An autobiography in films; some personal milestones and
revelations, for better and/or worse, in relation to movies I’ve seen.
By BRAD WEISMANN
Prologue: Why movies?
Well, they stick in my head. I can’t remember the names of close relatives, but
I can remember who played Blinky in “The Killers” (Jeff Corey, the marvelous
actor who became one of the great L.A. acting teachers after being blacklisted
in the 1950s, who also played Tom Cheney in the original “True Grit,” and
Plasus the High Adviser in the “Cloud Minders” episode of the original “Star
Trek” series – “You will dig the xenite!” – not to be confused with the
similar-looking John Marley, who played Jane Fonda’s dad in “Cat Ballou,”
Richard in “Faces,” and Jack Woltz, the director who gets his horse’s head in
his bed in “The Godfather.” See what I mean?).
Even though I trained
in theater, made comedy my business for years and journalism for more years, love
Shakespeare, poetry, art, opera, classical music, and jazz, there’s nothing
quite like film to mark my memory. I have been known to walk out of a film and
act and talk like the characters in it for hours at a time, overstimulated to
the point of being sleepless. I am some kind of weird living litmus paper.
My tentative list of
significant films is creeping up on 50 now, and will probably grow the more I
think about it. What will follow is an account of these vivid experiences in
the context of my personal life. Hopefully, there will be some insights and a
few laughs.
PART 1: DISNEY’S TRILOGY OF TRAUMA
Pinocchio
Re-release date: Jan. 18, 1962 (Original release date: Feb.
23, 1940)
Dir: Norman Ferguson, Thornton Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack
Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen
Prod: Walt Disney
Scr: Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William
Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia, Bill Peet
Phot: N/A
Mary Poppins
Release date: Aug. 29, 1964
Dir: Robert Stevenson
Prod: Walt Disney, Bill Walsh
Scr: Bill Walsh, Don DaGradi
Phot: Edward Colman
Bambi
Re-release date: March 25, 1966 (Original release date: Aug.
14, 1942)
Dir: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, David Hand, Graham Heid,
Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Norman Wright
Prod: Walt Disney
Scr: Perce Pearce, Larry Morey, Vernon Stallings, Mel Shaw,
Carl Fallberg, Chuck Couch, Ralph Wright
Phot: N/A
Heaven and hell. Simultaneously.
You know, Mom, why don’t you make my very first contact with
cinema memorable. Take me to the most intense iterations of the moving picture
experience human ever made – the most visually arresting, addictive,
mind-blowing kind of kinescopically psychedelically dank flicks mankind has
ever conceived and executed.
Are we talking the works of Bunuel here? Herschell Gordon
Lewis? Tod Browning? Ken Russell? Lucio Fulci? “The Exorcist”? “Last House on
the Left”? “In the Mouth of Madness”? No.
Oh, and fill them with highly questionable material for
children – including the murder of parents by unseen forces, uncontrolled and
hellish physical transformation, children who are neglected, then abandoned,
death, catastrophic fires, floods, consumption by enormous mammals . . . and
Dick van Dyke’s terrifying Cockney accent.
Of course, we are talking Disney films.
Oh, and make sure they are thought of as family classics,
canonical masterpieces that must be transmitted from generation to generation
to the end of time.
The source of my fascination with, fear of, and struggle to
dominate via analyzing film comes from these initial exposures.
Not that I’m ungrateful.
However, you would have done just as well by filling me as a
toddler with lysergic acid diethalymide and strapping me to a roller coaster
for three and a half hours straight, in terms of my present mental stability.
Of course, children’s stories, the ones that Disney magic
are usually wrought from, are not saccharine idylls. They are, and are meant
to, be memorably riveting, tough-minded, and transformative. Bruno Bettelheim’s
great book “The Uses of Enchantment” is a great place to begin unraveling the
coded messages nursery stories deliver.
Growing up in a family with a Scandinavian, Protestant
background, it was natural that my first reading would be of material such as
that crafted by the perverse and death-obsessed Hans Christian Andersen
(tongues cut out, feet hacked off, dying match girls and other children, and
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, who gets dragged down into something like hell for
a very, very, very long time and escapes only by becoming a bird -- that flies
into the sun?) And don’t get me started on the Brothers Grimm – anyone who’s
read the top-notch and forthright Ralph Mannheim translation of those folk
tales will find incest, cannibalism, mutilation, infanticide, and such! How
jolly!
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| "The Red Shoes": Of course, an angel cuts her feet off, 'cause she can't stop dancin'! |
But, of course, it’s the sanitized Victorian-era versions of
these stories that inspired Disney and most American adaptations of these
stories. Yet to the disturbing undertones already there, Disney adds elements
such as a Puritan glee in shame (Pinocchio’s shame at his not-quite-real
status) and punishing forbidden behavior (the Cronenbergian transformation of
bad boys into donkeys later in the film).
“Mary Poppins” is about the redemption of uncaring parents,
of course (at least the film is) – but all I seem to recall is horror – at the
neglect of the kids, the wind that blows the mean nannies away (I mean, they
had to earn a living, didn’t they?), at the toys putting themselves away in the
children’s rooms, at Jane and Michael chased through the dark streets of the
East End. And in retrospect, wasn’t there something druggy about the whole
production? A “spoonful of sugar” helps things get done quickly? Something that
makes you laugh and float to the ceiling? JUMPING INTO A PAINTING? Cocaine,
pot, and acid, all right there.
Aaaand “Bambi.” Witnessing the murder of Bambi’s mom was
pretty much much the defining moment of my childhood. What’s worse, it was a
death blow from an invisible enemy – Disney originally planned to show the
human hunter firing his rifle at her, but the canny producer didn’t want to
alienate the hunting lobby (it still complained). What results is even more
disturbing – cause divorced from effect, leaving me riddled with anxiety. Same
thing with the climactic forest fire at the end – an insane inferno, punctuated
with a pack of murderous hunting dogs, that I’m pretty sure made me pee my
pants.
Behind all this celluloid child abuse was the thought that
Man was to blame, not to be trusted. I took it to heart, and haven’t really
trusted the species since.
In sharp contrast with the calculatedly traumatic elements
are the even more traumatic sentimental elements. The bipolar contrast between
death and the babyish cuteness that serves less as a balance than as a
teeter-totter corrective to the tragic thrust of the narrative was repellent to
me. Lisping baby animals – whimsical figurines – condescending glee. Kids can
smell cognitive dissonance, and this stuff stank. The earlier feature-length
Disney films are rife with this kind of problematic sentiment and aggressive
fantasy – the heart-rending “Baby Mine” number in “Dumbo,” as well as the
frightening “Pink Elephants on Parade,” and the insanely overused
“shoot-the-dog” trope originated in “Old Yeller.”
The true devilment of course it that all three of these
films are so vivid, so technically proficient, smoothly and candy-colored
surreal. The triumph of image over idea in the Disney canon means that whatever
text, subtext, or overtone is present in the material presented is volatile – a
hot substance that floods into every nook and cranny of the recipient,
unmediated unless you are a cynical little bastard like me. And not even then.
Later, as the Disney affect flattened and became more
predictable, the severity of the attack on the senses diminished, losing its
punch as the Disney output lost popularity. It wasn’t until genius abilities of
producers such as Ron Clements, John Musker, Don Hahn, Bonnie Arnold, and Pam
Coats to mastermind projects that offered real emotion, plausible redemption
plots, actual humorous humor, combined with the wonderful Mencken/Ashman songs that
triggered a revival in film songwriting, that the ship righted. But even then, they still killed an awful lot of critters.
In retrospect, exposing me to the cinematic crack pipe of Golden
Age Walt Disney was the strongest kind of inoculation against manipulation
through popular art that one could devise, short of what Mark Lewis’ dad did to
him in “Peeping Tom.” And look how that turned out.
Next time: "The Toy that Grew Up" and foreign films on public TV
