After another round of ringmaster hand waves, the inmates stand back while the central figure removes the canister’s top with exaggerated caution. He double checks his gas mask and dramatically unscrews what becomes the tube’s lid within a lid within a lid. As he breaks through the final seal, a host of animated sprites shoot out of the opened flask startling everyone, including Disney, a thousand miles and several weeks away. The spirit squadron buzzes the canister a few times, then disperses across empty fields. The camera cranes up and over the lid of the container. Inside is an earthen metal powder, which a second team of animators makes sparkle yellow-purple, an iridiscent glow carrying all the colors of the rainbow. The lens gives a quick glimpse before the gas-masked trio closes the flask gingerly.
The corny voice-over elaborates: “What you have just seen is almost half a kilogram of Fairy Dust, squirreled away in precious allotments obtained from private, international channels, kept under the most stringent safeguards and security, saved for the most urgent occasion. That occasion is now, with the whole globe pitched in a battle where everything of value is at stake. This potent substance can turn a lump of pasty papier-mâché into a terraced garden.” Proving the claim, the next shot shows one of the masked soldiers, fingers glowing with a pinch of the invisible stuff, standing in the middle of emptiness. He opens his hand with a colored flourish and, following a perfect jump cut, the fields around him transform into a bustling downtown. The sequence repeats in another open space: a sprinkling of powder, and up springs a mountain range. Three times in succession the protectively clothed creature creates, ex nihilo, factories, scenic gorges, and quiet residential streets.
The narrator explains, “This is no ordinary element. The dust derives its power by acting as the mind’s prism. It is, in essence, imagination reified.” The unaccented voice claims that if used sparingly, “and a mere fingernailful packs a punch capable of amazing things,” the stuff will bleed goodwill across their condensed country’s borders, spilling over enchantment into the finished film.
Disney is stunned. While much of the trailer is done with paint and models, he is nevertheless impressed by the work already accomplished by his pickup team. He watches the staff rally their talent for one final, curtain-closing tour de force. The narration spells out the theory of Fairy Dust more clearly, slowly losing its parodic quality and taking on something of the promise of the metallic glow itself. “Can this powder really turn a rock pile into the Rockies? Can it in fact turn a miniature model of a sleepy town into a living, breathing replica, as convincing as the original? Can it explain us to ourselves, show us why we must win this one or die trying? Can we be standing in the presence of the substance that will not only crack the back of the Axis and blow this war wide open but also blow the very desire to wage war loose from the face of this forgetting earth? We dare not believe. But think of what we lose if we are wrong, if we fail to give the stuff a proper chance?”
The final shot, mirroring the first, pans daringly over the synthetic mountains and simulated cities that now tower over the prairies, dwarfing the surrounding cow towns. World World. Nothing on this scale has been attempted since D. W. Griffith’s Babylon set for Intolerance soared above the flypaper shacks on Sunset Boulevard back in 1915. The scope of the set suggests we fight another war this time, one that makes the first one look like 8 mm. The camera pulls all the way back, revealing the carpenters still extending the edges of the set, the voice-over urging the viewer to suspend judgment until hope casts its ballot.
The film flicks through the projector and flaps loosely against the take-up reel. The screen in Disney’s private viewing room goes white and he sits motionless in the dark, making no move to shut off the machine. The crew has cast the footage as a bit of camp strictly for his own amusement. But under the burlesque of flag-waving, he hears his crew’s own genuine hope in the restorative power of Never-never Land, calamine for a tortured and diseased world intent on betraying itself. He hears his ten thousand fellow internees ask how much a band of visionaries, armed with Fairy Dust, can do to correct history.
He feels the cast flexing its new freedom, gauging the odds against good intentions rising up irresistibly on the day the canister is finally uncorked. The final image of the comic short is so powerful that it undercuts its own irony. Real death, global snuffing out of people, slaughter for borders, economics, colored charts, and ideology, the glacial drift of perennially mucked-up national bickering: the whole bloody mess will fall away, the trailer insists, despite knowing better, if we can just tell the story of one person, tell the particular case fully and urgently and honestly, show how all that this fellow ever wanted is to get along and assist in the harvest of Goodwill. How can conflagration come of that?
If they can tell the Bud Middleton story convincingly and universally, the way to mutual trust might at last become clear. A life-size portrait of a fellow prisoner will reduce temptation to shoot before asking. Future dictators and demagogues will be laughed out of the beer hall. When they try to incite fear of the perfidious enemy, saying get the Jew, the Slav, the Asian, before he can get you, the crowd, having seen You Are the War, will say, “Who? Bud Middleton? You must be joking.” The secret subtext of the project, which must convince even the wartime censors, is: We man the trenches opposite ourselves. The twelve-minute film spoofs itself for believing make-believe. But its makers can no more not believe than they can stop their own circulation.
Nevertheless, however technically impressive the World World set, The Furious Phase demonstrates to Disney that neither steering committee nor cast of thousands really knows whether “Wishing might make it so” has any empirical validity to it whatsoever. In the darkened preview room, celluloid flapping loosely around the reel, the attempt to remedy a world gone madder than a galloping cancer through any medium as silly as documentary cartoon seems ludicrous. This war is the largest coordinated endeavor ever undertaken by man. Brooklyn Bridge, Boulder Dam, and the Great Wall of China combined are weekend excursions in comparison. Every person on the earth is in on the activity, inspired by it. We make love to this employment. Nothing in the entire thread of human endeavor—not cathedrals, not astronomy, not high finance—comes close to our expertise in mutual destruction.
The real game, pieces stretching over Normandy, the North Sea, Suez, the Urals, the Caucasus, the Low Countries, Burma, Singapore, Saipan, Guam, and everywhere in between, is by far the greatest testament to human engineering and ingenuity, to what collective effort can put together. Beginning with vestiges of horse cavalry, it has already graduated to rockets and soon jets. And this war will be dwarfed by the next one, the quiet, extended chessboard stretching out over decades in unthinkable complexity of move and countermove, working up to its silent denouement. While technically true, it is certainly numerically insouciant for Disney to point out that all vegetation begins in the Bud.
For a moment, on the painfully white screen, Disney sees how immense, amorphous, and undeniably real the war is compared to what he means to do. For a moment, the war seems so ubiquitous and undirected as to make the definite article seem ridiculous. The scope and obscene speed of the unstoppable undertaking all around him splinters its monolithic façade and becomes a bouquet of operations: Overlord, Citadel, Greif, Punishment, Market-Garden, Barbarossa, Sledgehammer, Torch. Each involves millions of Middletons, but Bud, whether buck private or bird colonel, no longer has any real choice in the matter.
Disney sees, years before the demure textbooks point it out, that this is the first round of a permanent People’s War. The accounts in the morning papers, with their line drawings and casualty counts, are so many box scores of mass suicide, the first universal violence that will take more civilian lives than soldiers’. Death will never again surprise us, coming in clean packets out of the sky, from underwater, across the sterilized earth, out of ovens and showers. The only weapon Disney has to fight the People’s War is the People’s Art Form. The madness of the human pageant got you down? See a
Show. Out with the houselights. Break forth the Fairy Dust. Magic powder, absorbed into the lungs and capillaries of the audience, reduces Stalingrad, Dresden, and Buchenwald to you and the you you share the armrest with.
All he has to offer the lost cause of embraced carnage is a good cartoon. All he can do is show Bud Middleton in all his details, convince the audience that his story is their story. Within the confines of the darkened theater, the public’s capacity to feel must seem crucial to the entire outcome of the collapsing planet. The caretaking of seasons, the survival of midwinter, is in small hands, the heart’s private bonfire.
He shuts off the dead projector. He must pull off the task in a two-hour slice of everyday life with the ugly spots edited out. A stirring soundtrack, slick set, and pretty leads, Disney has long ago discovered, can convince just about anybody of anything. His movie can manipulate by cropping out, selectively deciding what not to show. World World, that prison-built set in the empty Midwest, must be his lever and his place to stand. He is insane even to consider going through with the idea. But the alternative is to send his staff back to the concentration camp.
The sheer enormity of the project makes Disney long for the far easier task of selling the war. Victory Through Air Power was child’s play. Agitprop could come effortlessly: a little piece about the boys at Anzio getting nostalgic for the old neighborhood around Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. He dredges up a dusty old bottle of Moxie from the inner recesses of his makeshift desk. He drinks it recalcitrantly, with no idea of how long it has been there. He considers the wartime dispersal of his colleagues—the old Hollywood and Vine gang. He envies them; just about anything else he might have ended up doing for the war effort would have been unspeakably easier than what he is now considering.
Walt rubs his ears for hours, wondering if Huston and Capra, at this very minute making documentaries and cheer films for the army, are having half as much difficulty overcoming the technical obstacles to believability as he. Capra’s making Why We Fight. Disney must make the far more problematic and unpopular Why We Shouldn’t Have To. It occurs to him that Capra is a first-generation Italian. We’re at war with the Eye-ties too, right? What are THEY doing walking around free while we’re locked up? The suggestion is clear: national security is not separable from budding hatred.
All the other big directors and producers are off making straightforward propaganda documentaries, nothing tormented about them. All they have to do is keep the camera vertical and the cameraman alive under fire. Major George Stevens, of Swing Time fame, in the Atlantic with his “Hollywood Irregulars,” heads up the Special Coverage Unit of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, directly attached to SHAEF. And there’s John Ford in the Pacific, working for Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS on his most spectacular and convincing western of them all. Ford wins both an Oscar and a Purple Heart for The Battle of Midway, while his buddy and genius cameraman Gregg Toland makes a feature on what Disney’s blood relations did to the Pacific Fleet on the day of infamy.
On the Home Front, the private morale-boosting business enjoys nothing short of a creative renaissance. The glossy war epic is the greatest carnivore to come to Tinsel Town since Rin Tin Tin. As a genre, the War Film runs the gamut from Casablanca and Watch on the Rhine to Four Jills in a Jeep. Even Sherlock Holmes enlists in stemming the Nazi threat. The torrent of films following Hitler’s invasion of Poland already leads to a Senate investigation of Hollywood warmongering and profiteering. The movie industry, emptied of 30 percent of its males, continues churning out celluloid wars as diversion from the real thing, all on the same topic from the same point of view. The sole task of these films—and Walt, in his professional capacity, has seen his share of them—as well as their chief source of revenue is to mythologize the fighting as if it took place somewhere in the distant past. While Huston and Capra and John Ford shoot real war footage on location with the original cast, countless Hollywood hacks throw together monthly remakes of The Prisoner of Zenda, only in battle fatigues with interminable stock slaughter footage, all the love scenes taking place on South Pacific islands between the noncoms and their men. “Sarge, are you sc-scared?” “I’m always scared, son.”
What alarms Disney is not the relation between fiction and catastrophe, the profit and pleasure motives. He considers how Guadalcanal Diary, opening even as he measures his next step, must have gone into production within a week of the outbreak of fighting on that island. Similarly, The Mortal Storm, Waterloo Bridge, and Fritz Lang’s great Man Hunt, not to mention Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates, each released before we were even in the fray, either showed remarkable foresight or were privy to advance information.
At this moment, it hits Disney with the force of religious revelation: We have done this. We filmmakers. The world is in flames because we told people that they could cross the line into Anything Goes and get away with it. Leni Riefenstahl put that painter bastard in the hearts and minds of his people. She and Hans Steinhoff and Harlan. And our films, the Gold Diggers and Broadway Melodies: that’s how we wandered into this mess, let it get out of hand. Films that said that Don Winslow and Doug MacArthur are the same guy, that nothing could get so fouled up it couldn’t get extricated in the fifth reel.
Now that the unreal has lured us into it, the war can only be comprehended through the same portal. The war no longer has anything to do with the Casablanca conference. It is Rick and Ilsa. “You wore blue. The Germans wore gray.” That is the only color scheme a captive audience can understand. Paulus versus Chuikov means absolutely nothing. Disney and company are guilty of entrenching the real fight, in most minds, between Münchhausen and Sergeant York.
Well, he thinks: if film launched us on the trip into the inferno, then the world’s most famous film mouse must gnaw our way back out. But Disney knows the return trip will be far harder. You Are the War must tap into the same spirit of invention that led the pack into wholesale catastrophe in the first place. What happens on the World World set will be his most crucial work ever, far exceeding the routine war-bond drives. The project’s particulars take on so overwhelming an importance that Disney resorts to the most potent source of creative inspiration of this era: plagiarism. The stakes are so great, so much hangs in the balance, that nothing less than pinching from the old masters will do. About some things they are never wrong.
The technique he means to pinch is that view of Middle Americana going about its ordinary, small-town dance of courtship and romance that he has glimpsed two weeks before and still cannot shake. Disney has in mind to create on the World World set a full-size mock-up along the lines of the town in It’s a Wonderful Life. Disney, a member of the inner circle, has had a privileged early look at the project, and finds it a masterpiece. Capra has shown him the working script, but because of his involvement with Why We Fight, the country’s other Italian Navigator won’t be able to start it until after we win. Disney’s idea is to place that haunting scene between the youthful romantic leads, sweetly and greenly crooning a “Buffalo Gals” duet, against the backdrop of a world gone wholly and irrevocably insane. Then the audience, turning from their cozy, ordinary lanes down a back alley where bodies hang like piñatas, sliding from Second Street to Second Army, an encirclement too big to fit onto the atlas page, strolling from Bedford Falls into global Pottersville without noticing, will realize that the fate of their own town truly relies on two billion sets of single votes, the sum of uncountable and inconsequential Middleton middlemen.
For the sake of the future, he decides to steal that love duet that everything depends on: the hidden chain of connections inherent in George Bailey’s saving his brother from the sledding accident. Only this time, the script will run: if Bud isn’t here doing his part, he will trigger a series of cataclysms that won’t stop short of the ignition of the earth’s atmosphere. For the film to work, the layout must not tip off where the cultivated atrium of Bud’s life leaves off and the genuine garden-at-large begins. You Are the War must have no border, no chalk seam proclaimi
ng “Fairyland Ends Here. Now Entering the Real Thing.” The two must gradate smoothly into each other. The audience must believe, for two hours, that Bud’s decision will determine what awaits them outside the theater.
For in truth, everything depends on the successful application of Tinker Bell’s delivering powder. Neither Anzio nor Peenemünde nor indiscriminate civilian carnage renders World World’s cause so desperate. Something else has been let loose, something the Dwarves know little about, something Disney himself has only briefly glimpsed. George Stevens drops Disney a quick note about it in the winter of ’43, from his toehold in Britain: “There’s something on the continent, deep inland, something immense and terrible, awful beyond considering. . . . Rumors of it are everywhere. . . . I’m bringing the cameras when we at last get ashore, but I don’t know if we dare look on it, let alone film it.”
He cannot name it, but Disney knows that the terror deep in Central Europe already spreads outward. His own country, in the cold light of necessity, considers sending against the Japs incendiary bombs tied to the legs of bats. The idea is sponsored by the United States Navy and the Army Chemical Warfare Department. Is the charter of Disney’s film, then, any more fantastic? It is no more desperate, no more urgent, no more surreal, no more irrational, no more hopeless, no more unrealistic, no more misplaced, than the world it hopes to save by simulating. He sees clearly, as definitive and cleanly lettered as that flask the keystone frogmen uncorked: history conspires toward what we decide to rescue from the pyre. Out of the rubble of Central Europe, in what will instantly become the polarized battlefield for the next showdown, a German will put the idea perfectly: “World History is the World’s Fair.”
Disney determines to escape that fair, deny the grip of necessity. He sets down the dusty bottle of Moxie, gives the same idea another twist: he will deny that reality exists. He will live only for escape. Put that way, all the evil he means to outdistance comes creeping back. Which is it? So much depends on whether the other hostage, the audience, dares to make the break along with him. Perhaps no crime was ever righted except through retaliation, reprisal. But he will try another angle just this once, before the light fails.
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 23
