Participants
Take a Frown, Turn it Upside Down: The Cultural Deracination of Disney's Song of the South
Jason Sperb
Department of English
Wayne State University
aquariusjackson@yahoo.com
Expanding on research appearing in this fall's edition of The Journal of Popular Culture (38.1), my project differs from traditional postmodern takes on Disney theme parks by exploring the ride "Splash Mountain" as a simulation, in the Baudrillard's sense, that was a conscious masking and perverting of its original referent, the racially-controversial, Song of the South--the first single live-action full-length film to integrally incorporate animation and live action. Splash Mountain is not just its own depthless simulation, copied from another simulation (Song of the South); rather, Splash Mountain is a carefully crafted, politically and commercially-motivated act of late capitalism and, more importantly, on the state of race relations in America over the last sixty years. With Splash Mountain, Disney effectively pulled the original roots of Song of the South out from under the film. Instead of a richer, if far more problematic text, Splash Mountain represents a commodified, homogenized version, if any version, of its now distant "mask[ed]" and "pervert[ed]" relative. Following the lead of one of its own songs, Disney took "a frown and turned it upside down." Employing a "pastiche" of animation and audio-animatronics, which creates "a glossy mirage," to quote Fredric Jameson, the Walt Disney company removed the racist content and thus, "the incompatibility of a postmodernist 'nostalgia' art language [the nostalgia for Uncle Remus' old adventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear and Brer Fox] with genuine historicity becomes dramatically apparent." Here, Splash Mountain confirms Louis Marin?s assessment of Disneyland as the manifestation of the dominant cultural ideology and Jameson's critique of simulacrum as "a consequent weakening of historicity." Just as importantly, Splash Mountain, the deracinated, consumer-friendly evolution of Song of the South, stands as one example of Disney's implicitly "political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today."
