Disney
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Like any totalitarian state, Disney has no room for God
WHEN I was growing up, Boxing Day meant two things: cold turkey and Walt Disney. Year after year, as unchangingly as the Queen’s Christmas Message, on the afternoon of December 26, the BBC would serve up an hour-long compilation of Disney cartoons, movie clips and nature documentaries - usually, for some reason, involving a bear and its mother traipsing through the mountains - the whole thing one long free plug for the Walt Disney Company. Indeed, in the very early days, I dimly remember old Walt himself presenting the show. No other studio has ever been afforded such treatment since. There has never been a Spielberg Time or a Lucas Hour, with a world-famous producer being paid to advertise his product to 15 million eager consumers. But that was Disney; Disney was different. This month, as everyone knows, marks the centenary of his birth, an anniversary celebrated by his company with an almost sacrilegious intensity. “One hundred years ago,” proclaims the official website, “Walt Disney was born. And the world was changed forever . . . We all hold a special place for the magical legacy of this one man.” The official history of Walt Disney World is humbly entitled Since The World Began; one has the feeling the company would have called it Genesis if the name hadn’t already been taken. About three years ago, casting round for a subject for a new novel,
having already written books set in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, it struck me that the Walt Disney Company would make a perfect setting for a dystopia. There is something slightly frightening, almost totalitarian, about this faade of syrupy ideology - Disneyism - being maintained by the legendary commercial aggression of a company whose disgruntled employees call it “Mauschwitz” and which, in 1998, was worth an astonishing $75 billion. It was all there. First, the moustachioed, Big Brother-like founder - the object of a cult of personality that would have made even a dictator gape with envy. I went to Walt Disney World (on a working trip, without my children - a sin for which I have never been fully forgiven) and stood beneath Walt’s statue, gazing out across the Magic Kingdom: an environment as tightly controlled as the Kremlin. For $9.95, I bought the Disney equivalent of Mao’s Little Red Book: Walt’s Famous Quotes, containing The Founder’s wisdom on more than 100 subjects (Walt on patriotism: “If you could see close in my eyes, the American flag is waving in both of them and up my spine is growing this red, white and blue stripe”). There were even well-attested stories that Disney, like Stalin, had wanted to have his body preserved: cryogenically frozen, so that it might be brought back to life in some distant era, like a hideous variant on one of the theme park’s animatronic figures. But it was the behaviour of the company itself that provided an almost perfect model of a totalitarian state. For more than a decade, under the brilliant and ruthless leadership of Michael Eisner,
Disney has inserted itself into almost every aspect of life in the developed world. In the words of Peter Bart, the editor of Variety: “It was Eisner’s dream that the typical consumer would patronise Disney movies, watch Disney TV shows, buy Disney videos, spend money at Disney stores, vacation on Disney cruise lines, take his or her kids to Disney theme parks - all the while becoming completely enveloped in the Disney subculture.” In pursuit of this aim, Disney displays characteristics that anyone who has ever studied a totalitarian regime will instantly recognise. It uses architecture, for example, in Eisner’s words, “to imprint our stamp on the world” - hence such monumental structures as its enormous, Tuscan-style palazzo headquarters in California, whose roof is supported by ranks of 19-foot high terracotta dwarfs (eat your heart out, Albert Speer). It also employs that classic totalitarian technique of preaching family values while subverting the family structure, appealing over the heads of parents directly to their children. In the Disney empire, the young don’t put on uniforms or denounce their parents: they simply demand to be taken to things, or bought things - meals at McDonald’s, perhaps, because McDonald’s has paid Disney for the rights to give away toys promoting a particular movie. (So successful was this strategy that McDonald’s at one point became the world’s largest distributor of toys.) And, of course, like every totalitarian state - paradoxically, in view of its traditional association with Christmas - Disney abhors organised religion. As a global brand, it can’t afford to alienate any one section of its consumers - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists - by pandering to the beliefs of another. It therefore seeks instead to provide its own mix of opium for the masses by rewriting history, cannabalising myths, bowdlerising the classics - passing all of it through a kind of gigantic narrative blender to produce a PC mush of magic, dreams and environmentalism. Thus, in the movie Pocahontas, the evil Englishman, Sir John Ratcliffe, is shown, true to type, oppressing the peaceful, natureloving Native Americans, whereas, in reality, according to the head writer on the movie, what actually happened to the historical Ratcliffe was that “when the Indians captured him, he was nailed to a tree and skinned alive. That would have been a choice Disney moment. Maybe a good song sequence.” In the end, I never wrote the novel - partly because I’d probably have been sued from here till Magic Kingdom come if I’d ever tried; partly because, once I’d witnessed couples lining up to get married overlooking Cinderella’s Castle wearing satin mouse ears, I realised this was a phenomenon beyond satire; and partly because I decided, in the end, that consumers simply aren’t stupid: that for all Disney’s cunning and global reach, they could easily one day simply tire of it and turn away. That may be happening now. Disney’s latest profits, for the third quarter of 2001, even without the full impact of September 11, are down 82 per cent. The totalitarian model, it seems, doesn’t work for companies, any more than it does for countries.
One hundred years after his birth, and 40 years after I watched him on Boxing Days, Uncle Walt looks more than ever like Uncle Joe. Robert Harris The Telegraph, 26th December 2001
WHEN I was growing up, Boxing Day meant two things: cold turkey and Walt Disney. Year after year, as unchangingly as the Queen’s Christmas Message, on the afternoon of December 26, the BBC would serve up an hour-long compilation of Disney cartoons, movie clips and nature documentaries - usually, for some reason, involving a bear and its mother traipsing through the mountains - the whole thing one long free plug for the Walt Disney Company. Indeed, in the very early days, I dimly remember old Walt himself presenting the show. No other studio has ever been afforded such treatment since. There has never been a Spielberg Time or a Lucas Hour, with a world-famous producer being paid to advertise his product to 15 million eager consumers. But that was Disney; Disney was different. This month, as everyone knows, marks the centenary of his birth, an anniversary celebrated by his company with an almost sacrilegious intensity. “One hundred years ago,” proclaims the official website, “Walt Disney was born. And the world was changed forever . . . We all hold a special place for the magical legacy of this one man.” The official history of Walt Disney World is humbly entitled Since The World Began; one has the feeling the company would have called it Genesis if the name hadn’t already been taken. About three years ago, casting round for a subject for a new novel,
having already written books set in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, it struck me that the Walt Disney Company would make a perfect setting for a dystopia. There is something slightly frightening, almost totalitarian, about this faade of syrupy ideology - Disneyism - being maintained by the legendary commercial aggression of a company whose disgruntled employees call it “Mauschwitz” and which, in 1998, was worth an astonishing $75 billion. It was all there. First, the moustachioed, Big Brother-like founder - the object of a cult of personality that would have made even a dictator gape with envy. I went to Walt Disney World (on a working trip, without my children - a sin for which I have never been fully forgiven) and stood beneath Walt’s statue, gazing out across the Magic Kingdom: an environment as tightly controlled as the Kremlin. For $9.95, I bought the Disney equivalent of Mao’s Little Red Book: Walt’s Famous Quotes, containing The Founder’s wisdom on more than 100 subjects (Walt on patriotism: “If you could see close in my eyes, the American flag is waving in both of them and up my spine is growing this red, white and blue stripe”). There were even well-attested stories that Disney, like Stalin, had wanted to have his body preserved: cryogenically frozen, so that it might be brought back to life in some distant era, like a hideous variant on one of the theme park’s animatronic figures. But it was the behaviour of the company itself that provided an almost perfect model of a totalitarian state. For more than a decade, under the brilliant and ruthless leadership of Michael Eisner,
Disney has inserted itself into almost every aspect of life in the developed world. In the words of Peter Bart, the editor of Variety: “It was Eisner’s dream that the typical consumer would patronise Disney movies, watch Disney TV shows, buy Disney videos, spend money at Disney stores, vacation on Disney cruise lines, take his or her kids to Disney theme parks - all the while becoming completely enveloped in the Disney subculture.” In pursuit of this aim, Disney displays characteristics that anyone who has ever studied a totalitarian regime will instantly recognise. It uses architecture, for example, in Eisner’s words, “to imprint our stamp on the world” - hence such monumental structures as its enormous, Tuscan-style palazzo headquarters in California, whose roof is supported by ranks of 19-foot high terracotta dwarfs (eat your heart out, Albert Speer). It also employs that classic totalitarian technique of preaching family values while subverting the family structure, appealing over the heads of parents directly to their children. In the Disney empire, the young don’t put on uniforms or denounce their parents: they simply demand to be taken to things, or bought things - meals at McDonald’s, perhaps, because McDonald’s has paid Disney for the rights to give away toys promoting a particular movie. (So successful was this strategy that McDonald’s at one point became the world’s largest distributor of toys.) And, of course, like every totalitarian state - paradoxically, in view of its traditional association with Christmas - Disney abhors organised religion. As a global brand, it can’t afford to alienate any one section of its consumers - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists - by pandering to the beliefs of another. It therefore seeks instead to provide its own mix of opium for the masses by rewriting history, cannabalising myths, bowdlerising the classics - passing all of it through a kind of gigantic narrative blender to produce a PC mush of magic, dreams and environmentalism. Thus, in the movie Pocahontas, the evil Englishman, Sir John Ratcliffe, is shown, true to type, oppressing the peaceful, natureloving Native Americans, whereas, in reality, according to the head writer on the movie, what actually happened to the historical Ratcliffe was that “when the Indians captured him, he was nailed to a tree and skinned alive. That would have been a choice Disney moment. Maybe a good song sequence.” In the end, I never wrote the novel - partly because I’d probably have been sued from here till Magic Kingdom come if I’d ever tried; partly because, once I’d witnessed couples lining up to get married overlooking Cinderella’s Castle wearing satin mouse ears, I realised this was a phenomenon beyond satire; and partly because I decided, in the end, that consumers simply aren’t stupid: that for all Disney’s cunning and global reach, they could easily one day simply tire of it and turn away. That may be happening now. Disney’s latest profits, for the third quarter of 2001, even without the full impact of September 11, are down 82 per cent. The totalitarian model, it seems, doesn’t work for companies, any more than it does for countries.
One hundred years after his birth, and 40 years after I watched him on Boxing Days, Uncle Walt looks more than ever like Uncle Joe. Robert Harris The Telegraph, 26th December 2001
