(Looking for the Open Thread? Go here).
You would think, being that I am a social liberal, a feminist, a Jew, and an upper-middle-class suburban mother, that you might be able to draw a pretty crunchy-granola circle around me and fairly easily determine what I will and will not allow in my house. And in many cases, you would probably be right.
But I have a confession to make:
I don’t hate everything that I’m supposed to.
My affection for Disney has already made itself known, and right there, I’m already in trouble. “But the princesses!” I hear my feminist sisters crying. “And the culturally insensitive movie representations!” I hear from my Mid East crowd. “Not to mention fucking Epcot!” I hear from nearly every wanna-be international intellectual I have ever met.
But the princesses are not one-dimensional; they reflect a Western reality with which your children will have to grapple whether you want them to or not; the stories often have genuinely good messages or solid entertainment value — and if you actually talk with your kids, hey presto! You can use the more problematic aspects in the Disney oeuvre as teaching tools.
And stop with Aladdin all ready. You don’t have to like every single character in every single made-up story for that story to be a net good. And Epcot? God in heaven people! The folks who visit Epcot know they’re not really in Morocco! (Or Canada). And most of them will never have the money to go to the real place — but maybe their curiosity will be piqued (really? Canadians don’t all look like Celine Dion?) and they will choose to study up on the subject!
Oy, I get so sick of people demanding that every single moment of our entertainment reflect only that which we want to see in the world!
Which brings me to another couple of things I don’t hate (also part of Disney World Domination, Corp., now that I think of it): the High School Musical movies (be they # 1, 2, or 3), and Disney television’s Witches of Waverly Place.
Neither is likely to make a permanent entry into our cultural canon. Both have moments of annoyingly stereotypical assumptions about boys and girls and what matters to each respective group of humanity. The former has some songs that I would really rather not have to hear again.
But both are also fun and occasionally funny. Both also undermine a good number of stereotypes, and do so in ways that are neither dogmatic nor cloying. Both feature decent acting more often than not. And the former boasts a small handful of really good pop and/or big musical numbers that I’m not going to mind hearing for the rest of my daughter’s childhood.
It matters that in High School Musical, Troy chooses to follow both of his dreams as far as they’ll take him, and follows his girl, rather than her following him, or either of them denying their true passions. It matters that he’s white and she’s Latino. It matters that a secondary story line has an African American basketball player confess that he loves to bake — and that he and a white girl become a couple. I may never forget the pleasant shock of seeing the Barbie version of that black basketball player and that white girl side by side in the same box (they’re a couple! Of course they’re not sold separately!), combined with the even sweeter shock of knowing that my daughter will never be shocked by such a thing (though I did take the time to bring our shopping trip to a screaming halt so that I could tell her that when I was a kid, you would never have seen such a thing — ever. Because you wouldn’t have. I’m sure she appreciated the lecture).
It also matters that in Witches of Waverly Place, the goof-off, gets-in-trouble-all-the-time-but-ultimately-comes-through-for-the-family kid is the girl. It matters that her brother is the goody-two-shoes, the one who couldn’t be cool if his life depended on it — and the one who, ultimately, she can always count on. It matters that the parents appear to genuinely enjoy and respect each other, and that they, too are an intercultural family (nonwizard-wizard, but perhaps more importantly, white-Latino). It matters that a recent story arc involved Asian kids, the brother an even better student and goody-ier-two-shoes than the main boy character, and the sister an even worse student and bigger goof-off than the main girl character. Because a) Oh, hey! Asians aren’t invisible! and b) some of them are lousy students!
Is any of this enough? No. I would in particular be a lot happier if a broader spectrum of human (particularly female) body types were represented in Disney products and generally in Hollywood. (Why can’t the not-stick-thin girls ever find love? Or, come to that: the gay boy? [Say what you like, HSM's Ryan is as gay as Ken Mehlman]).
Nothing will ever be enough, frankly. We are going to be fighting these kinds of social battles, and people are going to be trying to make money on the back of our social battles, until the Kingdom comes. And I don’t believe that the Kingdom will ever come. So.
But I grow weary of having to hate everything that isn’t perfect, of having to pick apart everything that isn’t fully evolved, of having to apologize, if only to some stupid high-brow portion of my Super Ego, for letting my kids enjoy simple, mass-production pleasures. Not to mention occasionally getting a kick out of them myself.
I also don’t hate the onslaught of Christmas (TM) every November, Jew though I may be. So sue me.
And anyway, my 11 year old has already read Gilgamesh and Beowulf, and my 7 year old knows who Harvey Milk is. So back off!
Kylopod
/ August 27, 2010“But the princesses!” I hear my feminist sisters crying. “And the culturally insensitive movie representations!” I hear from my Mid East crowd. “Not to mention fucking Epcot!” I hear from nearly every wanna-be international intellectual I have ever met.
Apparently, portions of the left can be just as joyless as the Southern Baptist Convention.
Lev
/ August 27, 2010I enjoyed this, even if my tastes are a bit different than yours. Which figures. The sentiment is right, though.
I guess it’s amplified on the internet, but I don’t much care for this thing where you have to defend yourself for liking things. The unending authoritarian cult of cool. I have strong opinions on a lot of cultural phenomena but it doesn’t actually make me angry that someone likes, I don’t know, Katy Perry or Ke$ha, who are artists I really don’t care for. I definitely think there’s better stuff out there, and I sort of wish people would try to find something that hits them on a deeper level, but really I don’t care that much. Well, unless I’m forced to listen to it, but I think that’s understandable. Then it’s not just about tolerance. My general stance is, I might not care for it, but if you like it, more power to you. I’ve got other things to worry about.
In any event, my experience has been that people who hate everything are just trying to draw attention away from the fact that nothing really touches them. It’s basically cynicism, which is incompatible with happiness and joy. There’s enough stuff I love out there that I don’t need to spend time on the things that I don’t, unless it’s for the purpose of amusing myself or others.
anibundel
/ August 27, 2010I forgive you Princesses, if you forgive me Project Runway
I forgive you HSM, if you forgive me Glee
I forgive you Wizards of Waverly, if you American Idol
Together we can be two working towards healing the internet denigration of the things we love.
Rosa
/ August 27, 2010I don’t know, i was pretty agnostic on Disney til I had a kid.
And now I know how many kids are growing up with only Disney for media. Disney books, Disney movies, Disney cartoons. It’s really scary.
My son has cousins who watch a Disney movie EVERY SINGLE DAY. Sometimes two. Princess movies in a mix with other stuff is fine. A steady diet of them can’t be good for you.
BenjaminTheAss
/ August 28, 2010You should check out Tim Brayton’s retrospective of the entire Disney animated canon, written last year, one a day, in the lead-up to The Princess and the Frog. It actually made me re-watch some of them for the first time since childhood.
I know nothing of High School Musical, except that “Bet On It” is comically, cosmically, awful, and that it birthed the obnoxious Zac Effron into the public consciousness.
As far as the diversity angle goes, I think one of the unsung heroes of introducing (white) kids to “people who don’t look like them” is Nickelodeon. Back when I was growing up, a whole bunch of their shows (All That, My Brother and Me, Keenan and Kel) had black or mixed-race casts, and they never even had to make a big deal of it. They just did it. Though I do wonder of the significance of naming the only black family on Rugrats after Stokely Carmichael.
dmf
/ August 29, 2010as long as they leave your house having read to kill a mockingbird, on a more serious note the much ado about princesses and all is pretty silly what is not so harmless are these terrible teenybopper tv soapoperas that i think are from disney that my 11y/o niece is infatuated with, now i know this is all about parenting (don’t get me up on that soapbox) but she uses whitener toothpaste and wore a hairpiece to her first day of school this year, makes me sad.
Pearl of the World
/ August 29, 2010Off-topic, but I’m not on twitter so this is the next best way to ask you a question: the other day at the bookstore I sat down with a copy of The Atlantic magazine and read an article by Jeffrey Goldberg about how war with Iran was a foregone conclusion and that if America did not back Israel in this, the Arab states would ally themselves with Iran out of self-preservation. The article pissed me off because the author’s voice came across as presumptuous, as if war were some grand, romantic struggle that was necessary and its consequences excusable. Nevermind that the US is bogged down with two wars already. I was wondering if you had read it, or if you had an opinion on it.
emilylhauser
/ August 29, 2010Hey Pearl! I always forget how it is that we know of each other, but I’m glad to see you here! I don’t generally comment on my posts (it’s an effort to avoid fights, frankly), but I do have an Open Thread going right now. I’ll copy and paste your question into that thread and chat with you there — but not until tomorrow. My computer has died and I’m borrowing my husband’s machine just to play catch up for the evening! Check back on Monday…. And cross your fingers, please. I may need a lot of luck w/ my computer!
SWNC
/ August 30, 2010I grow weary of having to hate everything that isn’t perfect, of having to pick apart everything that isn’t fully evolved. Right on. I was reading somewhere about politics as “total lifestyle choice” and how flipping annoying that is–the idea that your politics define not only who you vote for, but what entertainment you like, etc. I tell you what I unashamedly love, love, love– old musicals. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is one of my particular favorites, even though its underlying story is fairly appalling, I suppose. But the dancing at the barn-raising! And Howard Keel singing! I just love it and I don’t care.