{"id":10875,"date":"2012-07-04T09:00:13","date_gmt":"2012-07-04T08:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=10875"},"modified":"2012-07-04T11:21:33","modified_gmt":"2012-07-04T10:21:33","slug":"my-town-the-strange-sexuality-of-disneys-underworld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2012\/07\/04\/my-town-the-strange-sexuality-of-disneys-underworld\/","title":{"rendered":"My Town: the Strange Sexuality of Disney’s Underworld"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1937 Goebbels presented a birthday gift of 18 Mickey Mouse shorts to the F\u00fchrer.\u00a0[…Disney] and Hitler […] shared an overall social vision. They dreamed of a dispersed post-urban society, with a population \u2014 kept in line by a strong domestic realm instilling a keen sense of blood loyalty and “family values” \u2014 that could be efficiently mobilized to serve either the military needs of the state or the labor needs of industry.<\/p>\n

– Matt Roth,\u00a0The Lion King: a Short History of Disney-Fascism<\/a><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Everyone knows about Disney’s ongoing\u00a0racism issues<\/a>, so to hear that Uncle Walt was an active member of the American Nazi Party during the Thirties may not come as much surprise.\u00a0But there were pink triangles as well as yellow stars in 1930s Berlin, and I want to know why pretty much all of Disney’s villains seem designed to display some kind of sexual or gender deviance.<\/p>\n

An Actor’s Life for Me<\/h3>\n
\"The<\/a>

An Actor’s Life for Me: The Fox seduces Pinocchio<\/p><\/div>\n

It starts with Pinocchio, and the Fox and the Cat. Probably best remembered for their song ‘An Actor’s Life for Me<\/a>‘, it’s this pair of crooks that first lure young Pinocchio off the straight and narrow. And I mean that literally: they’re Theatre Folk, dapper, urbane and not a little camp. Their bodies are constantly intertwining, grotesque and chaotic. I’m with Matt Roth when he says they’re obviously coded as gay – one of the key minorities Hitler argued, in\u00a0Mein Kampf<\/strong>, were\u00a0threatening the health and morality of contemporary European youth.<\/p>\n

But this doesn’t end with the fall of Hitler; later Disney films work their way through a succession of sexually deviant or ambiguous villains. The first significant entrant is the terrifying Maleficent<\/a> in\u00a0Sleeping Beauty<\/strong>(1959). Like\u00a0Aladdin<\/strong>‘s\u00a0Jafar (1992), she is elegant and a bit camp, though fundamentally sexless (witness how unattracted Jafar is to Princess Jasmine, wanting her only for political gains). Maleficent inhabits a strange underworld where orgiastic parties are the norm, and, like so many of her villainous successors, she’s got no-one of her own, but still remains determined to thwart the monogamous, heterosexual union of the noble royals Princess Aurora and Prince Philip (whose name was chosen by Uncle Walt in the 50s, when our Prince Philip was still someone nostalgia-loving Anglophile Americans might feel dewy-eyed about).<\/p>\n

\"Cruella<\/a>

Cruella de Vil – a withered, aberrant form of sexless femininity – squares up to the hyper-femme homemaker Anita<\/p><\/div>\n

Two years later,\u00a0101 Dalmatians<\/strong>‘ Cruella De Vil continues the trend. She shares Maleficent’s ill will towards the heteronormative family sphere, and acts as a kind of child-snatching boogyman. Her hyper-femme fashion sense only throws her withered, sexless frame into relief, and unlike the blissful feminine home of her friend Anita – who has settled down and found a nice man to take care of, sorting out Roger’s chaotic life with a Woman’s Touch – \u00a0Cruella’s decadent mansion is completely falling apart, which we can probably assume also mirrors the state of her biological clock. Cruella’s flamboyant yet barren sexuality focuses itself instead on fetishising the traditional trappings of femininity, including fur coats made from the produce of wombs more fecund than her own – like Perdita, the sexy Dalmatian.<\/p>\n

Dragged Up<\/h3>\n

In the 80s, long after Walt’s death, the intentional gender deviance of Disney’s villains becomes more blatant still: this time the Gays are even more obviously in drag, and they’re looking back to the golden\u00a0Pinocchio<\/strong>\u00a0age of seducing The Children away from their suburban homes: think of Ursula in\u00a0The Little Mermaid\u00a0<\/strong>(1989)\u00a0and her\u00a0contrast with the alpha male King Triton, his big beard, and the Barbie-style InnoDBl with her\u00a0Princess Diana hair<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

Dragged up… Ursula from The Little Mermaid<\/p><\/div>\n

Ursula is overweight, flamboyant and dragged up; her tentacles, as my pal Matt Roth points out (you really must read\u00a0this article<\/a>, seriously), only make her the more sexually ambiguous. Like Maleficent, she lives in an underground other-world, with a ‘garden’ of corrupted young people now condemned to live half-lives as plant-like beings. Her stagey hyper-femininity presents her as a dangerous prospect for the heteronormative, cisnormative InnoDBl – whose\u00a0voice<\/em>\u00a0she steals in order to seduce the also very straight Prince Eric.<\/p>\n

Ursula is given a metaphorical kind of new life (after being conquered by, er,\u00a0the erect prow of Prince Eric’s enormous ship<\/a>) in the figure of Hades in\u00a0Hercules\u00a0<\/strong>(1997). He’s pretty much an exact counterpart to Ursula, black tentacles and all. His cabaret-style song ‘My Town’, from the Hercules<\/strong> TV series, introduces the underworld as a kind of underground New York, with its king a flamboyant, gender-ambiguous leader revelling in its delights:<\/p>\n

It’s interesting, of course, that because of the source-text,\u00a0Hercules<\/strong>\u00a0must of necessity espouse the Ancient Greek worldview that says the Underworld – and therefore Hades himself – is a crucial part of the order of things; unlike the shady worlds of Pleasure Island and The Theatre in Nazi-era\u00a0Pinocchio<\/strong>, ‘New Hades’, and the queers and deviants that inhabit it is a potentially corrupting influence that can be tolerated, as long as it’s kept firmly in its place. It’s much the same theory as the ‘Circle of Life’ proposed by Mufasa in\u00a0The Lion King\u00a0<\/strong>(1994) –\u00a0the ghettoised handout-dependent hyenas and their liberal, childless and urbane overlord Scar are fine, as long as they’re kept in their own sphere (that is, the obscure Elephants’ Graveyard). When they take over, the Pridelands fall into ruin and corruption.<\/p>\n