I don’t like Mickey Mouse very much. I never did. I know this makes me sound un-American, possibly communist, but the darn critter just never made much of an impression on me. I think him bland, unremarkable and, as I suspect is true of most Disney creations, a cutesy shill for some retrograde strain of mid-century capitalist piety.
I never wanted to go to Disney World. Early in life I sense that the Magic Kingdom harbored many banal evils — heat stroke, temper tantrums, exasperated parents, bad food, epic lines and forced cheer. Visions of seething, sweaty masses intent on dredging fun from a swampland Xanadu in central Florida inspired in me only agoraphobia, nausea and an anticipatory exhaustion.
But I never thought ol’ Mickey any kind of evil creature. To my child’s mind he seemed harmless enough. Just kinda stupid.
As it turns out, Mickey Mouse has been sent back to the drawing board to be given a 21st-century overhaul, and the result is that he now bears a touch of … well … evil. Via Gawker Azaria Jagger reports that “Disney’s beloved panda-rodent mascot is getting a video game makeover, and it’ll give you more nightmares than the time he emptied all those buckets for that jerkface sorcerer.” Yes, the new Mickey, according to Warren Spector, creative developer of the firm developing the Epic Mickey game, is “able to be naughty — when you’re playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish.”
Report of a newly selfish Mickey Mouse comes, ironically enough, right when Sesame Street, a Public Broadcast Service mainstay whose many adorable creatures have been teaching children to share, to appreciate ethnic diversity and to tolerate alternative lifestyles, has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Sunny vistas of pluralism and broadmindedness, which Sesame Street has striven to promote over nearly two generations, now recede before dark clouds of regressive tendencies recrudescent in the world’s most recognizable rodent.
Until recently, Mickey Mouse distinguished himself by his somewhat mindless but indefatigable optimism. A 1953 Life magazine article calls Mickey Mouse “an awkward, artless creature, squeaking in the shrill tones of early talkies, but his was the bugle that never sounded retreat [...] everybody liked Mickey — the children who thought he was funny, the philosophers who thought he represented America’s raucous individualism.” Even in 1953, Mickey Mouse was considered “too sweet-tempered for current tastes,” and was frequently eclipsed by the more garrulous and changeable Donald Duck. Nevertheless, his saccharine individualism and cheerful optimism continued to sell. America’s favorite mouse thus underwent no major personality overhauls and continued to glue millions of children to millions of television sets.
It stands to reason then that newest incarnation of Mickey Mouse was developed to reflect the tastes of its audience. The boisterous, sweet-tempered mouse is now a law-breaking, egocentric rat. And while Mickey’s newest incarnation may be the stuff of nightmares, it certainly isn’t anything new. In fact, it is eminently fitting. We have the Mickey Mouse we deserve. We are no longer that charmingly boisterous (and yes, sometimes devilishly devious) nation that smashed National Socialism and inspired the likes of Jack Kerouac to drive across the country and then come home, drop some speed, and write about his wonderful adventures in a strange land, but an ill-tempered, duplicitous empire on the decline, ravaged by the boondoggles and Ponzi schemes of a financial sector run amok, bereft of the hope of regaining any kind of cultural or intellectual prominence.
The new Mickey takes to the American landscape just fine: A New York Times article describes the mouse as gleefully and cunningly traversing a “forbidding wasteland.” The article also claims that the new Mickey is, in fact, not a new Mickey, but a reincarnation of a Gilded-age forbear: “In many ways, it is a return to Mickey at his creation. When the character made its debut in ‘Steamboat Willie’ in 1928, he was the Bart Simpson of his time: an uninhibited rabble-rouser who got into fistfights, played tricks on his friends (pity Clarabelle Cow) and, later, was amorously aggressive with Minnie.”
This side of paradise: the robber-barons' own magic kingdom.
The year that “Steamboat Willie” first came out, Herbert Hoover, a Republican associated with the booming economy of the 1920s, won the election by a landslide. In Paterson, New Jersey 3,500 workers in 130 broad silk mills went on strike, demanding a 10% wage increase, an eight-hour day and recognition of their union. Newspapers were going out of business as a result of mergers: “Chicago once had five morning newspapers; now it only has two,” an article from Time laments. Montgomery Ward securities on the New York Stock Exchange were skyrocketing. The rich were getting richer, and the poor — well, in three year’s time, they’d be living in the infamous Hoovervilles, which sprouted from the ground like so many toadstools, the musty fruits of a president that felt only private-public cooperation could sustain long-term growth, that the banks would regulate themselves through the failed National Credit Consortium, and play nice after a few gentle chidings. In other words, 1929, with its social unrest, unpredictable stock market and gilded-age fat cats, looks very much like 2009.
So as we come full circle, we can at least console ourselves that we’ve got the cartoon characters to match the historical moment. And rather than call them nightmarish, it might be better to refer to creations like the new Mickey Mouse as Unheimlich, which, according to pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, belongs to “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” We are only rediscovering a historical moment we thought we’d left far behind, that upon conscious reflection seems like nothing we had experienced, or could experience. How could we go back to needing strikes for wage increases or humane working conditions? How could playing the stock market once again seems riskier than BASE jumping? How could we once again be governed by lawless Wall Street fat cats who appear beyond the reach of the law? It seems insane to have to return again to a historical moment that shares all those unsavory attributes — that’s the stuff of one’s fourth-period history class and Friday night movies. Indeed, as Freud goes on to explain, the “uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.”
No single entity has done more to efface the imagination and reality than the Disney company, with its battalions of “Imagineers” plying themselves tirelessly to refine and expand the Disney product. And Disney is no friend of the public domain. It lobbies constantly for copyright revisions to prevent its beloved mascot from falling to such a lowly — and unprofitable — place. Indeed, how jealously it clutches its cash … er … mouse to its ample corporate bosom means that Mickey’s egotistic new self, rather than signaling a risky departure from Disney’s ethic, all too faithfully reflects it. In today’s economic climate, when monolithic transnationals like Disney find themselves virtually untrammeled by statutes, regulations or considerations of the common good, a cagily pragmatic mascot is more than simply necessary. It is inevitable.
The new Mickey Mouse is now neither the Gilded-Age sharp he began life as nor the civic-minded milquetoast he became. The new Mickey Mouse is a neoliberal.
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Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Henry Brulard