Marathon: Pernicious Parting Gifts (3 of 13)

I finally think I have somewhere to go with this one. I was reading a thread on Facebook that grew out of a bunch of ex-Eleven Names (Thomas, Cathleen) people talking about how, looking back, Disney movies were steeped in some pretty backward and scary thinking. The heroes, looking back, aren't so heroic and have been lionized in a way that obscures what they're doing.

The villains, more and more, start to look like they're the ones being wronged. The princesses have less and less control and are acting in ways that aren't so rebellious. And while I feel mad snarky (can I copyright that phrase?) watching the same people talk about "society" who criticize me listening to punk rock, I feel like..maybe Disney's the one getting the bum rap here.

Maybe we're putting too much on the back of something that's designed to give youngsters a primer on how to act in the culture we've created.

Also, I used the word youngsters. I'm proud of myself.

Then again, this kind of stuff is pernicious precisely because it comes under the radar and because it gets passed off as reasonable and normal. It's only by looking into it that we see what's going on under the surface. And it's that questioning that leads me to track three on the Marathon record, Some Lovely Parting Gifts, a song about all the lies taught as lessons to us, which lead to bad ways of thinking. All the things that taught us to think straight, of which Disney had to be one.




First, I'm not sure what I took from the Disney movies I saw as a child. I was influenced by other things also. I was influenced by books, video games and other movies, I think. So my learning doesn't stop with them. Im also unclear on the idea that kids took anything more from Disney than "other people say these things are good, so do good things," which is a lesson that's significantly larger than Disney.

That said, there's a good chance a number of early Disney movies are trojan horses bringing in other ideas with them that we don't recognize.

All of that says, those are still the tools that taught us to "think" straight. What did we win as a result of playing Disney's game?

And, is it fair or reasonable to ask Disney to create something that's meant to inspire people to do more when they're younger than 14? If, after you saw some Disney programming, did you as a child continue to absorb media? Books? Movies? Games? Did you fling yourself down that path as a result of seeing something there? I can only speak for myself, and while I don't remember Disney movies well, I know I watched a couple and I took a lot from them. Is it because I'm white, male and straight? Possibly? I don't know.

This begs the question: What did you (or I) do after we consumed Disney media? Did seeing Disney media lead you to consume more and more media until you learned things were not as pretty as they seemed? In other words: Did a Disney film or TV show foster a life-long love for things that have expanded your mind? Do they get credit for that? Do they deserve credit (for better or worse) for beyond that? Perhaps not, but that doesn't absolve them of the responsibilitiy to write something that's centered more carefully now. A lot of their now "classic" material was written sixty or seventy years ago so it's long since time to write different stories, more inclusive ones.

We grow, I think, when we're brought face to face with what came before and realized how far it is from what we believed. We change. We see more things. Those are the powerful moments in our lives, I think. It's only when we look into the mirror and realize, with horror the things that lurk behind what we took for granted that we grow.

We learn more sophisticated lessons as we get older. Life gets complicated and messy.

I don't want to say Disney is a necessary evil. But if it wasn't called Disney, it'd be called something else and be close enough to the same thing: Teaching kids the wrong right ways to go about living their lives.



In Some Lovely Parting Gifts, the focus is on the instruction of students and classrooms.

Disney is emblematic of the stains left on our psyches from childhood. They're a cheap tool to help kids make sense of the world around them. These tools leave impressions that looking at the Disney princesses reveal. We learn that the world is vast and frightening. In those moments of realization, we reach out for something. The song itself finds a kid running into a broom closet with words he's supposed memorize. I infer that to mean that he recognizes something is Very Wrong, but can't vocalize quite what it is yet.

Black mortarboard, a wooden ruler, and papers marked with A's The tools that taught me to think straight
In some schools, thinking the right way is done with carrots. In others, it's done with sticks. The A's, for thinking the same way as the teacher are the carrots. The wooden ruler (used in Catholic schools to beat pupils) are the sticks. Disney is a carrot. Cool things happen to people that do "good" actions.

We learn from Disney's instruction how to behave on a basic level. Some of these behavior patterns are unhealthy. Many of the lessons are suspect. But we get rewarded for them all the same. Our reward doesn't come in confetti falling and a game show host, but the rewards come all the same. Sometimes, it's getting into a conversation with someone that you have no affiliation with otherwise. It's a "oh, you watched Disney movies as a kid, too?"

Disney might be one of the grinning showmen in the center of Some Lovely Parting Gifts, the man who'se eyes we ought to watch. Are the eyes twinkling? If they are, do we even know what that means?


Remember when I talked about other things in the culture that surrounds us reinforcing what we've learned from Disney? Marathon has a line about that, too. Letters validate the tests numbers to see who'se the best.

To go pop culture on you: Twilight's a book series where the main character is being stalked by someone who is literally hundreds of years older than her and hangs around a high school. And this is romantic and not worthy of a restraining order and To Catch A Predator. Frankly, I view this is a particularly post-Disney story. If you want a story that justifies this kind of fantastical romance, look at Beauty and the Beast. The Beast is a semi-abusive misanthrope, to use Thomas' words.

The two stories share a basic premise: An innocent woman gets caught in the spell of a potential lover that while perhaps honestly loving her exhibits characteristics that have the potential for violent, non-proportionate response to "things that could make them angry."

Beast's behavior is being smoothed over by larger social forces calling it part of love. While the concern and desire to care for the partner may be authentic, the potential for spousal abuse remains and it's whitewashed.

We grow and we learn. In both cases, (whether it's the Facebook comment tree or Some Lovely Parting Gifts OR re-viewing Twilight or Disney) there's a bit of the horror of realization. I'm not sure I'm horrified. I just knew this before.

Strangely enough, I'm left with an appropriate pithy parting sentence: What's old is new.

It's Shxt Like This That Distances Me From Comics

I know this isn't Marathon #3.

I wanted to write something that wasn't pastepunk stuff and the Marathon pieces take a lot out of me. It's something to knock out the cobwebs and get me off my intellectual butt. This is about...Necrosha. Necrosha is a story about reanimating the dead that got published today that isn't called Blackest Night.


There's a preview page of the Necrosha one-shot in the X-Men universe (from Marvel Comics) which took me out of the world the authors had created and brought me back, kicking and screaming to this one.

It's a shot of Selene, the Black Queen, an X-Men villianess. She's an important member of the Hellfire Club's inner circle and she's a powerful character. She's a 15,000 year old psychic vampire, for heaven's sake. She can grind people to dust with her mind or dominate them to her will. This is a woman with considerable powers and prowess of her own.

She's teaming up with some other death related villains to launch an attack on the X-Men, because she believes she can ascend to godhood for no adequately explored reason, but do villains really need reasons? Answer: No. It's usually better if they don't.

And yet, she's dressed up like an bondage model. That breaks the fiction for me. That pulls me out of the narrative. I don't feel like a reader when I see that. I feel like a target audience. I feel like I'm being titillated, insulted and kept on a leash to make sure I'm paying attention. Take a look at it yourself.

I feel like I'm being reminded that these designs are made to influence buyers. And yes, I know that her costume is based on an older costume, which is just as flattering. But this is 2009. We've learned, right? We don't have dress up the women in those kinds of outfits to get readers to understand the woman is meant to be alluring, destructive and nefarious. It's an image thing. It's her image. It's the image Marvel wants her to have.

The problem is that there's another image and that's Marvel's image of the buyers of which I am one. (That said, all of this could also be said for DC, at random, I could show you Green Lantern Corps #35, but that's tangential.) I recognize that this is an old argument. I recognize I'm profoundly new to this criticism that's been going on for a while now.

It's hard for me to believe that a woman who is 15,000 years old chooses to dress that scantily in on a cold night. I mean, okay, she's a vampire. That requires an abbreviated wardrobe, I grant, but the bondage theme is the straw (or tail) that broke the camel's back.

Maybe I'm just roid-raging. I felt like a kid again and the experience wasn't pleasant. For all the time I've invested in my understanding, all the different perspectives I've tried to wrap my mind around and all the fighting I've done with how I'm supposed to act, pages like this remind me that I'm still just viewed as a person to be insulted with "sultry" women.

I don't believe I'm unique in that I'm college graduate reading comics and am willing to try new universes and characters. Maybe I am. I'm going outside to take a walk and figure out how deeply I feel about this.

It makes me feel powerless and reminds me of the production of comics. The big fear in my mind is that I'm just naive. That of course these comics are aimed at dudes (used colloquially) that define the lowest common denominator. That the patina of storytelling is just that. That I'm putting too much intellectually on something that was never meant to carry it.

Maybe this feeling of being taken advantage of is in my head. I hope it is, but frankly, I never should have left the story in the first place and the fact that even after typing through this, the original problem still remains is the troubling part.