Of Mice And Money Men

If Comcast's takeover of the Disney Corporation goes ahead, the world's biggest media conglomeration willbe built around one of humankind's most ancient practices. Investing animals with human characteristics issomething we've been doing since we first applied charcoal to the walls of a cave. Ten thousand years later,as the $500m we have just spent watching Finding Nemo suggests, we still see ourselves as animals and animalsas ourselves.

This suggests two things to me. The first is that, however much we assert our independence from nature, ourconsciousness remains in its thrall. Our minds were shaped when nothing was more real to us than the fear ofbeing eaten and the fear of not eating. Peter Jackson, in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, deliberately exploitsthis primordial memory, by exposing us to giant hyaenas and mastodons: two of the Palaeolithic animals withwhich our minds evolved. Steven Spielberg's tyrannosaurs and velociraptors, though they appeared more real,were less compelling. Could this be because, pre-dating rather than predating us, they played no role in thedevelopment of our evolutionary consciousness?

The second is that, though our engagement with the world is supposed to have been governed by a detachmentfrom the objects of our curiosity ever since the Enlightenment, our tendency to project our minds intoanimals, plants and inanimate objects is undiminished. Anthropomorphism is an irredeemable humancharacteristic, and let he who has never sworn at his computer be the first to deny it.

But while there is something very old about Disney, there is, or was, something very new about it too. Itwelded commercial, cultural and political power in a way the world had never seen before. I remember beingstruck in the 1980s by the conjunction of two images. One was a photograph of the May Day parades in Moscow,with rockets looming over the heads of the marching soldiers. The other, taken six weeks earlier, was aphotograph of a St Patrick's Day parade in New York, in which giant Goofys and Donald Ducks were suspendedabove the marchers. The Soviet display was a conscious and deliberate attempt to project power, the New Yorkparade merely a celebration of the symbols of nationhood. But the St Patrick's Day iconography seemed to mealmost as sinister as the May Day manouevres, and for a while I couldn't understand why.

Was it simply that age-old prejudice against the upstart nation which had helped shove Britain back intoits box? It is hard for British people, even those of us who contest imperialism, to rid ourselves of theresentments of a toppled empire. But I think I had got over it by then. Was it because Disney characterssymbolised the crass and trivial aspects of American culture? Which other country, after all, constructs itsnational image around cartoon animals?

Well, just about all of them. Britain's lion and unicorn are, if anything, more ridiculous than Disney'scaricatures, for the simple reason that they demand to be taken seriously. There is nothing as risible asthose innumerable servile states whose eagles or lions or dragons proclaim the status of top predator. But inthe ubiquity of the Disney characters we encounter just the opposite: hegemony represented by an infantilisedmouse and an infantilised duck. Far from seeing this as ridiculous, I find it deeply frightening.

It's not just because of what I have read about Walt Disney and the corporation he founded. Today we knowthat the world's favourite uncle was a wife-beating, child-grooming, [1] union-busting employer of Nazi warcriminals, [2] who denounced Hollywood dissidents to the House Unamerican Affairs Committee and mademendacious propaganda films like "Our Friend the Atom".[3] The corporation has repeatedly beenexposed for contracting its toy- and clothes-making work to atrocious sweatshops. In 1996, the year in whichDisney's chief executive Michael Eisner made $565m, the workers stitching Disney's branded clothes in Haitiwere earning as little as a dollar a day.[4] In China today, according to a new report by the US NationalLabor Committee, a factory producing Disney toys enforces 130-hour weeks, with a day off every two months. [5]But my fear of the dominance of Disney's magic kingdom is about more than this.

One of the paradoxes of our times is that, as western societies age, their culture is infantilised. Just asthe number of elderly people in America and Europe begins to tip the scales against the young, youth cultureis exalted as never before. And the youths we celebrate are getting younger. There's a simple reason for this.It is easier to get inexperienced people to part with their money (or to persuade their parents to part withtheir money) than it is to deceive the elderly. Money chases youth, and culture chases the money. Advertisersdetermine the content of TV shows and newspaper features, which in turn shape our cultural consciousness.

As Eric Schlosser has shown, it was Walt Disney who "perfected the art of selling things tochildren". [6] He developed a vertically integrated business in which his TV programmes sold his films,and his films sold his theme parks and toys. He was able to drum up fealties among children that no othercorporation had been able to summon. The Mickey Mouse Club he established in 1930 helped to pioneer a new formof brand loyalty, and to extract the names, addresses and preferences of its members.[7] Only one company -McDonalds - has captured children as effectively as Disney has, and for the past eight years McDonalds andDisney have enjoyed an exclusive global marketing agreement. In both cases, a hard hegemonic will is exercisedthrough the commercialisation of "happiness" and "fun". Disney's creation and dominationof the youth market represents the definitive triumph of the empire of commerce.

So perhaps we should not be surprised to see, in that St Patrick's Day parade and in so many other eventsover the past 60 years or more, people marching behind the mouse and the duck. It may be an unconsciousdisplay of power, but it is a display of power nonetheless. "Hollywood conquered the world," theAmerican critic Michael Medved told the Daily Telegraph last year, "long before America had conquered iteconomically or militarily ... Its films were our advance legions." [8] In the 1940s, the Motion PictureExport Association used to call itself "the little State Department". [9] One Hollywood producerdescribed "the meshing of Donald Duck and diplomacy" as "a Marshall Plan for ideas". TheUS, he announced, needed Hollywood more than it needed the H-bomb.[10]

Walt Disney's characters are sinister because they encourage us, like those marchers, to promote thehegemony of the corporations even when we have no intention of doing so. He captured a deep stream of humanconsciousness, branded it and, when we were too young to understand the implications, sold it back to us.Comcast's hostile takeover bid suggests that the power of his company to seize our imaginations is declining.A giant media corporation may be about to become even bigger, but if the attack means that Disney is losingits ability to shape the minds of the world's children, this is something we should celebrate.

www.monbiot.com.

References:

1. Eg Glenys Roberts, 1st December 2001. The Mickey Mouse Monster. The Daily Mail.

2. Eric Schlosser, 2002. Fast Food Nation. Penguin, London.

3. ibid.

4. Eg The Haiti Support Group, December 1996. Haiti Briefing no 21; The National Labor Committee, 29th May1996. An Open Letter to Walt Disney; Anita Roddick, 16th February 1997. Multinationals Exploit and Only We CanStop Them. The Independent on Sunday.

5. Toys of Misery 2004, February 2004. The National Labor Committee and China Labor Watch. http://www.nlcnet.org

6. Eric Schlosser, ibid.

7. ibid.

8. Graham Turner, 17th June 2003. The New Empire. The Daily Telegraph.

9. Toby Miller et al, 2001. Global Hollywood. The British Film Institute, London.

10. Walter Wanger, cited in Toby Miller et al, ibid.