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10 Disney cites Shakespeare: The limits of appropriation
RICHARD FINKELSTEIN
I
By 1938, Walt Disney had received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and the University of Southern California for his innovations in animation technology and aesthetics, what one citation called his “one touch of nature [that] makes the whole world kin.”1 Until the 1940s, critical reception of Disney’s work saw him as a great reconciler—joining art and commerce, high and low art, easily acceptable fare and innovative work (Smoodin 1993:98–101 and passim). During subsequent decades, however, the praise changed to disdain and outright hostility. Condescension, especially toward Disney’s minor family-values films of the 1950s, became antagonism toward the political and cultural implications of his work. Because of its penetration into several converging media markets, Walt Disney Corporation is now used to exemplify theories, originating with the Frankfurt School, about the increasing power of commercial culture and the subsequent impoverishment of citizens.2 Instead of celebrating Disney for creating a world family, critics excoriate him as a patriarchal imperialist (Dorfman and Mattelart 1975), and for creating a family in which no one participates. Others charge that his films commodify memory by substituting orchestrated fictions, simulacra, for a history that he helped to fracture (Fjellman 1992: 32, 57; Giroux 1994:29–31; Project on Disney 1995:65).
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