This month marks the 40th anniversary of Walt Disney's death from lung cancer, a long time by most measures and an eternity for figures in the popular culture, who usually evaporate quickly from our memories.
To a surprising degree, however, he has managed to survive in the national consciousness, not just as a corporate logo but as a kind of cultural barometer. Ask just about anyone how he or she feels about Disney, and you are likely to get either a beaming tribute from those who recall him fondly and enjoy his animations and theme parks, or a scowling denunciation from those who see him as the great Satan of modern mass culture.
Disney doesn't leave much room for anything in the middle. Even now he essentially cleaves the culture between the hoi polloi and elites, between those who willingly surrender to his wiles and those who seem hellbent on resisting them.
In fact, Disney seems to have always had that effect, though during his lifetime it was serial rather than simultaneous.
When he burst on the national scene as the creator of Mickey Mouse in the late 1920s, he was widely regarded as an artistic naif -- young (he was only 26 at Mickey's inception), uneducated (he had only a year of high school), informal, plain-spoken and unpretentious. Though Mickey made his claim on the public's heart as a winning rascal who seemed blithe to the anxieties of the Depression, intellectuals embraced him, too, much as they had embraced Charlie Chaplin a decade earlier. Thornton Wilder went so far as to call Chaplin and Disney the only true geniuses the movies had produced.
Still, for all the hosannas, there was a bit of condescension in the intellectual approbation. It was Disney's naivete the intellectuals loved, his lack of affectation. Disney, they thought, was too plebian to have regarded himself as an artist, which is what made him one in their eyes.
The problem with this interpretation was that the intellectuals were wrong. Disney wasn't completely without affectation or pretense, and he certainly hoped that what he was making was art. By the time he released ``Fantasia'' late in 1940, combining the music of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven and others with animation -- and some of it abstract animation at that -- the cat was out of the bag.
The reviews were generally positive, but there was now for the first time some griping about Disney among the intelligentsia.
And yet even as Disney's artistic reputation plummeted, his popularity with the general public was, if anything, soaring -- not only because of hugely successful feature animations such as ``Cinderella,'' ``Peter Pan'' and ``Lady and the Tramp,'' or the Disneyland theme park or the new live-action films, but also because of Disney's role as the avuncular host of the Sunday evening television broadcast and as the avatar of conservative, mainstream American values.
The television Disney was wholesome.
He was genial. He was at once a nostalgist celebrating the past and a visionary pointing to the future, thus meshing American tradition with American innovation.
But if these elements helped cement Disney's popularity among the general public, in part because he was so self-consciously homespun and square, they only reinforced the intellectual contempt for him, thrusting Disney into the center of a raging debate about the direction of American culture in the postwar period.
What seemed most to repulse many intellectuals was the sense that Disney infantilized America by refusing to confront reality, and it was reality in all its complexity, agony and sordidness that the intellectuals seemed to revere as the very foundation of art and intelligence. The theme park was especially castigated for its neglect of American tensions. Disney encouraged Americans to inhabit an imaginative universe not unlike that of a child, where reality had been transformed into fantasy and its harm expunged.
For this act of anti-art, he was to be eternally condemned.
``Disneyfication'' became and remains a dirty word -- the primacy of false experiences over so-called real ones.
As University of Texas Professor Douglas Brode has pointed out in his recent book, ``From Walt to Woodstock,'' Disney's values, especially as evinced in his films, are much more complex and even contradictory than either his fans or his enemies admit.
His values are not traditional conservative American. On the contrary, Disney's films challenged authority, disdained the acquisition of money, abhorred hypocrisy (including religious hypocrisy), promoted tolerance and community and celebrated rebelliousness. (Just see how Davy Crockett challenges Andrew Jackson in the 1950s TV programs, or how Pollyanna scolds her own minister for his intolerance.
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This should have been perfectly evident to anyone who wanted to see it, but most people seem to have preferred refracting Disney through their own prism.
Yet it is in Disney's odd combination of libertarianism and liberalism, optimism and cynicism, nostalgia and futurism, faith and doubt that one may find not only the real man but the real America he represented.
After 40 years, Walt Disney is not either/or -- the best or the worst.
He is both the best and the worst -- not the polarizing center of cultural warfare but a portent of the truce between high and low.
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