1940s America, and on social concerns with producing children who are “brave, good and true.” Read against the backdrop of 1955–60, incipient meanings in the old scripts surface and the role of singular Americans reaching across race difference, recoded as species’ boundaries, to help weaker “species” seems more emphatic. Neither reading may be definitively attributed to Walt Disney productions as a final or fixed meaning; rather, perhaps, what surfaces in a reading of a text changes to serve its cultural moment.
1. See Brode’s From Walt to Woodstock.
2. Stephen Watt, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 335.
3. This classic Disney television program appeared for one hour every weekday afternoon from October 3, 1955 to September 1959, and ran in syndication as a half hour program from 1962–5 (Watt, 335).
4. Sammond provides reference to 1958 Nielsen numbers that reported the show was seen in over 7 million homes and by 21 million viewers (348). Commenting on what he calls the show’s “oddly martial format,” Sammond notes that the series struck a balance between conformity and individualism “by placing that individualism in the service of the club as a whole, channeling innate personal talent and drive into collective projects” (346).
5. So named by Stephen Watt and Christopher Finch among texts I’ve reviewed.
6. Lynda Haas details the dark fates of many mothers in Disney films in her essay, “Eighty-six the Mother: Murder, Matricide and Good Mothers.”
7. Sammond comments explicitly on the fashioning of Walt Disney’s life story to fit within this American trope on pages 74–5, and implicitly throughout his study.
8. For a catalogue of the many encomiums piled upon Dooley, see James Fisher’s cultural biography. Among those he highlights: “A Splendid American,” a “Non-Ugly American,” “Doctor America” and, predictably, an “American Hero.”
9. Dooley was a native of St. Louis, a graduate of Notre Dame University and a Catholic, so regional and religious media picked up his story eagerly. He also gained national attention. His doings were regularly reported in national magazines and newspapers, and he was of sufficient celebrity to merit an appearance on What’s My Line? and This Is Your Life. He would eventually be suggested for sainthood. James Fisher records this media coverage in detail, and I viewed some of the extensive holdings on Dooley at the Western Manuscript Archive at University of Missouri at St. Louis.
10. Fisher suggests that Dooley was accused of active homosexuality while in uniform.
11. Fisher captures Dooley’s adept blending of business acumen with benevolence when he dubs him a “Madison Avenue Schweitzer.”
12. In Dr. America, James Fisher considers thoroughly this suggestion, which was originally posited by Diane Shaw in an LA Times Magazine article in 1991.
13. Dooley, Edge, 13.
14. Dooley does not explicitly reference then-President Eisenhower’s “People-to-People” program, but his fan club leader/secretary, Theresa Gallagher does, explaining that, like the People-to-People program, Medico promoted individual action as “the key to international friendship and world peace” (Gallagher, 22, 32). Eisenhower mentions inaugurating this program in September 1956, but does not refer to it again in The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (410).
15. Dooley’s use of the “platform” image is recounted in James Monahan’s Before I Sleep: The Last Day of Dr. Tom Dooley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961). The other images are recounted in Lawrence Elliot’s The Legacy of Tom Dooley (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1969).
16. I have developed these themes in my essay “Tom Dooley and the Cold War Revision of ‘Indochina’” in Sinographies: Writing China.
17. Dooley, Night, 300.
18. Gallagher, 8.
19. Gallagher, 35.
20. Gallagher, 7.
21. Gallagher, 19.
22. And yet, his practice seems to be more typical of American practices than not. Similarly, writing of USIS interventions in Formosa in the late forties, George Kerr describes how that agency sent “mobile units” consisting of sound trucks and projectors) into the hinterlands of that Island to show American films as part of their mission to “tell the people about democracy” (147).
23. Dooley, Edge, 53.
24. Uelman notes, “Mickey and his gang undoubtedly portrayed the ‘American ideals’ Disney hoped to preserve” (10). Disney’s ideals include sexual conservatism and staunch anticommunism (Ostman, 82); Disney crushed union activity at his studio and testified as a friendly witness in 1940s Congressional hearings (Smoodin, 3, 20). Disney’s films are at least as ideological as any other cultural product.
25. Gallagher, 19.
26. A.W. Hastings’s essay “Bambi and the Hunting Ethos” traces the film’s reputation as anti-hunting propaganda that indicts villainous man’s aggressions against innocent nature.
27. Linda Haas notes that often “a mother appeared in the original text, but was excised in the Disney revision” (196).
28. Gallagher, 28.
29. In some measure, Dooley was disabusing his American audience of ideas that had been inculcated by Disney during the war. In several short cartoons produced between 1942 and 1945, caricatures of Japanese appear. Hirohito, along with Hitler and Mussolini, is mocked in “Der Fuehrer’s Face” (1943), which won an Academy Award that year. The depiction of Hirohito as bucktoothed and bespectacled became the Disney standard when Japan and the Japanese were to be portrayed. Soon, in “How to Be a Sailor” (1944) Goofy torpedoes a series of bucktoothed and spectacled vessels arrayed before a rising sun. The 1944 “Commando Duck” darkens the caricature considerably. First, a scene shows two Japanese soldiers disguised as a rock and a tree bungle a chance to shoot Donald due to exaggerated rituals of politeness. The next scene shows an array of rifles leveling on Donald; while one putatively Japanese-accented voice eagerly anticipates the shot, another such voice urges the first to hold his fire for a moment because “Japanese custom say, always shooting a man in the back please.”
30. Dooley, Edge, 53.
31. The passages cited here focus on Dooley’s mission to Vietnam and Laos, and, indeed, as his missions progress, Dooley shows increasing sensitivity to the uniqueness and particularity of Asian cultures. Still, his focus on particular nations must be read within the context of Cold War American foreign policy in which the “domino theory” encouraged a rhetoric of interchangeability. The domino theory stressed that if any Asian nation fell to Communism, all would fall—it didn’t matter which fell first. Dooley and other Asia Firsters seem to have held the obverse to be true as well: that intervention in any Asian nation was a good thing. For an overview of the development of the domino theory, consult Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945–1990.
32. Gallagher, 28. Fisher argues that Dooley’s Irishness was often “invoked to reaffirm his stature as the quintessentially ‘regular’ American” (Dr. America, 73).
33. Gallagher, 42.
34. After World War II, Sammond notes a sea-change in child study presumptions that retreat from regulation and regimentation of childhood, and embrace a “natural child” in response to the threatening outcome of totalitarian regimes’ training of children into docile masses. In reaction, US child care theory moved toward a more child-centered approach. In exemplifying the ways that Disney echoes and voices the concerns of the two eras, Sammond turns to different film texts. He considers the proliferation of Disney nature films in the post-war years, and focuses largely on Pinocchio to examine the prescriptions of the earlier era.
35. Sammond, 78.
36. Sammond, 78. Similarly to Sammond, Watt groups Dumbo, Bambi, and Pinocchio as Disney’s “populist” feature films, and the three heroes as epitomes of Depression-era American concerns. Watt asserts that Dumbo is “the virtuous, defenseless underdog who struggles against arbitrary forces, bucks up his courage, finds his way to productive work, and ultimately joins with other marginalized figures to overcome their oppressors. His story was a social and political allegory for Depression-era America” (90).
37. According to Claudia Card, in Collodi’s tale, Pinocchio squashes the cricket when it annoys him; later, when he is in distress, he calls upon the cricket, who appears to him as a ghost (63).
38. Mosley, 181.
39. It seems that even as production started a rendition vey true to Collodi’s tale was planned. Collodi stresses the heartlessness of the wooden boy and so did Disney. But, looking at the storyboards one day, Ham Luske commented that “’We’ve made him into an unfeeling little monster instead of a human being. Walt, what this kid needs is a conscience.” So compelling was Luske’s insight that, according to Mosley, “Walt called production to a halt while the character of Jiminy Cricket was developed” (179).
40. The tradition of the “man of feeling”—who is all the more manly for his feeling reaction to the pain and distress of others—is very long indeed (one need only think of all the weeping men of 19th century fiction who are applauded by male and female novelist alike for their “manly show of emotion”). In its post–World War II American permutation, the wisecracking, cynical, American man who is celebrated for his ability to feel quite often feels for—and takes care of—children. I have in mind novel heroes like Bellow’s Henderson, the Rain King who redeems himself by adopting an African child, and Salinger’s Holden Caulfield who dreams only of protecting children. In addition, films include The Geisha Boy in which Jerry Lewis protects a young Japanese orphan, and Hell to Eternity (1960) and Dondi (1961) in which David Janssen similarly protects orphaned children of Asian and Italian (respectively) descent; famously, although not produced until 1968, in The Green Berets, John Wayne assures a Vietnamese orphan that the child is the reason Americans are in Vietnam. Each text rings changes on the tender-hearted-tough-guy, as well as on the American-mentor-to-child-from-another-nation theme.
41. Sammond reproduces an advertising page directed at teachers alerting them to Jiminy’s segments on the show (359).
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Brode, From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Card, Claudia. “Pinocchio,” From Mouse to Mermaid: the Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture. Eds. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 62–71.
Dooley, Thomas A., M.D. Deliver Us from Evil: The Story of Viet Nam’s Flight to Freedom. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956.
_____. The Edge of Tomorrow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958.
_____. The Night They Burned the Mountain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960.
_____. “The Night They Burned the Mountain,” Reader’s Digest 76 (May 1960): 93–99+.
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