April 10, 2007	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 21, 1428

LONDON: In 1928, soon after the birth of synchronised sound, word reached senior MGM employees that there was a mouse in their midst. Naturally, they asked to screen it. Victor Fleming, who went on to direct The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, was ecstatic when he saw it. Frances Marion, a screenwriter who was one of the few powerful women in Hollywood, loved it so much she dragged Louis B Mayer out of his office and into the projection room. Mayer, however, howled in horror. Pregnant women went to see MGM movies, he cried. Didn’t they know women were afraid of mice? Then he stormed out, slamming the door in the face of a scruffy young man whose creation he’d dismissed: Walt Disney.

Thanks to Frank Capra, who recommended the new cartoon to his boss at Columbia Studios, Mickey Mouse was brought into the world soon afterwards. He became an instant hero, receiving 30,000 fan letters in a single three-week period and attaining the status, by one reckoning, of ‘most popular motion picture star’. Chaplin, on whom he was partly modelled, requested that Mickey Mouse be played before his films; Eisenstein was ‘frightened’ by the cartoons’ perfection; Roosevelt insisted that a Mickey Mouse cartoon be kept in the White House at all times; EM Forster saw in him ‘a scandalous element which I find most restful’.

In his astonishingly thorough, nimbly narrated biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, Neal Gabler argues that Mickey Mouse was a reflection of Walt Disney himself — childlike, indefatigable, pathologically optimistic. Disney’s animators based Mickey’s gestures on Disney’s, his voice was performed by Disney. The man and the character existed in symbiosis: ‘I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known,’ Disney proclaimed; his wife referred to herself as a ‘mouse widow’. Both Walt and Mickey were ‘escape artists’, as Gabler puts it, and both became symbols of their time.

Gabler specialises in such figures. His previous books — one on the movie moguls, another about the ways in which the forces of entertainment have transformed reality, and a stunning biography of journalist Walter Winchell — document the lives of men who each became the linchpin in an aspect of the 20th century. If Winchell’s world was about information and power, Disney’s is about fantasy and power. Or, rather, it’s the world of a man who was able to make his compulsion to control look as though he was simply indulging in fantasy. ‘He defined the terms of wish-fulfilment,’ Gabler argues and, in retrospect, ‘had not been so much a master of fun or irreverence or innocence or even wholesomeness. He had been a master of order’.

At the Disney Studios, realism quickly took hold. Where cartoon characters had previously bounced back from any incident, now gravity was introduced. Their vacant, rubberised features were exchanged for emotion and personality. A fine-art professor was put on the payroll for life-drawing classes; animators were sent to acting school; slow-motion photographs were specially commissioned. The animators were working towards, in Disney’s ingenious expression, ‘the plausible impossible’. To this end, Mickey Mouse was gradually transformed from an anarchic, swashbuckling icon to a neat, well-behaved little boy.

That in itself is a melancholy sort of fairy tale, and if Disney’s trajectory didn’t mirror Mickey’s exactly (Disney certainly didn’t get any more polite in his old age), its loss of spontaneity and unbending embrace of conservatism found a certain echo in it. Rumoured to be an anti-semite, Disney became undisguisedly reactionary after a major strike at his studio in 1941. (Gabler expertly rejects the anti-semitism charge, while acknowledging that Disney took Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film-maker, on a tour of the studio one month after Kristallnacht.)The strike was a long time coming. Disney refused to give individual animators credit; he fired one just for asking whether it was time for lunch. In October 1947, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, incorrectly targeting the League of Women Voters as communists who had boycotted him.

In the early 50s, he put all his energy into building Disneyland, a universe of nostalgia rendered material, scaled to the proportions of childhood.

After he died in December 1966, a rumour circulated that Disney had been cryogenically frozen, so that he could rest, like Sleeping Beauty, and wake up in 1975. The rumour was untrue, but it persisted for a good while and revealed, in Gabler’s phrase, ‘a public unwillingness to let go of him, even to the point of mythologising him as an immortal who could not be felled by natural forces’. What the gossips didn’t know then was that Disney didn’t have to be immortal, or even alive, to maintain his hold. For better or for worse, ‘this Disney thing’, as he called it, seems destined to go on regardless. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service