Das Maus

In the beginning was the line: squiggling merrily, unpredictably across the frame before arranging itself into an abstract geometric form or perhaps a stick figure doing acrobatic tricks. In those nearly prehistoric cinematic days, just after the start of the 20th century , animation entranced the eye and opened the mind, particularly the eyes and mind of a handful of largely Germanic, largely Marxist, artists and intellectuals. While the wider intellectual community debated whether the cinema--that vulgar and hybrid form--could ever become an art in any customary sense, this alert minority saw in these little drawn films unique expressive possibilities, a logical (and often charming) extension of the modernist revolution gathering force everywhere else in the visual arts.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Esther Leslie’s “Hollywood Flatlands,” a dense, often fascinating, sometimes frustrating history of the theoretical arguments surrounding the development of animation, is the extent of this discussion. You will be amazed at the sheer weight of the words that Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer--Marxists all--placed on the quivering shoulders of Mickey Mouse. They found more to think and write about in him and his pals than they did in the whole infinitely larger history of live-action features, which they mostly despised.

They argued persuasively that animation is “absolute” cinema, owing nothing to any preexisting art and something that could only be accomplished in movies. This set it definitively apart from dramatic films, which drew their ruling conventions from 19th century novels and the melodramatic stage.

Moreover, animation in its early days was strictly two-dimensional, like much of modernist painting. There was no attempt in movie cartoons to create the illusion of the third dimension: depth. As Leslie says, the experimental artists of the early 20th century “found that cartoons touched on many things they wished to explore: abstraction, forceful outlines, geometric forms and flatness, questioning of space, time and logic .... “

It was also an art with an implicit political dimension, something that was not lost on the Marxist theorists, which is why, for a time, Mickey Mouse became their beau ideal. Mickey and his gang appeared to them as rebel-victims of the capitalist system. The Mouse, in his earliest incarnation, was a rubbery, infinitely malleable and not entirely lovable critter. In an emergency (and there were plenty of those), his little body could be twisted into machine-like shapes in order to counter the malevolent, mechanized world that bedeviled him. Paraphrasing Benjamin, Leslie writes that the cartoons show “that even our bodies do not belong to us--we have alienated them in exchange for money.” And “[t]he cartoons expose the fact that what parades as civilization is actually barbarism.” And, most significant: “[t]he cartoons are object lessons in the actuality of alienation. Disney’s cartoon world is a world of impoverished experience, sadism and violence. That is to say, it is our world.”

This is not a totally false reading of early Disney shorts such as “Steamboat Willie” or “Plane Crazy,” though it is rather a humorless one. You have to doubt that “the massive success of these films” was based on the fact that “the public recognizes their own lives in them.”

More likely what audiences responded to was a cheeky, cheery, never-say-die spirit in which The Mouse confronted a world in which things took on human traits (including malevolence), sorely testing both his inventiveness and his insouciance.

It would have been all right with the European intellectuals if Walt Disney--and Leslie’s book becomes, by and large, a history of Disney’s enterprise as seen through their eyes--had stayed in that vein. But, of course, he could not. One doubts that he was even aware of their attention, though he surely knew about the good--though far less high-toned--words their American counterparts were saying about him in the early ‘30s. What he had on his mind, which was of a technocratic and entrepreneurial cast, was quite a different aesthetic (if we dare use that word in this context).

He thought his films’ “flatness” was a defect, not a virtue. He wanted to add the third-dimensional illusion to them and, once he had the multi-plane camera, that fell within his capabilities. He also wanted characters to be more “realistic,” to more closely resemble their natural models. At the same time he wanted them to be more genially human, rounder, softer, cuddlier. Like the vast majority of his audience, he preferred reality, or some version of it, to abstraction. He thought it was just fine to introduce drawn representations of real human beings into his imaginary gardens. Indeed, he instinctively understood that if he was going to make feature-length animated films, he was compelled to do so.

It was a course that created consternation among the European theorists, many of whom, exiled by Hitler, were then in the United States. Adorno had already conceived an intense antipathy for Donald Duck, whose splenetic temperament often caused him to be beaten up by his enemies. He felt these sequences were teaching ordinary Americans passivity in the face of their capitalist and bourgeois oppressors.

Feature animation, like feature films of every kind, offered more of the same. The films accurately represented reality’s surface as all of us perceive it but generally indulged the fantasy of ordinary-seeming men and women heroically triumphing over its inequities. Mein Gott: The movies even tamed, and then silenced, Adorno’s favorite cartoon character, Max Fleischer’s sexually challenging Betty Boop.

OK--you there in back of the room, stop giggling. These are serious men trying, however awkwardly, to defend the vulgar energy of low culture and the austere aspirations of high culture against the irresistible flood of comfortable, comforting middlebrow culture that eventually dominated the movies.

But I agree. They are sometimes laughably abstract, as they wheel their big theoretical guns up and aim them at cartoon characters. Certainly you wish Leslie, a neo-Marxist English academic, would at least occasionally argue with them.

For in truth, the movie business, particularly in the catch-as-catch-can days that particularly concern her, resists classical Marxist interpretation. Take the matter of length, for instance. Charming as short cartoons often were, their anarchical spirit could not sustain audience interest for spans longer than their abbreviated running times. As did live-action films, they needed to develop more complex narrative devices. The pressure for feature length was, in fact, resisted by the capitalists who controlled the business. It was artists and audiences who insisted on longer films. It was the same with other innovations, notably sound, color and, for that matter, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The bankers at first saw only that these technologies would add cost to the products without necessarily increasing profits.

It may be true that in their formative years, the movies had an unrealized potential to be more poetic or impressionistic. Certainly there were films, ranging from “Man With a Movie Camera” to “The Crowd” to “The Gold Rush,” that hinted at these possibilities. But populism spoke louder than poetics or Marxist theory. I think, finally, that the people chose their own opiate.

But still, it is good to be reminded, as we are by “Hollywood Flatlands,” that the two great alternatives to Hollywood, the Russian and the German film industries, were crushed by dictatorships. Even more important, this handsomely designed book reintroduces us to quaint but not entirely invalid ways of analyzing movies, ways that looked at commodity fetishism, the alienation of labor, idealized naturalism. In an age when the Walt Disney Co.--a vast multinational, heedlessly hawking imagery in venues undreamed of by its founder--is completely lost to sober cultural debate, it is not insignificant to remember that, quite recently, the opposite was the case.

The way the old-fashioned intellectuals expressed themselves was often risible, but we can still discern in their writings an increasingly faint but quite authentic alarm that we should not entirely dismiss or ignore.