Free Disney's Most Notorious Film by Jason Sperb

WOLFE, “UNCLE REMUS AND THE MALEVOLENT RABBIT” (1949)
    Among such sources today as conservative film criticism and general fan discourses, the most often repeated popular platitude regarding the film’s racism is that Walt Disney’s
Song of the South
was from a different time, and thus must be accepted within the historical context of the 1940s. But such assertions invariably distort the complicated and ambivalent contexts of the film’s first release. In a way,
Song of the South
was
always
“of a different time”—that is, it was anachronistic even when it was made. Writing at the end of the 1940s about the film and about Joel Chandler Harris’s original stories (first published in 1880), Bernard Wolfe argued that white interest in the stories of Brer Rabbit was always founded on a fundamental ambivalence. 1 Uncle Remus reflected a fear of black anger regarding centuries of enslavement, coexisting with a need by whites to be accepted or even loved by African Americans to alleviate the guilt over that past. In the 1940s, this white ambivalence that had long accompanied Harris’s stories migrated with its cinematic adaptation. This time, however, the split between fear and love became even more acute for both white and black audiences—something that responses to the film at the time and over the next six decades would reflect. After World War II,
Song of the South
was immersed in a culture of ambivalence regarding racial progress in the United States. The notion that Disney’s film was just another work that reflected a “typically” racist environment is simply untrue.
    Any single text reception study must begin with a detailed overview of the film itself—not a rigorous textual analysis, but an account of the complicated and contradictory contexts out of which it originally emerged. This chapter examines the ambivalent conditions of historical, technological, and ideological possibility surrounding
Song of the South
when it was first made and released in 1946. By “conditions of possibility,” I mean the various circumstances that potentially influenced both filmmakers and audiences of the time. Moreover, they also serve as a guide for scholars today attempting to map the subsequent accumulation and dissipation of ideological readings. Since films work within existing audience beliefs, it is problematic to talk of a text’s inherent a priori ideology. At the same time, as this chapter explores, a film can lay the foundation that, in the long term, helps activate, and account for, future readings. Any detailed reception history of a resilient classical Hollywood film such as
Song of the South
cannot offer a definitive linear narrative of racial progress or regression. Instead, the repetition, redundancy, and shifts in its recirculation offer only momentary, historically specific glimpses into how particular audiences saw a film whose meaning is always in flux.
    This chapter begins by exploring the history of African American representation in Hollywood up to the 1940s, followed by a brief discussion of World War II’s impact on these stereotypes. Thanks to the efforts of the Office of War Information and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Hollywood moved briefly away from the plantation stereotypes that
Song of the South
would bring back. Such progress was offset by what Thomas Cripps has identified as a period of “thermidor.” 2 This refers to the conservative backlash, in which
Song of the South
had a visible presence, to the otherwise progressive wartime period. Next, this chapter examines the Disney company at this time—the early “ideological” success with
Three Little Pigs
(1933) during the Great Depression; the negotiation with scientific discourses on the American “child” (as discussed in the work of Nicholas Sammond); the economic woes experienced in the late 1930s and 1940s; and the learning experience of working extensively with live action as part of