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.

Hola!

Hello, Cathleen Kennedy here, the newest contributor to this often humorous, frequently political (when James is writing), sometimes existential, and always serious forum we call elevennames.

When Thomas mentioned that he, Zach, and James had a blog, and that they were looking for other people to write every now and again my first thought was “well why not? Its not like I have lots to do this semester . . . . besides my senior project”. (which is sort of a big deal at our school) So now I am using this incredibly reputable blog as a tool for procrastination, by once a week subjecting you people out there in internet land to my opinions, ideas, and random digressions of thought.

What else is there to say? I like history, but nothing more recent than about 200 years ago. I often times work on plays both at school and in community theaters, usually in some kind of sewing or costuming capacity. I know three other languages besides English, and am in general very academically focused. And I enjoy nerdery of all varieties.

Oh, and I have no idea who I am voting for this coming election, because while I care about the future of our country, I know I will probably end up voting for the democratic candidate, no matter who they are. *sigh*

Now I am frantically casting around for a ghost story so I can be cool like the other kids and fit in for theme week . . . . I am actually incredibly interested in that sort of stuff, but am not sure if I should come up with some kind of vague, but real story like Zach, or just retell one of my favorites.

This is a semi true incident that combines something that actually happened with a ghost story I was told in Scotland and a conclusion that was provided by a friend to whom I was retelling the story:

In 1348 the Black Death or Bubonic Plague as it is called now, had reached Scotland. By this time the disease had been moving northward through Europe for a year and a half. In the capital, Edinburgh, people heard reports of the huge death toll in other cities. In Paris there were reports of over 400 people dying every day, not to mention the fact that it was said that entire villages could die over night. There seemed to be no way of stopping the horrible, painful death that came to everyone who caught this plague.

Then the disease somehow managed to breach the city’s walls. The first person infected was only a peasant, but the rest of the population, both rich and poor knew that with in days they too could be part of the epidemic that had swept across Europe. So the next night the city officials paid the brick layers to seal up the street on which the infected person lived. The inhabitance of the unlucky street woke up to find 12 foot tall brick walls had been erected at either end of their road shutting in both in the infected inhabitant and several families of healthy people.

Over the subsequent weeks the people in the surrounding area could hear the screams and the pleas of the people trapped with in the walls, as more and more of them became infected and others simply died of starvation. It is said that the residence of Edinburgh invented ear muffs, so they wouldn’t have to be consistently tortured by the horrible sound of their neighbors dying. Of course, there was no way of dealing with the stench. The bodies of the dead began to pile up because there was no way to dispose of them, and soon even those outside the walls could not ignore the horrible smell of rotting corpses that wafted from the walled up street.

Eventually the people inside the walls grew silent, and after about two months, the city officials decided that if everyone who lived there was dead (and they surely were by this time), then they could clean out the houses and resell them. There was only one man brave enough to enter the corpse infested street, a butcher. He brought his knives and a wheelbarrow and went systematically through the houses chopping the dead into manageable pieces and then disposing of the body parts. It took him three weeks of hard work, but in the end the houses were ready to be resold.

However, everyone who lived in one who has lived in those house between the 14th century and now has reported seeing dismembered body parts lying around their homes at some point or another accompanied by a horrible smell and sometimes ghostly screaming.

And now you know the horrible truth about earmuffs.

For another fun ghost story listen to this