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Page 183

II

Shakespeare’s presence in The Lion King and The Little Mermaid provides Disney with cultural capital that puts its entertainment products in a position to win the approval of critics—recently, even Broadway critics—and thus the tickets of upper-middle-class, educated parents who bring their children to the theater and must sit through the presentation. Approval by the affluent also brings good public relations and political influence for the company. Hence, Disney has contributed to the revival of New York City’s 42nd Street with its stage production of The Lion King and with the renovation of a theater in which to perform it. Michael Eisner has also allied the company with the architectural vanguard, having gained much publicity for appointing Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Charles Moore, and Helmut Jahn to major assignments for the corporation. All of these activities have brought extensive and free, favorable press coverage.

Particularly in The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, Shakespeare also strengthens Disney’s bottom line less directly. Shakespeare’s presence in these two films helps to make Disney taste and thus, a Disney view of human development, become the standards by which other entertainment products are measured. For Disney, Shakespeare authorizes essentialist, puritan models of development that tie growth to the acquisition of discipline and the taming of rebellious, simplistically defined Oedipal impulses. The heroic young people in Disney’s films overcome threatening obstacles to supplant parental power with their own. But implicitly in The Lion King and explicitly in The Little Mermaid, only discipline, culture, and the subduing of natural pleasures can bring the acquisition of either things or power.

In struggling to organize some of the most private elements of experience, both films regulate desire and pleasure. As Jean Baudrillard fears, consumption becomes an organized extension of production (1988:43). It is not just that audiences come to desire Disney products; it is that they are alienated from the experience of liberating pleasures, of pleasures not shaped by the mechanistic requirements of capital formation. Both films thus use Shakespeare to authorize their arguments, to tame their characters, and in the process, to standardize audiences’ consumption of their products.

Disney’s Little Mermaid preserves, even intensifies, the kind of Puritan presentation of female maturation that Andersen imposed on his sources for a Calvinist audience (Zipes 1983:71–94). The two

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