Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  Out from the top drawer comes Stimson’s checkbook. The secretary fills in the payee and signs it. He pauses at the amount, giving Disney a significant look: what do you need? Disney looks him back, stating a figure higher than he expects to get, a staggering budget by 1942 standards. If Stimson turns down the number, he’ll be softer on the next point. But Stimson fills in the figure without flinching and says, “I assume that’s just a first installment.” Disney begins to get an inkling of the real power lurking underneath the currently popular contradiction in terms, Arsenal of Democracy.

  Stimson hands over the check and tells Disney to make something for all of us, something that will last. He turns his back on Walt and goes to his window, looking out on the Lincoln Memorial. A sweep of his hand indicates the panorama of classical revival buildings. But these marbles have always made Disney nervous, as if one look in the other direction would reveal an enormous pillared stadium filled with Vienna Choir boys. He demurs, saying that his film must be about the median fellow, the American’s American, the butcher, baker, fruit-and-vegetable vendor, who masterminds history without even knowing it: You are the war.

  Stimson nods his head abstractedly. “Perhaps. But no jingoism. Film it for the future, so that a national switch in enemies will make no difference.” Disney is taken aback. Stimson sees the dismay and patiently delivers political-science lecture number one: the ins and outs of adversarial relations. “Don’t be too concerned with this little scrap we’re having with the Germans. Or even the Japanese, for that matter. They are only today’s enemies. This too will pass. The director of Mission to Moscow, for instance, as blamelessly patriotic as he is now, will find himself embarrassed in a few years.”

  Walt gets a quick glimpse of the divvied-up postwar world. He asks Stimson point-blank if it’s the Russians, our allies, that we’re really after. The secretary of war just grins sadly and shakes his head no. Disney has seen that grin before. He places it with a rush: I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down. What only now occurs to the animator of The Führer’s Face is that the civilized world stands on the threshold of liberty, the cutting edge of the age of universal justification in the name of necessity. And he cannot believe what he sees over that threshold.

  Stimson stares out over the memorial parkway, exercising the statesman’s prerogative of holding conversations with his back turned. He muses about the New York World’s Fair of ’39, waxing nostalgic, wishing it were still possible for Disney to retrieve and film another world like that one. He speaks of Flushing Meadow as if it took place three centuries and not three years ago. The man who got his start busting trusts for Teddy Roosevelt stands gazing upon a new and unfamiliar landscape. He watches the old one roll down the Potomac out to the ocean. He falls silent. “History,” Secretary Stimson finally says, turning to Disney, “is servitude.” He implies that this year’s alignment—the Japs and Germans as the incarnation of evil, China and Russia as the heroes—is irrelevant, a deliberate and misleading bill of goods come the inevitable 180-degree reversal just a few years down the pike. What will the war films of thirty years hence look like, when half our market is in Germany and Japan? “Make something that will last,” the secretary reiterates.

  Stimson gazes out on a world where it has become irrelevant whether or not detachments of Japs on Pacific islands really knock out American teeth for their gold inlays or play ringtoss with brains and bayonets. Irrelevant who, exactly, pulls the severed tendons of a dissected Jew’s hand, making it wave hello for the recording scientific camera. A subterranean current of darkness has made its way to the surface of daily life and can no longer be pushed back down. He describes, wordlessly, how national states must now take up the game, learn it, formalize it with power politics and covert operations. We have given birth to the world of the permanent threat.

  This much Disney understands the Cabinet man to say. But he cannot tell if Stimson, the man who more than anyone else has his finger on the present’s pulse, implies that the battle is already lost, or if he is pleading with Disney, the Mouse, and the power of enchantment as if they were the world’s last chance. He does know, however, that this ambivalence will make the secretary no more agreeable to his next request. For Disney has come here with much more than a blank check in mind.

  “Mr. Secretary,” he interrupts the other’s reverie. “For this project, I’ll need a staff.” He tells Stimson how his own studio is booked solid with government work for the next three years. No problem, says the other. Hire what you need; the bankroll is here. Disney explains the difficulty. He needs sets, costumes, actors, artists, writers, construction engineers, technicians. For a project this size, Disney says he’ll need ten thousand bodies.

  It’s Stimson’s turn to be taken aback. “Where can we find those numbers in wartime?” Walt glides over to the colored maps on Stimson’s desk. He finds North America, locates the Southwest. He puts his finger down on a small town that was not on the map before February of this year.

  The implication sinks in. Stimson raises his head and looks at Disney, comprehending, sympathetic. But across his face is the grisly certitude that there is no countering the enemy’s concentration camps without camps of our own. The only answer to runaway fire is to raise the risk of irreversible conflagration. “I’m sorry, Walt. We can’t do that. Even for you.” We must have the courage of our convicts if we want to win.

  Disney wastes no time arguing the ethics of the point. Instead, he smiles like a man about to pull a larger-than-life rodent out of his hat. He informs Stimson that if he can’t get the ten thousand bodies out, he will publicly demand to be arrested. Stimson suddenly recalls the well-known but hitherto conveniently overlooked fact that Walt Disney’s grandfather was the offspring of a geisha girl and a midshipman on Matthew Perry’s ship Susquehanna. Disney is, in short, an American of Japanese Ancestry living in that sensitive national security area, Hollywood. The Cabinet minister and his administration are handcuffed by their own pronouncement. They cannot incarcerate the man who brought another world to the screen, a world in every way superior to our own. The public would not abide it; they would throw the war. But the law is the law. If Disney holds a press conference and the Feds make an exception by not taking him into custody, the whole infrastructure of the roundup will crumble into embarrassing and indefensible double standards. The situation is what is known in political science as a hot potato.

  Stimson is trapped into meeting Disney’s terms. He agrees to release, gradually and without press, ten thousand inmates into Disney’s private custody. They will be issued special exemptions reserved for sensitive projects. Work papers. Walking papers. Stimson insists that Disney must not shoot the project anywhere on the Pacific rim. They must be kept out of urban areas, under parole, inland, as hidden as possible.

  Walt has anticipated that, already selecting a secret tract deep in the interior for the filming. For practical as well as emblematic reasons, he plans the shoot for the weighted center of the nation’s population, equidistant from every average you he will eulogize. That, by 1942 calculations, puts the set not far from the town of Disney’s birth, hidden in covert and invisible fields of corn.

  The interview finishes. Disney takes Stimson’s hand, strides from the office, and reboards the DC-3. He flies from Washington straight to that new jail out near Bonneville Flats, Utah, where his two employees are held. Walt scrambles down the improvised exit ramp onto the desert runway, flashing his startled welcoming committee his disarming trademark grin. He finds Tom Ishi and Ralph Sato, his fellow nisei, who greet him courteously but listlessly. He is astonished at their transformation. Well fed, well clothed, well treated, his friends are nevertheless little more than walking broken spirits, a condition familiar in prisoners of war.

  Walt takes a guided tour of the camp, ending up at the bunkhouse Sato and Ishi share with five other captives—two businessmen, a lawyer, an engineer, and a junior-college president, Americans who have fallen through the wartime
cracks and are lost. He huddles his seven fellow passengers together in the bunkhouse and presents them with a what if: suppose they could prove to their wardens that they are a national resource and not a liability. Suppose that even those of enemy extract can prove to be as good Americans as the next duck. He eases them humanely into the escape plan that will spring them all from jail. But not too abruptly, or their hearts might ossify.

  Slowly Disney unfolds it to them: they can enjoy special exemption, walk away from this place, but only if they agree to partake in a massive escapist and propaganda project on a scale larger than anyone has ever dreamed possible. The film must do more than merely prove the patriotism of the AJAns who put it together. It must reveal the spirit of the nation itself, contribute to the common defense, promote the general welfare. Every shot, camera angle, and inked image must celebrate the American, showing in an immediate, visceral, and irrefutable way why he and nobody else is destined to win this one. If, calling on both real and imagined pictures, they can tell a story that convinces enough people of the inevitable victory, then the inevitable will follow.

  The vote in the bunkhouse is unanimous, Jeanette Rankin’s theory of democracies notwithstanding. Anything, even conscription into working on the most shamelessly naïve and flag-waving cartoon imaginable, is better than spending another night of unearned humiliation. They ratify their allegiance to the project by taking the nicknames Dopey, Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Doc, Doc II, and Doc III, because none of them, including Walt, can for the life of him remember all of those other dwarves’ names.

  Over the next weeks, Disney demonstrates his genius for administration. He and the dwarves scour the one hundred thousand prisoners and assemble a crew possessing extraordinary and varied creative skills. Countless brainstorming sessions later, the newly formed nisei corporation has in place all the logistics for the transfer of these ten thousand to the planned midwestern location. With an unlimited budget, the Acquisitions Committee buys a vast maw of farmland at wartime prices. They purchase the ideal spot, a historical emptiness nestled in an impossible expanse of cornfields: the birthplace of barbed wire.

  Advance construction crews move out, appropriating an old barbed-wire magnate’s mansion for use as HQ. They construct living quarters, dining hall, even a small auditorium for screenings and meetings. In the first week of December 1942, they stage the groundbreaking. A bank of documentary cameras catch the moment when Disney paces out the area by foot. The film is developed and sent to Washington. Then the Steering Committee freezes all further construction until they have a better sense of what they’re doing.

  For truth is, neither Disney nor his associates Ishi and Sato nor the other five dwarves nor any of the ten thousand extended support personnel, only a handful of whom have ever worked on a movie shoot before, has any real film script in mind. The project has been from the beginning nothing more than airy nothingness with an urgent motive. Disney, from the day he was caught reading Rilke into his recorder, has decided that he would first free as many compatriots as possible, and then figure out the specifics of freeing the wider audience of millions. He has appropriated a considerable government sum to make something only marginally more planned than home movies.

  Inside the enclave, however, the atmosphere is one of joyful carnival. A plaster cast of Mickey rises larger than life over the new village: black-tailed, white-gloved, hollow-irised, hemisphere-eared. For the time being, the scriptless prisoners of war enjoy the estate privileges of Lords of Misrule. All the while, a steady stream of newcomers trickles through the gate. Many drop and kiss the frozen ground, although it is the same ground they have just escaped from, and in many ways the same compound.

  The only thing they do have, aside from Stimson’s mammoth check, is a vast, flat, empty, infinitely pliable, blank slate of land cordoned off with wire. They can make of it anything they choose. At groundbreaking, Disney delivers an inspiring address to the small cadre of still-assembling ranks. He tells them to look at this evacuated place and imagine it filled with the perfect world. Think one step beyond verisimilitude. Do not stop at the goal of creating a replica “just like real life,” but imagine a finished product that fleshes out real life and improves on it.

  He promises that what tech engineers cannot build, what cameramen cannot capture in the lens, artists, under Disney’s supervision, will paint right on the emulsion with animating pens. Trust to imagination, keep good faith, and technical matters will attend to themselves. Disney, ever the American Pragmatist, wraps up his speech resoundingly: “Soon, we will get to work, make in this blank place a two-hour adventure that will change the way people look at their part in the big picture. We can’t see the finished shape yet, but we’ll discover what we’re after as we go along. If we love our material, we can make a picture that will hasten the advent of the camp-free world.”

  Disney steps down from the makeshift podium to tumultuous applause. He discovers, to his surprise, that he has set out on the rickety, impossible, and enormously suspect enterprise of making a populist epic. In the next few days, he manufactures busywork for the cast of thousands: orders for a dozen sets, three sound stages, developing rooms, offices. He does not hope for great results, but he must start producing something tangible.

  What comes of the collective camp spirit surprises even Disney. By the first thaws of 1943, the set begins to blossom with inspiration. A band of houses appears, forming a filmable Main Street. Not far away, three newly released generations of artisans revive Oriental papier-mâché technique and raise a convincing model of the snow-capped Rockies. Painters create whole Manhattans out of muslin backdrops. Others, without instruction, do what they know how. Some sew, some script; others orchestrate, hang lights, or practice handling cameras. Disney marvels at what can come about when ten thousand voices hash out their community rules with no vested interests except results.

  Disney himself makes great progress in focusing the film. Most important, he finds the film’s hero. For once it is not Ike, Marshall, Walter Pidgeon, or any of those iconic soldiers. For the hero of this most ambitious Disney epic yet, Walt will pluck an average face right out of the theater audience. The hero of this prodigious, unprecedented undertaking will be the Man Behind the Man Behind the Gun.

  A returning burst of the old inspiration that has been bottled up ever since he first caught a glimpse of the film tells Disney who the lead must be. Taking an inadvertent tip from the nostalgic Stimson, he will return to Flushing Meadow. What happens when a wide-eyed boy wakes from a dream of progress to find himself the king of swing-shift swing time? What happens when, from behind the billboard announcing Coral Sea and El Alamein, he suddenly emerges, colossally real, as persistent as the sixth in an Andrews Sisters chord? Walt will find that boy, the one who stood in ’39 marveling at the missile to the future. He will track down Bud Middleton to his position in the home-front line. The boy, nearing draftable age, will be the film’s star, the force leading the way to that promised, future world.

  The kid ought to be easy enough to find. He’s worked in Hollywood. He’s a natural in front of the camera. All Bud needs to do to emblemize Americans is be himself. To stand for everything there is, he must simply do what he has always done: be Bud Middleton, in the here and now. The boy’s story will certainly fill five reels, especially with Mickey as co-star. “After all,” Disney says, resorting to a favorite phrase, “there’s more to any dwarf than any of us suspects.”

  By the time Disney takes off for Hollywood to track the boy down, the movie set has been christened. Someone invents a sobriquet that catches on like cholera. Although they know it is a little fulsome, the nisei cannot resist calling the burgeoning magic kingdom World World. One group of craftsmen creates a pastel banner to hang over the movie set’s main gate. For text, they reject the first proposal, WORK WILL SET YOU FREE, in favor of the far superior:

  IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO

  Disney stands under this gate with his right-hand man, taking leave of the c
ommunity and vowing not to come back without the movie’s hero-to-be. He and Sato look back on a flurry of activity spreading irrepressibly over the former cipher of land. “All this motion, all this doing,” Sato exclaims. “My God! We are actually going to pull this thing off.” He meets Disney’s glance, and falls silent. Very quietly, he asks, “We’re really sprung, then? It’s really up to us?”

  All Disney can answer is, “Tell me how free we are, Ralph. You tell me.”

  11

  Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight . . .”

  Eddie, Jr. had left Pop beached on the front porch, abandoned his mother and Lily to the shipwrecked house, and let Artie and Rach drift out of town on Illinois 5. He had felt no qualms about making his own emergency exit in the company of friends. Pop had promised to turn himself in in a couple of weeks. Eddie Jr. could do nothing between now and then but give in to November at eighteen.

  And that came as easily to him as the answers in the back of an algebra book. At the end of the evening, warm in the belly of his friends, Eddie paired off with the prettiest, a junior named Sarah. He had talked her into seeing the second showing of Fantasia at the Egyptian, De Kalb’s 1930s Deco revival theater. Now he walked her back home, singing in two-part harmony, “And dance by the light of the moo-oon!”