The Crackpot of EPCOT; a review of The Perfect American by Peter Stephan Jungk.
From Wed., 12 June 2013 to Monday, 15 July 2013, I read Peter Stephan Jungk's novel The Perfect American, an English translation of Der König von Amerika (published in 2001 by J.G. Cott'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart; the original German title's literal translation is "The King from America," or "The American King," BTW) by Michael Hofmann (NY: Handsel Books, an imprint of Other Press LLC; 2004; ISBN: 1-59051-115-8; 186 pps.).
Prompted by an article in the Tuesday, 4 June Wall Street Journal about a new opera by minimalist composer Philip Glass (much of whose music I really like: The Photographer, the soundtracks to Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, and Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, etc.), I requested, via inter-library loan, the source material for this opera: a short biographical novel about Walt Disney by the Austrian writer Peter Stephan Jungk called The Perfect American (original title: Der König von Amerika; published in German in 2001), translated into English in 2004 by Michael Hofmann.
The Perfect American is a semi-satirical look at the last year in the life of a man who lived long enough to see the colloquial version of his given name become a brand name, a trademark; Walt Disney was what would be called in today's world a "chief creative officer" or a "shared universe architect" (to use variations of titles currently employed by the likes of Geoff Johns at DC Comics and Jonathan Hickman at Marvel Comics, respectively), with the very important proviso that he didn't actually draw any of the characters that he would hold the copyright for, or write their stories. (One presumes that the CCOs and "Marvel Universe Architects" actually produce at least some of the work credited to them.) In The Perfect American, "Uncle Walt" is shadowed by an obsessed animator whom he fired for political reasons in the 1950s, the fictional Wilhelm Dantine (whom Jungk named after a real-world Viennese, the eponymous Lutheran theologian and prison reformer); it is Dantine who is the book's narrator.
One would think that there would be more than sufficient grist for the satirist's mill in the life, ambitions and hobbyhorses of the U.S.'s other "uncle," but, as presented here, the edges are oddly blunted, the heights of arrogance -- and lunacy -- oddly flattened. Jungk ticks off many of the boxes, and includes many bits of trivia that I didn't already know: there's Walt's well-known fixation on cryonics (EPCOT -- an acronym for "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" -- was originally designed to be a cryogenic center, "where there would no longer be burials in the established form" [p. 46; p. 140], but it was science fiction author Ray Bradbury, one of Walt's friends, who first told him about the possibilities of cryonic suspension by recommending Robert Ettinger's 1962 book, The Prospect of Immortality [p. 46], and it was the Viennese architect Victor Gruen, who designed the first outdoor shopping mall in the U.S. [in Kalamazoo, Michigan], and advocated revitalizing cities by making their "urban cores" more pedestrian friendly, who also fed his enthusiasm for cryonics, and his desire to abolish funerals [p. 146]); his reactionary political views that seem to owe as much to his anger towards his abusive father, who was a lifelong socialist (p. 61), as to any well-thought-out political philosophy; his racism (p. 60) and anti-Semitism (p. 134); and his studiously cultivated old-fashioned sensibilities (the teeth-gnashingly dated and saccharine Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [1937] was Walt's favorite movie from his own studio [p. 130]; his favorite song was the children's counting song "This Old Man," which was published in 1906, when Walt was five years old [p. 150]) and apparent aversion to sex (pps. 104-05; then again, Jungk has Walt tell his [fictional?] personal nurse and confidante, Hazel, of his frustration over the public backlash against a vaguely erotic scene in the 1962 movie Bon Voyage!, "'all because Fred MacMurray got wrapped up in a goddamned conversation with a goddamned whore. I got bags and bags of letters from angry parents. How could I be so immoral. Disney stood for clean fun, kids, no hidden meanings. I can't ever do the things I really want to do.'" [p. 42]); there's also the rather alarming intelligence that Walt was one of Ronald Reagan's political mentors (he was confident that "Ronnie Ray-Gun" would be governor of California in the near future, and possibly even president of the United States at some indeterminate date; Walt took credit for Reagan switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and declared, "'For years he's been taking my advice, how to present himself, how to speak, how to move'" [p. 41] -- quite an "I told you so!" for those of us who thought that Reagan, as POTUS, was more of an animatronic puppet than an actual human being), and the in some ways even more alarming intelligence that Bette Davis nearly got the lead in the 1964 movie Mary Poppins, but lost it because Walt "didn't like her singing voice" (pps. 172-73). (Although Bette Davis would've been better able to convey the darker aspects of P.L. Travers's creation, one can't imagine the Disney Studio allowing such a portrayal to reach the public -- or, if it did, that it would've found as much favor with the public as the Julie Andrews version did.)
But for all the rather sterile fascination of learning of Disney's influence on the U.S. space program (Walt was buddies with ex-SS officer Wernher von Braun; Walt asked von Braun to ask his NASA employers to let Neil Armstrong be the first astronaut to set foot on the moon, simply because Armstrong promised to "'leave a Mickey [Mouse] doll and a copy of the very first Mickey film, Plane Crazy, in the Sea of Silence. With my signature on Mickey's back.'" [p. 37]; amusingly, it was the "Man and the Moon" episode of the TV show Disneyland, original air date 28 December 1955, that prompted President Eisenhower to goose the Joint Chiefs of Staff into getting serious about a space program, a prospect of some consternation to von Braun; Jungk has another Disney consultant, physicist Heinz Haber -- like von Braun, a Nazi war criminal sheepdipped by the U.S.'s Operation Paperclip -- say that von Braun begged him and Ward Kimball, a Disney animator [and one of "Disney's Nine Old Men"] and director of that episode, "'[P]lease don't make it appear as though our cartoon show had spurred the president's announcement!'" [p. 39]; this is a case of life imitating art, as the 1950 movie Destination Moon -- based on a novel by another science fiction Grand Master, Robert A. Heinlein, who also co-wrote the screenplay -- has an animated Woody Woodpecker short sell the idea of a lunar expedition to a group of private investors), or in reading anecdotes relating the eye-rolling particulars of his monumental ego, if not out-and-out hubris (Jungk has him declare, regarding his grandiose plans for a cryonic center, "'I'll become a kind of Messiah for everyone who is afraid of death'" [p. 48], as well as predict, to a malfunctioning animatronic puppet of Abraham Lincoln, that the U.S. would achieve victory in Vietnam, which would be swiftly followed by a conquest of the Soviet Union: "'...our GIs will walk through a liberated Moscow with machine guns....Red Square will be renamed after you, Mr. Lincoln, Marx Prospect after me...'" [p. 62]; and Dantine remembers Walt announcing, in an odd bit of parallelism to John Lennon's ill-advised declaration to a newspaper reporter that The Beatles are "more popular than Jesus", "'I'm more famous than Confucius or the Queen of England....More people know my name than the name of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, or Adolf Hitler'" [p. 168]), or the head-snapping knowledge that Walt not only spent several hours with Thomas Mann in early 1938, he actually had at least heard of his major books up to that point (p. 103), there still isn't really a lot of "there" there: aside from its brevity, I'm not convinced that I wouldn't have enjoyed reading a biography of Walt more than I did The Perfect American. (Indeed, its brevity was no help, as I found The Perfect American so tedious that I seriously contemplated, more than once, abandoning it without finishing it. This is a terribly dull book about two terribly dull -- and nearly equally egotistical -- men, only one of whom is fictional.)
I'm not convinced that the fault lies entirely with its subject matter: Jungk's style isn't egregiously bad, as translated by Hofmann (who would go on to win accolades for his 2009 English translation of Hans Fallada's 1947 novel about German resistance to the Nazi regime, Every Man Dies Alone), but it is dull and uninvolving. Jungk likely wanted to show how laughably callow and shallow Walt Disney was -- a paper mouse of a man -- but the way he's presented here, he seems like an embalmed corpse before he actually dies and is cremated, against his wishes for a cryogenic preservation in the hopes of an eventual revival: one good puff of air, and he'd disappear. If it weren't for the bits of trivia, I would've gotten absolutely nothing out of this novel.
The most interesting interaction here -- and would that Jungk had seen fit to expand on it -- is the one between Walt and his former partner Ub Iwerks (born Ubbe Ert Iwerks; "It was Walt who persuaded him to abbreviate his name" [p. 157]), the real father of Mickey Mouse, when Iwerks visits Walt in the hospital, four days before Walt dies:
"Disney had fallen asleep while [Iwerks] sat on the edge of the bed. When he woke up, he whispered: 'Our world...created with crayons, pencils and ink...is a better world, isn't it?'
"'The idea of you they have in intellectual circles, the notion that you only ever made pleasant things and that your version of the world is rose-tinted, is completely mistaken,' replied Iwerks. 'All the gloomy scenes in your movies! There is suffering, loss, betrayal, violence, and sexual awakening. What about the absence of the mother in Snow White, in Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella, and all the wicked stepmothers and witches. What about Fantasia?! A firework of light and shade, the paradisal and infernal aspects of the world...'"
-- p. 158
There are also a couple of instances where Jungk's portrayal of the Americanness of his characters falters: first, when Dantine calls Lincoln "the most popular of all American presidents" (p. 52) -- surely Lincoln's hagiographers, of whom there were and are many, couldn't boost the "Rail-Splitter's" popularity in the South, or in much of the West; second, when the 13-year-old boy who is Walt's roommate during Walt's first hospitalization in the last year of his life refers to the hospital's nurses as "sisters" (p. 127), which is a still-current term for nurses in the UK and Germany (die Schwester), but one which a young American boy who had never lived abroad or who had never had prolonged contact with foreign or foreign-based relatives would not be likely to use, certainly not in a moment of excitement such as that caused by talking to a bona fide celebrity, if not one's idol. In the first case, one might stretch a point and say that Dantine overstated Lincoln's popularity amongst Americans out of ignorance, willful or otherwise; in the second case, the fault clearly rests with the translator and the editor.
In short, I'm still hopeful that The Perfect American will make a decent opera; but if I want to further plumb the depths, or lack thereof, of Walt Disney's character and legacy, I'll stick with a biography. If I want a takedown of the Disney empire, I'll probably just re-read Carl Hiaasen's 1998 pamphlet Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World.
Prompted by an article in the Tuesday, 4 June Wall Street Journal about a new opera by minimalist composer Philip Glass (much of whose music I really like: The Photographer, the soundtracks to Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, and Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, etc.), I requested, via inter-library loan, the source material for this opera: a short biographical novel about Walt Disney by the Austrian writer Peter Stephan Jungk called The Perfect American (original title: Der König von Amerika; published in German in 2001), translated into English in 2004 by Michael Hofmann.
The Perfect American is a semi-satirical look at the last year in the life of a man who lived long enough to see the colloquial version of his given name become a brand name, a trademark; Walt Disney was what would be called in today's world a "chief creative officer" or a "shared universe architect" (to use variations of titles currently employed by the likes of Geoff Johns at DC Comics and Jonathan Hickman at Marvel Comics, respectively), with the very important proviso that he didn't actually draw any of the characters that he would hold the copyright for, or write their stories. (One presumes that the CCOs and "Marvel Universe Architects" actually produce at least some of the work credited to them.) In The Perfect American, "Uncle Walt" is shadowed by an obsessed animator whom he fired for political reasons in the 1950s, the fictional Wilhelm Dantine (whom Jungk named after a real-world Viennese, the eponymous Lutheran theologian and prison reformer); it is Dantine who is the book's narrator.
One would think that there would be more than sufficient grist for the satirist's mill in the life, ambitions and hobbyhorses of the U.S.'s other "uncle," but, as presented here, the edges are oddly blunted, the heights of arrogance -- and lunacy -- oddly flattened. Jungk ticks off many of the boxes, and includes many bits of trivia that I didn't already know: there's Walt's well-known fixation on cryonics (EPCOT -- an acronym for "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" -- was originally designed to be a cryogenic center, "where there would no longer be burials in the established form" [p. 46; p. 140], but it was science fiction author Ray Bradbury, one of Walt's friends, who first told him about the possibilities of cryonic suspension by recommending Robert Ettinger's 1962 book, The Prospect of Immortality [p. 46], and it was the Viennese architect Victor Gruen, who designed the first outdoor shopping mall in the U.S. [in Kalamazoo, Michigan], and advocated revitalizing cities by making their "urban cores" more pedestrian friendly, who also fed his enthusiasm for cryonics, and his desire to abolish funerals [p. 146]); his reactionary political views that seem to owe as much to his anger towards his abusive father, who was a lifelong socialist (p. 61), as to any well-thought-out political philosophy; his racism (p. 60) and anti-Semitism (p. 134); and his studiously cultivated old-fashioned sensibilities (the teeth-gnashingly dated and saccharine Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [1937] was Walt's favorite movie from his own studio [p. 130]; his favorite song was the children's counting song "This Old Man," which was published in 1906, when Walt was five years old [p. 150]) and apparent aversion to sex (pps. 104-05; then again, Jungk has Walt tell his [fictional?] personal nurse and confidante, Hazel, of his frustration over the public backlash against a vaguely erotic scene in the 1962 movie Bon Voyage!, "'all because Fred MacMurray got wrapped up in a goddamned conversation with a goddamned whore. I got bags and bags of letters from angry parents. How could I be so immoral. Disney stood for clean fun, kids, no hidden meanings. I can't ever do the things I really want to do.'" [p. 42]); there's also the rather alarming intelligence that Walt was one of Ronald Reagan's political mentors (he was confident that "Ronnie Ray-Gun" would be governor of California in the near future, and possibly even president of the United States at some indeterminate date; Walt took credit for Reagan switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and declared, "'For years he's been taking my advice, how to present himself, how to speak, how to move'" [p. 41] -- quite an "I told you so!" for those of us who thought that Reagan, as POTUS, was more of an animatronic puppet than an actual human being), and the in some ways even more alarming intelligence that Bette Davis nearly got the lead in the 1964 movie Mary Poppins, but lost it because Walt "didn't like her singing voice" (pps. 172-73). (Although Bette Davis would've been better able to convey the darker aspects of P.L. Travers's creation, one can't imagine the Disney Studio allowing such a portrayal to reach the public -- or, if it did, that it would've found as much favor with the public as the Julie Andrews version did.)
But for all the rather sterile fascination of learning of Disney's influence on the U.S. space program (Walt was buddies with ex-SS officer Wernher von Braun; Walt asked von Braun to ask his NASA employers to let Neil Armstrong be the first astronaut to set foot on the moon, simply because Armstrong promised to "'leave a Mickey [Mouse] doll and a copy of the very first Mickey film, Plane Crazy, in the Sea of Silence. With my signature on Mickey's back.'" [p. 37]; amusingly, it was the "Man and the Moon" episode of the TV show Disneyland, original air date 28 December 1955, that prompted President Eisenhower to goose the Joint Chiefs of Staff into getting serious about a space program, a prospect of some consternation to von Braun; Jungk has another Disney consultant, physicist Heinz Haber -- like von Braun, a Nazi war criminal sheepdipped by the U.S.'s Operation Paperclip -- say that von Braun begged him and Ward Kimball, a Disney animator [and one of "Disney's Nine Old Men"] and director of that episode, "'[P]lease don't make it appear as though our cartoon show had spurred the president's announcement!'" [p. 39]; this is a case of life imitating art, as the 1950 movie Destination Moon -- based on a novel by another science fiction Grand Master, Robert A. Heinlein, who also co-wrote the screenplay -- has an animated Woody Woodpecker short sell the idea of a lunar expedition to a group of private investors), or in reading anecdotes relating the eye-rolling particulars of his monumental ego, if not out-and-out hubris (Jungk has him declare, regarding his grandiose plans for a cryonic center, "'I'll become a kind of Messiah for everyone who is afraid of death'" [p. 48], as well as predict, to a malfunctioning animatronic puppet of Abraham Lincoln, that the U.S. would achieve victory in Vietnam, which would be swiftly followed by a conquest of the Soviet Union: "'...our GIs will walk through a liberated Moscow with machine guns....Red Square will be renamed after you, Mr. Lincoln, Marx Prospect after me...'" [p. 62]; and Dantine remembers Walt announcing, in an odd bit of parallelism to John Lennon's ill-advised declaration to a newspaper reporter that The Beatles are "more popular than Jesus", "'I'm more famous than Confucius or the Queen of England....More people know my name than the name of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, or Adolf Hitler'" [p. 168]), or the head-snapping knowledge that Walt not only spent several hours with Thomas Mann in early 1938, he actually had at least heard of his major books up to that point (p. 103), there still isn't really a lot of "there" there: aside from its brevity, I'm not convinced that I wouldn't have enjoyed reading a biography of Walt more than I did The Perfect American. (Indeed, its brevity was no help, as I found The Perfect American so tedious that I seriously contemplated, more than once, abandoning it without finishing it. This is a terribly dull book about two terribly dull -- and nearly equally egotistical -- men, only one of whom is fictional.)
I'm not convinced that the fault lies entirely with its subject matter: Jungk's style isn't egregiously bad, as translated by Hofmann (who would go on to win accolades for his 2009 English translation of Hans Fallada's 1947 novel about German resistance to the Nazi regime, Every Man Dies Alone), but it is dull and uninvolving. Jungk likely wanted to show how laughably callow and shallow Walt Disney was -- a paper mouse of a man -- but the way he's presented here, he seems like an embalmed corpse before he actually dies and is cremated, against his wishes for a cryogenic preservation in the hopes of an eventual revival: one good puff of air, and he'd disappear. If it weren't for the bits of trivia, I would've gotten absolutely nothing out of this novel.
The most interesting interaction here -- and would that Jungk had seen fit to expand on it -- is the one between Walt and his former partner Ub Iwerks (born Ubbe Ert Iwerks; "It was Walt who persuaded him to abbreviate his name" [p. 157]), the real father of Mickey Mouse, when Iwerks visits Walt in the hospital, four days before Walt dies:
"Disney had fallen asleep while [Iwerks] sat on the edge of the bed. When he woke up, he whispered: 'Our world...created with crayons, pencils and ink...is a better world, isn't it?'
"'The idea of you they have in intellectual circles, the notion that you only ever made pleasant things and that your version of the world is rose-tinted, is completely mistaken,' replied Iwerks. 'All the gloomy scenes in your movies! There is suffering, loss, betrayal, violence, and sexual awakening. What about the absence of the mother in Snow White, in Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella, and all the wicked stepmothers and witches. What about Fantasia?! A firework of light and shade, the paradisal and infernal aspects of the world...'"
-- p. 158
There are also a couple of instances where Jungk's portrayal of the Americanness of his characters falters: first, when Dantine calls Lincoln "the most popular of all American presidents" (p. 52) -- surely Lincoln's hagiographers, of whom there were and are many, couldn't boost the "Rail-Splitter's" popularity in the South, or in much of the West; second, when the 13-year-old boy who is Walt's roommate during Walt's first hospitalization in the last year of his life refers to the hospital's nurses as "sisters" (p. 127), which is a still-current term for nurses in the UK and Germany (die Schwester), but one which a young American boy who had never lived abroad or who had never had prolonged contact with foreign or foreign-based relatives would not be likely to use, certainly not in a moment of excitement such as that caused by talking to a bona fide celebrity, if not one's idol. In the first case, one might stretch a point and say that Dantine overstated Lincoln's popularity amongst Americans out of ignorance, willful or otherwise; in the second case, the fault clearly rests with the translator and the editor.
In short, I'm still hopeful that The Perfect American will make a decent opera; but if I want to further plumb the depths, or lack thereof, of Walt Disney's character and legacy, I'll stick with a biography. If I want a takedown of the Disney empire, I'll probably just re-read Carl Hiaasen's 1998 pamphlet Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World.