Book-It 'o14! Book #30
The Fifty Books Challenge, year five! ( 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) This was a library request.
Title: From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells
Details: Copyright 1995, Indiana University Press
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Ranging from Pinocchio to Pretty Woman, this volume addresses the Disney film legacy from feminists, marxist, poststructuralist, and cultural studies perspectives. Considering Disney's dual role as American icon and cultural production industry, the contributors treat a range of contemporary issues: the performance of gender, race, and class: the heritage of fairy tales; the translation of oral culture into visual text; the engendered images of science, nature, technology, family, and business. From Mouse to Mermaid creates a persuasive cultural critique of Disney's ideology and demonstrates how power, representation, and identity are vital sites of struggle in American culture.
The contributors are Brian Attebery, Elizabeth Bell, Claudia Card, Chris Cuomo, Ramona Fernandez, Henry A Giroux, Lynda Haas, Robert Haas, Susan Jeffords, D. Soyini Madison, Susan Miller, Patrick D Murphy, David Payne, Gregory Rode, Laura Sells, and Jack Zipes."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've always enjoyed cultural dissection and Disney has been an interesting pick-apart for me this year.
How I Liked It: There are some things here to consider. This book is almost twenty years old. Disney's princess franchise, good for much speculation and picking apart, had not yet come into being and their "renaissance" was arguably still happening. Perhaps most importantly, though, the blogosphere had yet to exist, to help mainstream and popularize cultural critic and scholarly media dissection.
So unfortunately, too often this book comes across laden with scholarly gatekeeping prose. The contributors are largely writing for what feels like other professors/scholars for the purposes of cold study alone. The idea of this being something "for the masses" as a means to better understand the media they consume is damn near impossible. I'm not saying it should be "dumbed down," but the wit and reflection that flesh out other cultural critiques (like many in the blogosphere) is absent and it's necessary.
Like a book of short stories, it has its ups and downs consistent with the author of the particular contribution. Taking into account this was written in 1995 before the effects of the "Disney Renaissance" on a generation could be examined, or the princess franchise was officially embraced and aggressively marketed by Disney, there's still over seventy-five years of Disney's affect to account for in culture. The fact the contributors extend the critique not only to explicitly Disney films (meaning films made under studios owned or once owned by the Disney corporation, like Hollywood Pictures, Miramax, and Touchstone) widens the scope of criticism while simultaneously dulling the light they wish to shine on Disney's influence. The title (the original, Doing Disney: Critical Dialogues in Film, Gender, and Culture, was vetoed by Disney's lawyers, who do not allow third party books to use the name "Disney" in their titles) evokes Disney's animated work while the actual criticism runs the spectrum.
By at least one author, the book also takes seriously the much-discredited 1992 bizarre hatchet bio of Walt Hollywood's Dark Prince (among other things, the book takes the "frozen under Disneyland" myth seriously, and alleges Disney wasn't the biological son of his parents but secretly adopted by them) and appears to struggle at times with taking a cultural critique of children's media seriously (never mind that cultural critique of children's films, even cultural critique of Disney's films, had existed decades before this publication). It does pose some interesting sections, including the much Queer-decoded Beauty and the Beast and the racial politics of Jungle Book and Song of the South.
The book is a kind of interesting period piece, in a way. It doesn't necessarily offer any provoking ideas that one won't find elsewhere better provoked, but it's an undeniable, albeit very, very small part of the evolution of progressive cultural dissection.
Notable: In a section devoted to the dissection of the massively popular The Little Mermaid and its effects, the author examines various aspects of the "mermaid" trope (for its title, the author borrowed a line from Barbara Bush's highly controversial speech to the 1990 graduating class of Wellesley College; "Why Do the Mermaids Stand?") and offers a quote from Tori Amos's 1991 ballad "Silent all These Years"
"But what if I'm a mermaid.../hey but I don't care/cause sometimes, I said, sometimes/I hear my voice and it's been HERE?/silent all these years."
Amos has said the inspiration for the song came from reading Hans Christian Andersen's original story to her niece and a negative review that derided her vocal abilities as sounding like "The Little Mermaid [voiced by Jodi Benson] on acid."
Title: From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells
Details: Copyright 1995, Indiana University Press
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Ranging from Pinocchio to Pretty Woman, this volume addresses the Disney film legacy from feminists, marxist, poststructuralist, and cultural studies perspectives. Considering Disney's dual role as American icon and cultural production industry, the contributors treat a range of contemporary issues: the performance of gender, race, and class: the heritage of fairy tales; the translation of oral culture into visual text; the engendered images of science, nature, technology, family, and business. From Mouse to Mermaid creates a persuasive cultural critique of Disney's ideology and demonstrates how power, representation, and identity are vital sites of struggle in American culture.
The contributors are Brian Attebery, Elizabeth Bell, Claudia Card, Chris Cuomo, Ramona Fernandez, Henry A Giroux, Lynda Haas, Robert Haas, Susan Jeffords, D. Soyini Madison, Susan Miller, Patrick D Murphy, David Payne, Gregory Rode, Laura Sells, and Jack Zipes."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've always enjoyed cultural dissection and Disney has been an interesting pick-apart for me this year.
How I Liked It: There are some things here to consider. This book is almost twenty years old. Disney's princess franchise, good for much speculation and picking apart, had not yet come into being and their "renaissance" was arguably still happening. Perhaps most importantly, though, the blogosphere had yet to exist, to help mainstream and popularize cultural critic and scholarly media dissection.
So unfortunately, too often this book comes across laden with scholarly gatekeeping prose. The contributors are largely writing for what feels like other professors/scholars for the purposes of cold study alone. The idea of this being something "for the masses" as a means to better understand the media they consume is damn near impossible. I'm not saying it should be "dumbed down," but the wit and reflection that flesh out other cultural critiques (like many in the blogosphere) is absent and it's necessary.
Like a book of short stories, it has its ups and downs consistent with the author of the particular contribution. Taking into account this was written in 1995 before the effects of the "Disney Renaissance" on a generation could be examined, or the princess franchise was officially embraced and aggressively marketed by Disney, there's still over seventy-five years of Disney's affect to account for in culture. The fact the contributors extend the critique not only to explicitly Disney films (meaning films made under studios owned or once owned by the Disney corporation, like Hollywood Pictures, Miramax, and Touchstone) widens the scope of criticism while simultaneously dulling the light they wish to shine on Disney's influence. The title (the original, Doing Disney: Critical Dialogues in Film, Gender, and Culture, was vetoed by Disney's lawyers, who do not allow third party books to use the name "Disney" in their titles) evokes Disney's animated work while the actual criticism runs the spectrum.
By at least one author, the book also takes seriously the much-discredited 1992 bizarre hatchet bio of Walt Hollywood's Dark Prince (among other things, the book takes the "frozen under Disneyland" myth seriously, and alleges Disney wasn't the biological son of his parents but secretly adopted by them) and appears to struggle at times with taking a cultural critique of children's media seriously (never mind that cultural critique of children's films, even cultural critique of Disney's films, had existed decades before this publication). It does pose some interesting sections, including the much Queer-decoded Beauty and the Beast and the racial politics of Jungle Book and Song of the South.
The book is a kind of interesting period piece, in a way. It doesn't necessarily offer any provoking ideas that one won't find elsewhere better provoked, but it's an undeniable, albeit very, very small part of the evolution of progressive cultural dissection.
Notable: In a section devoted to the dissection of the massively popular The Little Mermaid and its effects, the author examines various aspects of the "mermaid" trope (for its title, the author borrowed a line from Barbara Bush's highly controversial speech to the 1990 graduating class of Wellesley College; "Why Do the Mermaids Stand?") and offers a quote from Tori Amos's 1991 ballad "Silent all These Years"
"But what if I'm a mermaid.../hey but I don't care/cause sometimes, I said, sometimes/I hear my voice and it's been HERE?/silent all these years."
Amos has said the inspiration for the song came from reading Hans Christian Andersen's original story to her niece and a negative review that derided her vocal abilities as sounding like "The Little Mermaid [voiced by Jodi Benson] on acid."