So the law of the father still works in this monotonous movie, disabling the cartoon principle of plasticity by presenting as given, as frozen, the categories that were at issue, in question, in motion, in the larger culture. The first Pixar contribution to the new Disney mix of the 1990s, Toy Story, won’t stand for that kind of authentic abstention and its cynical attendant, resignation from the world as it exists. Like The Simpsons, it forces us to play with the idea of the father as an absent cause of everything that’s both funny and sad at the end of the twentieth century.
In any event it makes us want to ask, where’s Dad? Mom is in plain sight from the standpoint of all the toys who open the movie by planning a parallel birthday party for her son, their beloved Andy. Dad is invisible from beginning to end unless we read their story, the toys’ story, as a treatise on how to reinsert fathers into the family romance of our time. His absence is the premise of the movie, in other words, but the writers don’t leave it at that; they urge you to believe that Toys R Us by suggesting that Woody and Buzz, the cowboy and the astronaut who compete for the son’s undivided attention, are the father we all need.
Woody (Tom Hanks) is the distant echo of the Western hero who resists progress and fears the future because he knows they mean the eclipse of his independence, his unique and self-evident position in a fixed moral universe. He recalls Sebastian the Crab from The Little Mermaid, another unwitting opponent of development, who wants Ariel to stay down under “de water” because up there on dry land, they work too hard: “Out in de sun, dey slave away.” But Woody also stands at the end of a long line of white-collar middle managers who crowded TV screens in the 1950s and 1960s, pretending that “father knows best” (think of the staff meeting that Woody holds before Andy’s birthday party). So he represents a hybrid of male images drawn from film and TV, the characteristic cultural media of the twentieth-century United States.
Buzz (Tim Allen) is Thorstein Veblen’s engineer, Vince Lombardi’s shoulder-padded poet, and Tom Wolfe’s astronaut rolled into one—he’s the ex-jock with the right stuff who hates the past and believes almost religiously in the technological armature of progress. He wants to go to the moon and thinks he already has the equipment he requires. He represents “the machine,” the favorite metaphor of American writers in the twentieth century, but he reminds us of cheesy Saturday-morning cartoons, too, and not just because he recognizes himself in a TV commercial.
Together, and only together, Woody and Buzz are the missing father the son needs. At the outset, Woody is simply afraid of the future—he might be displaced by a new toy—and Buzz is just contemptuous of the past, when space travel was science fiction. By itself, neither side of the modern American male can make the family whole again by restoring the father to his proper place at its head. And each, by himself, is vulnerable to Sid, the nasty boy next door who captures them.
This boy is another mad scientist, a young Frankenstein, but he means business—he’s perverted modern technology to the point of absurdity if not criminality by turning beloved toys into ugly and malevolent machines. Like the folks who are exploring the human genome, he takes things apart and reassembles them as if he’s trying to invent brand-new species (think of the disfigured baby doll’s head glued to Erector Set spider legs). He scares everybody, including his sister, but mainly he scares the parents in the audience, who still like to think they’re the origin of the next generation.
For this kid’s goal is to downsize Dad by dividing him up and dispersing his parts among many new contraptions. Sid represents the hard side of
Microsoft—he’s bound for glory in Silicon Valley by depriving dads of the good jobs they had when baby boomers were dutiful sons. Like the audience, and like dads everywhere, Woody and Buzz experience this threat as dismemberment, perhaps even as impending castration. No kidding. Susan Faludi’s best-selling book of 1999 quotes Don Motta, a middle-aged middle manager laid off by McDonnell Douglas in 1992, as follows: “There is no way you can feel like a man. You can’t. It’s the fact that I’m not capable of supporting my family. . . . I’ll be very frank with you. I feel I’ve been castrated.”
Only by joining forces, only by coming together and trading on each other’s strengths, can Woody and Buzz—the two sides of American manhood (thus fatherhood)—defeat the perversions of technology and familial relations that Sid represents. Only then can they resurrect the mangled
toy soldiers, the heroic fathers from World War II, who were buried by Sid in the sandbox—buried that is, in the post-Vietnam memories of their postwar children. Only then can they reappear, courtesy of old-fashioned rocket science, at their son’s side, just as his family reaches the horizon of no return.
So Toy Story was a great deal more complex and frightening than another parable of “more work for mother” or another evasion of the question, where’s Dad? This movie spoke directly and productively to the sense of loss—the loss of jobs, the decomposition of “traditional” families, the fear of the future—that permeated American culture back then. The sequel did not.
In Toy Story 2, Woody still fears the future in which Andy will outgrow his favorite fatherly toy. He fears it so much that he had decided to retire to a museum of TV memorabilia, the cartoon equivalent of a nursing home, where he won’t have to beg for attention. Buzz understands Woody’s fear, but he’s willing to let go, even to be put on the shelf where childish things languish and get forgotten until the garage sale—he’s willing to let this son grow up and decide for himself what’s worth keeping and caring for. Before Woody can leave for the museum, however, he gets kidnapped by a crazed antique dealer. Buzz then leads the other toys on a successful rescue mission that ends with Woody’s return to the familial fold, just in time for Andy’s return from summer camp. The newfangled father apparently knows best, even though his purpose is merely to retrieve the wanderer, to keep Woody where he belongs, in the bosom of his—or is it the?—family.
The original Toy Story taught us that a usable model of fatherhood and family—of selfhood as such—can’t be imagined by committing ourselves to the past or the future, as if these are the terms of an either/or choice. It taught us that we exile ourselves from the present and from our families when we try to stay in the past along with Woody or when we try to flee the past along with Buzz. In the end, these two understood that each had to adopt an attitude toward history which allows for both previous truth and novel fact—an attitude that lets each of them change the other and so makes their cooperative effort, their unison, greater than the sum of its parts. They taught us that the point is to keep the conversation going between the past and the future, not to choose between them. The point is to live forward but understand backward.
So the sequel is less hopeful, more elegiac (more funereal, more nostalgic) than the original. It spoke directly, but not very productively, to the sense of an ending that our strange millennial moment afforded us. For it suggests that you can’t teach an old toy new attitudes. All you can do is get older and watch as your kids grow up, move out, move on. And pretty soon you’ll be on the shelf like your own father, downsized not by technology but by time—by the growing gaps of memory you share with the people who say history is bunk.
Such weary resignation probably seems realistic as the baby boomers start thinking about how to finance their retirements. Even so, Toy Story 2 inadvertently advertises another and more useful truth. It goes like this. Only when our attitudes toward history become fixed do the past and the future look the same, that is, impervious to change. When those attitudes are unhinged by watching the end of modernity, when we understand that the world is a fable waiting for our editorial revisions, we know better.
You might now ask, Ye gods, how and why did cartoons become so serious and so central in American culture at the end of the twentieth century? Good question. We start with a tentative answer in the next chapter.
Steamboat Willie. The first incarnation of Mickey Mouse, just a line drawing in motion. As Mickey fle
shed out, so did the backgrounds, until his world looked as real as ours. Source: Walt Disney Pictures/Photofest.
Angels in America. The Prior Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, played by Emma Thompson in the highbrow PBS production of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gay Fantasia,” a two-part allegory of HIV as a modern plague. Is she facing backward when she addresses the audience? Source: HBO/Photofest.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In Joss Whedon’s narrative neighborhood, on the other side of town from Mr. Rogers, Buffy teaches us that there’s no way beyond this tedious world with all its tiresome, almost rural idiocy. Big science surrounds us, superheroes are among us, but we won’t not get out alive. Maybe the vampires will survive the fire next time; the rest of us will be dead, and that is a good thing. Source: The WB/Photofest.
Bugs Bunny. Clearly a new version of the Trickster who permeated African American folklore. Did we know, somehow, that he announced the advent of a new racial regime in which the silly, sometimes angry white man with the gun would finally be outsmarted? Or did we see a cartoon version of Clark Gable, the fast-talking, carrot-chomping hero of It Happened One Night? Source: Warner Bros./Photofest.
Donna Summer. She worked hard for the money, honey. Like funk, disco signaled the renewal, not the demise, of American popular music by returning us to the dance floor and making rhythm tracks the central element in the musical scene. It also did so by expressing and advertising a new, more open gay culture. Source: Photofest.
Eddie Van Halen. The rock star as virtuoso steeped in classical music. Another indication that gender trouble was the regnant mode of musical arrangement at the end of the twentieth century was, of all things, heavy metal, a genre supposed to be by, for, and about angry white men who have enough stamina to hoist huge triangular guitars and scream for hours about evil, death, suicide, and such. Source: Photofest.
I Spit On Your Grave (1976). Outside of Trolls III, this is quite possibly the worst movie ever made, but it is no less important for that. The victims here include not only the four men who gang rape the heroine, but male supremacy itself. Source: Cinemagic/Photofest.
The Little Mermaid (1990). Ariel wants to leave her fluid, formless, watery habitat, where human artifacts have no proper names and no real functions, where work is unnecessary and obedience to the Father is the primary rule. “Betcha on land, they understand—bet they don’t reprimand their daughters! Bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to stand.” Source: Buena Vista Pictures/Photofest.
Freddy Krueger, from A Nightmare on Elm Street. The gleeful Slasher who adjourns the distinction between appearance and reality by bringing a childish dream world to life, thus ending our allegiance to a world governed by reason, science, or adults. Source: New Line Cinema/Photofest.
Public Enemy. This was taken soon after Spike Lee’s hit movie Do the Right Thing (1988) had made them a mainstream sensation. The group was named after one of the original gangster movies. Chuck D., the rapper (right front), was inspired by the Last Poets, a group of proto-rappers formed in 1968 that was, in turn, inspired by Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, both popular spokesmen of race pride and black nationalism. Source: Photofest.
RunDMC. According to the New York Times, this was hip-hop’s first “crossover” group, but Run (Joe Russell) and D. (Darryl McDaniel) dressed in hoodies and jeans to keep it real, and their samples of rock music (in their case, Aerosmith) followed long-standing precedent among DJs. Source: Photofest.
Scarface (1931). Paul Muni’s performative blueprint. Unlike the hero of Westerns, that strong, silent type who talks mainly to the horse, the early gangster couldn’t stay still, and he wouldn’t be quiet—he was determined to disturb you. Like the sonic Gangsta of rap music, he was a meditation on the kind of manhood available to males who could find no place in the mode of production authorized by the law. Source: United Artists/Photofest.
Scarface (1983). Every successful intruder on the American scene was once an immigrant or a criminal: Al Pacino’s manic homage to Paul Muni, which soon became the representational reality of the sonic Gangstas who were “gonna get rich or die tryin’,” erases the family romance that was The Godfather and reinstates violence as the American anthem. Source: Universal Pictures/Photofest.
The Simpsons. Where’s Dad? By the third or fourth season, Homer took over from Bart, the son, as the central character in TV’s longest-running sitcom, thus dispensing with all our Oedipal expectations and forcing us to the conclusion that fathers are vestigial beings who nevertheless keep us laughing. Source: Fox/Photofest.
South Park, the boys. The minimalist extremity of animation: every character is rendered as a little round cut-out with eyes and a mouth, a circle that moves like a stage performer who is always face front, as if the world is a chorus line made of buttons. This conscious abstention from the possibilities of visual representation makes South Park a television show for the blind. Source: Paramount/Photofest.
South Park, Mr. Hankie. There is something happening here that is remarkable, and its name is shit. This TV show is the most amazing study in anality since Jonathan Swift or maybe Martin Luther—Father Christmas comes from the sewer, anal probes come from outer space, and loquacious turds get their fifteen minutes of fame—but why? Source: Comedy Central/Photofest.
South Park, Chef. Is he the Trickster, a surreal yet benign demonstration of the demonic? Is he Br’er Rabbit’s Tar Baby, that gooey, fecal mass, all grown up and growling at us? Is he the comedic version of the racial dreams that have haunted the American imagination since 1607? Source: Comedy Central/Photofest.
Robert DeNiro in Martin Scoresese’s Taxi Driver. Are you talking to me? In 1976, Times Square was not a tourist destination unless your purpose in coming was pornographic. Travis Bickle understood that and knew what to do about it. Source: Columbia Pictures/Photofest.
Toy Story. Where’s Dad? In its first feature, Pixar answered the question by putting him right in front of you, but not so that you’d notice. Woody is the Western hero who fears the future; Buzz is the man of action who hates the past. If they don’t come together and combine their attitudes toward history so that each modifies the other, they’ll be downsized by the mad scientist next door and unable to help Andy, their son. Source: Walt Disney Pictures/Photofest.
The Spirit. The artist behind this syndicated comic strip, Will Eisner, is the founding father of the graphic novel and perhaps the first theorist of how the visual space and conventions of comics form the analogue of the “sequential art” we call movies. Source: Warren Publishing/Photofest.
The New York Dolls. The touchstone of punk rock, and, no offense to Jon Landau or his client, the future of rock and roll. A leering, androgynous, trash-rock glam band with remarkable musical knowledge, background, and skills. As Crawdaddy put it in reporting on New York’s punk scene: “It is difficult to say where affectation ends and reality begins.” Source: AP/Wide World Photos.
Ronald Reagan in the South Bronx. At the very moment that hip-hop made urban renewal the project of the objects, the goal of the so-called ghetto itself, Ronald Reagan appeared to bemoan the decay of the South Bronx. Little did he know that young black men and women were already reinventing their lives, their streets, their neighborhoods, and their nation through music, dance, clothes, and, not least, graffiti. Source: AP/Wide World Photos.
Spiegelman. The cover of Maus, a two-volume story of a troubled Holocaust survivor, a kind of “Memoir” once removed, written—and illustrated as a comic book—by his son, another survivor of the choices Oedipus invented. Spiegelman rendered these totally realistic characters, including himself, as figures who remind us of Mickey Mouse, if only Mickey had a shrink. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, giving the graphic novel sudden repectability. Source: Book Cover from Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale/My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman copyright © 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
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br /> Warhol. Andy Worhol’s iconic “Marilyn,” which sealed the fate of fine art by abolishing the distinction between mass-produced and endlessly reproducible commodities—among them Hollywood celebrities like Marilyn Monroe—and the unique effect of the gifted artist on canvas. The cartoon politics of the piece are nevertheless still priceless. Source: © 2009 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ARS, New York.
Lichtenstein. More cartoon antic from an immensely talented artist. In French. That world elsewhere, where we go slumming in search of cheap thrills—you know the neighborhood, it’s crammed with comic books, pornography, and tractor pulls, it’s where we used to go for relief from the pretensions of professional life? It moved in on you when you weren’t looking. Source: Roy Lichtenstein estate.
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