Disney's Audacity: The Stage and American Life

Beyond happy endings and uplifting story lines, Disney's coupling of technology to fantasy was the wedding of something totally ruled by finality, by a utilitarian purpose, to a reality that is pleasure in and of itself, it was the reconciling of temporality to poetry. That the world one lived in was so prodigal to grant the wonderful results of the association of these two polarities was not just a revelation, but Disney's greatest generosity. The results of it were typically American, in joining the objectivity of artifice with the warmth of emotion, and yet universal, in expressing the power of childhood, hope and love. They were also typically American in the conception and creation of life purely for the embodiment of a story, or of preconceived lines: for the stage, in a broader sense of the word. Life on stage, or, more precisely, life for the stage expresses in one goal ingenuity and faith, that is, the control of artifice, of creating for a purpose, and the passion of liberation, of the inexorability of storylines. Stage is simultaneously an assertion of mission fulfillment and destine, that is, of will and of forces greater than will.

Disneyesque Obama

In his Victory Speech, Obama, with his amazing inspiration, summed up the American essence in the phrase "We Can!"
He'd mentioned that something that was practically impossible-his Victory- had happened, for everything is possible in America. Doesn't it ring a very familiar bell?
One of the most fascinating things in the U.S. is the constant interplay of two antagonistic forces: A rigid predictability that results from an almost fundamentalist observing of not just laws, but rules, vs. the freedom of an amazing creativity and tradition-breaking. If, one one hand, Americans go undone when someone breaks a simple traffic rule, even if such infraction does not, at the moment it is done, put anyone in risk-like doing a U turn in a practically empty street- they, on the other hand produce records of rebellious inventiveness (James Dean, Elvis Presley, Walt Disney, of course) that change the world. If, on one hand, American life is rigorously rule-regulated, making unpredictability and unconventionality a big, de stabalizing threat for most,on the other hand this same life brings forth the most revolutionary humanitarian and cultural expressions, as well as technologic world-changing discoveries . It goes from Rock'n'Roll, fast food and Coca-Cola to the world web.
Real American leaders, I think, balance these two forces. At the same time they are brave innovators, they look for, they find and they establish essence, and what is essence if not that which is immutable, constant and, even though unconventional, it is, much more than traditional, archetypal? Like Walt Disney, Obama found it in freedom, as a fundamental American value. "We Can!" is the essence.

Disney Givingness

In the Magic Kingdom, technology materializes fiction into stage
and into characters for your participation: because of you. You experience
it as givingness, as a taking care of you, in the same goal you take care
of it by making it valid. You experience it as givingness, as you are also
granted the gift of giving. Disney’s givingness concerns the turning of
his visitors into givers themselves: the granting the gift of giving.
How much more generous can this be?

America for Disney

In the post war period, American art was making its mark with Abstract Expressionism, the style that ends with themes in order to value subjectivity, the inner state of the artist. The nuclear threat and its psychological consequences bequeathed to man a relative, unstable world. If the world turned relative to being destroyed by man himself, if time and space are relative themselves, everything that meant external reality, solid ground, became a question mark, rather than a certainty. To say that the only way, thus, to find stability or meaning was to turn inward is to declare that absoluteness switched from outside to within: to reassert the artistic quest for essence in one’s inner world.
For Disney, however, the external world, more than merely solid, was impregnated with meaning. Walt Disney’s disciplined optimism, coinciding, perhaps with what I am referring to as mysticism, would never allow the dismissal of external reality as something vulnerable to destruction, to a meaningless or “unhappy ending”. Things should turn out well. Disney’s patriotism was most likely his metaphorical “wishing upon a star”. America should settle all conflicts. It was America that served Disney’s idealism and not the other way around. The world should be forever there as ground and stage for the development of a better life, and much better, for that matter, with the help of American ingenuity (Disney’s idealism for Epcot).

Disney Sharing

In the speech Walt Disney made on the occasion of Mickey's twentieth birthday, Mickey, among many things, also expresses the natural merging of the private and the public in Disney, when the latter, with humbleness, exposes his feelings, almost apologetically justifying his affection for his creature on a emotional and at the same time professional level: “The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound up with my own personal and professional life. It is understandable that I should have sentimental attachment for the little personage who played so big a part in the course of Disney productions.” In the Mouse, Disney’s intimacy is at one with Disney’s sharingness.

Disney Dignity

Disneyland resulted from the dignity of believing that we are worthy of paradise. No wonder, Sergei Eisenstein, in commenting the Silly Symphonies, praised the purity and brightness of Disney’s soul, and asserted that Disney was beyond good and evil. (Sergei Eisenstein Walt Disney- Circe).
Disney’s innocence distilled the American search for material heaven, that is, the all American impunity to the spirit/matter dualism of religion in general and of much of the philosophical tradition that molds and responds to the guilt-stricken human condition. In Disney, innocence, freedom and daring were one and the same.

Disney Heartbeat

The essence of original Disney animation, the power all its other qualities spring from reverts almost literally to Walt’s compulsive giving of life. It is expressed as a sharing of indiscriminating life-of life, therefore, rendered maternally giving- by both organic and inorganic, human and animal, equal and fantastic elements. In early shorts, for instance, animate and inanimate being were given physically human characteristics in responding to action, as if the physical human element was the all- encompassing heartbeat. A train locomotive could have eyes and mouth, a wiener of a hotdog could be spanked on "its" butt. In the feature films, on the other hand, inanimate matter didn’t have to act human, as long as it made sense to the story line. Snow White’s castle, or the well she sings to, or any other “thing” she comes across, for example, didn’t have eyes or arms, it just fit the story. What was physically human became just emotionally human. In the beginning, indiscrimination had a physically anthropomorphic expression, developing, eventually, to the more abstract dimension of story meaning. In both cases though, this sameness of heartbeat is an all-pervading sweetness, all-inclusive warmth. Realizing or not, the audience felt within love when watching it.

Disney Dynamism

The constant motion of the image above tries to pay homage to Walt Disney's ongoing creativity.It alludes to Disney's impersonating, giving of life and giving of identity. Disney and nature are reflexes of each other. He is in the heart of life. In continuous generosity.
When Walt Disney merged participation with spectatorship in Disneyland, participation meant physical presence, along with visual appreciation, or with contemplation. Disney classical rides extended audience's participation to action. Since 2003, with Mission: Space, Walt Disney World has been offering an unprecedented harmony between movement and wonder. In the ride Mission: Space, at WDW, participation encompasses emotion, visceral feeling and the pure mind sense of liberation. More than any other interaction, such exchange, involving not just concentration, but compliance and surrender, is a purgative, upgrading exchange with artifice. Unprecedented as it is though, it obliges Walt Disney's typical reaching for and granting the experience of awe. It also obliges Disney's wedding of extremes that are apparently irreconcilable: the feeling of glory through guts and sight, that is, through physical dynamism and aesthetic appreciation. (The second paragraph is from the book "From Mars to Marceline")

A Streak of Existentialism

In my texts, I wanted to preserve the immediacy of passion, the distance of reflection, and the puerility of homage paying. Whether this is ambitious or not, the reason is humble: I don’t believe anything can be complete if the author of it excludes, in cold impartiality, personal involvement with his subject.
I therefore interweave objective considerations about Disney creativity, not just with what I see as related topics in the technological, psychological and mystical aspects of life, but with what it was for me. The impact it had on decisive moments of my life was definitive, culminating with the revelation of Walt Disney’s life through the reading of his biographies. After all, whether the writer is Bob Thomas or Marc Eliot, none can neither evade nor embellish enough what is so apparent: Disney’s authenticity

Giving Life

In joining extremes, the spontaneity Disney handled fake and real alike, animals and robots, nature and technology, suggests his genius for animation as a compulsive giving of life. Only with such generosity, creativity can be so indiscriminate as to render artifice and nature spontaneous extensions of each other.

The faithfulness of Disney to the primitive, sensorial element is also his faithfulness to himself, to that original and therefore unquestionable part of oneself that, simultaneously, answers to body and to heart. A rediscovering of origin that, as the coming of a full circle, is mystical. It relates to Disney’s reaching an abstract dimension of matter through matter itself, that is,his reaching fantasy through visual expression in animation and through multi-sensory experience in Disneyland.