Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Anthropological Materialism and the Aesthetics of Film
- 2 Soviet Film: The Giant Laboratory of Technological Innervation
- 3 Film and the Aesthetics of German Fascism
- 4 Charlie Chaplin: The Return of the Allegorical Mode in Modernity
- 5 Mickey Mouse: Utopian and Barbarian
- Conclusion : Benjamin’s Belated Aktualität
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Mickey Mouse: Utopian and Barbarian
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Anthropological Materialism and the Aesthetics of Film
- 2 Soviet Film: The Giant Laboratory of Technological Innervation
- 3 Film and the Aesthetics of German Fascism
- 4 Charlie Chaplin: The Return of the Allegorical Mode in Modernity
- 5 Mickey Mouse: Utopian and Barbarian
- Conclusion : Benjamin’s Belated Aktualität
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter explores Walter Benjamin's writings on Mickey Mouse, focussing especially on the unpublished note ‘Mickey Mouse’ (1931), ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–1939). These texts are read in conjunction with other essays from the period, such as ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) and ‘Karl Kraus’ (1931), since Benjamin detected in the anarchic, destructive, and technologically driven figure of the early Mickey Mouse a similar project to overcome bourgeois civilization and, especially, the individual subjectivity upon which humanism was based. The chapter also draws on some references to Disney films as dream images in the Arcades Project (1928–1940).
Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Mickey Mouse; ‘Experience and Poverty’; positive concept of barbarism; dream images; J.J. Grandville.
Walter Benjamin first mentions Mickey Mouse in 1931, in a note written in light of a conversation with Kurt Weill and Benjamin's close friend, the banker Gustav Gluck, drafted under the title ‘Zu Micky Maus’. From this point until 1936, when he mentions Disney films for the last time in the second version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Mickey Mouse occupies a significant, if secondary, position in Benjamin's writings on cinema and experience. This short-lived presence mirrors the general fascination of intellectuals with this popular figure, which soon waned. Only Sergei M. Eisenstein would continue to defend Disney until the early 1940s. During the 1930s, Benjamin collected a number of German and French newspaper clips on Disney, which aided his argument around Mickey Mouse in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) and in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. Disney often appears in Benjamin's work alongside Charlie Chaplin, since both are associated with the therapeutic function of laughter. He was not alone. The journalist Harry Carr quoted Walt Disney in a 1931 article for the American Magazine in which he acknowledged his debt to Chaplin on the creation of Mickey Mouse: ‘We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin […] a little fellow trying to do the best he could.’ Although both characters constantly struggle with authority, their approach to reality and to the problems they face are at odds.
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- Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film , pp. 195 - 234Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020