The Contender

In my last post I excoriated Edward Zwick’s 1998 film The Siege for its incessant, contemptuous punishing of Annette Bening’s heroine. The most infuriating aspect of it was that the film betrayed no self-consciousness about what it was doing. There seemed to be no moment when, by a line of dialogue or a bit of business, one got the sense that Zwick and his screenwriters were wrestling with their material – trying to make a better movie but constrained by the established vocabulary of Hollywood screenwriting tropes.

Two years later, Rod Lurie’s political drama The Contender would be an exemplar of this same self-consciousness. Like The Siege, it set itself a daunting challenge in casting a talented and well-respected actress in a part that seemed to call for greater steeliness and authority than Hollywood movies often grant their leading ladies. But whereas the former film made no attempt to rise to the challenge – effectively leaving things at “look at the well-meaning but incompetent bitch” – The Contender really leaps at the challenge. That it ultimately falls far short of the mark is discouraging, but I nonetheless look back on it with vastly more liking and respect than Zwick’s travesty.

In the event, The Contender rests entirely upon Joan Allen’s performance as “Senator Laine Hanson” of Ohio, who has been nominated to fill the gap left by the recent death of the vice-president – a nomination which is to be fiercely contested by the most sexually-repressed, misogynistic elements in the Republican Party. From the very first, then, we are in old-school liberal Democratic territory, still championing Geraldine Ferraro in the 1984 election in 2000.

This pedigree, however, brings with it the uncomfortable corollary that, as a character, Laine Hanson has to be made into some sort of liberal ultra-paragon – so spotlessly noble and faultlessly pure of heart that only the most bigoted reactionaries would oppose her. Accordingly, throughout the film, it is enumerated that she is a vegetarian, a secularist, pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-term-limits-and-campaign-reform, anti-death penalty, would make selling cigarettes to minors a federal offence, and supports military spending only for purposes of combating genocide. And in addition to all this we see she’s a loving, devoted wife and mother, a sharp dresser, and cuts a great figure jogging in Arlington National Cemetery. The upshot of this too-good-to-be-true characterization, however, is that she rapidly ceases to be a very identifiable, to say nothing of likable, character. The film bears the same off-putting tone as other American political films, from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and State of the Union on down to The Candidate and Dave, in which we are presented with pious, dewy-eyed virgin candidates who idealistically expect to bring about profound reform through sheer good intentions and purity of heart. We are expected to recoil with them from the unsentimental and unglamorous day-to-day realities of the political process, in which flexibility and deal-making are the only ways to even survive, let alone get anything done. The overall sense is that these lofty souls are doing us a great charity by condescending to run in today’s sordid electoral process, and the voters and the system jolly well ought to grant them every consideration and courtesy because of it. It goes without saying, of course, that in the real world we would soon have the pleasure of saying “good riddance to bad rubbish” to anyone delusional enough to really approach politics in this spirit. Many Hollywood political movies, however, seem genuinely to believe their own nonsense.

And it is here that The Contender’s convolutions begin, because Rod Lurie – who both wrote and directed this film – is clearly canny enough to have sensed this pitfall in advance and tried to avoid it. As a result, the film is liberally sprinkled with sex, one-liners, and narrative backstory which represent a concerted attempt to make Hanson seem more like a fully fleshed-out human being. We are first introduced to her having sex with her husband on her office desk; it soon emerges that her father was a long-serving governor of Ohio, thus implying that her Senate seat may be less meritocracy than nepotism; and we learn that her husband used to be the husband of another woman, from whom she stole him. These are exactly the sort of inconvenient biographical realities that actual political candidates will always have to finesse, and had Lurie stayed on this level, the film would have been far more successful.

All of the efforts to mitigate the tone of holier-than-thou smugness founder on the nature of The Contender’s actual narrative arc, however. The film’s central plotline hinges on a piece of seemingly-damning information the Republicans have dug up on Laine’s past: that in college she supposedly gang-banged an entire house full of frat boys. This is the sort of salacious tidbit that has no bearing on her ability to serve as vice-president, or as president herself, but the opposition are smugly aware that once it has been incepted in the electorate’s mind, it will end up defining her far more than anything about her policy positions or voting record. And in a more mature political film, this fact would have been blithely acknowledged, and we would get to witness the way canny politicians will have equally cynical countermeasures to hand.

The Contender, however, will have none of this. From the very first, Laine’s response resembles less what any real politician’s would be, than that of the saccharine vision of Sir Thomas More evoked by A Man for All Seasons. She simply refuses to dignify these allegations with a response, and makes it clear that she will withdraw her name from the nomination sooner than do so. She declares with extreme dignity that it is unconscionable that questions about such matters be put to her in the first place, since if she were a man such a college escapade would not be considered relevant. Leaving aside the extreme dubiousness of this claim – one suspects the same Republicans would have leapt with the same fervor on the same details about Clinton’s youth – one resents the way Lurie has loaded the dice here. Sucking and fucking an entire frat house is such a wild-yet-ultimately-harmless exploit that it’s easy enough to agree with Laine, but the underlying assumption that old-school chivalry is supposed, at a certain point, to trump the routine workings of partisan politics is an uncomfortable one. Back in ’84, the Democrats were understandably vexed that the Republicans burned up a few weeks of political oxygen by raising suspicions about Ferraro and her husband’s taxes, but was this some fundamental breach of the rules of honor, or a legitimate partisan victory by playing within them? And if the latter, where does the supposed boundary lie? Soon enough, one begins to read the film against the grain, suspecting that its real concern is not whether the Republicans have violated some quorum of political decency, but whether they’ve simply violated Laine’s ego and sense of entitlement. When Joan Allen reads the line “it is simply beneath my dignity,” she’s evidently meant to sound resolute, but one hears it as unpleasantly dismissive. When we cut in to a lingering close-up of a tear running down her cheek, one thinks “crocodile” as much as anything else. When she compares her own predicament to Isaac Lamb, the first person ever called before HUAC, one immediately thinks “delusions of grandeur/martyrdom.” McCarthyism is justifiably one of liberal America’s favorite boogeymen, but its currency is debauched by being used too profligately, and Laine is doing exactly that here. By refusing to “name names” in this instance, she faces not imprisonment, ostracism, and unemployability, but only the loss of the chance to be the second-most-powerful person on the planet, with the consolation of a seat in the Senate and an enhanced national profile.

Eventually the film commits a final, unpardonable cheat by "vindicating" Laine and having the allegations turn out not to be true after all, allowing her to plume herself even more luxuriantly on her virtue (See? I could have honestly denied them, but I still refused to dignify them!) but by then it really makes no difference, because a terminal threshold of insufferability has already been passed. It can be pinpointed in a plot twist whereby the bigoted Representative Sheldon “Shelly” Runyon (R-IL) has gone so far, in the confirmation hearings, in baiting her over the issue of abortion that his own wife has slipped Laine the information that she herself had an abortion many years ago (which “Shelly doesn’t know”). In the subsequent scene, Runyon’s blustering has reached such a height of ass-holery that every viewer is yearning for Laine to deploy her newfound bit of dirt and devastatingly deflate him, but we know with eye-rolling certainty that she won’t because she is too piously, ostentatiously noble to do so. And she doesn’t.

 That Joan Allen received an Oscar nomination for The Contender is not at all surprising – these are the sorts of roles that are custom-written to attract the Academy’s attention, and had she in fact won I would have been disappointed but not surprised. Far more gratifying is that Jeff Bridges received a nomination for his performance as President Jackson Evans, whose performance – along with Sam Elliott’s as Chief of Staff Kermit Newman – is instrumental to the film’s redeeming qualities. Chief among these are that the film’s interest in politics is genuine and voracious. Throughout the 1990s, watching films like Dave and Wag the Dog, one could readily bemoan the passing of the great 70s tradition of political engagement, embodied both in the paranoia films like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View, and in the earnest-realist tone of works like The Seduction of Joe Tynan. As he makes clear in the DVD featurette, however, Lurie came to The Contender with the specific agenda of doing justice to the 70s tradition, and the results show. This is a film which makes no allowances for the politically un-saavy, with lines such as “I think the House has advise-and-consent power on this one” and “the people have given you Reagan-like approval numbers” zipping past with no pause for explanation. Likewise, knowledge of historical figures like Anwar Sadat, relative to Churchill, Mandela, and de Gaulle, is simply presumed. People who don’t know off the top of their head that Gerald Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller vice-president after assuming office upon Nixon’s resignation are not this film’s core audience.

The scenes involving Evans and Newman are invariably the film’s best, what with the easy tone of familiarity with political reality that Lurie elicits from them. These are hardened political veterans with none of Laine’s moralistic illusions about politics. Evans is such a master manipulator that he can turn a sharksteak sandwich into a first-class weapon against a young neo-con Democrat who may help the Republicans; and Newman is the sort of unflappable enforcer who, seeing the whole imbroglio purely as a matter of who can out-smear who, thinks nothing of roaring “I want something EMBARRASSING! Something sexual! Little boys, midgets, that sort of thing! Cows! I don't give a goddamn!” To Laine’s sanctimonious plea that “if we do that we’re no better than he is,” he tersely replies “we are no better.” Such are the film’s moments of refreshing candor, which ring so blissfully true. When Evans first moots Laine as his vice-presidential pick – saying "if it doesn't work with Hanson we'll go back to Hathaway" – he does so in a tone that one can readily imagine Obama matching – sitting in the Oval Office with Joe Biden and Jack Lew, saying “if it doesn’t work with Rice we’ll go back to Kerry.”

There’s a moment early in The Contender that even more vividly shows a road not taken. When Governor Jack Hathaway (D-VA) – the scorned first-choice pick for vice-president – arrives home crestfallen after his rebuff, he finds his wife Fiona waiting for him on the front steps of the governor’s mansion, cutting a strikingly earthy figure in saggy jeans and a salmon-pink tank top. She proceeds to cattily lay into him for simply accepting his rejection and feeling sorry for himself – declaring “you’re going to take it up the ass and you want to bend over to make it easier for them?” and “you’re just going to mope around like some fourteen-year old girl who can’t get a date to the dance?” They had, after all, gone to all the trouble of arranging a car accident, which Jack would save a young woman from, thus burnishing his national profile and visibility. Fiona then does nothing less than set the whole plot of the movie in motion by fiercely informing Jack that he’s going to call up Runyon and set all the backroom scheming against Laine in motion. In short, deception having failed, they now have recourse to cronyism. She seems to understand politics far, far better than Laine Hanson.

And lastly, there's Gary Oldman's performance as Runyon. But that one will require a whole new post to itself...

The Siege

Often enough in this world, serious cinephiles may find themselves belabouring the point that Hollywood action blockbusters all seem to be appallingly reactionary drivel – refusing any hint of moral culpability on the part of America’s martial institutions, and making an infantile caricature of their opponents. Why, the cinephile line goes, can’t more intelligent films be written, which deliver gunfights, chases, and explosions sure, but which also seriously engage with the issues underlying Hollywood’s routine action plotlines?

Edward Zwick’s 1998 film The Siege answers the question handily: because whenever such an attempt is made, the results always seem to be even worse than the brainlessly reactionary status quo.

The Siege is that pre-9/11 film which tried to realistically envision what catastrophic terrorist attacks on New York would look like, and what society’s response might be. So like Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla and Michael Bay’s Armageddon that summer, we see a lot of New York getting smashed up real good. The difference is that while in those films we were allowed – nay expected – to completely turn off our social sensitivities and atavistically revel in all the wanton carnage, here we are expected to be shocked and distressed at the real prospect of all this. This moralizing undertow is faintly off-putting in what is still, after all, supposed to be a Hollywood blockbuster spectacle, but one goes with it at first. In short order, we learn that the Arab-American community will obsequiously “co-operate fully” with FBI investigations; that terrorists who fully intend to blow up a bus anyway can be talked into letting the children off first; that Bruce Willis’s terse four-star general is a “card-carrying member of the ACLU”; that declaring martial law is a great way for Clinton to “look presidential”; that Arab professors who sign off on student visas are of course bloodthirsty terrorists themselves; and that US troops will soften in the heart and lower their weapons in reply to a big noble speech. The Siege strains for a realistic tone throughout, but after a certain point the contrivances build up to a point that it’s swimming hopelessly against the current, and you catch yourself thinking it might as well just give up the pretense and embrace its numbskulled side. Moreover, the film’s most distinctive visual attractions – lots of intense shots of the American military deploying inside New York, and Bruce Willis playing a mercurial and unpredictable hard-ass – were done with much greater gusto and less convolutedness in those much-abused spectacles from 1998, Godzilla and Armageddon. Comparing The Siege to the other two is to grudgingly come up against the fact that Hollywood’s blockbuster status quo is imperfect, yes, but that those at the helm do have some idea what they’re doing.

The supposedly reactionary side to such films can be excused easily enough because of, rather than in spite of, their very simplicity and crudity. Watching the training montage at the end of Rocky IV, for example, I’ve always been struck by how the actual devices being employed – the cross-cutting between Rocky working out in the woods and his rustic farmhouse, versus Drago training under hi-tech laboratory conditions, sternly watched by unsympathetic supervisors – have nothing intrinsically to do with crude Reagan-era anticommunism. We're simply seeing one more iteration of the classic human myth that spiritual strength for victory comes from closeness to nature, as opposed to the dehumanizing effects of total mechanization. It requires only the simplest imaginative adjustment to revel in the brio with which Stallone invests the sequence, while looking past the infantile Cold War politics.

Likewise, the thematic crudities of films like Godzilla and Armageddon represent their directors simply taking the narrative line of least resistance, in order to focus on the spectacle aspect. Of course this doesn’t yield completely satisfactory films, but the mega-spectacle they offer is still such a potent, bombastic intervention into our imaginative lives that their narratives would need to be a lot more repressively moralistic and censorious than they are to fully counteract its effect. When one looks at this New York Times Home & Garden feature on Roland Emmerich’s outlandish new London home, for instance…

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/07/garden/20080807-EMMERICH_index.html

…one’s first reaction is almost certainly to fume “why can’t he/won’t he transfer that same politically irreverent spirit into his actual films?” rather than to dismissively say “one more confirmation of what an idiot and a vulgarian he is.” Likewise, when in the opening sequence of Armageddon, Michael Bay lovingly recreates the famous 1934 photo of Grand Central Station, and then has a meteorite blast it to smithereens, one feels the infectious joy of a child at play, boisterously bashing his toys around. The sort of spectator who would priggishly say “that’s not funny – you should respect the classics of architecture and photography,” is probably exactly the sort who would think The Siege is, in spite of everything, a template for how Hollywood should work, because it attempts to be educational and uplifting about a serious subject.

To these contemporaries, one would finally have to add as an obvious influence James Cameron’s True Lies. And this comparison goes to show where the source of so much of Cameron’s greatness as a filmmaker lies, and why Zwick in contrast – for all his epic earnestness – has never really transcended his second-tier standing. Cameron’s films have given us Sarah Connor, Ripley’s power-loader/firepower incarnation, Rose DeWitt Bukater, Neytiri, and possibly Alita someday. His one foray into TV with Dark Angel single-handedly made Jessica Alba a kick-ass star. Even True Lies, for all the dubiousness of Jamie Lee Curtis’s treatment, gave us an irresistible performance by Tia Carrere as the deliciously minxy villainess. Zwick’s spectacles, in contrast, have always been totally male affairs, and seem imbued with the idea that the forging and testing of martial bonds between men is the highest and most inspiring form of drama. That this sort of dramaturgy generally leaves absolutely no place for women – except as virtuously suffering well-wishers and mourners – never seems to come up. The one time Zwick did try to inject a strong female presence into one of these films, with Meg Ryan in Courage Under Fire, it was as someone who died before the beginning of the narrative proper, and who may in fact have been a coward unjustly buoyed up by political correctness. This sort of solemn mythologizing of male warrior bonds is impossible to take seriously because it represents such a transparent act of immature myth-making: men don’t really want to admit they can’t handle living with and relating to women, so they create a mythic worldview in which humanity’s highest achievements are located away from, and inaccessible to, women. A general leading troops into battle seems less heroic when we know he’s a hen-pecked weakling back home with his wife, and so the relative importance of the two has to be grossly re-weighted. And accordingly, Zwick’s films tend to take place in historical locales – Civil War America, feudal Japan, war-torn Africa, World War II’s Eastern front, etc. – where this won’t seem too incongruous. To try and pull this off within a totally familiar and contemporary setting, however, is problematic in the extreme.

In light of all this, it comes as absolutely no surprise that The Siege’s first and most intractable problem is that its supposed hero – Denzel Washington’s FBI chief “Anthony Hubbard” – is a misogynistic asshole. This in itself wouldn’t be such a catastrophe, if only the film was aware of it and finessed it, but alas, Zwick seems deluded that he’s created a sympathetic hero here. The result is that Annette Bening’s heroine – CIA agent “Elise Kraft” – undergoes a two-hour marathon of endless abuse, and is never allowed to stand up for herself. Scene after scene goes by with Hubbard insulting her, ignoring her advice, disrespecting her authority, or otherwise seeking to denigrate and humiliate her, and Bening’s part not only never allowing her any revenge, but even any real anger or offence. Zwick was presumably attempting to have her be polker-faced and mysterious in the way we might expect a CIA agent to be, but that sort of walking softly only works dramatically if we are also absolutely sure that she has a big stick handy which she simply isn’t bothering to use at the moment. The film, however, does not bother to provide this. On literal realist grounds, Kraft would have flunked out of CIA training within a week, seeming to be psychologically incapable of taking control of a situation. Even Elizabeth Olsen’s befuddled and brainwashed cult escapee in Martha Marcy May Marlene, a few posts ago, seemed better at standing up for herself.

Even all this wouldn’t quite have made the film so toxic to me if there hadn’t been one slightly discordant scene that showed what might have been. Around the beginning of the second act, the “good guy” cast is in a restaurant, celebrating what they believe to have been the destruction of the terrorist cell, when Kraft sounds Hubbard out on the Palestinians. He notes the seeming dissonance in how she seems to love them so much, but nonetheless “works against them” with the Israelis. “Just the crazy,” she replies, “I tend to be suspicious of all true believers, present company included.” And here she mounts a devastatingly accurate critique of not only Hubbard’s character, but the type that seems to fill the niche of “authoritative hero” in so many Hollywood movies throughout history: “Catholic school, president of this, captain of that, hard work, make a difference, fair play, change the system from within, rah-rah-rah. … It’s easy to tell the difference between right and wrong. What’s hard is choosing the wrong that’s more right.”

In a better film, this sort of swift and surgical stroke would have set the tone for the rest of the narrative, with Hubbard having to wean himself off his easy moral absolutism and learn to respect Kraft’s more detached, relativistic worldview, presumably after having first made a catastrophic blunder of some sort by obstinately refusing to do so. The Siege, however, is not that better film. The very scene itself is undercut by having Kraft be drunk and unstable, and then caveating her remarks by saying “ignore me, I’m shitfaced.” And the ensuing movie lets Hubbard totally off the hook on all counts, and continues to punish and humiliate Kraft for the remainder of the movie before finally her off at the end.

The one caveat to all of this is that, if it’s going to exist at all, a part such as Hubbard could only be played by an African-American actor nowadays. To have Kraft be comparably belaboured by a white male would have put the film so beyond the pale as to be unreleasable by a major studio. As it is, a few (male) critics decided that having the ass-headed hero be the descendant of slaves made his cavalier insolence toward the woman some sort of character psychology, rather than unreconstructed misogyny. Six years later one would see this same sort of dynamic at work again with Will Smith’s performance in I, Robot – a film which manages to be even more problematic than this one, but at least offers some interesting sci-fi visuals in recompense. Ultimately, though, the only redeeming feature about The Siege is that it was an ignominious failure at the box office.

Disney Daemonized – Part Two of Two

Disney’s second animated feature, Pinocchio, would lamely attempt to reconfigure Snow White’s Queen positively, in the character of the Blue Fairy. That the experiment was a failure can be gauged by the very different fairy godmothers we would later see in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty – more matronly specimens of dotty grandmothers or eccentric aunts. The similarities between Snow White and Pinocchio, however, end there. Whereas in Snow White, the Queen’s death is obviously just there for form’s sake, the first thing one notices about Pinocchio is how it goes through four sets of quite scary villains, none of whom are punished in the slightest for their deeds. The incomparably-named “J. Worthington Foulfellow,” and his buffoonish assistant Gideon, make some money selling Pinocchio to Stromboli, and then some more selling him again to the Coachman, and that’s the end of it. Stromboli of course loses considerable earning prospects when Pinocchio escapes, but his business will presumably continue successfully enough otherwise. We see the Coachman’s slave trade in donkey-boys have a successful day, although Pleasure Island must represent a pretty considerable overhead. And apart from presumably bruising his snout smashing into the cliff-face, Monstro remains free to terrorize the oceans for years to come.

The world, Pinocchio seems to be saying, is filled with terrors and dangers for little boys, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about them, even if you’re determined to behave well. You’ll probably just get shanghaied or kidnapped anyway, to be sold off to be worked to death and then gruesomely mutilated. This is a message you wouldn’t see Disney spinning in today’s PC-positive-obsessed society, and they probably only keep Pinocchio in release because they’re confident most people won’t see it in these terms. The preferred reading however – about “always let your conscience be your guide” – is so childish as to be impossible to take seriously, particularly in light of how it all really boils down to the bad old ethos of “don’t touch yourself.” The business about “give a little whistle” when you feel your will start to slide essentially means to give your penis a good whack or douse it in cold water. And if, on the other hand, you give yourself over to immorality, then you will be shamefully and visibly marked out when your appendage sprouts into prominent, wooden visibility.

In light of all this, the Pleasure Island sequence is a bit of a red herring, but still interesting inasmuch as we find out that, when loosed from this repressiveness, Pinocchio is actually a pretty resilient party animal. From what we see, it appears that all the other boys have drank, smoked, and brawled themselves into complete exhaustion, but Pinocchio and Lampwick are still up and at it. Lampwick, incidentally, is a new milestone for Disney. In the non-Queen sections of Snow White, and in Pinocchio thus far, all the characters have been basically pantomimes. The thinking was apparently that in animation, one wants to get the maximum interest and screen time out of every movement, and so one sees the dwarfs and Cleo, Figaro, Jiminy, et. al. taking exaggerated amounts of time and effort to get from point A to point B, and having broadly comic difficulties articulating any point of dialogue. Lampwick, however, breaks with all this and becomes the first Disney character to be tersely forthright in a distinctively American idiom. One wonders if Disney had seen Dead End and realized how much further he could go with animation. Lampwick’s joyously vulgar American common sense also serves to highlight the degree to which Disney was working in a very un-American tradition of European folklore and fairy tales. Jiminy Cricket made sense on his own terms hitherto, but no sooner does Lampwick say “you take orders from a beetle?” than we start to wonder why. It shows just how unprecedented Snow White really was that it managed to be so un-self-conscious about its fairy tale European setting, and how it only took one more film for some self-consciousness to set in on Disney's part.

Finally, one of the most famous images from Pinocchio is the scene where he is about to head off for his first day of school, all chipper, upbeat optimism – and to demonstrate the fact visually, he turns his body abound 360º below his neck, without his head moving an inch. For modern viewers, the image will immediately evoke memories of the demonically-possessed Regan in The Exorcist, and perhaps produce instinctive mewling about how things were so much more innocent back then, before all this diabolical perversity we have to live with nowadays. This, I submit, is totally to mistake the line of evolution. What Pinocchio really shows is how much of the daemonic was in Disney at its very first, and how much the infantile “positive/therapeutic/wholesome/reassuring” patina that’s been spread over Disney since has obscured the fact. This disconnect would become even more pronounced with Disney’s next film, Dumbo.

Dumbo is chiefly remarkable as an illustration of child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s notion that all authentic fairy tales are, at heart, horror stories which have been strategically diluted to the point of providing a memorable frisson to very young children. One’s most immediately vivid memory of the film is likely to be that yes, clowns are indeed very scary (see picture at left). Only in an obnoxiously sanitized American circus are they supposed to be funny in a cute and harmless way – in the sort of Old World manifestation Disney offers here, they channel our gallows humour about how gruesome and turbulent life is.

The list of shudder-inducing images accumulates from there: the elephants being used as slave labour to erect the big top in a cruelly driving storm; the way the children are all feral little monsters tormenting Dumbo’s mother; Dumbo’s drunken hallucinations after mistakenly sampling the clown’s moonshine; and so on and so forth. Like Pinocchio, this is another of those films whose reputation as sweet family fare survives only because adult refuse to actually see the film on visceral level, as opposed to simply watching it on a narrative level. Indeed Dumbo is particularly cunning in this regard, as it opens with the most sanctimoniously wholesome business possible: all the cute little baby animals being immaculately dropped down before their mommies by the storks. Surely a film which has begun on this note can’t go on to contain anything nightmarish?

Stripped down to its most basic level, the conclusion of Dumbo is actually quite uplifting in its horror-story way. Dumbo’s eventual vindication and acceptance comes not because his supposed monstrosity has somehow been healed (like Pinocchio’s woodenness), or because he’s somehow redeemed himself in the eyes of the community by performing some great deed, but because he finally embraces the monstrosity of his huge ears, and learns to fully draw upon their power. The ensuing spectacle simply overawes people, and earns him fame and fortune as a world-beating freak, where he had only been shunned and abused as a marginal freak. This is a truly daemonic and amoral universe, so unlike the facilely therapeutic messages that the corporatized Disney of later years would churn out. To get some contemporary equivalent, you’d have to rewrite Tangled to have Rapunzel set herself up as a tyrant queen, and use her magic hair to deal out immortality in exchange for fealty.

For anybody harboring lingering illusions about Disney’s old “innocence” – of the sort that would lead them to take Dumbo’s storks seriously – Bambi provides an open and shut case that they are deluding themselves. It is quite simply one of, if not the most, sensual films ever produced by Hollywood in the era of the Production Code. All the slinkiness and thinly-veiled aura of sex that one sees in The Lion King’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” sequence can be traced back to Bambi, which demonstrates again the way that people view these older Disney films through a different set of critical eyes. They are “historical classics” – with all the irrelevance and lack of visceral immediacy which that fusty phrase implies – rather than living texts to which you react the same way you would a newly-released film. Thus, when one sees a rival buck backing Faline behind a hedge, and Bambi bounding in to see him off, and the two of them fighting fiercely, and Bambi and Faline then sleekly promenading through the forest, and then vanishing into a glen, and one cut later lying asleep beside each other on a bed of soft grass, one knows it doesn’t mean anything – it’s simply an arbitrary accumulation of shots – because this is a “historical classic,” by Disney no less.

The emphasis on the reproductive function of sex is strikingly frank in Bambi, and would be reproduced absolutely verbatim in The Lion King fifty-two years later. The film opens with the birth of the male protagonist, with the father looking so proud and the mother so sensate and physical that one knows there were no storks involved here. Likewise, the film ends with the male protagonist having reached sexual maturity himself, having switched roles from newborn to father, and now witnessing the birth of his own offspring. In-between-times, thus, the narrative function of the rivalry-and-courtship sequence becomes clear – simply to propagate the species by doing what their affection-instincts tell them to. This is a remarkably earthy tone to strike, naturalizing the physical side of sex at the complete expense of any “higher” spiritualizations of love, and getting right to one of Christianity’s perpetual problems – the way that Nature constantly makes nonsense of the notion of original sin. Reading As You Like It, my favourite part was when in Act III, Scene 2, Touchstone tells the shepherd Corin that he is surely damned because he brings “the ewes and the rams together,” and essentially gets his living as a pimp through “the copulation of cattle.” This is Shakespeare posing an impishly devious paradox for his religious audience, since Touchstone seems to have logic on his side, but basic common sense tells us that what he’s saying is ridiculous. Seeing animals go at right out in the open with no embarrassment can presumably be an awkward experience even for people who may think of themselves as open-minded and liberated. We still have the human traits of self-consciousness and foresight, and religion has long been expert at exploiting those to make us feel uncomfortable about our bodies and sex. 

With Bambi, however, Walt Disney is using his new medium of realist feature animation to put us into a completely different mindset, where the mating urge is totally naturalized – all just part of the circle of life. This makes the Christian Right’s attempt to treat the old Disney films as artefacts of a sort of pre-lapsarian innocence – as opposed to the more cynically knowing tone that came to characterize the company after Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Frank Wells took over – particularly idiotic. It is precisely the ultra-knowingness of the Eisners and Katzenbergs of the world that prevented The Lion King from achieving Bambi's graceful lack of self-consciousness in this regard. Sure the famous “look” from Nala is totally unmistakable, but it comes at the price of any more sustained narrative. Bambi’s mature courtship of Faline stands in opposition to his aversion towards her as a fawn. In a scene that rings agonizingly true for any male who remembers their childhood, we see how the two are first introduced by their mothers, who take a sort of a sort of passively sadistic delight in Bambi’s fumbling uncertainties in the face of a girl. He only finds his confidence at the sight of a troop of virile young stags bounding into the meadow, which immediately makes him want to show off his masculinity in the most crudely boyish way – challenging Faline to fight. The two have nothing in common, and Bambi despises being outmatched three-to-one. This scene makes me suspect that the famously heartbreaking moment of Bambi’s mother’s death has a much more vengeful dimension to it that is generally appreciated. Once it has happened, however, we next see Bambi at the age of sexual maturity, and all uncertainty about Faline’s purpose has vanished. The courtship begins with no pretence at developing her as a character.

The Lion King can do none of this. The childhood uncertainty has been rewritten to make Simba and Nala best friends, in a childishly spunky way, so that their eventual mating is less brazenly biological. Likewise, the birth of their cub at the end comes only after the entire stretch of the third act has blunted the cause/effect relation to the courtship sequence. Furthermore, the totally patriarchal tone of Bambi’s sexual economy would no longer wash by the 1990s, so some effort had to be expended on making Nala into a real character, however vaguely defined. Her best moment is her introduction, where she has the most vividly realistic and animalistic moment of any character in the film, chasing down Pumbaa with a ferocious hunting face devoid of the prettified anthropomorphism that would return only moments later.

This ability to immerse oneself in the sensual, physical aspect of nature, with no moralizing denial, existed more fully in Disney’s earliest feature films than its resurgent ones of recent decades. It would reach its absolute zenith in the one film I have neglected from these two posts, simply because I can’t do it justice: the work of genius that was Fantasia. In the “Rite of Spring” sequence, unlike The Lion King, the hunt is allowed to succeed, and the likable duffer of a stegosaurus gets mauled and killed by the tyrannosaurus. It’s an astonishing instance of the rhythm and implications of art overriding facile concerns of what’s appropriate to show children, and the contrast with Disney’s 2000 feature Dinosaur shows just how far from that peak of maturity things have slid.