The Cheerful Solipsist
Walt Disney and his century.
by Bill McKibben
Mr. McKibben reviews Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler (Knopf, 2006, 816 pp., $35)
Felix the cat, reigning champion of the cartoons, was knocked flat by noisy
Mickey, who soon captured the world. In the early years of the Depression he was
regarded as one of the top movie stars across America and Europe—an Austrian
critic moaned that he was more popular than Mozart. Soon there were hundreds of
Mickey Mouse Clubs in theaters across America—according to one paper, they had
more members than the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts combined. And why? The
professors weighed in, of course—he was an idealistic altruist, or a counterweight to the rise of totalitarianism, or a "representative of a jittery new machine age." Gabler argues strenuously, though, that Mickey was mostly a projection of Walt himself—"his intrepid optimism, his pluck, his naïveté that often got him into trouble and his determination that usually got him out of it, even his self-regard, branded him as Walt's alter ego." Whatever else we might say about him, Gabler concludes, "Mickey Mouse is in thrall to his abilities of imaginative transformation. Whether he is turning an auto into an airplane or a cow into a xylophone, Mickey … like Walt Disney himself, is always in the process of re-imagining reality… . He makes the world his. In the end, Mickey Mouse was the eternal promise of cheerful solipsism."
Solipsism, of course, no matter how cheerful, is the opposite of the community spirit that so enchanted Disney in his boyhood idyll. The two themes—Horatio Alger
individualist pluck versus open-hearted camaraderie—competed for his soul, but
over time the first almost always won out. The heart of Gabler's book recounts
Disney's achievements in his greatest decade, the 1930s, and especially the story of the relentless, feverish dedication with which his team made Snow White, perhaps his greatest triumph, and Fantasia, perhaps his most unusual success. The movies—from Bambi to Dumbo—are true masterpieces, both of art and spirit. And yet they tend, as Gabler says, toward a pattern: "the Disney theme of embracing maturity and responsibility and taking control of one's own destiny, even at the risk of being exiled from one's safe and satisfying childhood oasis." Autobiography made art.
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