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Page 193 “other” whose evil is not essential, like Ursula’s, but culturally constructed. It is not surprising that during the same years in which Shakespeare scholars found “good” figures in The Tempest increasingly suspect—the Reagan—Bush 1980s—Disney produced a film reifying their sunny natures and demonizing their opponents. The Little Mermaid therefore participates in a larger cultural project to reclaim Shakespearean themes—even Shakespeare himself—for the conservative structure of the multinational marketplace. The general effects of animated appropriation on Shakespearean reception are structurally conservative because viewers principally understand the borrowings by relying on general, familiar patterns of plots and characters. Structurally conservative appropriation is the end to which Disney films put both Frye’s model for Shakespearean structure and psychoanalytic patterns of development. However animators may be using Shakespeare, the typical viewer brings to the theater popular paraphrases that circulate through many sectors of culture. As evidenced by Disney’s other quotations of Shakespeare (e.g., Iago as a bird in Aladdin, and isolated lines), popular culture focuses more on character than other elements. (Everyone knew what it meant to call Mario Cuomo “Hamlet on the Hudson,” but audiences have to be told about the sources of movie plots such as Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight.) This fact pushes appropriations of Shakespeare toward the personal, and toward psychological allegory. Disney’s appropriation of Shakespeare thus promotes a corporate agenda that, with regard to cultural difference, coincides with modernist projects. It borrows Shakespeare to authorize essentialist models of the heroic self, to discipline bodies and the transgressive tendencies they represent, and to seem apolitical by bringing together sources rooted in temporally and geographically disparate cultures. Although its size, brand recognition, and market penetration magnify Disney’s visibility, the conflation between corporate and modernist agenda is inevitable within our late capitalist environment, which is connected by an interlocking system of mass communications, like the one Leo Bogart (1995) describes. This environment, constantly reshaping and reshaped by rapid shifts in the international distribution of wealth and technology, encourages renegotiations of the distinction between elite and haut-bourgeois culture as different groups claim their worth. Consumers buy what they know, but they also want standards. Since appropriation both reifies and conservatively affirms familiar interpretations or |
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