Greetings From Dismayland
Walt and Dutch say hi.
The last time both writers and actors were on strike, in 1960, Ronald Reagan was the head of the Screen Actors Guild. A fair share of commentary has been pointing this out in the days since SAG-AFTRA joined the Writers Guild of America on Hollywood’s picket lines. Exactly why isn’t all that clear; most commenters seem generally supportive of these strikes, and there is admittedly a level of novelty that Hollywood labor was once led by one of America’s most notoriously anti-union presidents – the man whose early presidency was defined by the crushing of the air traffic controllers’ strike.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, this was a far more “civil” labor dispute, with none of the bad blood and war of words that is characterizing this time around. And though the studios may have had fewer CEOs able to make such tone-deaf gaffes as Disney’s Bob Iger recently did, the simple fact is that studio heads were just as vicious and frankly slimy then as they are now. Reagan, for his own part, and in his capacity as president of SAG, had been instrumental in aiding Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusades, encouraging fearful actors to name names. One can imagine that Reagan’s enthusiastic cooperation in locking up reds just over a decade prior put many a CEO’s mind at ease as the strike was called.
As it turns out, Reagan gave friendly testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee on the very same day as Walt Disney: October 20, 1947. Disney, whose upbringing by his socialist father Elias hadn’t stopped him from becoming a virulent reactionary, was also a friendly witness. His hatred of unions had already become infamous during the 1941 animators’ strike, and Disney insisted during his testimony that communists had played a key role in organizing the Screen Cartoonists Guild. As a result, at least one of the participants in that strike, Art Heinemann, was blacklisted.
Heinemann had been art director for 1940’s Fantasia, and had developed the story for the animated film’s famous “Night on Bald Mountain” segment. Incidentally, even Disney’s most favorite animators would pay consequences for his testimony. Bill Tytla, who had drawn and animated the terrifying Chernabog for “Night on Bald Mountain” and was reportedly believed by Walt to be his most valued talent, joined the picket line during the 1941 strike. Several years after leaving Disney, Tytla got a job at Tempo Productions, an animation studio founded by Zack Schwartz and David Hilberman, two of his former Disney colleagues.
Despite the renown that Tempo would quickly gain for high quality work, the studio wouldn’t last long. Hilberman had also been a leader in the animators’ strike, and like millions of others had attended Communist Party meetings in the 1930s. Walt named him as a communist in his HUAC testimony. After being blacklisted, Tempo Productions went under. Hilberman, Schwartz, and Tytla were again out of a job.
It’s all in keeping with what we know today of Disney the man and Disney the company. These limitations on artists’ social mobility might also be seen as an attempt to define what animation was and wasn’t. We often forget just how wondrous the event of full-length animated film was for audiences, and the degree to which it opened up the imaginations of masses of people. Esther Leslie, speaking of her 2002 book Hollywood Flatlands, elaborates:
Animation is an art of metamorphosis, of transformation and it is as if the ways in which the animated form shifts from one state to another proffers an inkling of a transformation that could be undergone by all – politically, socially. Therein lies the utopian axis of animation - motility and mobility are its propulsive force, the opening onto an infinite, anti-gravitational other-space.
To some it seems downright criminal that Disney is probably less enthusiastic about animation than any time in its history. One might even say the company is outright disdainful of it, if all the CGI and live-action remakes of beloved animated classics are any indication. By that same token, it isn’t difficult to imagine Disney is the most enthusiastic to avail itself of the labor-saving costs offered by artificial intelligence, and quite indifferent to the fetters it places on artists’ and viewers’ imaginative scope. Originality has never been so sacred to the studios as we’ve been led to believe, but now it is bloody obvious.
Disney has long played the role of pacesetter in Hollywood. It’s been this way since at least the beginnings of the Cold War, when the post-war consumer boom led to dramatic changes in work and leisure. It was Walt Disney who showed the world that onscreen fantasy could be brought into the corporeal world and shaped into a theme park. It didn’t take more than a few decades for other blockbuster studios, most prominently Universal, to follow suit.
The values that have come with this extrapolation from screen to street have never been all that hidden, but with the reds iced out and labor militants cowed, it was just a lot easier to spread them with impunity. Disneyland’s Main Street USA was explicitly modeled on an ideal of small town America that never really existed except in the minds of the country’s whitest and most fearful: proudly provincial and aggressively positioned against the stream of cosmopolitanism. Few need reminding of just how bigoted the place can get, from years of outspoken homophobia to Splash Mountain being built around Song of the South.
Ronald Reagan, incidentally, was also there on Disneyland’s opening day, chosen as one of three emcees while Walt cut the ribbon. In 2012, when the Reagan Library hosted an exhibit on the life and work of Disney, it opened with a statement connecting the two men. “Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan were two eternal optimists who shared a belief in the essential goodness of the American way of life.”
This “goodness” is, of course, one that is purged of all radicalism, in which poverty is invisible not because it doesn’t exist but because the beaten down poors know to stay out of sight. Even those who make this retrograde utopia possible. It can only ever be a fantasy, but it is a fantasy with disciplinary power. No matter how much Ron DeSantis and other culture warriors shriek about Disney’s newfound “wokeness,” this fantasy remains central to the company’s ethos.
What makes it doubly insidious is its ubiquity. There is, by now, hardly a single human alive whose memories of childhood wonder have not been shaped by a Disney commodity, by its vision for the future. Yes, all the fans of Pixar and Marvel are increasingly furious about how Disney has ruined their favorite IPs, but there is little conversation on just how much of the world Disney has ruined with Pixar, with Marvel. Whatever their strengths (Pixar) or many, many faults (Marvel), both present a very different sense of possibility from the earlier decades of animation described by Leslie. And it’s a horizon shared, in one way or another, by the rest of the co-owners of the dream factory. We would be suicidally naive to think that, should the studio owners have their way, they won’t impose the same on writers, actors, and any culture worker in their wide orbit.
Yet another reason to do whatever we can to ensure the writers and actors win. Difficult as it is to picture our childhoods without it, the world would be a better place if the Disney model were kept at bay. Better still if it were simply launched into the sun.