by Spitz, Marc
With “the easy access to every aspect of pop music now there’s no strain or risk involved for the listener,” Morrissey observed in the middle of the last decade, when he was in his late forties. “There’s nowhere to hide or to find the hidden and the forbidden for yourself—it’s all on vulgar display. Certainly when I was younger than I am now it was very unusual to come across any other living human who actually heard the records that you heard and it was very unusual to discuss lyrics with somebody. But these days of course with the Internet and so forth and the obsession with knowing as much as possible—it’s all become meaningless where everyone knows everything instantly.”
Similarly, as Simon Reynolds once observed, “The Indie scene is struggling to protect ‘innocence’ in the face of a sophisticated culture.” And that was in 1986! If anything can dilute the movement’s power, it’s the movement itself; hence the appearances of an organized campaign against Twee mainstreamers like Zooey Deschanel and Lena Dunham.
Once confined to the bedroom, Twee is now beyond viral, but will this mean the eradication of bullying, blight, ignorance, misogyny, three Human Centipede films, the Kardashians, and the Real Housewives? Will it save humankind or, as many haters fear, soften it to the point of inertia or implosion? It depends on whom you ask: William Blake’s Lamb or his Tyger. This book provides no conclusions (that’s your job), only a sense of history and trajectory. I will lay out how a segment of society got here and pushed the Twee aesthetic along, and where are we going as a new, hybrid generation. The Twee Tribe, with its teens and sixty-year-olds, its carpetbaggers and narcs and exploiters and its saints, pushes the movement daily, hourly, by the second and millisecond, toward its destiny. Is that a good place for humankind, or an even worse state than the one we are already in? I offer few opinions, beyond an aside or two. As you read on, I hope your own opinion about this—the slowest, strangest, and most polarizing of all the great postwar youth movements—coalesces as you encounter Anne Frank, Holly Golightly, Edward Gorey, Plath, Seuss, Morrissey, Murdoch, Zooey Deschanel, and a fuck-lot of kittens.
Chapter 1
The Mean Reds
1945–1963
In which an idealistic but haunted collection of artists, industrialists, actors, poets, songwriters, and one teenage girl (posthumously) endeavor to piece back together a broken world and make it new, safer, and more beautiful using hope, vision, and even memories of the horror and pain they’d seen and suffered.
While members of “the Greatest Generation” are passing on with each new year, their sacrifice, their stories, and the violence and destruction that they survived still affect our modern popular culture well over a half century on. Children are taught by schoolteachers about the great battles of the two world wars and the impossible cruelty and inhumanity of the Holocaust. But the postwar years also gave rise to a dozen or more unconventional and unofficial teachers who took on this task either directly or, often, by sharing their own mental scars. Here we are considering the artists, those among the survivors who wrote or sang or imagined and virtually invented a new world that somehow reclaimed whimsy, hope, idealism, and kindness in the face of battle and soon, the Cold War’s long nightmare. Whimsy was not merely frivolous to these beleaguered but resilient men and women, but rather absolutely necessary for the survival of the species. Openheartedness, a loud, primal yowl of honesty, or a whispered plea for sweetness was not embarrassing or unseemly or, most crucially, unmasculine here but instead a powerful expression of grief and fear that instantly made any other kind of outpouring seem trite and guarded.
Walt Disney, born in Chicago in 1901 to itinerant and hardscrabble working-class parents, was witness to both world wars of the early and mid-twentieth century. The young Disney was handsome, with a wide forehead, an elegant nose, a strong chin, and a mischievous glint in his eye. Driven by patriotism and a desire to escape his rough upbringing, he was all too eager to serve in World War I. Alas, he was too young. Perhaps portending of his future ingenuity, he forged his passport and traveled overseas anyway, into the action. During the war, he drove a Red Cross ambulance in France, tending to the mangled and the dead.
Although he was the youngest male in the Disney clan, the war girded him and he grew up quickly. By the time he returned to America, he had the kind of preternatural focus that makes presidents and empires. Animation was still a new art form then, with technology seeming to develop by the hour. Walt Disney drew and sketched characters and intended to study these new techniques to bring them to life, both as a vocation and a means to entertain what he had directly perceived as an increasingly dangerous and dark world. In his early twenties, while his peers were gallivanting to the hedonism-stoking new jazz sounds, Disney sat alone in the library studying textbooks. Here is a trope we will see over and over again as we go on, the solitary party-misser lost in a world of books but destined to emerge, ironically, as the centerpiece of an even greater revelry one day. The largely European visionaries that enthralled Disney, inventors like Émile Cohl and Ladislas Starevich made two-dimensional figures dance and move as if conjuring spirits and company off the page. By the 1920s, Walt and his brother Roy had formed a company and were making their own films. Each new expensive and rare camera, lens, or filter provided a sense of fun—and a lack of shame, as there seemed no right or wrong way to operate them. The Disney Company entitled their product Laugh-O-Grams in cheerful tribute to both the folly that the machines inspired and their determination to return laughter to a post–World War I America.
The young Walt Disney was a gambler, frequently risking his entire fortune on ambitious projects. But he had his pragmatic side as well. Sensing the power of a strong brand, he endeavored to create a prototypical mascot that would, he hoped, be his key to wealth and power. This ill-fated creature was ironically named: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is all but forgotten today, but the poor guy bears more than a faint resemblance to Disney’s greatest icon and spiritual avatar, Mickey Mouse: a broad smile, long black ears, and shorts to cover his modesty. Mickey (for a very brief time Mortimer, until Walt’s wife suggested otherwise) was created in 1928. In early shorts like “Plane Crazy,” he was bright, filled with ingenuity and patience—all the best qualities of the American worker. When we first heard him (it was Walt’s own voice) in “Steamboat Willie,” we had a high, happy, plucky voice to go with the ears and the shorts. Most of all, Mickey had hope in the face of adversity, making him—if not Walt Disney himself—the first American Twee icon, and certainly the most enduring.
When Walt Disney first journeyed to Hollywood in the late 1920s, he had little money and no entry to the studio lots. There were few prospects, but the young man had determination, a battle-tested sense of whimsy, and an almost holy frivolity. And he had Mickey. For a while, he attempted to be a live-action, conventional film director of live actors, but when that didn’t pan out he and his partners fell back into what they had to admit was a more natural path: breathtakingly inventive, enchanting, and sometimes quite darkly themed animation.
The lack of fear of darker, often morbid subject matter—clearly drawn from the war—and the fact that the Disney studio shop was one of the first independents, setting up in a big house far from the gilded lots of Paramount and Warner Bros., further establishes Disney’s Twee bona fides. He was Indie when Indie wasn’t cool. Perhaps a little Goth too. Goth culture is about nothing if not about making something joyful and positive about horror and, well, death.
“The Skeleton Dance” is as macabre as popular child-aimed art gets. The visions of World War I never really left him, but a decade on, the young Walt Disney was combating them with humor. One of the first and most famous of the seventy-five short films he made early in his independent studio career, “Dance” virtually set the template for Tim Burton’s oeuvre. (Burton pays homage to it in the animated 2005 film Corpse Bride.)
“The Skeleton Dance” concerns a graveyard late at night. A dance troupe of skeletons sneaks from their cr
ypts and boogies to Edvard Grieg’s “March of the Trolls” (orchestrated by future Bugs Bunny composer and arranger Carl Stalling). Other Silly Symphonies take on classic children’s fables like “The Three Little Pigs” (also not exactly light fare). The shorts were inventive technologically, with both “The Skeleton Dance” and Mickey Mouse’s 1928 debut “Steamboat Willie” receiving sound in postproduction. Soon audiences were flocking to see whatever the Disney studios would come up with next, and Mickey would appear along with a list of superlative-worthy subjects in Cole Porter’s 1934 standard “You’re the Top.” The deeply colorful “Flowers and Trees” from 1932, hand painted in an age when even movie stars lived in black and white, won a special Academy Award.
Feature films came next, many of them with vast crews and budgets that even in the mid-1930s exceeded millions of dollars. Snow White, based, again without fear of darkness, on a Gothic Grimm’s fairy tale, was a blockbuster in 1937, and Pinocchio, arriving in 1940, would eventually prove a hit as well, albeit upon re-release. The films started a tradition that continues to this day: they are aimed at children, are embedded with a variety of morality messaging, but they manage not to offend their adult moviegoing companions, rather reconnecting them to some of the heartwarming goodness that they may have lost to time. The message goes down easy when rendered in Technicolor with animation that was the modern equivalent of fine art. Then came the Second World War.
Pinocchio opens, as war overseas is escalating, with what some consider one of the most serene and joyful moments in cinema history: a hobo-ragged Jiminy Cricket (given a smooth, Bing Crosby–esque voice by Cliff Edwards) singing “When You Wish Upon a Star.” The song itself, rivaled only by Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” may be the ultimate Twee anthem. Moonlit, alone, and at peace, Jiminy Cricket delivers what would become Disney’s de facto message: “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, anything your heart desires will come to you.” If you take the leap—and in a time when the larger world population is about to make its discovery of Auschwitz and the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki loom, that very leap is foolish—you will be rewarded.
The Beach Boys’ fragile Brian Wilson, born in 1942, two years after Pinocchio and one after America entered the war, never got over the message or melody of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Years later it would inform the first masterpiece to distinguish the Beach Boys from a dozen other Southern California surf-rock purveyors, the ballad “Surfer Girl.” Later still the Beach Boys would pay direct homage to the ethos with “Disney Girls (1957),” a nostalgic ode to childhood: “Oh, reality, it’s not for me, and it makes me laugh. Oh, fantasy world and Disney girls, I’m coming back.”
No matter one’s age and no matter how disturbed by cataclysmic events outside one’s room, the song implies, all one has to do is spot Jiminy Cricket’s star and make a wish.
Pinocchio himself is the by-product of a wish of faith. He is the creation of the lonely wood-carver Gepetto, who lives alone with a goldfish and, yes, a cat (Figaro). Gepetto’s workshop is visited one night by the Blue Fairy, who rewards the old man for all his lovingly crafted toys, clocks, and music boxes by granting his wish that his beloved Pinocchio come to life. Of course, there’s a catch. He is, after all, still just a walking, talking piece of pine.
“You have to prove yourself to be truthful and unselfish,” the fairy warns Pinocchio, “then you will be a real boy.”
“The Bully,” the bête noire of the humanist Twee hero, is taken to task far back in Disney’s oeuvre too. Another early Silly Symphony is the fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling” (1939), with the namesake duck mocked by his fellow ducks until one day he is revealed to be a graceful swan. Then there’s the case of Dumbo (1941), quite literally a circus freak, delivered by the stork to his mother, an elephant in a traveling circus, who loves the calf unconditionally despite his enormous ears. Dumbo, of course, becomes the star attraction of the circus, those ears acting as a pair of gliders that enable him to fly around the big top. “Beware of who and what you pick on,” Disney seems to be saying.
It’s ironic that many of these films were popular all across the European movie market at the same time that the most thuggish, institutionalized, and deadliest wave of bullying and intolerance was sweeping the continent. 1n 1938, the year that Time magazine proclaimed Adolf Hitler Man of the Year, Disney produced a short film version of the pacifist children’s book Ferdinand the Bull.
In the age of modern warfare, questions about the nature of humankind began to be taken on by pop culture; it was no longer simply the province of escapism and lighter fare aimed at children. Even the young could not avoid philosophical issues. Are we born or made evil? Hitler was once a baby, just like every other baby in the nursery, or was he different? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such things were still fairly cut-and-dried: the devil was real and so were angels. But in the postindustrial secular age, debates about what exactly contributed to our nature and when it began could no longer be dismissed. A new, difficult, and relatively sophisticated kind of secular morality, so prevalent in the Disney films, became commonplace among nearly all popular children’s entertainment. Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand begins life in their slight but powerful 1936 book—and the Disney film two years later—as a misfit (as most Disney heroes do). His mother frets that he is “not like other bulls.” He is a loner. While his peers count off the days until they are big and strong enough to go to the city and fight in the arena against the heroic matadors, Ferdinand has no such interest. “Why don’t you run and play with the other bulls?” his mother pleads. But Ferdinand is content to sit under his tree and smell the flowers. Two years pass and Ferdinand has not changed his ways, but of course nature has unavoidably altered him. The bull calf is now stock strong and massive.
By chance, as a car from Madrid is passing through town, Ferdinand has the misfortune of sitting on a bumble bee. Ferdinand rises, snorts, and bucks, impressing the men who then take him into the city and redub him Ferdinand the Fierce. Hype fills the bullring to capacity as the greatest matadors vie to be the first to take on Ferdinand, but when they draw their blades, he refuses to fight. It’s the anticlimax of the season. Frustrated, the Spaniards are forced to cart him back to the cork tree, where he lives out his days in peace.
Ferdinand, often interpreted as a commentary on the Spanish Civil War, was a merchandizing sensation in 1938 as the German army was secretly plotting to invade Poland and begin a thousand-year Reich of world domination. The bull who refused to fight would appear on playing cards and board games and as children’s toys; he was a triumphant outsider and resister who would not buckle to thugs, a Twee archetype for the ages even three quarters of a century later. Elliott Smith, Twee cinema-soundtrack stalwart and lost boy of Indie rock, had the bull tattooed on his flesh.
The clever Emo-soul Punks Fall Out Boy would pay homage with the title of their breakthrough 2005 album From Under the Cork Tree (the tree where the gentle bull loved to lie and dream).
The war itself hit the Disney studios hard in the bank book as well as in the soul of its increasingly dark but still crucially child-friendly subject matter. Case in point: when the hunters come after Bambi and his mother in the most notorious scene from that eponymous 1942 film, some of the animators reportedly suggested that the audience be shown the adult deer’s bloodied corpse in the snow. Disney absolutely refused.
Combat during the First World War had helped steel the young Walt Disney’s spine, but as a middle-aged businessman with a family to support and a studio to run, losing a large percentage of the European market was a blow. The Disney lots were no longer making enchanting features; they were housing Lockheed aircraft. Disney began stark propaganda films such as Victory Through Air Power, a still technologically stunning but dour manual for “neutralizing the opposing state.” Walt Disney being a natural storyteller, these harsh realities are couched in history lessons designed to gin up patriotism with the tale of
the Wright brothers’ triumph at Kitty Hawk. Yet at heart, this is a Disney film about killing—particularly the most efficient ways to kill and destroy the enemy. The man who brought us the dancing mushrooms of 1940’s astounding Fantasia was now animating bombardiers and explosions.
Disney’s enterprise would of course survive the war, and thrive, rebounding with more feature-length smashes like 1951’s Alice in Wonderland. By then, the man himself was through with violence and pain. The weariness was a long time in coming. Lady and the Tramp (1955), yet another classic, was “dedicated to all dogs,” the implication being that loyalty and simplicity were not only admirable but worthy of great reward. The titular Tramp is a cynic, commenting at one point, “The human heart has only so much room for love and affection,” but Disney proves him wrong in film. Lady melts the street-smart mutt’s heart, later inspiring a classic monologue in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco: “Essentially it’s a primer on love and marriage directed at very young people, imprinting on their little psyches the idea that smooth-talking delinquents recently escaped from the local pound are a good match for nice girls from sheltered homes.” Disney himself had a place in mind where all were welcome and even the most reprobate and recidivist scoundrels and “chicken thieves,” as the Tramp was, would be welcome and somehow redeemed. That same year, Disneyland, a real-life Narnia, albeit one with a carefully maintained image and a perhaps disingenuous facade, opened to the public.
