In this section: Intro Vaudeville and Music Hall The First Stars The Challenge of the Air The Picture Palace |
4 Mickey Mouse and Disneyland
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In the story of Mickey Mouse reality is denied and overcome in still another variation of the castration theme. Mickey's solution is different and most original.
Mickey Mouse symbolizes the small, invincible, invulnerable, utterly victorious and triumphant, old and omnipotent child. He follows blindly, persistently, and trustingly the pleasure principle. Like Ferdinand, he enjoys no love affairs, and his body would be ill-adapted to such activities. With a man's voice, he would embarrass us; with the eunuch's voice, he is exceedingly funny and lovable. His smallness enables him to do the forbidden things we wished to do as children but were not allowed to. We still want to do them, and Mickey Mouse gives us a chance to do them vicariously by identification, without guilt, and at reduced rates. Where we stopped in fear, where we knew the dreadful consequences, Mickey Mouse continues. Mickey succeeds neither by Ferdinand's passivity nor by Superman's dream of glory, but because of his small body's magical omnipotence.
The Mickey Mouse films are the unfolding of a mechanized fairy tale. Like a happy child, Mickey is not intimidated by knowledge and experience. Reality has no power over him. His superiority guarantees him more than oldfashioned invulnerability and immortality. In an offhand way he also conquers the most powerful enemy mankind has today: the machine. With the help of magical tricks he forces the machine into submission to his almighty will. He humanizes all machines and makes them live; and he mechanizes all living beings, just as he himself seems to be a mechanized toy. His wish turns into absolute law.
The ancient Greeks and Romans did not know how to deal with the danger implied in the machine. They avoided the dilemma by inhibiting their technical skill. The ancients possessed enough scientific knowledge to have invented almost all modern machines, but they were too narcissistic to tolerate the replacement of body functions by dead machines. God created man, but not machines; therefore the man of antiquity had his eyes on man, not on machines. He despised them as unlike God, as unholy.
The Hellenic man preferred to be served by the living extension of his body in the form of slaves. He refused to use his vast technical knowledge to create a mechanical extension of his body. To improve and extend the range of his hearing, he did not invent the telephone but used the ears of his slaves. He used the machine in the theater in the form of the deus ex machina, and later, slowly and sparingly, he used machines in the technique of war.
Mickey Mouse shows us how to reduce the machine to the role of a servant instead of a god. He symbolizes a playful inversion of the machine age. As the child endows his animal friends with human features, so Mickey Mouse humanizes the machine and thus conquers it. In more romantic times, love conquered all. In the machine age, Mickey Mouse -- the mechanized symbol of the little and victorious phallus -- enjoys victory over everything. He continues where his pint-sized ancestors like Rumplestiltskin and Tom Thumb became outmoded. Mickey is the key to the gate of wisdom. He is the true deus ex machina of antiquity transposed into our times. Mickey Mouse fights the cruel machine and wins hands down. There is only victory, no more tragedy -- and no more reality, either.
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