From "Disney and its conservative critics: Images versus realities" by Ronald E. Ostman
This article focuses on conservative critics issues with Disney released films. There is little to no mention of the theme parks, but it does provide some useful information on Walt Disney and how the company was run under him. Therefore this information would be helpful and setting the groundwork and motivation that one could assume went into the theme parks and how it was developed.
* "According J. Anthony Lukas and Richard Schickel, founder Walt Disney had a personal reputation as a 'great puritan entrepreneur of culture in the 20th century...an extreme expression of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture values.'
The late Walt Disney was a Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan conservative.
According to Finch, after Mickey was established as a national (and later international) star he was expected to behave properly at all times. If he occasionally stepped out of line any number of letters would arrive at the Studio from citizens and organizations who felt that the nation's moral well-being was in their hands. It was becoming harder and harder to find comic situations for Mickey [in the mid-1930s] that would not give offense in some quarter. Eventually he would be pressured into the role of the straight man...
According to Kunzle, 'even love is prohibited (the relationship between Mickey and Minnie, or Donald and Daisy, is 'platonic'-but not a platonic form of love)" (2 of 9)
These quotes help to illustrate the type of man that Walt Disney was, and therefore we can better understand how Mickey Mouse developed into the image that we have today. However, it is interesting about the relationship between the "couple." People at the parks always say that Mickey and Minnie, along with Donald and Daisy, are forever sweethearts which is why they aren't married. I wonder if this is a more modern take on Walt's vision.
"Disney culture soothes some of our deepest cultural fears. Facing the complexities of pluralism, we try donning identical Mickey Mouse ears. Worried about our lack of historical identity, we find comfort in a personal audience with Mr. Lincoln. As we question the 'American Dream' and the structures of consumerism, we visit Disneyland and can affirm that America is, in Mickey's words, 'the best in the world.
"Mickey's is a child's world, safe (though occasionally scary), nonviolent, non-ideological, where all the stories have happy endings...
"In the 1970s, critics on the political Left began questioning the company. For example, in 1975 Kunzle wrote convincingly that lurking not too far below Mickey and Walt Disney and company's innocence were 'the scowl of capitalist ideology' and 'imperialist values.' Since Disney was shown to wear political and economic trappings, it was not too far a leap of logic to realize that Disney products also could be used to advance a particular cultural agenda." (5 of 9)
These quotes progress from discussing the overall Disney culture to how Mickey and the entire Disney culture can be used to express specific political and cultural views.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Fan Culture
From "Fan Culture, the Internet and the British Influence in Popular Music Studies" by Gary Burns
Overall I'm not sure that this article is the most helpful for my purposes. Yet it does help in the discussion on whether Disney is a serious topic for academic study. There are a few quotes that will be useful in the website.
*" the popular culture movement, which analyzed all forms of popular products of the entertainment industries, and did so without any a priori assumption that such products are inferior or that the creators or consumers of such works are dolt." (201)This passage seems like an excellent definition of popular culture
*"The writers of articles in Rolling Stone have always been primarily journalists, whereas the scribes of Record Collector also have some claim to be called researchers. They go back and read old periodicals (including Rolling Stone) and books. They use archives (and become archivists themselves). ... Their work tends to be definitive historical research--often on a microscopic subject, but all the more definitive for that." (202)
Difference in reporting popular culture and analyzing it
*"The Internet now provides easy access to facts that were impossible to obtain only a few years ago." (203)
*"Web sites are this carrying on some of the important traditions established by fanzines collectors, discographers, and pedantic amateur reseachers." (205)
Both quotes help to examine that relationship between the Internet and the recording industry. These ideas can be easily be applied to the role of the Internet in the growing Disney culture.
Overall I'm not sure that this article is the most helpful for my purposes. Yet it does help in the discussion on whether Disney is a serious topic for academic study. There are a few quotes that will be useful in the website.
*" the popular culture movement, which analyzed all forms of popular products of the entertainment industries, and did so without any a priori assumption that such products are inferior or that the creators or consumers of such works are dolt." (201)This passage seems like an excellent definition of popular culture
*"The writers of articles in Rolling Stone have always been primarily journalists, whereas the scribes of Record Collector also have some claim to be called researchers. They go back and read old periodicals (including Rolling Stone) and books. They use archives (and become archivists themselves). ... Their work tends to be definitive historical research--often on a microscopic subject, but all the more definitive for that." (202)
Difference in reporting popular culture and analyzing it
*"The Internet now provides easy access to facts that were impossible to obtain only a few years ago." (203)
*"Web sites are this carrying on some of the important traditions established by fanzines collectors, discographers, and pedantic amateur reseachers." (205)
Both quotes help to examine that relationship between the Internet and the recording industry. These ideas can be easily be applied to the role of the Internet in the growing Disney culture.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Inventing Popular Culture, part 1
Storey states in the Preface that "the book will explore the ways in which the idea of popular culture is often a way of categorizing and dismissing the cultural practices of 'ordinary' people" (xii). This examination will help to explain why the artistic creations of Disney are often dismissed. A closer look at the various frameworks of popular culture furthermore assists in explaining the various facets of the Disney corporation.
Frameworks:
1. Folk Culture - "popular culture as a quasi-mythical rural 'folk culture'" (1)
Based on the notion that the culture of the "rural people" needed to be preserved, middle class intellectuals began to collect and gather songs, stories and artwork to ensure that it would remain a part of the country's history. As Storey organizes it, there were two historical period -- the first period focused on the collection and study of ballad and folk tales and the second period focused on the collection and study of the folk song. The usefulness of looking at folk culture as popular culture aids in the promotion of the "very embodiment of the nature and character of a nation." (2) Cecil Sharp makes a similar point when arguing for "introduction of folk songs into elementary schools" which would "stimulate the growth of the feeling of patriotism" (12-13). Yet the most useful notion in seeing folk culture as popular culture in relationship to Disney is the linking of the past to the present. As Storey mentions in the beginning of the chapter, the "real" folk culture is not preserved but the "myth" of the folk culture. Disney is quite successful in using this tool in its theme parks. By presenting a ideal of say Hollywood as we all believed that it existed in the 1930s and 1940s, it sells the fantasy of what the magic of Hollywood today could be.
2. Mass Culture - a dividing line between culture and mass culture was created by Matthew Arnold,Culture and Anarchy, in which he said that culture is "the best that has been thought and said in the world"
This concept of Arnold lends itself very nicely to the separation between high culture and low culture. Additionally, "popular culture as mass culture is the 'anarchy' embodied in the disruptive nature of working-class lived culture" (20). Other intellectuals pick up this concept and put their own spin on it, but remaining close to the original idea. For example, the English literary intellectuals, the Leavisities, "believed that 'culture has always been in minority keeping'" (21). Examples of his this belief was played out was the removal of Shakespeare and opera from the masses into the hands of the minority tastemakers. The Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, had another take on the ideas of Arnold and the Leavisties. He believed that "the hyperdemocratic rule of the masses...will pain the world a single shade of gray: 'The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select'" (25). So rather than creating social anarchy as Arnold suggested, Ortega suggests that everything will be the same and therefore meaningless. While it seems that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would be saying the same thing that "the cultural commodities produced by the cultural industry...are marked by homogeneity...all mass culture is identical," they are not. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that "it actually maintains social authority." (28). It dulls the senses of the masses in a way that they do not understand that they are missing anything.
Frameworks:
1. Folk Culture - "popular culture as a quasi-mythical rural 'folk culture'" (1)
Based on the notion that the culture of the "rural people" needed to be preserved, middle class intellectuals began to collect and gather songs, stories and artwork to ensure that it would remain a part of the country's history. As Storey organizes it, there were two historical period -- the first period focused on the collection and study of ballad and folk tales and the second period focused on the collection and study of the folk song. The usefulness of looking at folk culture as popular culture aids in the promotion of the "very embodiment of the nature and character of a nation." (2) Cecil Sharp makes a similar point when arguing for "introduction of folk songs into elementary schools" which would "stimulate the growth of the feeling of patriotism" (12-13). Yet the most useful notion in seeing folk culture as popular culture in relationship to Disney is the linking of the past to the present. As Storey mentions in the beginning of the chapter, the "real" folk culture is not preserved but the "myth" of the folk culture. Disney is quite successful in using this tool in its theme parks. By presenting a ideal of say Hollywood as we all believed that it existed in the 1930s and 1940s, it sells the fantasy of what the magic of Hollywood today could be.
2. Mass Culture - a dividing line between culture and mass culture was created by Matthew Arnold,Culture and Anarchy, in which he said that culture is "the best that has been thought and said in the world"
This concept of Arnold lends itself very nicely to the separation between high culture and low culture. Additionally, "popular culture as mass culture is the 'anarchy' embodied in the disruptive nature of working-class lived culture" (20). Other intellectuals pick up this concept and put their own spin on it, but remaining close to the original idea. For example, the English literary intellectuals, the Leavisities, "believed that 'culture has always been in minority keeping'" (21). Examples of his this belief was played out was the removal of Shakespeare and opera from the masses into the hands of the minority tastemakers. The Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, had another take on the ideas of Arnold and the Leavisties. He believed that "the hyperdemocratic rule of the masses...will pain the world a single shade of gray: 'The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select'" (25). So rather than creating social anarchy as Arnold suggested, Ortega suggests that everything will be the same and therefore meaningless. While it seems that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would be saying the same thing that "the cultural commodities produced by the cultural industry...are marked by homogeneity...all mass culture is identical," they are not. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that "it actually maintains social authority." (28). It dulls the senses of the masses in a way that they do not understand that they are missing anything.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Thoughts on the Study of Popular Culture?
John Storey's text, Inventing Popular Culture, is an introduction to the study of popular culture. What are some of the fundamental methodologies, vocabularies, and goals of the study of popular culture? In what ways might we use this language to help us understand Disney culture?
Saturday, February 16, 2008
During: Quotes and Key Terms
Important quotes from chapter 1, "The Discipline":
Key terms to define and keep in mind:
Culture is not a thing or even a system: it's a set of transactions, processes, mutations, practices, technologies, institutions, out of which things and events (such as movies, poems or world wrestling bouts) are produced, to be experienced, lived out and given meaning and value to in different ways within the unsystematic network of differences and mutations from which they emerged to start with.... For cultural studies today, cultural objects are simultaneously 'texts' (that is, they have meaning) and events and experiences, produced out of, and thrown back into, a social force field constituted unevenly by power flows, status hierarchies and opportunities for many kinds of transportation, identification and pleasure. they are also social institutions, some based in the state, others in the market or in so-called civil society. (6)
The first characteristic feature of cultural studies is that it is...an engaged study of culture.... The second ideal feature of cultural studies...is that it ought to be self-reflective. (9-10)
Entertainment is said to be the USA's biggest export now. (14)
In enterprise culture, cultural industries are routinely regarded as economic contributors, as employers, as attractors of tourism and business.... Culture is regarded as a means through which governments can manage different communal values and traditions in society.... (16-17)
Key terms to define and keep in mind:
- Entrepreneurialism and enterprise culture
- Cultural materialism (Williams)
- Hegemony (Gramsci)
- Ideology (Althusser)
- Representation
- Everyday life (de Certeau)
- Base/superstructure theory of culture (Marxism)
- Postmarxism
- The subject; subject-positions; identity
During, "Media and the Public Sphere"
During, Simon. “Media and the Public Sphere.” Cultural Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005. 109-142.
How does During understand "technoculture"? How does technoculture suggest "the emergence of a new domain between the public and the private" (141)? How do you think the Internet functions as a media/medium through which we can study popular culture? In what ways is the Internet a "globalising technology" (88)? The Internet is a medium notorious for its economic dimensions. How do you see the Internet's economic dimensions impacting Disney as a consumable commodity?
How does During understand "technoculture"? How does technoculture suggest "the emergence of a new domain between the public and the private" (141)? How do you think the Internet functions as a media/medium through which we can study popular culture? In what ways is the Internet a "globalising technology" (88)? The Internet is a medium notorious for its economic dimensions. How do you see the Internet's economic dimensions impacting Disney as a consumable commodity?
During, "Space"
During, Simon. “Space.” Cultural Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005. 81-106.
- Consider During's overview of globalization in the chapter on "Space." Is Disney a global culture?
- During comments that, in one sense, "globalisation needs to be regarded as the outcome of a history of Western expansionism" (83). How do you understand Disney's relationship to globalisation in this sense?
- "Technological factors in the process of globalisation include the development of new communications technologies, especially the Internet..." (85).
- Consider During's comments on the more negative sense of "vernacular globalism" (87) as a "dislocat[ing]" force tending to the "Americanisation of the world." How do you understand Disney's relationship to these facets of globalisation? To the spectre of "global uniformity" under capitalism?
- Consider the way During speaks of "nation" in this chapter. In what ways might we think of Disney as a nation? Disney culture as a national culture? Disney subjects as patriotic? What about the way Disney represents other cultures?
- As above, Anderson's concept of "imagined communties"-- religion, like nation, an "ideological formation based on the organised imagination" (99).Balibar on nationalism (100)? Disney and tourism, the "tourist gaze" (101)?
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