Books part the second: Disney is the evil (but we have some anyway)
I did promise the second contradictory part, did I not?
So in my first post about selling books by pitching them to girls or boys I said that I don’t want to wake up in a world where there are the “men’s books” and “women’s books” sections in the bookstore. And I pretty much implied that letting marketing drive your content is evil.
The same week, I got into a discussion about why I don’t throw out Disney books that people give to Noah or burn them or treat them as evil. I also don’t explain to Noah that those books are lousy or bad. And although I think I can honestly say I haven’t purchased any, I have bought Mary Poppins and now Cinderella for our home viewing.
(Amusingly, perhaps, for some reason Noah took one look at the Cinderella DVD cover and instantly hated it. He calls it “the umber-ella” and each time I’ve even moved it he’s shrieked “no umberella,” so it hasn’t actually been shown yet.)
I know why I got hold of that end of the stick: for me it’s one thing to say why I won’t spend my toy and book dollars on something, and another thing to destroy something that someone’s given to Noah.
But then there’s the larger question of how I am going to handle Disney and is it the evil. Because really you cannot be a parent and not have to come to terms with Disney in some form or other.
I am pretty uncomfortable with the Disney message, if there can be said to be one beyond “buy our next/new thing.” First, there’s the Disney world of, as brilliantly parodied from time to time, singing chipmunks and watered-down fairy tales. We all know the heroines have gotten increasingly weirdly proportioned and that, Mulan aside (and even then), their position as rescued and not rescuers remains suspect. Not to mention happily ever after as a concept - not that Disney invented it, but they certainly have perpetuated it.
And of course there’s the question of its marketing practices, which are massive and dastardly (although I am glad they are no longer in partnership with the ironically named Happy Meals, being neither meals nor happy.) The Disney Princesses have to be about the most evil, if brilliant, repackaging of material like, ever, and their message is hardly benign. And I’m sorry, but Celebration, USA, is just fucking weird.
And of course it is not the most ethical company in its practices.
And there’s the fact that I grew up with one of the original, I swear, Disney fans. My mum took great pride in being able to sing a zillion Disney songs, and we solemnly went to see each film as it was released or re-released. There was always time for reruns of the Mickey Mouse Club.
The less than benign lesson that was absorbed into our system - in some fairly odd ways actually - was to try to create that kind of a world on the surface of things. The ever smiling and helpful daughter.
I hesitate to try to apply almost anything from my childhood to the real world because my life was so half completely normal and half completely abnormal, but for me, and perhaps not only me, Disney represents much of the darker side of what Robert Bly terms the Sibling Society in his book of the same name: the push by a corporate entity to keep people basically stupid and young so they will not grow up and keep buying their shit. Except for us, it was even more personal than that: it was the push to make things come out okay.
(This all came back to haunt us on the day that Teresa went out with my mother to get a simple, tasteful wedding dress and came back with a dress with beads, sequins, and the 1994 bow on the ass. (Had these existed, we might have had to worry about an exorbitant price tag, too. And yes, this is the logical extension to the Disney Princess line.))
Even with all this awareness, though, and skepticism and sheer grumpiness, I cannot honestly say, as a child of the 70s, that I think Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, Bambi and Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp, are awful, per se. I’m even sadly fond of the fairy godmother zapping Prince Valiant’s sword - “o sword of truth fly swift and sure / that evil die and love endure.” That could possibly be my life motto in some ways there; that it was a sword of truth is what I like most about it. Not might or strength or something.
For what they are actually I think there was care in the production of them. They certainly don’t have the power of the originals where I have read them, and of course women’s roles are totally what one expects of them, but as I rewatch some of them I am more struck by what I think is interesting than what I think is awful. And although Mary Poppins the musical is nothing to the four Mary Poppins books, I actually think it holds up pretty well.
And going on my own experience, well, my mum pushed Disney. But she also took me to see real ballets - Swan Lake, La Fille Mal Gardee, Romeo and Juliet. After R&J she took me to see West Side Story at a rep movie theatre, to compare the stories. We had a ream of Disney books alongside Journeys Through Bookland, a volume set of classic “kids’” lit (not sure 1001 Nights fits into this really) and Little Women. And ultimately, I guess, if I had to describe that as a little war going on in our literary sphere, I would have to say that the good stuff pretty much won.
Not because my parents explained that Disney sucked - blasphemy - but because the good stuff simply was better. I’m sorry, but it’s kind of cooler when the stepsisters cut off their heels and are betrayed by the blood trail, and Cinderella hitches them to her wedding carriage and drags them around the town. And no one who has read Hans Christian Andersen in any decent translation is going to be swayed by a callypso beat.
Maybe I’m over confident but I guess I believe that there is room for the odd badly drawn Lion King book (a gift from cousins) or even “the Poppins” in Noah’s world, as long as there are also the luminous and quirky and complex books and movies and music and art alongside them.
Now I must add that over all of this there is the awful Disney schlock - mouse ear mugs and endless variations on “Ariel sits and plays with jewels and does her hair” and whatever else; I’m not really up on it, thank the powers that be, other than a Disney Babies set of books we got in a box of hand-me-downs that I hate but Noah loves (they have flaps and talk about letters and opposites and that sort of thing). I hope to keep a fair amount of that at bay.
But I can’t quite shake that if I were to tell Noah that these things that I secretly sort of like on this very well, kid level, are terrible things and ban them, that I would be losing out on something else.
Not least of which that childhood probably is the appropriate time to think that Peter Pan is a hero and Wendy a good friend.
So no, no Disney ban at my house. But I am busily stocking the originals.
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