ABSTRACT
Mickey Mouse, one of the most known pop icons of the recent centuries, is usually referred to as a symbol of innocence, joyfulness. A character so disseminated within our modern culture that we hardly even question it’s origin or even message, at this point. In this thesis I investigate how the portrayal of Mickey Mouse has shifted throughout history, and how there have always been intentions behind these metamorphosis. From starting out as mere entertainment purpose, to representing the US army as a propaganda boy, to being an ideological tool in the spread of the capitalist ideal, how is it that Disney have maintained the image of the innocent Mickey throughout the decades? Such is the power of the icon in maintaining myths.
Starting off from looking into how my personal relation with such an icon originated, going into a historical analysis into the evolution Mickey under the guide of Walt Disney, into breaking apart the inner workings of the iconography itself, this text is an attempt to understand the relations between the parts that compose the icon of Mickey Mouse. It encompasses theories of mass communication, linguistic and pictorial patterns we recognize and relate to, as well as the societal relations that surge from a character having a near god-like omnipresence across the globe.
This is not only a statement on the dualities an, at first inoffensive, icon can have, but also a speculation on the origins and consequences of the state of society and it’s relation to icons in a capitalist mindset.
"I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing—that it was all started by a mouse."
—Walt Disney
1.1 THE OMNIPRESENCE OF THE ICON
I remember one of the first memories I can recall is the 4 year old me approaching my parent’s bed in the middle of the night asking them to put on a 'little movie'. The movie in question was Disney’s “Hercules" (1997) and I would religiously watch it every day several times. This compulsion in consuming animated cartoon movies extended to several other titles, many of which created by the Walt Disney Studios. This is not an unusual or even new phenomenon in our modern upbringing as children. Cartoons have been the companions of most people’s childhood, at least to those born in the later half of the 20th century. It’s hard to point out exactly what leads to our obsessions, even more so when we are children. We as children are very literal beings. We try to make sense of the world through everything we absorb, with little to no filter of reality, fiction or even irony.
Our identities are built upon the stories we hear, the values we inherit from fragments of passed down knowledge. In more ancient times these stories, passed orally from the wielder of the knowledge, in most cases the chief of the group, and would serve as a means of educating the members of the community on a similar set of values, which is no different from what we try to do today. The difference nowadays lies in who is trying to sell you their story. And since the 1940s Was Disney Studios have had such vast output of films, from quantity to popularity and acclaim, that through the decades they have managed to reach somewhat of a monopoly of the major children oriented films being released (with a few contenders such as Dreamworks studios, which is responsible for the creation of important titles in today's pop culture but that was never able to reach the status of Disney productions). Disney-produced films accounted for 33% of the total US film market in 2019, just to show how relevant it still lives up to be in contemporary times as well, this is without even taking in to account other companies and studios bought by the Disney company in the 21st century such as ‘20th Century Fox’ and Marvel Studios, summing up to nearly 40% of the total US film market.
This comes to show the reach Disney productions have always strived towards, a vehicle of communication able to make even the bigger news broadcasters envious (even though currently also owning Fox News). The influence of Disney in the world of entertainment and communication is undeniable, and if we take into account that it is the second biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world (being only behind Comcast, owner of NBC channel in the US), the power that it has to, even if subconsciously, mold the public opinion, it could easily function as a tool of manipulation in an ideological context. And well, the truth is that US military was very quick to pick up on this fact. This is what this thesis is about, how a cartoon character, which at first was ‘merely' an agent in the up and coming television/filmmaking entertainment industry, went on to become one of the most relevant pop culture symbols of the last centuries, being recognized and having played a role in the lives of many people from around the whole globe (even if from a subconscious level). And as a wise man once said: “With great power comes great responsibility” (this is a quote of Uncle Ben from Marvel’s Spiderman, which ironically is also owned by Disney nowadays), but this so called ‘responsibility’ relies on the people using the image of the character. And as we will see further on, the people, as well as their intentions, behind Mickey Mouse and the Disney company, have constantly changed to comply to political issues in which the US had a use for a vehicle of mass communication.
1.2 CAN MICKEY MOUSE BE CONSIDERED A PROPAGANDA TOOL
The word propaganda is usually a term that is employed when we talk about authoritarian regimes and how they, through the control of their means of communication, create a cultural mythology around their image (visual culture) to sell a specific narrative. We tend to associate it as a negative term, suggesting manipulation, deceiving and other ‘evil' intents. It is also something considered some old-fashioned, as the majority of the time we use it to refer to the totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler, not so often used when referring to contemporary politics. But what we may not realize at first is that is occasionally used in democratic systems also. For instance, the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States was justified under the pretense that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Even in more recent events such as the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the US (curiously enough Fox News, falling under the Disney corporation umbrella of owned companies, acted as the main campaign news source for Trump voters during the election), or the 2018 election of Bolsonaro in Brazil, both labelling critical media against them as belonging to the domain of “fake-news” and relying their arguments in the form of “alternative-facts” points back to typical authoritarian methods of propaganda, these tactics being characteristics of what we call post-truth politics.
What we associate with propaganda, is nothing more than intention. We pass to classify it as propaganda once we are able to identify an intention, through the passing of a certain message containing a specific narrative/point-of-view. If we abstract this definition of propaganda could we consider all forms expression as propaganda? When we tell stories there is always a point-of-view, a message to be passed on, whether it be a book, a speech or even a painting. Maybe the stigma of the word propaganda is just surrounded by our own anguishes of identifying an enemy, an opposing view to our own world vision, inherited from a post Cold War polarization.
So if we were to answer if Mickey Mouse has served as a tool of propaganda, the simple answer is yes, for as we will see in the coming chapters he has been employed multiple times as in both internal and foreign politics by the US army/government. But if we take into account what was previously mentioned on how any sort of expression of a point-of-view, an ideal, can be considered propaganda, then if we even look back at the stories featuring Mickey in the early days of his inception, still completely outside the radar of US officials, he could already be considered part of a propaganda agenda. Although not of a county’s ideology, but of a man’s.
2.1 PAINTING THE BACKGROUND OF WALT DISNEY
In order for us to understand how Walt Disney went from being one of the most iconic and recognized names in the animated film industry to being commissioned by the US army to produce campaign material for them, we must take a step back and look at his past seeing him as a person, rather than the icon his name has become alongside his Mouse companion. It is his convictions as a person that reflect on his characters, his world building, as well as with whom he does business with. Many hypothesis can be brought up once we start looking into Walt’s upbringing and how it either justifies, or relates to his creations and actions. Just like anyone else, his personality and inclinations are largely determined by the events of his childhood and teenage years. It is also curious to think that his films would have this same effect, influencing on the construction of character of millions of other children.
Born in 1901, Walter was one of the younger brothers (and a sister) in the family of his father Elias Charles Disney and his mother Flora Call Disney. While Walt was still very young his father would venture into various entrepreneurs across the country from looking for gold in California to being convinced to buy 200 acres of land in Missouri to settle a farm, after his previous farm had also failed. The setting of the farm is already one of the characteristics present in What Disney early works, this being the first argument into how his upbringing influenced him in much of his production. But let’s briefly get back to his father, for his influence on Walt is somewhat underestimated, especially as a lot of his father’s traits directed Walt into being his antithesis, especially in the political spectrum. I reiterate that this is only speculation from my part. What is known and documented is that Elias Disney was a fierce socialist and catholic. A preacher known for his fierce speeches during his Congregational Church sermons on Sundays as well as a supporter of Eugene Debs, several times candidate for presidency through the American Socialist Party. He was also known to be a strict father and would frequently beat on his sons and even confiscate the little money his children would make (Like any good preacher) selling newspapers and things of the sort, justifying it on the account that he would take it for ‘safekeeping' as they were too young to know the value of money (Another one of those ironies, where Walt would go on to die with an estimated net worth of $1 billion dollars in today’s inflation).
Nevertheless, he was not content. During this period was also emerging an organization of volunteers that were sending out people overseas to medically assist in the battlefield. This organization was the American Red Cross. Through these initial years of the war, the organization had several branches spread out all over the USA, having sent around 8 million people abroad to help in the war effort. Due to the sheer amount of volunteers and it’s quick expansion, they would be somewhat less rigorous with who enlisted, they were volunteers after all. This led Walt to forge a fake birth certificate and thus was sent to France were he was an ambulance driver for 1 year, coming back to the United States in 1918 with the end of the First World War.
2.2 DISNEY PRESENTS
Now Walter was back home. The war was over and his patriotic instincts could be subsided for some years to come. Dormant but still there, nonetheless. Now it was time for him to start working on his artistic career, which is after all, what we know Walt Disney for. He moved to Kansas and studied at the Kansas City Arts School. After he finished his studies he spent a few year working for advertising agencies painting poster and announcements of new films. And from there is where he had the idea to open his own animation studio, along with his brother, Roy Disney, and a friend of theirs, Ub Iwerks, as partners, thus founding… not 'Disney studios yet', but it’s precursor: ‘Laugh-o-gram’. This was a short lived version of the studio while they were still based in Kansas City and were mainly focused on making small adaptations of fairy tales that would be screened before main features in theaters, a premise that would evolve into becoming many of his future successes later as Walt Disney studios. They maintained the operation in Kansas from 1921 until 1923, where they moved to Los Angeles, as Hollywood started becoming the hub for entertainment producers that migrated in flocks from all around the country, as money began to flow for all sorts of production with films becoming more and more present in the in the global cultural landscape.
When in Hollywood, now under the name of Disney Brother’s productions, which later became the Walt Disney Company, they got in touch with distributor M. J. Wrinkler, saying they had several ready films to sell. The distributor accepted to pay 1500 dollars per animated short. It wasn’t much but it was enough to support them through the making of two shorts: 'Alice' (not to be mistaken by the feature film 'Alice in Wonderland’ which he would later release in 1957) and 'Oswald, the lucky rabbit’. Both films were very successful both financially and also technically, implementing various new forms of film production, mixing live-action shots with the cartoon animated characters and backgrounds. When we get on to talk about the how Disney cartoons went on to become so relatable, this could be considered one of his earlier experiments in blurring the lines between the fiction and reality.
But after being conned by one of the executive employer of theirs, they lost the rights to to their two main productions. This could have been the downfall the whole company, were it not for an idea of Walt’s that would change the world. The company lay now in debt and would really need a success at least the size of their previous production. Looking at the competition, ‘Felix the Cat’ was by far most successful character being featured. So logically, as a counterweight to the ‘Çat’, Ub Iwerks drew the infamous Mouse based off of a mouse Walt had adopted during his years in Laugh-o-gram. The key feature of the design of the mouse was that it was so recognizable by simply drawing out it’s three circles of the head. In the forth chapter we will dive deeper into the inner workings of what makes us identify and attach meaning to specific shapes and forms.
2.3 THE INCEPTION OF MICKEY
And so the iconic character was created. Drawn by the hand of Ub Iwerks, with some of the vision of Walter they birthed the character that would save their studio from debt and what would later on become this worldwide phenomena that we know today. But as we talked about in the first chapter, any story can serve different purposes both through the intention it’s creator or through the personal sense of the viewer. And since it’s inception, Mickey Mouse would already prove to be subject to this fluidity in his personality and traits that this whole thesis revolves around, a key feature that would allow him to fit in to whichever end goal was required of him, from making money for the Disney company to influencing global politics in favor of the United States.
Mickey was created in 1928, and being the blank slate of any newly created character, would already generate controversy within it’s creators as to how he should be characterized. Walt saw him as a character with a touch of Chaplin, while Iwerks thought of him more in terms of a Douglas Fairbanks (An actor know for his swashbuckling roles in silent movies in the 1920s such as ‘The Mark of Zorro’ and ‘Robin Hood’).
“[Mickey] was always an adventurous character. I thought of him in that respect, and I had him do naturally the sort of thing Douglas Fairbanks would do.”
—Ub Iwerks
Whether Mickey would lean one way or the other, only time would mold his personality, but at the time only one thing was certain, he had to be put on the big screens as soon as possible. And so within the first year of his creation, Disney Productions had made already four movies starring Mickey Mouse, one of them being the infamous 'Steamboat Willy’. This was a huge hit and consolidated the character of Mickey Mouse from the get go in the animation industry. But with the fame also came turbulence to the relationship between Disney and Iwerks. As more popularity the Mickey films gained the least Iwerks was given credits to the creation of Mickey, as Disney’s control became more and more dictatorial within the studio environment. This lead to one episode were during one of the film events a little girl approached Walt asking for a drawing of Mickey, where he simply handed a napkin to Iwerks and demanded he drew the character for the girl. In an burst of indignation Iwerks stormed out of the event. He would work in the studio until 1931 before quitting to work on other animation studios, where he wouldn’t be answering to Walt’s demands, leaving behind his esteemed creation he had so much care for. This whole incident of Disney ‘stealing’ from Iwerks is portrayed in an episode of "The Simpsons”:
The entire plot, revolving around the legal question of who created the anthropomorphic mouse Itchy, is also a reference to the controversy over whether Mickey Mouse was created by Walt Disney or his animator Ub Iwerks. When Roger Meyers Jr. (The character that represents Disney in the episode) pleads his case in court, he mentions that several animated television series and characters were plagiarized from other series and characters: "Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren't for someone plagiarizing The Honeymooners, we wouldn't have The Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sergeant Bilko, there'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear?”
From these few examples of movies Mickey Mouse had already gained worldwide popularity by 1931, being featured in Cinemas across Europe and even Japan. In Japan it had become quite a popular character, his imagery being incorporated into the famous game of Menko cards and they would even produce local comic strips featuring Mickey. The fact that his image was being disseminated all around the globe ended up meaning that other people were also creating the graphical material of the character. And with the authorship of the Mouse being divided, regardless of it being intended that way or not, it could also be argued that it becomes another character. New cultures, new morals. I believe that this wasn’t even such a preoccupation on behalf of Disney as a company at the time the extent of these ‘transformations’, and in this way different people from different parts of the world already start having nuanced little differences in the perception and interpretation of such character. Overall he is still just a playful children’s cartoon, but he is no longer attached to just one reality.
But considering how Japan went through a process of a rise in militarization and nationalism after the Great Depression and World War I, an aversion to American Imperialism was also present in the country, especially leading on to World War II and their alignment with the Axis. And what more could symbolize American imperialism more than Mickey Mouse? The synthesis of this aversion can be seen in the animated movie “Evil Mickey Attacks Japan” from 1934, in which the plot consisted of a foreshadowing of a flying army Mickey Mice coming to attack Japan in 1936. Ironically this animation did predict correctly the conflict between Japan and the United States during the second World War. And it was this exact conflict that called Mickey Mouse to arms, in what would would be the start of his career in military propaganda.
3.1 FORMING ALLIANCES: DISNEY AND THE ARMY
Upon the attack of Pearl Harbor by the then called Empire of Japan on December 7 of 1941, Walt Disney Studios, located in Burbank, California, was somewhat overtaken by 500 United States Army troops the very next day. This marked the only Hollywood film studio occupation by the military in history and lasted 8 months. The initial reason for the troops to be stationed there was the protection of a nearby aircraft plant from enemy air raids, and consequently turned many parking garages and other facilities into ammunition depots and maintenance stations. From then on it was only a small leap until Walt Disney was approached by government officials to work for them in what would be the start of a long lasting relationship. If you also recall from Walt Disney’s own past, his support of the the troops and the war was anything but hidden, this being the perfect opportunity for him to combine his love for cartoons with the will to help the United States in the war.
At first they had illustrators making mascots and insignias for the Navy, but soon other branches of the government such as the Air Force, Department of Agriculture and the Treasury Depart jumped in and soon Walt Disney Studios was creating all sorts of material for the government from badges, to propaganda films to even designing Mickey Mouse gas masks. The reasoning behind choosing Walt Disney and his characters as an ambassador for the government and it’s war effort was a clever tactic to firstly broaden the reach of the their messages, as a big parcel of the US population consumed Disney cartoons or where at least familiar with them, and secondly using such cartoon characters was a good way to mask the harsh reality of war, putting a layer of innocence and childlike hope that appealed to younger and older audiences alike, for as much as the characters themselves are targeted towards children, the message will usually reach their parents by either them also seeing the cartoons/posters or by their children telling them, making it a very broad range on audiences that the Disney characters could target.
But apart from just the regular population of the US that were part of the war effort by buying war funds or rationing or any other form of being an indirect participant in the conflict, the Disney characters proved to be quite popular within the soldiers themselves, after having been given Disney insignias and such to their squadrons they began themselves appropriating the characters, especially the aircraft pilots. The characters would be painted on the side of the airplanes and showed a very different side of these characters, a mixture of irony and violence as these at first innocent characters would be swearing to beheading nazis or bombing ‘Japs’ whilst holding that typical Disney smile. This just comes again to show that the message of character (propaganda) does not lie within itself, but on those who appropriate of it, and their own personal intentions.
But the extent of the Disney image merging with this military didn’t refrain to just the symbolic and imagetic realm with insignias and posters. At this point in time Disney already produced toys of it’s characters, the beginning of an enterprise that would define Disney and bring the Disney universe to outside the big screens, what would later on lead to the construction of Disneyland, the ultimate translation of the movie world to our reality. So already being inserted into the production market of merchandise, things such as gas masks were commissioned from the studios by the military. An effort to bring innocence to another facet of the war that otherwise has no connotation to anything other than death and destruction. It is understandable that such a thing would happen in the United States considering their incentives throughout the 20th century to promote capitalistic lifestyle/products under all sorts of ‘masks' and justifications. From this specific case of the gas-masks and other war related ‘merchandise' I case a good side and a negative side from such a tactic. The benefit to incorporating something so child-like to an object of such extreme and terrifying contexts of usage would be the easier adoption of it to children (even though that is considerably arguable considering how creepy it seems for some people, me included), which then would only promote the general well being since more children would be wearing gas-masks in theory. On the other hand, this does in fact end up watering down the perception we have of the gravity of something like war, putting on a Mickey mask on top of it and pretending it’s not as bad as it seems.
The point I am trying to make putting these two things in balance is not to say there shouldn’t be protective war gear directed towards children, but that a simple rebranding of a product can change a person’s whole perception of events, morals and intentions. And this was the biggest lesson that both Walt Disney and the US army figured out together through the second World War.
3.2 DISNEY AND THE COLD WAR IN SOUTH AMERICA
The Second World War campaigns and insignias was the first of the collaborations between Disney studio and the US government. As decades passed, the proportions of the Cold War grew to an extent where the US was fighting for ideological dominance in several different countries around the globe, being South America one key target in this period. After the end of the first World War the United States already had put in practice the “Good Neighbor Policy”, which consisted of an approximation between America and Latin America, in an effort to regain the trust of the southern nations after a deterioration in their relationships after Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick Policy”, which we can all guess what that implies. But the truth is that this was a long thought strategy to recover the United States from the Crash of 1929, steadily opening doors to foreign markets for exporting products, as well as the American way of life. Later on this would prove to be the perfect entry way into Latin America amidst the Cold War ideological conflict.
Disney productions started making a name for themselves with their animations and subsequently their movies. But the more the ‘gospel' of Disney spread internationally, other kinds of mediums found themselves to be adapted to local markets and entertainment consumption habits (as we saw examples from Japan, for instance). The comic book proved to be one of those formats that managed to reach to a mass audience, especially in third world countries where the access to a cinema, or a television set was only for a few. There are very specific characteristics of the comic book format that make it so favorable to it’s dissemination in poor countries throughout the 20th century. Being printed weekly issues and in high quantity newspaper paper, the costs of producing and buying comics were somewhat accessible, and differently from a television at the time, the comic could be passed on to a friend, a sibling, a stranger. This ensured even more the spread and popularity of the Disney comic market.
This combination of the characteristics of dissemination of the comic book medium allied to the massive popularity of Mickey and his companions made the Disney comic book the perfect tool for ideological discourse to be spread amongst poorer countries. This was a phenomenon studied by two Belgian social scientists of mass media, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, in their book “How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic” being first published in 1971. This book was a landmark in both investigating the mechanics employed by Disney to change public views on certain issues as well as the whole context the book was put out from, being unable to even be published in the United States until the 1990s.
Published in Chile under the publishing house of the then president Salvador Allende, a known socialist that tried to implement policies that would make the country a more autonomous power, denying the influence that American companies tried to insert themselves into the countries economy. Allende had a view to exacerbate the Chilean culture by empowering it’s population in a way to make them proud of their native richness, in a way to also be wary of this exterior influence played out by both the US and also the Soviet Union, considering Cold War tensions
"I come from Chile, a small country but one where today any citizen is free to express himself as he so desires. A country of unlimited cultural, religious and ideological tolerance and where there is no room for racial discrimination. A country with its working class united in a single trade union organization, where universal and secret sufrage is the vehicle of determination of a multiparty regime, with a Parliament that has been operating constantly since it was created 160 years ago; where the courts of justice are independent of the executive and where the constitution has only been changed once since 1833, and has almost always been in effect. A country where public life is organized in civilian institutions and where the armed forces are of a proven professional background and deep democratic spirit. A country with a population of almost 10,000,000 people that in one generation has had two first-place Nobel Prize winners in literature, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, both children of simple workers. In my country, history, land and man are united in a great national feeling.”
—Salvador Allende, during a speech at UN
But it was not long until in 1973 Chile suffered a Coup d'Etat, later found to be secretly funded by the US, made by Augusto Pinochet. This plunged Chile into a right-wing dictatorship that lasted all the way until 1990. The motivation for US interference in such a drastic manner (even if behind the scenes) was to stop Salvador Allende from nationalizing the copper mines, which were own by US companies, which had already been making the diplomatic relations between the two countries on a thin line, leading to economic embargo from the US and consequently inflation and stagnation on some sectors in Chile. During this time Pinochet promoted several book burnings of malicious titles to the regime, amongst them “How to Read Donald Duck”. But what could be so menacing about a book analyzing how Disney comics were made for foreign (specifically South American) audiences?
3.3 IDEOLOGY FOR EXPORT
The research of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart is a deep dive into inner workings of the subliminal messaging present in these comics for export. These books were intentionally adjusted to the specific contexts of the areas they would be distributed at, with an emphasis in molding the social construct and preconceptions of the target audience in order to adjust to the American set of morals and imperialist ideology. The manipulation would occur in many different forms from changes in the translation to the actual portrayal of foreigners within the stories in the comics.
But the most essential characteristic of the use of the Disney comic is that it is trustable, and for that Dorfman and Mattelart also accounted one of the reasons being that since the animals come from the ‘natural world’ they tend to be more pure. And is there any purer knowledge to be learned than by nature itself? This is the premise it invites the reader into, but as this notion expands into streets, towns, countries is where Disney has brought you into it’s parallel reality.
—David Kunzle
4.1 ONE MOUSE TO RULE THEM ALL
This notion of Disney creating a parallel reality of itself is partially the work of building a whole filmography of all these characters, stories and settings, but to achieve this widespread omnipresence that we know them for, one key element was crucial to that effect: bringing this crafted reality of their's into the real world. It sounds like something abstract speaking of worlds and realities, but the strategy for achieving this effect couldn’t be more grounded in the material realm, by the use and spread of merchandise. What at first may have been motivated by sheer economic interest, the start of production of merchandise for Mickey and company paved the way for the blurring of the line between what is real and what is the Disney reality. As more and more the place of fantasy and the place of real life intertwine as these characters seize to be mere storytellers in the screen to materializing as miniatures, watches and whatever object imaginable, all with a resemblance to these characters.
This effort to permeate the households of the world, not just through the rhetorics of it’s films but through literal presence, is what has allowed even bigger manifestations of the Disney imaginarium coming to life with, for instance, the creation of the Disneyland theme parks. The theme park in itself is an interesting example of this immersion that Disney asks of it’s audience, especially if we take into account that the experience of going to the Disneyland Kingdom demands not only an acceptance of the values and myths that their films create, but to be an active participant in creating and maintaining this facade. Disneyland promises it’s visitors a magical experience, a ‘dream come true’, and sells the creation of an unforgettable family experience. But it can only achieve such universal and ‘pure' experiences through a sanitized view of our reality, where sex, death, failure and tragedy have no place.
"It is a debased trivial culture that voids both the deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple spontaneous pleasures, since the realities would be too real and the pleasures to lively to induce . . . a narcotized acceptance of mass culture and of the commodities it sells."
—Dwight MacDonald (1998)
If we think of Disneyland from an urban planning point of view, it is even possible to trace parallels between Rem Koolhaas’ ideas present in his book “Delirious New York”, where he explores how the wills and values of a local culture manifests into how a city is built, and Disneyland can only be seen as an output of the spectacle, so emphasized within American culture since the beginning of the 20th century. The difference between a normal city’s development and something like Disneyland is that Disney has control over both the media it puts out for it’s self-contained universe, as well as of the spectacle itself. By mobilizing society’s relationship with media and spectacle, it has lead to much of it’s power and profit.
The boundaries between the myth of Disney and that of reality become even blurrier once the influence of this fictional realms surpasses even the theme park onto becoming an actual city. In 1990 Orlando, Disney built from the ground up the city of Celebration, Florida. This town was the ultimate achievement from Disney to permeate every aspect of a person’s life. This market a branding nirvana for Disney, where you could live your whole life inside the brand, yet no brands where allowed inside the town. Once you have built the fantasy you want to shut the door behind you so no-one may come in to break the illusion. Disney was selling the American dream, a nostalgia of the small time American town. Nostalgia being one of the main artifices that manages to keep adult audiences still attached to this ‘dream’. But from where does this nostalgia originate? Could it be a temporal longing for our childhood times? Could it be that the image of Disney, more specifically Mickey, be so ingrained within our collective memories already that we already attribute his image to this feel-good remembrance of a past, even if that belongs not to reality, but the Disney realm?
4.2 DISSECTING THE ICON: THE POWER OF THE IMAGE
“The names of the Presidents change; that of Disney remains. Forty-six years after the birth of Mickey Mouse, eight years after the death of his master, Disney’s may be the most widely known North American name in the world. He is, arguably, the century’s most important figure in bourgeois popular culture. He has done more than any single person to disseminate around the world certain myths upon which that culture has thrived, notably that of an 'innocence' supposedly universal, beyond place, beyond time—and beyond criticism”
—David Kunzle, 1975
To start to talk about the formation and effects of icons in our society, I would like to first bring out this graph that shows the recurrence of the word “icon” (both in literature as in film) across the decades. As you can see the popularity and the adhesion of the word “icon" is a recent phenomenon. Only with the ascendance of mass media does the discussion of the icon come into place. But make no mistake, for the concept of an icon exists since the beginnings of civilization. Gods and kings alike served as the icons before the advent of mass communication. And alongside mass communication, the past decades have seen the rise of brands seeking a global “iconic" presence that is remembered. Logos, mascots, corporate identities are all assets that are more and more praised as having this power to synthesize a certain message that companies try to pass across to their consumers. This is true as well regarding to the Disney Corporation, being Mickey Mouse the ultimate example of an iconic mascot.
Before delving deeper into the implications of icons in our modern history I would like to specify somewhat the “meaning" of the icon that I’m considering, as I speculate on it’s relations with the way we see the world. The word “icon" can mean many things. The way I’m using the word “icon" is based on the analysis of Scott McCloud in his book “Understanding Comics” (1993) being that an icon would be "any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea”. If you were to go into the deeper dictionary meaning of the word it would definitely be broader than this, but to the effect of keeping a more narrow consistency, as we apply this definition to different contexts, I believe it more appropriate to using this as our ‘landmark’ to come back to. According to McCloud we can separate the icons into three different categories:
Symbols: these are images we use to represent concepts, ideas and philosophies.
Language, science and communication: these can be considered icons of the practical realm.
Pictures: images designed to actually resemble their subjects.
From these categories we could also separate we can also distinguish icons into pictorial and non-pictorial. In the non-pictorial icons, meaning is absolute. Their appearance doesn’t affect their meaning because they represent invisible ideas. In pictures, however, meaning is fluid and variable according to appearance. They differ from ‘real-life’ appearance to varying degrees. And that leads to a diversity of meaning, even if they are representations of the the same real-life starting point.
As we arrive at this point we are able to start understanding the formation of the ‘language' of cartoons, so familiar and unquestioned to us, at this point in cultural development. I say ‘language' because the reading of a cartoon already consists of an active role of the viewer into it’s interpretation. The photograph of a real-life subject is already a framed interpretation , taking it away from it’s original ‘habitat' to be viewed in whatever context it is presented. It is already extracted from reality. The transformation of the subject into an icon consist of a series of simplifications and abstractions from a more representative counterpart, the photograph for instance. These abstractions can be as arbitrary or as intentional as needed, but that is where the magic of the icon lies, the act of simplifying/abstracting an image puts upon the creator the question of what remains to represent this subject. The meaning is condensed into these fragments of pictorial clues, which when handed over to the viewer can lead to several different interpretations of the same things, considering the different backgrounds and pre-suppositions that are constructed upon us as individuals in our own upbringings.
If we try to reach the essence of this simplification of forms, we reach the alphabet. Looking at the image below, we already see the letter as a representation of a bull, as the writing system evolves through time and passing on to other cultures, the forms simplify, abstract. And this is where the true power of rallying on iconography shines, for as the abstraction increases, the more baggage of meanings the icon can hold. And if we go back to the construction of Mickey, it is simply three circles.
But does this explain our attachment to this Mouse?
4.3 WE ARE ALL MICKEY MOUSE
There is no simple answer to give when trying to explain why we feel attached to things, especially with fictional characters. The representation and iconography, which we have gone through in the past chapter, play a part in this, but in this case what makes Mickey so approachable is how the representation in itself helps sustain the mythology of the character, which has been slowly built through the decades. And much like the recurrence of the discussion around the icon, the discussion of the myth has followed a similar rise in relevancy in the past few decades.
Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them. Simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. The various myths presented in Disney World: of progress, magic, family closeness, happiness, adventure without danger, and so on, are from a Barthesian perspective of associating these values to signs and signifiers. Though a myth may be manipulative, it “hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection”(Barthes). But that does not mean he denies the power or potential harmfulness of the mythical signification, for it is never arbitrary, it is always in part motivated.
“(…) mythology, since it is the study of a type of speech, is but one fragment of this vast science of signs which Saussure postulated some forty years ago under the name of semiology. Semiology has not yet come into being. But since Saussure himself, and sometimes independently of him, a whole section of contemporary research has constantly been referred to the problem of meaning: psychoanalysis, structuralism, eidetic psychology, some new types of literary criticism (…) are no longer concerned with facts except inasmuch as they are endowed with significance"
—Roland Barthes
The mythical aspect of Mickey explains to us our attraction in the realm of stories and ideas. But to go through this mythical construction, the imagery of the character plays a significant part in making us relate to him on the aspect of the cuteness, an often overlooked characteristic of cartoons where they quickly reels us in under the trust of cuteness in it’s characters, only to then voice their opinions and intentions through this shell of cuteness.
"Cuteness could thus serve as shorthand for what Hannah Arendt calls the "modern enchantment with 'small things' ... preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues," which she also acerbically refers to as the "art of being happy ... between dog and cat and flowerpot." For Arendt, the "petite bohneur" of the cute is thus part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the expansion of the charismatically "irrelevant," which she links to a genuinely public culture: "What the public realm considers irrelevant call have such an extraordinary an infectious charm that a whole people may adopt it as their way of life, without for that reason changing its essentially private character.”
—Sianne Ngai
“myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi (…) the meaning is always there to present the form: the form is always there to outdistance the meaning”
—Roland Barthes
5.1 THE MOUSE OF TODAY
As we arrive to the times of today, Mickey’s role in popular culture is a little confusing to say the least: on one hand Disney Corporations are considered the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world, in theory making Mickey as if the ambassador of American entertainment, but considering how many decades it has been since any film has starred Mickey Mouse, he somehow symbolizes today much more a businessman managing from behind the curtains the empire he helped create. But on the other hand his image has already permeated so much of our collective cultural subconscious that you could say that nowadays we see much more of people appropriating the image of Mickey and attributing to it the person’s own meaning. Be it through wall paintings in school walls, or memes on the internet, Mickey lives in the imagination of people.
So much so that as an example we can look into Wouter Klein Welderman’s project ‘Monument for Transition’. Welderman planned on creating a big sculpture in a public space in the town of Moengo, Surinam, alongside anyone who wanted to participate. By letting the people of Moengo decide about important sculptural elements, such as the subject of the sculpture, its shape, its story, a lot can be said about the local culture and references that manifest. Wouter Klein Welderman wanted to use an existing icon that stands for a certain kind of transition. One of the icons that changed Western society a great lot, is the Walt Disney cartoon Mickey Mouse. Curiously enough, Wouter along with the people of Moengo decided upon making the sculpture into a Mickey Mouse. Mickey stands atop totem legs full of faces on them. These faces are also marks of a transition, a transition of people and cultures that have come, changed, gone. Especially after after the civil war in surinam, there are still people under the effect of such transitions. And at last there are the transitions that are still to come.
The fact that Mickey is such an universal icon at this point means that all sort of people take hold of it’s image, some promoting a common culture (such as Welderman’s project) but others use it for more mal.icious means. For instance, “Tomorrow's Pioneers” was a Palestinian television program for children, where the co-host was a man dressed in a Mickey Mouse costume. The show was highly controversial as it consisted of the regular educational television format, but the messages behind the episodes were focused on antisemitism, anti-Americanism and anti-Western culture in general.
"The original host of Tomorrow's Pioneers and Farfour, Hazim Al-Sha'arawi, stated that it was his idea that Farfour (the character who dresses as Mickey in the show) be killed by an Israeli interrogator, adding that the show "wanted to send a message through this character that would fit the reality of Palestinian life." El-Sharawi states, "A child sees his neighbors killed, or blown up on the beach, and how do I explain this to a child that already knows? The [Israeli] occupation is the reason; it creates the reality. I just organize the information for him." Al-Aqsa's TV deputy manager stated that the program in fact is simply "about Palestinian kids express[ing] their feeling[s] regarding what they witness -- if it's [the] occupation it's about that…"
This comes to show also the power and dangers of resignifying such an universal icon that people already somehow have an expectation towards. This also makes me wonder if the actual icon of Mickey is not becoming but an empty shell of meaning, left with just a superficial resemblance of childhood innocence in which you can insert whatever kind of discourse within it that it will already have an appeal to people just because of the recognition of the icon. Memes that portray Mickey Mouse on the internet utilize that very same mechanic, and it’s interesting to see how now the image of Mickey can be used by people to, for instance make jokes on American News, something which would be unimaginable while Walt Disney held total control of the character.
5.2 THE MOUSE OF TOMORROW
These modern day icons are fruits of our capitalist society, but have taken a life of their own within the general public’s cultural subconscious. For Mickey Mouse specifically he has long transcended the title of just a character and has become something of an ethereal presence amongst pop culture. He is more a symbol of Disney than even Walt Disney which carries the companies name. And in the same manner as his icon, brands and theirs images become ever more fluid and spread through different aspects of our lifes, from entertainment, to food, to housing, to urban planning. Capitalism is the 21st century’s main religion, and being Mickey a somewhat new god-like icon, we still do not know how Mickey’s presence can still shape shift with the changes in our society, for at the pace that we develop our means of communication after the advent of the internet, it’s simply naive to think that this is something you can just predict. Nevertheless, as we have seen with the whole trajectory of this icon, the tendency lies in the continuation of the dematerialization of Mickey Mouse. From mouse, to icon, to becoming a concept (?). But if/when this time comes it makes me wonder, will the future look back at us in any specific way because of Mickey Mouse? Could it be used as material to better understand our society and values?
Regardless, as long as we live in capitalist driven society we will always be surrounded by icons. And what I find worrying about the way we have been dealing with this over saturation of new media being produced at a never before seen scale is that I believe we have reached a feedback loop that we keep consuming concepts long past that are just made anew to adapt to the current environment, but still carry a baggage of meaning of it’s former self. Recycling of outdated values that lead to it’s corruption. I hope that these few words on this paper will somehow make us more aware of the influence that these icons play in our lives, and how we must always remind ourselves that these are all man-made objects, stories, concepts, and we should be able to build our own reality from our own interpretation. Be suspicious of those who claim to know the truth.
"We have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time, where you are now, is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, you are disempowered. You are giving it all away to icons. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. And what is real is you and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, and your fears.”
—Terrance McKenna