Dumbo WP

Walt Disney’s Dumbo: A Myth of Modernity A Working Paper by William L. Benzon

Introduction: Pure Motion between Animals and Humans ...................................................1 American Mythology in Disney’s Dumbo .............................................................................3 Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed........................................................................................9 Animals in Cartoons: Tripping the Elephants Electric ........................................................19 Roustabouts, Trains, Elephants, and Crows .........................................................................25 Notes: Mother and Son, Gender and Violence in Dumbo...................................................36 Six Nights and Days of Dumbo.............................................................................................47 Why A Stork? The Opening of Dumbo ................................................................................56 Electric Juice for Animals and Machines .............................................................................62 Metamorphosis, Identity, and Metaphysics in Dumbo and Fantasia ..................................74 How Dumbo Ends: Crows Left Behind................................................................................85 Dumbo as Myth 1: Beginning and End ................................................................................90 Dumbo as Myth 2: Realigning the World ............................................................................96 Dumbo as Myth 2.1: Interlude on Method .........................................................................106 Dumbo as Myth 2.2: Machines and Fordism .....................................................................109 Dumbo as Myth 2.3: A Bit of Circus History ....................................................................116 Bleg: The Subconscious Mind ............................................................................................118 Dumbo as Myth 2.4: Talking Animals ...............................................................................120 Dumbo Interlude: The Bear That Wasn’t ...........................................................................125 Dumbo as Myth 3: Modern Times ......................................................................................127

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Introduction: Pure Motion between Animals and Humans It was back in the early Spring of 2007 that I sent Mike Barrier a longish email on Dumbo. I sent it as ordinary correspondence and did expect him to publish it. But he did. Which was fine by me. But I had no intention to do any more work on Dumbo. Then, for whatever reason, I posted Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed in the Fall of 2010. Again, I had no particular reason in mind and certainly had no intention of doing extensive work on the film. That post become the second most popular one on New Savanna, and still is. Tripping the Elephants Electric was my third major piece of Dumbo. I posted it on June 29 of this year, 2012, and fully intended to do some more work on the film. But not as much as I ended up doing. And I will do more work on it. Just how much more, and when, I don’t know. For now, though, it is best to lay things to rest, more or less. I need to let things settle down before I read through the whole slew of posts and try to make sense of it all. For that WILL be required. I like what I’ve done. I don’t feel that I’m on top of things just yet. It’s more like I’m just getting around to figuring out what questions need to be asked. I need to think more about animals and about this “myth logic” that I keep invoking. And I probably need to gin up some more sophisticated intellectual equipment, more than can be conveniently deployed on New Savanna, even in a series of long-form posts. As an example of the sort of thing I’ll be pondering, consider the bath scene. Vladimir Tytla, the lead animator for Dumbo, based his work in that scene on observations of his own infant son interacting with his mother as she bathed him. We SEE an elephant on the screen, but we see the gestures and motions of a human infant and mother at play. Similarly, in the middle of The Nutcracker Suite in Fantasia we see goldfish dancing languorously and sensuously. Don Lusk based those movements on footage that director Sam Armstrong shot of Princess Omar, who is supposed to have danced before crowned heads. We see animals on the screen, but we feel their movements as human movements—or do we? Not quite, not exactly, I think. We abstract or extract the motions from the image and match the movements we see with our own inner movements. Somehow in this process the movements themselves float free of us and them and become just movements and gestures, pure expression. Essences even. That’s what I want to understand. One of the things anyhow. It’s a simple thing, really. But we don’t have the language we need to understand that simplicity. That’s what I’m after. That language. This marvelous film has brought me closer to it.

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American Mythology in Disney’s Dumbo

This is lightly revised from a long email to Mike Barrier, the eminent animation historian, about Disney’s Dumbo, which he then posted on his website.1 ***** Dear Mike: I suppose it’s been over thirty years since I last saw Disney’s Dumbo, or some part of it, so my expectations were most strongly influenced by what I’ve read in the last year or two. I was primed for the “Baby Mine” and “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequences. The crow sequence caught me off guard, but as soon as it got started I had a sense of recollection.

Black Crows What’s interesting about that sequence, of course, is that the crows are voiced and animated as African-Americans, though they’re just crows. Many of those featureless roustabouts earlier in the film appear African-American as well; but they are people, and they don’t talk or sing. They are bit players. The crows are more significant to the plot. While they start out with ridicule – though a rather odd sort of ridicule as it’s directed at the notion of a flying elephant – they’re quickly won over to Dumbo’s cause by a “sermon” preached by “reverend rodent” (Timothy Mouse). They then work with Timothy on a scheme that succeeds in getting Dumbo to fly. That is to say, they provide both social support and practical aid. What interests me is the specific role these African-American crows play. For that role is deeply sanctioned within American culture. Though I’m not prepared to sketch out a history, I can give some salient examples. Perhaps the single most important example is Mark Twains’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck’s father was an abusive alcoholic who beat Huck so frequently and badly that Huck finally decided that he had to run away in order to save his live. In the course of 1

http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Essays/Dumbo/Dumbo.htm

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running away he met up with Jim, a slave whom he knew and liked, who was running away as well. The fact that Jim is presented as simple and naïve shouldn’t blind us to the fact that he plays the role of a supportive a nurturing parent to Huck. Here then, at the canonical heart of American literature, we have an abused white child seeking solace in the company of an African American.

And that’s what Dumbo does. A couple of years later Disney does Song of the South – which I’ve not seen since whatever fragments showed up on Disney’s TV program – where the frame story has the same situation, a white child finding solace with a middle-aged African American, good old Uncle Remus. A few years after that, in 1950, Kirk Douglas stars as Rick Martin in Young Man with a Horn, based on the novel by Dorothy Baker (which, in turn, has some relation to the life of Bix Beiderbicke). Rick Martin was orphaned as a young boy and came under the spell of jazz. He was befriended by Art Hazzard, an African American trumpeter, who gave him trumpet lessons and acted as a father to him. Thus the fact that those crows in Dumbo are given African American moves and voices is not at all a casual matter. It taps very deep currents in America’s cultural mythology. Disney’s audience would have had no difficulty seeing and hearing those crows as African American. After all, Amos ‘n Andy had been a popular radio program since the early 1920s. The sound of black voices was a familiar one in just about every household that had a radio – though the characters on the show were voiced by white actors. But there was nothing unusual about that, either; that practice dates back to the 19th century. And Cliff “Jiminy Cricket” Edwards, who voiced the lead crow, was clearly well-grounded in that tradition. The other crows were voiced by members of the Hall Johnson Choir, which was an African American outfit. Now, in bringing this up, I’m not trying to tar Disney with the charge of racism. I’m just pointing out what’s there and how it relates to larger patterns in American culture. Walt Disney wouldn’t have achieved his near mythic status if he hadn’t been able to reach deep into American mythology. This is one example of his ability to do so, and in a startling way – in a story about an outcast baby elephant. [Surely it is worth nothing that those crows were animated by one of the jazz musicians on Disney’s staff, Ward Kimball.]

Pink Elephants So, Dumbo is restored to society through the mediation of some African-American crows. Once I got that far in my thinking I began to rethink the previous sequence, the pink elephants. That is a marvelous piece of animation, but what does it have to do with the story? How does it advance

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the action? To be sure, something very important happens in the course of that sequence – Dumbo flies up into the tree – but that event isn’t depicted in the sequence itself. The sequence is just there.

Well, what if Disney and his animators had decided to depict Dumbo’s first flight? It seems to me that that would entail real problems, especially for Disney’s aesthetics, if not cult, of cuteness. It is one thing to show this cute big-eared baby elephant getting tipsy and blowing funny bubbles and seeing things, but do you really what to depict him bumbling around and somehow managing to fly without really knowing what he was doing? While there’s no technical difficulty in doing that, it does seem to me that keeping it realistic, even within the terms of the cartoon, would require that you besmirch Dumbo’s cuteness, or come dangerously close to doing so. Further, it would rob the “learning to fly” sequence of its interest. There wouldn’t be any dramatic point to it. Finally, it would reduce the difference between Dumbo’s circus world and the crow’s world to one of mere geography. We see Dumbo stumble around in the circus, he somehow begins flapping his ears, takes to the sky, and ends up in a tall tree – all before our watchful gaze. How dull, but disillusioning. Instead, Disney takes us into this marvelous surrealistic sequence of transmogrifying pink elephants. What that does is eradicate the circus world from out minds. And that circus world was a pretty cynical one. It’s not simply that Dumbo and his mother were ostracized, but that the circus itself was not a place of fun and fantasy, but just a gig. Whatever it is that children have in mind when daydreaming about running off to join the circus, this is not the circus they dream about. The boredom and cynicism displayed by the animals (e.g. the yawning lion) in the opening day parade, for example, was marvelous, as was the nastiness of the clowns. These are, after all, what the show is about, and Disney reveals them to us as just, well, creatures, with interests of their own and no particular admiration for the circus that so enthralls the audience. The pink elephants sequence replaces all that with an example of real magic and whimsy – though at times its also a frightening. Thus, at the end of the sequence when the last of the pink elephants transform into clouds at sunrise, we’re ready to enter a different moral universe, one with different values. It’s not simply that the crows, as individuals, are more sympathetic to Dumbo, but that they live by different values than those status-driven elephants that shunned Dumbo and his mother and those clowns who were only interested in exploiting Dumbo so they could hit the boss up for a raise. The crows were able to consider Dumbo’s ears as signs of remarkable ability and were willing to act on that perception, though with a little deception thrown in (the “magic” feather).

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The pink elephants sequence tells us that the difference between the circus world, in which Dumbo is shunned and his mother imprisoned, and the crow’s world (in the sky), is not simply one of geography. It is a difference in imaginative and moral capacity. Thus the transition from one world to the other is not merely physical; it is also mental and imaginative. The pink elephants sequence underlines that aspect of the transition.

Scapegoating and Politics A few other things are worth noting in this general context. First, while Snow White and Pinocchio were set in a fairytale Europe of sometime past, Dumbo is set in a highly stylized American present. Thus in the newspapers that flash across the screen after Dumbo’s triumph on the first has a story entitled “Britain in Greatest Offensive” while a bit later we see a color picture of Dumbo-inspired airplanes entitled “’Dumbombers’ For Defense.” The characterization of the crows is another aspect of this contemporary setting. Then there is that odd stork beginning. I have no idea whether or not it derives from the source book or was created by Disney. But there’s a very telling lyric in the song: “You may be poor or rich, it doesn’t matter which. Millionaires, they get theirs, like the butcher and the baker . . .” That lyric in effect frames the rest of the story with egalitarian sentiment.

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Thus when the elephant matrons reject Dumbo, their actions explicitly contrast with that framing sentiment. The film is not sympathetic to them at this point. But that’s not the final judgment. During sequence where we see laborers setting up the circus tent during a ferocious rain storm—the show must go on!—the film surely asks us to identify with all those who do that back-breaking physical work, a group that includes both the faceless roustabouts and the elephants and other circus animals—a bit of cross-species comradeship, incidentally, that’s especially telling in our era of growing ecological awareness. When we get to the circus show itself we see the elephants building a ridiculous pyramid while the ringmaster is blathering away. At this point the film definitely sympathizes with them. Their lives are on the line, but there’s no evidence that the ringmaster-owner is concerned with anything beyond spectacle. At the very end of the film, of course, the matrons are restored to grace in the (fragile) bounty that has come to the circus through Dumbo’s success. What interests me is the scene after the pyramid collapses, bringing down the big top, and the matrons are wounded and bandaged. That's when they take a solemn vow that Dumbo is no longer an elephant. That, of course, is cruel of them. It is precisely because their cruelty is so obvious that it is also obvious that Dumbo is being scapegoated for that disaster. Did he play a role in the disaster? Yes. Was it his fault? Not in any clear and obvious way. But they can punish him while the ringmaster, who surely shares in the blame, is beyond their reach. That are, after all, only elephants and are ultimately dependent on that boss for their livelihood.

It seems to me this cuts deeper than the elephants’ initial disdain for Dumbo. That’s mere snobbery and we have to take it at face value. This scapegoating is the result of a rather nasty social process which is, however, common and familiar. Surely Disney is to be commended for depicting this process. In the end, though, it’s not clear to me that Disney was entirely successful with Dumbo. For one thing the ending seems a bit quick and easy to me. In a way the pink elephants sequence is too successful; it simply erases the previous movie from our memory. But that erasure does little or nothing for those faceless roustabouts, or even those avaricious and exploitive clowns. Dumbo has his crow “posse” and he and his mother now live in a luxurious railroad car. But the values that kicked him to the curb are still in place. The matrons may be singing Dumbo’s song, but they’re singing it in the careful accents of middle-class propriety. The emphasis is certainly on Dumbo as an individual. But, by establishing a contemporary setting, an egalitarian sentiment, middle-brow snobbery, and those African-

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American crows, Disney entails a wider social context. This leaves me with the odd feeling that, in some ways Dumbo is a more ambitious film than, say, Pinocchio. The Pinocchio story seems strongly self-contained within the relationships between the three central characters; it’s an entirely personal story. Dumbo, though intensely focused on a very important relationship – that between mother and child – embeds that relationship in the larger world in a fairly open-ended way. Disney was reaching for more than he had in Pinocchio. Is it too much to see in Dumbo the first step down a path that Disney chose not to explore?

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Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed “Pink Elephants on Parade,” from Walt Disney’s Dumbo, is one of the best known, and strangest, animated sequences that Disney, or any studio, has ever done. As the sequence begins Dumbo and Timothy Mouse are pleasantly drunk; when it ends they’re sleeping high in a tree. The sequence tells us nothing about how they got from one state to the other, nor does it tell us anything that’s otherwise going on in the movie. The movie is about elephants, the sequence is about elephants, pink ones; and that’s seems to be all that connects it to the movie. Putting that aside, is there any order within the sequence itself or is it just a collection of strange gags?

1. Elephants from Elephants Let’s start at the beginning. Dumbo and Timothy have drunk water that was accidentally laced with booze. They get drunk and Dumbo starts blowing rather surprising bubbles through his trunk. Timothy asks him to blow a large bubble, which he does. That bubble assumes elephant form, turns pink, and proceeds to blow a second pink elephant from its trunk. The second blows a third, and now we see four pink elephants. Their trunks become trumpet-like, playing a fanfare which we hear on the sound-track. They merge their trunks

and the merged bell expands, bursts, and becomes a portal for a parade of marching elephants.

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Each elephant in the parade is playing a musical instrument, which is a deformed part of its body. There are three things to note so far. 1) The parade of elephants has now become effectively detached from Dumbo. He blew the first bubble, but it became an elephant on its own. The rest followed from that. 2) The purely instrumental music we’re hearing is, in effect, being created by the elephants themselves. 3) At various points in this opening segment we see reactions from both Dumbo and Timothy; they’re on-screen characters. We get a series of gags emphasizing that the elephants are making the music, and then we see a parade of small elephants march around (notice Dumbo watching them):

There is no structure in the film-space itself on which those elephants are marching. They’re stepping on the edge of the frame. This is the sort of self-conscious gag that’s as old as animation itself – such trickery was fundamental to Winsor McCay’s work, but also to Disney’s Alice shorts. Those elephants will parade around the entire perimeter of the frame and then they’ll start expanding until they burst.

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2. An Elephant State of Mind With that we move to new phase. We no longer see Dumbo or Timothy on screen; they’re out for the rest of the sequence. The elephants are no longer depicted as being the source of the music. They’re just elephants. And the music gets a vocal that comments on the rather creepy things happening on screen. First we get a flood of elephants:

And then we see a lone elephant looking rather scared in a strange institutional bed (it’s got castors at the bottom of the bed posts). Could this be a nut house, a funny farm?

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Perhaps. But also, that bedded elephant gives us a point of entry into the scene. Is that us? Could be. The rest of the sequence is a bunch of visual gags playing on shape and color, ending with a creepy walking creature constituted of elephant heads:

We zoom in on the yellow head, and its eyes become a pair of pyramids.

3. Elephant Odalisque With that, we move to the next phase, which is a surreal Orientalist fantasy:

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Those pyramids were the eyes of that yellow elephant head. The creature between them appears to be a cross between an elephant and a camel. So we’re moving away from elephants. And the music has changed; Disney’s dropped the “Pink Elephants” song in favor of generic slinky Oriental exotic music. Before you know it we’re looking at a swaying cobra, which is standard cartoon fare for music like this. And that cobra becomes a bizarre harem-girl elephant:

And her buttocks become a single eye, staring at us:

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What just happened? In the opening phase of this sequence Dumbo and Timothy are on-screen observing the parade of autonomous elephants. In the next phase an elephant in the psych ward is seeing strange things; and that elephant is us. Now something up there on the screen is looking at us!

4. Elephant Couple Dance This, obviously, has got to stop. There’s another visual transition (a yellow curtain rips open) and the music changes to a fast waltz. Now we see a pair of elephants dancing:

Presumably the large one is male, the small female. She poses for him:

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And then they ice skate and ski. These are leisure activities. All of a sudden we’re in a very different world. It’s a social world; these elephants are interacting with one another. Those two elephants, the man and the woman, are having fun together. No more funny farm follies. Now, think of Dumbo. He’s been separated from his mother, with no sense that he’ll ever be reunited with her. His world must be rather scary. We could read the opening phases of this sequence, then, as depicting that mood. But the current sequence, with leisure-time fun, that’s different. It’s almost as though that we’re looking ahead to what life will be like at the end of the film, when Dumbo’s has his triumph. But we’re not there yet. We’re still in pink-elephant land.

5. Hot Elephant Juice We’re got two more phases to go. The skiing gives way to a Latin sequence (don’t ask me how, just watch the movie) with up-tempo Latin music. Hot hot hot!

And the couple becomes a group:

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Now it’s happy time with the gang. The tempo picks up ...

6. Elephant Machines . . . the elephants become cars, trains, planes, toboggans, all whizzing around through empty space at a faster and faster tempo.

And then it all explodes:

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And the sequence is over. Elephants come down from above, transforming into pink clouds and dawn, and Dumbo and Timothy are up in a tree:

Whatever else Disney’s achieved in this sequence, he’s gotten us from a state where we feel sorry for Dumbo’s really miserable plight to one where we’re relieved and perhaps even feeling a bit of hopeful expectation. We’re relieved that this strange pink elephant stuff is over. But the peppiness of that Latin music got the blood moving. Perhaps there IS something to look forward in this movie after all. That is to say, the sequence has performed a dramatic function even if it hasn’t given as any new information about how characters. In contrast, imagine if Disney had actually tried to depict however it is that Dumbo ended up in that tree? Allow me to repeat a passage from my first essay: It seems to me that that would entail real problems. It is one thing to show this cute bigeared baby elephant getting tipsy and blowing funny bubbles and seeing things, but do you really what to depict him bumbling around and somehow managing to fly without really knowing what he was doing? While there’s no technical difficulty in doing that, it does seem to me that keeping it realistic, even within the terms of the cartoon, would

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require that you besmirch Dumbo’s cuteness, or come dangerously close to doing so. Further, it would rob the “learning to fly” sequence of its interest. There wouldn’t be any dramatic point to it. Finally, it would reduce the difference between Dumbo’s circus world and the crow’s world to one of mere geography. We see Dumbo stumble around in the circus, he somehow begins flapping his ears, takes to the sky, and ends up in a tall tree – all before our watchful gaze. How dull, but disillusioning. Instead, Disney takes us into this marvelous surrealistic sequence of transmogrifying pink elephants. What that does is eradicate the circus world from out minds. And that circus world was a pretty cynical one. It’s not simply that Dumbo and his mother were ostracized, but that the circus itself was not a place of fun and fantasy, but just a gig. Whatever it is that children have in mind when daydreaming about running off to join the circus, this is not the circus they dream about. The cynicism displayed by the animals in the opening day parade, for example, was marvelous, as was the nastiness of the clowns.

So, the circus has been put behind us and we’re up a tree. With some crows. And, while these crows mocked Dumbo initially, they ended up sympathizing with him and helping him. As for those crows, they’re obviously modeled after black stereotypes, which is more than I want to get into here, though I say quite a bit about it in my post at Barrier’s. Here and now the point is simply that the world of the tree, and of the crows, is a different one from that of the circus. It’s in this world that Dumbo gets a new start in life. Might we then read the autogenesis of those parading pink elephants as the seeds of Dumbo’s own rebirth? Perhaps. Can’t say yet. Haven’t thought about it enough. All I can say is that the “Pink Elephants” sequence does make some kind of sense. Give me another year and I’ll have made some progress.

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Animals in Cartoons: Tripping the Elephants Electric

I’ve been thinking about the relationships between animals and humans in this Disney’s Dumbo, in the fact that it centers on animals—elephants in particular—and not on humans. This is not at all unusual. By this time, 1941, there’d been a substantial history of cartoons centered on animals. If anything, cartoons were more likely to center on humans than animals. At the same time I’ve been trying to get a handle on what, for lack of better terms, we can think of as the metaphysical implications of animation as a medium, specifically, animation as opposed to live action film-making. I’ll leave the metaphysics as an exercise for the reader as I’ve not figured out how to do it yet. But I’ve got half a clue about the animals.

Of Animals and Cartoons Why elephants? Akira Mizuta Lippit has a most provocative suggestion in Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (pp. 186-187): The Oxford English Dictionary places the first known usage of the word anthropomorphism in the context of “an injunction against attributing human traits to animals” in the second half of the nineteenth century. (Until this referential shift, the word was used to indicate mistaken attributions of human qualities to deities.) It is during in the nineteenth century, with the rise of modernism in literature and art, that animals came to occupy the thoughts of a culture in transition. As they disappeared, animals became increasingly the subjects of nostalgic curiosity. When horse-drawn carriages gave way to steam engines, plaster horses were mounted on tramcar fronts in an effort to simulate continuity with the older, animal-driven vehicles. Once considered a metonymy of nature, animals came to be seen as emblems of the new, industrialized environment. Animals appeared to merge with the new technological bodies replacing them.

Near the very end of the book Lippit has some most provocative comments about cinema, animation in particular (p. 196): One final speculation: the cinema developed, indeed embodied animal traits as a gesture of mourning for the disappearing wildlife. The figure for nature in language, animal, was transformed in cinema to the name for movement in technology, animation. And if animals were denied the capacity for languages, animals as filmic organisms were themselves turned into languages, or at least, into semiotic facilities.

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If Lippit’s speculations are plausible we can begin to see why so many animals appeared in cartoons. As Lippit notes a bit later, animation “encrypted the figure of the animal as its totem” (p. 197). And so we have Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda, Tom and Jerry and Yogi the Bear, Huckleberry Hound and countless others, funny animals all. In Lippit’s terms, those funny animals are “semiotic facilities.” Facile, in the sense of virtuosity, they are, and fascinating as well.

Elephant as Machine One of the most fascinating of these semiotic facilities is the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence in Dumbo. Those elephants take on so many forms and aspects that I’m tempted to read it as nothing less than an elephant-oriented ontology. But I’ll refrain, for the moment, and rest content to underline Lippit’s point about the curious semiotic equation that’s been set up between animals and the machines that have replaced them. Consider the following frames from Pink Elephants. In the first one have become cars; in the second, a speed boat; and in the third, two roaring trains:

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I would add that not only have animals disappeared because we’ve been killing them off and replacing animal power with with machine power, but as more and more people moved from rural areas to cities and then to suburbia the remaining animals became less accessible to larger and larger segments of the population. City folk didn’t live among animals, though they could keep them as pets and they could see them in circuses, like the one depicted in Dumbo.

The Electric Elephant Lippet has one more revelation for us (p. 197): “Thomas Edison has left an animal electrocution on film, remarkable for the brutality of its fact and its mise-en-scène of the death of the animal.” The film clip is available on YouTube, along with clips of other electrocutions and brutal deaths and killings.2 The elephant was named Topsy 3 and like Dumbo’s mother, who all but went rogue in defense of Dumbo, she was female. She spent her last years at Luna Park on Coney Island, where she killed three men in three years. She was executed on 4 January 1903 before a crowd of 1500 people and Edison’s film was seen throughout the country. I don’t know whether anyone at Disney’s was familiar with this event, but it seems possible. After all, the resonance of this execution is still with us. When Luna Park burned to the ground in 1944 the fire became known as “Topsy’s Revenge.” In 2003 the Coney Island Museum effected a memorial to Topsy. Learning of Topsy’s execution hasn’t changed my views on Dumbo. In fact it has only deepened them. It certainly adds resonance to the figure of electricity that is clearly depicted within the Pink Elephants sequence (recall the first frame above), not to mention the generally neon glow of the elephants:

2 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bowA1xUZpmA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)

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Is this bedridden and horrified elephant in a mental hospital, perhaps for electro-shock treatments?

Elephant as Subaltern Topsy’s electrocution sets up one more resonance. At roughly that time in American history, for a quarter century before and after, lynching was all too common in America.4 Most, though not all, of the victims were black. And many lynchings were public, with large numbers of men, women, and children in attendance. Many of these events were photographed and the photographs reproduced and passed around, often in the form of postcards. This resonance helps clarify the relationship between the elephants in Dumbo, the roustabouts, and the crows, which I’ll explore in a later post. Early in the film there’s a stunning sequence in which the elephants work with the roustabouts, who are Black, to erect the circus tent. As I will demonstrate, that scene is obviously designed to create a strong identification between these two groups. 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

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Then, after the Pink Elephants sequence, Dumbo finds himself up a tree. There he meets some crows and they help him to fly. Those crows are obviously figures for Black men. And the song they sing is a treasure house of ontological juxtapositions, aka category mistakes, that all but explicates itself. I’ll close this post with those lyrics: When I See An Elephant Fly: Did you ever see an elephant fly Well I seen a horse fly I seen a dragon fly I seen a house fly I seen all that too I seen a peanut stand And heard a rubber band I seen a needle that winked its eye But I've been, done, seen about everything When I see a elephant fly What'd you say boy I said when I see a elephant fly I seen a front porch swing Heard a diamond ring I seen a polka dot railroad tie But I've been, done, seen about everything When I see a elephant fly I saw a clothes horse and he rear up and buck And they tell me that a man made a vegetable truck I didn't see that, I only heard Just to be sociable I'll take your word I heard a fireside chat I saw a baseball bat And I just laughed till I thought I'd die But I've been, done, seen about everything When I see a elephant fly But I've been, done, seen about everything When I see a elephant fly When I see an elephant fly

Addendum: The Execution of Topsy I was thinking more about the execution of Topsy and wondered whether or not it appeared in a recent book on the history of amusement park: Gary S. Cross and John K. Wilson, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP 2005). So I opened up the index, found Luna Park, and there it was: “and Topsy, 1”. Bingo! And on the opening page no less.

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For my purposes that’s the important, that the incident was listed in history of the emergence of the modern amusement park. That’s an index, if a weak one, of how the event resonated. Topsy’s owners had intended to hang her, but the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals objected so strenuously that the sought another way. Thomas Edison came to their rescue. Edison was in a rivalry with George Westinghouse over which kind of electricity should be used to power America. Westinghouse favored alternating current while Edison favored direct current. Edison argued that DC was the safer technology and demonstrated his point by publicly executing dogs and cats with AC. The execution of Topsy thus was a significant opportunity to publicize his view of the dangers of AC. That grisly bit of information wasn’t in The Playful Crowd (I found it at the IMDB, here5), which only asserts that Edison had been promoting “the electric chair as a human form of capital punishment” (p. 1). And that, presumably, is why he had a film crew there.

Addendum 2: An Elephant Hanged Commenting on an older post about Dumbo, Jeb informs us that an elephant was publicly hanged in Tennessee in 1916. The article reporting the story ends with this coda: In an article published in the March 1971 issue of the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, author Thomas Burton reports that some local residents recall "two Negro keepers" being hung alongside Mary, and that others remember Mary's corpse being burned on a pile of crossties. "This belief," Burton writes, "may stem from a fusion of the hanging with another incident that occurred in Erwin, the burning on a pile of crossties of a Negro who allegedly abducted a white girl." The murder of an elephant: a spectacle. The murder of "a Negro": another spectacle.

5

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0231523/plotsummary

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Roustabouts, Trains, Elephants, and Crows With a Latourian Afterward I want to look at two things in this post about Disney’s Dumbo. First, we look at the tent-raising sequence, in which Disney establishes an equivalence between elephants and roustabouts. It’s not merely that they dominate the sequence, and they work together on the same task, but that Disney stages the scenes in a way that emphasizes their likeness, their ontological equivalence. That same theme is taken up in the lyrics sung by the crows in the last quarter of the film, “When I See and Elephant Fly.” That’s the second thing. I end with an afterword on Latour’s concept of plasma.

The Animate Machine The tent-raising sequence begins at night. As the circus train comes to a halt the locomotive “breathes” a sigh of relief—you hear that on the sound track—and the engine flexes in the middle, but, obviously, cannot hear the sigh or see the flexing in this frame grab

though you can see the puffs of “exhaled” steam as the locomotive flexes as it relaxes into a full stop. The breathing and flexing is the sort of biomorphic vitalism that is typical of and pervasive in cartoons. Anything can be given the aspect of life. While we can treat that biopomorphism as a stylistic feature common in cartoons that we can ‘bracket out’ of serious consideration as we know that, in fact, steam locomotives are not alive, I propose that we not do that. The train in this film flexes and coalesces in a way typical of animal movement, but not of mere mechanism. Beyond that, it has been common to talk about locomotives and other machines as kinds of animals. Consider this passage from Henry David Thoreau’s “Sound” chapter in Walden (1854), which I discussed in an older post:6 When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion . . . with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in gold and silver wreaths . . . as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery 6

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search?q=Thoreau

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of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.

Given the nature of animation as a medium—to create the illusion of life from a succession of still drawings, I think we need to take such things as serious statements about the world, though, of course, we must exercise some care in taking them seriously.

Working Together Once the train has halted the animals exit. Here we see Dumbo following behind his mother:

Notice that rain has started to fall. It will quickly develop into a torrential downpour. No sooner do we see elephants leaving than we see roustabouts. Notice that one of them has a sledgehammer; he’s prepared to work:

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The fact that the roustabouts follow immediately upon the elephants establishes an association between them. But are we to think of them as LIKE one another or as DIFFERENT? We don’t know that quite yet. It depends on what happens next, and after that. If you look closely you’ll notice that the roustabouts seem to be dark skinned (Black, like the crows that show up later in the film) and that their faces have no features. The lack of facial definition may reflect budgetary constraints ad Disney was under orders from its bankers to economize. If we are seeing evidence of budgetary constraints, depriving the roustabouts of faces isn’t the only obvious possibility. Consider this night-time shot of clowns in silhouette:

Animating those shadows is much simpler, and thus cheaper, than animating figures fully in the round. Still, this treatment of the roustabouts may also play a thematic role, serving to reduce the difference between humans and animals by reducing the difference between one roustabout and another. They’re not individuals, they’re muscle. Like the animals. In this next frame we SEE the elephants working. It’s beginning to look like elephants and roustabouts are alike, at least in this context:

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But not all the animals work. Tigers, for example, do not:

Thus a line has been drawn. Elephants and roustabouts are alike in that they work. In that respect, both differ from tigers. As obvious as that is, I don’t think it’s trivial. We’re dealing in myth logic here, and myth logic has its own rules. Here we see roustabouts tossing tent pegs, emphasizing their status as workers, while the next frame shows them driving a peg into the ground:

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Wouldn’t you know, the elephants too hammer pegs, even Dumbo:

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This elephant scene follows immediately upon the roustabout scene without so much as a frame between them and without any fancy transitions, no dissolves, fades or wipes, just a quick cut. Elephants and roustabouts are doing the same thing and so are, in some sense, the SAME. Disney didn’t have to stage things in this way. That elephants could hold hammers with their trunks, pound tent pegs, and do so in coordination with one another—that’s rather fanciful, though no more fanciful than elephants exchanging gossip or flying. Nor did Disney have to juxtapose the elephants and roustabouts so closely. This sequence was deliberately staged to establish an equivalence between the two species, humans and elephants, and an equivalence that goes beyond the bare necessity of allowing for audience identification with Dumbo. That would surely happen without this work scene. Shortly after the peg driving we see another kind of animal helping with the work:

The camels (there’s another one off frame to the right) are carrying tent pole segments. They appear only in this one sequence and no other animals appear: elephants, camels, and (nonworking) tigers. The sequence now focuses on elephants—these are only representative frames:

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As the scene comes to an end the roustabouts return, tossing and positioning the ropes that will be used to haul the tent up the highest, the center, pole.

The tent is hoisted and the scene ends.

In What Sense Alike? Elephants and roustabouts are different in many ways, but also alike in many ways. The judgment that is implicit in this sequence is, I submit, fundamentally a social one, not a biological one (see the Latourian Afterward below). Disney and his animators are assimilating the roustabouts and the elephants into the same position in society, not merely the society of the film, but the larger society in which they live. Our society. Roustabouts are elephants, and elephants are roustabouts. That train, it too, is being assimilated into the same position in society. Position in society is what this film is about. Dumbo’s large ears make him an outcast. First he was merely weird and, as such, as object of ridicule. But then, after he played a role in a terrible accident in during a performance, things got worse. He was supposed to jump to the top of a pyramid of elephants, but he tripped over one of his ears as he was running to the springboard and, instead, ran into the elephant at the bottom of the pyramid:

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The accident wasn’t Dumbo’s fault, but he was made to take the fall. The other elephants gathered together and took a solemn oath that Dumbo was no longer an elephant.

He was ostracized, no longer part of elephant society. Of course, his mother had already been locked up for mad because she’d defended Dumbo from a human who’d mocked him and, when the ringmaster came after her with a whip, she lost it. So, both Dumbo and his mother were effectively kicked out of circus society and elephant society. That is, of course, within the film. In the society of film goers, they are stiff very much IN society. They are, in fact, the focal points of that society, Dumbo especially. He is, after all the protagonist of the film. And it is through his action, successful flight in performance, that his mother is brought back into circus society.

Those Crows and Their Puns That brings us to those crows, whom I’ve already discussed above. They give Dumbo the encouragement and confidence, not to mention a helpful placebo, the “magic” feather, he needs to actualize his flying ability. They are, of course, Blacks in disguise as crows, and thus kin to the

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roustabouts in a human way and to Dumbo in an animal way—they’re animals and they all can fly. I don’t want to discuss the crows, however, as I’ve already discussed them. I want to look at the song they sing: When I See An Elephant Fly. Disney eases into the song with a little bit of spoken dialog: Crow 1: Did you ever see an elephant fly? Crow 2: Well, I seen a horse fly Crow 3: I seen a dragon fly Crow 4: I seen a house fly

Each line contains a (well-worn) pun playing on the fact that “fly” can be used as a verb, depicting a certain kind of locomotion, or as a noun, indicating a certain kind of animal. The first three linkages involve large animals animals—elephant, horse, and dragon—to fly, and the dragon is more a creature of myth than of reality. The fourth links to an inanimate object, a house. So we’ve got inanimate linked animate. Which is to say, this song isn’t just a series of puns, but puns that are thematically relevant in that they equate things from different ontological levels, different links in the so-called Great Chain of Being: machines (steam locomotive) and animals, humans (roustabouts) and animals (elephants), and now mammals (elephant, horse) and insects, mythical creatures (dragon) and insects, and inanimate structures (house) and insects. The song proper adds more such cross-category equations. As the fourth crow speaks his line, the head crow comes into view and utters his reply, starting with speech and modulating into song. Here’s the song proper, which I present without commentary: I seen all that too I seen a peanut stand And heard a rubber band I seen a needle that winked its eye But I've been, done, seen about everything When I see a elephant fly What'd you say boy? I said when I see a elephant fly I seen a front porch swing Heard a diamond ring I seen a polka dot railroad tie But I've been, done, seen about everything When I see a elephant fly I saw a clothes horse and he rear up and buck And they tell me that a man made a vegetable truck I didn't see that, I only heard Just to be sociable I'll take your word I heard a fireside chat I saw a baseball bat

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And I just laughed till I thought I'd die But I've been, done, seen about everything When I see a elephant fly But I've been, done, seen about everything When I see a elephant fly When I see an elephant fly

No wonder this film was so popular. It’s a celebration of democracy in which people, animals, and things are all put on the same level of “being.” This is NOT a matter of mere verbal assertion, even of philosophical argument. No, it’s different, and works into the mind, if I may, the soul, in a different way. This is, in the terms of an old cliché, showing, not telling. Showing reaches a realm of our being that is inaccessible to telling. And they’re put there through a medium, animation, in which everything starts out the same, as lines sketched out on paper.

A Latourian Afterword The philosophical ideas which have been uppermost on my mind for the last year or so are associated with Bruno Latour, who is best known as an anthropologist. That’s what he mostly does, albeit the strange anthropology of science in which one studies scientists in their laboratories rather than exotic peoples in remote corners of the world. But his anthropology has a philosophical flair, and his writing frequently has extensive passage of primarily philosophical reflection and analysis. One of his principle themes is that all “actants” must be considered in a proper ethnography, nonhumans as well as humans. What he’s concerned about is the process by which these actants, of any kind whatsoever, take their place in society, which he often terms “the collective.” That is to say, these actants are ontologically equivalent IN the collective. In Reassembling the Social Latour introduced a concept that sheds an interesting light on this emphasis. He talks of plasma (p. 244) namely, that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified. How big is it? Take a map of London and imagine that the social world visited so far occupies no more room than the subway. The plasma would be the rest of London, all its buildings, inhabitants, climates, plants, cats, palaces, horse guards. Yes, Garfindel is right, ‘it’s astronomically massive in size and range’.

Plasma, thus, is that which exists, but about which we have no knowledge and so it has no presence in our collective, our society. Everything that’s shown in Dumbo, of course, is known, by definition. And every projection from our collective into the film, or from the film into our collective, that too consists only of things that are known. The purpose of the film, as I am reading it, is to restore democracy within this collective by putting all the participants, animal, vegetable, mineral or human, on the same basis. Dumbo, the baby elephant who can fly, is the focal point of this metaphysical trickery. And everything in the film is, in fact, lines and paint. Everything is on a level.

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Notes: Mother and Son, Gender and Violence in Dumbo I’ve got Dumbo on my mind. But this is just a quickie, mostly screen shots and light narrative. The analytical work will have to wait. You are, of course, welcome to supply your own analysis. *****

All the elephants we see are female, except Dumbo. The stork who delivers him—and why does Disney make such a big deal out of this fairy about of storks delivering babies?— refers to him as “little fella.” Mrs. Jumbo names him Jumbo Junior. Jumbo Senior is nowhere to be found. In the tent-raising, the roustabouts are male and the elephants, of course, female. The final action in the sequence is to raise the center portion of the tent up the center poll. The elephants provide the muscle:

Here it goes:

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The next day:

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to judge whether or not to see Freudian undertones in a scene where females provide the power needed to erect the Big Top. How, in some detail, does Mrs. Jumbo get locked up for mad? A big-eared boy taunts her beloved Dumbo on opening day:

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Then he lays hands on Dumbo and blows in his ear:

For that he gets spanked, as perhaps he should be, but not by an elephant:

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A line has been crossed. A human has been “attacked” by an elephant, the largest land-living animal. Somehow panic sets in, we don’t see just how or why. We just see people running and Mrs. Jumbo enraged:

The ring-master enters, whip in hand, and starts cracking it. Handlers go after Mrs. Jumbo with ropes, to no avail. She just gets madder and madder and grabs the ring-master by the foot, lifts him in the air, and dunks him in a pail of water. The horror! The horror!

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For this Mrs. Jumbo is locked in a cage:

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It’s in the aftermath of this debacle that Timothy Mouse befriends Dumbo. He sees the adult females shunning Dumbo and feels sorry for the little guy. He approaches them as they’re huddled in a ring, makes funny faces and noises, and they’re suitably scared:

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He castigates them for their churlish behavior—“Overstuffed hay bags!”—and then goes off to find and comfort Dumbo. In a scene that involves a good deal of physical play in which Timothy climbs on and over Dumbo, including down his trunk to stand on its tip, Timothy succeeds. Dumbo is feeling better. Timothy has a brainstorm. He sneaks into the ringmaster’s tent while he’s sleeping (ringmaster at the right, the shadow is Timothy):

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and implants an idea deep into his mind: “I am the voice of your subconscious mind, your inspiration, now concentrate.”

“Remember, your pyramid of elephants IS standing in the ring, waitin’ for a climax.” “Climax,” echoes the ring master in his sleep.

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Timothy replies, “You are now getting that climax.” “Climax,” the ringmaster replies. Timothy then goes on to explain his idea. Dumbo comes running into the ring, jumps from a platform to “the very pinnacle of your pyramid. He waves the flag for a glorious finish.”

You get the idea. As Timothy backs out of the tent the ringmaster awakens with a great idea: “I got it! I got it!” This seems to me rather an open invitation for Freudian speculation, but I’ll leave the details—about which I’ve not yet thought—as an exercise to the reader. While you’re working through them, remember that Mrs. Jumbo got locked up when as a consequence of her reaction to a boy blowing in Dumbo’s ear. Now Dumbo’s mouse companion is talking into the ear of the ringmaster, the one who ordered her locked up. What becomes of this flash of inspiration? The elephants for the pyramid, a very shaky pyramid. Dumbo stumbles over his ears on the run-in and he crashes the pyramid. As it falls the top elephant grasps the center pole. It breaks and the tent comes tumbling down. At the very end of the scene Dumbo peeks out from under a patch in the tent and waves his little flag, as though in surrender.

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Think about THAT, the whole tent comes tumbling down, the reverse of the labor we witnessed in the tent-raising sequence where the roustabouts and elephants worked together. Now we see an infant male elephant fail in executing the scheme hatched by the ringmaster, the boss. Except that it wasn’t really the ringmaster’s idea. The idea was implanted into his subconscious mind by Timothy Mouse, Dumbo’s friend and scourge of officious elephant matrons. The mind boggles at trying to unravel the causal loops. And we’re not at the end, not by any means. The officious matrons ostracize Dumbo. Dumbo becomes a success playing the role of an infant rescued from a fire by the clowns. Note that, as the ringmaster was dunked in water by Dumbo’s mom, now Dumbo is dunked in some white liquid by the clowns. Timothy and Dumbo visit his mom in the clink. She sings to him. Timothy and Dumbo get drunk, inadvertently. Pink Elephants. The crows—remember, they’re Black. Dumbo flies. Success. Dumbo’s a hit, he and his mother are restored to circus society. The End. The mind boggles. ***** Three things struck me this time through, not so much about the film but about working with the film: 1) How so very much can be conveyed so quickly and easily in this medium. 2) How easily it is to conflate one scene with another. I’ve watched this film many times, and studied it, and I still get things confused. In particular, I confused the scene in which Mrs. Jumbo dunks the ringmaster with the one in which Dumbo is at the center of an accident that brings the tent down. 3) How what seems like a limited thing in the mind can go on and on and on when you start to work it out in prose.

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Six Nights and Days of Dumbo When I’d originally published this I organized it around the rite of passage scheme identified in the classic anthropological literature. That’s a three-part structure. But as I continued to work on the film, I realized that the film was also organized to fall into six “nights” and six “days”—scare quotes because these nights are days are more mythical in character than naturalistic. So that’s how I’ve organized this section, which can also serve as a synopsis of the film. The subheadings in Helvetica indicate this night/day structure, starting with the night. But I’ve also indicated the “chapters” imposed on the film by the DVD packaging. Those divisions are numbered consecutively, one through seventeen, and are indicated in boldface. The timings are approximate. There’s a final section which indicates the breakdown by three-part ritual structure. ***** 1. Opening Credits (00:00:00) Just what it says, opening credits. No story action at all. We start out in the air with the storks. We end with an incident in which the line between humans and elephants gets crossed, not constructively as in chapter 5, Setting up the Big Top (where the roustabouts and elephants work together) but destructively: a boy taunts and grabs Dumbo, his mom spanks the boy, and she then dunks the ringmaster.

NIGHT ONE: Infants Delivered 2. Look Out for Mr. Stork (00:01:16) Opens on a storm, voiceover: “Through the snow and sleet and hail . . . through the blinding lightening flash, and the mighty thunder crash . . . nothing stops him, he’ll get through.” Note that during the lightening flashes we can just make out some hills at the bottom of the screen:

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Fade to a lone stork in the sky, flying across the moon holding a bundle in its beak. Song starts: “Look out for Mr. Stork . . . You may be poor or rich, it doesn’t matter which. Millionaires, they get theirs, like the butcher and the baker . . .” The lone stork becomes a flock, flying in formation. The storks peel off and head down, to Florida, winter quarters of the circus. Bundles drop with parachutes. They land in animal cages, unrap themselves, and the infants pop out to eager happy mothers, and perhaps a father (tiger). Mrs. Jumbo expectantly scans the sky. No parachute for her.

DAY ONE: Dumbo is delivered Not only where the other infants delivered during the night, they were delivered while the circus was in camp. Dumbo is delivered during the day, and while the circus is on the move. This is important, as it marks another difference between Dumbo and the rest. The other infants were delivered at night and while the circus was on location.

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3. The Circus Moves On (00:04:10) Daytime, aerial view of train being loaded. Uniformed animal handlers. Animals board. Bustling music. When the elephants board, Mrs. Jumbo is second to last, head hanging low. Sad. One last scan of the sky. Last elephant pushes her into car. Ringmaster calls “all aboard” and train whistle answers “all aboard” – yeah, it ‘talks’. Train pulls out. Song: “Casey Junior.” We see one last stork, high in the sky with a bundle. Lost in the clouds. This stork has a red cap and a blue uniform. It’s different from all the other storks. Note: Now I’ve got half an idea why Disney lingered so long on this stork business. It gives him an emphatic way to differentiate Dumbo from all the other infants even before we see him. His arrival is DIFFERENT. It’s late, and the courier is different from the others. 4. Delivery for Mrs. Jumbo (00:06:30) A single stork, weary, on a cloud, talking to himself. looking to find where to deliver his little bundle of joy. Consults a map. Lands on train, finds proper car, delivers infant. Stork recites two greeting card jingles and asks Mrs. Jumbo to sign a receipt. She does: “X”. He seems a little upset at that. Stork sings a ‘naming’ song (“Happy Birthday”) before Mrs. Jumbo can unwrap her infant, whom she names “Jumbo Jr”. Well received, one matron observing “this is a proud proud day.” And THEN his ears pop out. Other matrons are distressed and disdainful. He’s dubbed “Dumbo.” Matrons giggle and cackle. Mrs. Jumbo shuts them out, literally (she closes a window between their area and hers). Snuggles with Dumbo. Night falls and we see the train traveling to the next stop. Note: Jumbo Jr. is separated from his name. That name identified him with his father. His new name is his own, sorta.

NIGHT TWO: Big Top and Banishment Again, a stormy night, including thunder and lightening. This is clearly meant to echo the first night. 5. Setting Up the Big Top (00:12:45) First the tent raising. Elephants and roustabouts working together. Dumbo works too. The night is stormy. (Echoing the storm in the opening frames?) The final act is to hoist the tent up the central pole. We observe this from below, looking up the pole. For more detail, see: Roustabouts, Trains, Elephants and Crows.

DAY TWO: Dumbo’s First Day at the Show Opening day parade. Ringmaster in the lead on a white horse. Initial POV seems mostly low, as from a child. Animals bored and disdainful and pay little attention to the crowd. Clown

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contingent comes right before elephants, who are high and proud. Dumbo happily tags behind his mother (last in line), holding on to her tail, with a doll seated on his back. He plays to the audience, stumbles in the mud. Fade. 6. A Bath for Dumbo (00:16:57) Dumbo and mom play at the bath. He runs outside as the crowd streams in. A goofy looking kid makes fun of him. His mom spanks the kid. Panic! The crowd streams away, Mrs. Jumbo goes rogue, dunks the ringmaster in water. Note: The line between humans and elephants is thrice crossed. The kid crosses it when he grabs Dumbo. Mrs. Jumbo crosses it when she spanks the kid and when she dunks the boss. She’s separated from circus society. For more detail, see: Roustabouts, Trains, Elephants and Crows. Begins with Mrs. Jumbo’s exile from the circus into a locked trailer. Dumbo himself is banned from elephantdom after the elephant pyramid collapses. He sees his mother again, and gets drunk, followed by Pink Elephants on Parade, which makes the transition to the final movement, in which Dumbo and mom are restored to circus society, but in better circumstances.

NIGHT THREE: Exile and Inspiration 7. Mrs. Jumbo in Solitary Confinement (00:20:03) Night time, we see an animal car with locked door and two signs: “Danger”, and “Mad Elephant”. Camera to Dumbo (cross-dissolve?) who’s crying. Camera pans to elephant matrons in a circle, gossiping. “After all, one mustn’t forget, one is a lady.” Timothy Mouse, in red uniform, with had, hears them, which eating a peanut. Is disgusted. Dumbo approaches the matrons, they shut him out. Dumbo slinks away. Timothy Mouse decides to get them. Scares them and tells them off. Goes to find Dumbo and befriend him. 8. Dumbo Meets a New Friend (00:23:28) Dumbo hiding in a mound of hay. Timothy Mouse approaches and entices him out with a peanut. Dumbo grabs onto Timothy’s tale with his trunk. (An important gesture that will be repeated at various times in the film.) Timothy hatches a plan to bring Dumbo success. He overhears the ringmaster talking to his attendant. “I’ve got an idea! What an idea!” It’s for a pyramid of pachyderms. “And now comes the climax!” That’s the end of the idea, no climax. “Maybe it comes to me in a vision, while I dream.” We see this conversation in silhouette. Timothy gets an idea, saying” “Dumbo, you’re a climax.” He goes to the ringmaster’s tent and climbs up near his head. He talks into the ringmaster’s ear and suggests a pyramid with Dumbo at the top. The ringmaster awakens: “I got it! I got it!” For more detail, see: Mother and Son, Gender and Violence in Dumbo: Some Quick Notes.

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DAY (evening) THREE: A Brilliant Disaster The film doesn’t give any strong indication that we see any day-time action on day three. Presumably the disastrous performance did not happen the night the ringmaster got the idea. It seems to have happened during the evening. As the disaster comes to a close the camera moves outside to show the tent collapsing. It’s dark, and gets darker as it totally collapses. So I’m going to count this as an evening show on the third day. 9. A Pyramid of Pachyderms (00:28:25) Fade in from black on the ring as the announcer introduces the Pyramid of Pachyderms. The pyramid is to be built on a ball that appears to be roughly 3 or 4 feet in diameter. One elephant to another: “To hear him talk, you’d think he was going to do it.” Elephants build pyramid, awkwardly (remember, they’re all balancing on one ball). Dumbo’s eager to come out. Timothy (we assume) ties his ears above his head. Dumbo runs out, ears become undone, he trips, and runs into the ball. The pyramid falls, bringing the tent down as well. Fade to black. That is, the tent he helped erect on the second night has collapsed.

NIGHT FOUR: On the move, Dumbo’s banished Night-time. Rain. Train moving. Matrons, heavily bandaged, are talking. “I never thought I’d live to see the big top fall.” “Because of that Dumbo I never can show my face there again.” About Dumbo: “They’ve gone and made him, dear I just can’t say it, made him a clown.” The others are crestfallen. “A clown!?” “No.” “Yes.” “Oh, the shame of it.” They ban Dumbo from elephantdom. Why all the stormy nights?

DAY (evening) FOUR: Dumbo’s Disgrace As with the previous circus-act sequence, I’m locating this one in the late evening. 10. Dumbo’s Disgrace (00:35:14) Opens on Dumbo in make-up, holding a rattle in his trunk, high up in a burning building. Creamcolored make-up on face (white face?) and wears a baby cap. Clown in elephant drag runs around “save my baby!” Clowns to the rescue. Gags and business. Hose, water, gas on the fire. Dumbo hesitates on the platform. Is smacked from behind and he goes into the net the clown-firemen are holding. He breaks through into a bucket of white liquid. (In contrast to the water Dumbo bathed in and in which his mother dunked the ringmaster.) The crowd cheers. An unhappy Dumbo gamely shakes his rattle to the crowd.

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NIGHT FIVE: Celebration, visit mom, pink elephants After the show, clowns in their tent, chatting up their triumph. Break out the booze. Toast to Dumbo. Cut to Timothy washing Dumbo’s face with a toothbrush and encouraging him. Dumbo’s sad. 11. Dumbo Visits His Mother (00:38:06) Continuing directly from the previous scene, Timothy, who’s standing on Dumbo’s trunk, informs him: “We’re going over to see your mother. I made and appointment for you.” Dumbo perks up. They go. She can’t get close enough to the window to look out—she’s shackled to the wall. So she reaches her trunk out through the bars and Dumbo grabs it. Tears. “Baby Mine” on the soundtrack. She hooks her trunk, Dumbo sits in it, and she rocks him. Timothy is happy. We see other animal infants and mothers during song. As song ends Timothy leads Dumbo away. Cut to the clowns in silhouette in their tent, talking and drinking. They decide to raise the platform Dumbo jumps from. 40 ft. 80, 180, a thousand. “Be careful, don’t hoit the little guy.” “Ah go on, elephants ain’t got no feelins’.” Pleased with the idea, they decide to hit the boss up for a raise, and sing about it. Liquor bottle falls off the table and into a water bucket. 12. Dumbo Gets the Hiccups (00:42:29) Walk back from visit to mom. Timothy Mouse in front, Dumbo behind, trunk holding onto Timothy’s tail. “What would your mother think of you, if she saw you crying like this. Remember, you come of a proud race. Why you’re a pachydoim, and pachydoims don’t cry.” (Renaming) Dumbo hiccups. They look for water and find the bucket that’s been doused with booze. TM grabs Dumbo’s trunk and leads him to it. Dumbo drinks. TM give more encouraging talk. Tells Dumbo to hold his breath until D turns red: ”Swallow.” D does, and breathes too. Hiccups, with bubbles. TM wonders about the water, falls in, gets drunk. Climbs out, music starts. Dumbo keeps blowing bubbles. They get bigger. And stranger. TM rides on a pair, goes inside some. A zig-zag one, on which TM lounges. It pulls itself into a sphere. At TM’s request, square one. Out comes a cube. And then, again by request, a great big one. That changes into . . . 13. ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ (00:46:02) Opens on the first elephant bubble, just as it’s becoming an elephant. Lots of stuff happens. The whole pink elephant world blows up more or less at dawn. Pink elephants float down from the sky and become clouds. Dumbo learns that he can fly and takes possession of that power, as it had possessed him while he was pink-elephanting. That restores him to the circus in a way that feels good and right to him, and to his mother.

DAY FIVE: Crows sing, Dumbo flies 14. Up A Tree (00:50:54)

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Four variously dressed crows up in a tree wondering how that elephant got up there. “They ain’t dead, is they.” “No, dead people don’t sno, or do dey?” The ‘head’ crow joins in. The others show him. Looks down and we see, for the first time, Dumbo sleeping on a branch, with TM in the crook of Dumbo’s trunk. Head crow goes down to investigate. Banter about up here and down there. “Brother Rat.” TM looks down, panics, wakes Dumbo up. Dumbo looks down, starts tipping, grabs branch with trunk, falls. Lands in a pond. Note: Again, water. Dumbo was bathed in water, by his mother and then gets make-up washed off his face by TM. Mrs. J dunks ringmaster in water. Dumbo and TM get drunk on booze-laced water. Crows fly down, laughing. Timothy and Dumbo start walking away, feeling low, Dumbo holding on to Timothy’s tail. Jim Crow suggests (perhaps in jest?) that they flew up. TM concludes that they did. Grasps the implication immediately. 15. ‘When I See an Elephant Fly’ (00:54:34) Crows sing the pun-filled song, “When I See and Elephant Fly.” Song ends. Crows rolling on the ground in laughter. TM gets mad, jumps up on a tin can, throws his hat off. “All right gennelmen, the Reverend Rodent is gonna’ address you.” “You oughta’ be ashamed of yourselves...” and TM tells Dumbo’s story: “They made him a clown. Socially he’s washed up.” The crows are taking it in, hats off, tears roll down beaks. Timothy and Dumbo start walking away, feeling low, Dumbo holding on to Timothy’s tail. Jim Crow asks them to stop: “We done seen the light, you boys is OK.” He calls a huddle among the crows, with Timothy. Comes up with the idea of the magic feather, which is using “’cology, you know, psychology”. Note: Is this like the psychology TM used to implant his idea into the ringmaster’s mind? 16. Dumbo Flies (00:58:34) “Use a magic feather. Catch on?” And, with a bit of prodding, Dumbo launches from a cliff, holding the magic feather in his trunk w/ TM riding in his hat. Flaps ears, lots of dust, and when the dust clears they’re airborne. See Dumbo’s shadow on the ground. The crows join him. Singing: “But I be done seen, about everything, when I seen an elephant fly.” (Society found) Dumbo lands on telephone wires, which sag under Dumbo’s weight. Crows land on Dumbo. Jim Crow: “Boy those city folks sure is in for a surprise.” Laughter. Note: The film opens with storks flying. Dumbo’s restoration to the circus happens through flight, a restoration that upsets what the clowns had planned. This restoration, in turn, reunites him with his mother and them both with the other elephants.

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NIGHT SIX: Dumbo barnstorms the Big City 17. Dumbo’s Surprise (1:00:12) Opens on aerial view of tent. Search lights playing the sky. Zoom inside, burning building, hysterical clown-mother, and Dumbo up there at the top. Lots of business. Dumbo launches, drops feather, keeps going down, but under TM’s frantic pleading, extends ears just in time to miss the ground. Lots more business ending in clown getting dunked in white liquid. Dumbo gets a trunk full of peanuts and sprays the elephant matrons.

DAY SIX: Happy ending TM: “We’re going down in history.” Cut to presses rolling and we get a montage of newspaper headlines and stories, including “Dumbombers for Defense.” Cut to exterior of happy train rolling along. Once again, on sound track, “Elephant Fly.” The four matrons happily sing the final line, in synch. Dumbo and mom have last car, a very snazzy one. Mom sets at the rear, waving her trunk at Dumbo, who’s flying with his crow posse. Dumbo flies into mom’s arms. Sunset. Crows on telephone pole, talking about Dumbo’s autograph. End (01:03:41)

Chronology with Ritual Overlay I’ve discussed the standard-issue account of ritual life that’s been kicking around in anthropology for a century or so, in Ritual in Apocalypse Now.7 The structure derives from classic work by Arnold van Gennep and Emile Durkheim. ONE. Establishing a World (Secular) Night 1: storm, storks, babies delivered to all but Mrs. Jumbo. Day 1: Dumbo is delivered during the day, to a moving train. Night 2: Tent is erected during a storm, Dumbo helps. Day 2: circus parade, Dumbo bathes and plays with mother, Dumbo mocked, boy punished by Mrs. Jumbo. Panic! Mrs. Jumbo is banished! TWO. Exile (Sacred, Liminal) Night 3: Mrs. Jumbo locked up. Dumbo shunned by gossipy matrons; TM befriends Dumbo and gives ringmaster a brilliant idea. Day (evening) 3: the act bombs, injuries all around. Big Top collapses onto Dumbo. Night 4: Night-time trip in storm and rain, matrons meet, banish Dumbo, he’s been made a clown. Day (evening) 4: the act’s a hit; clowns, fire, and water, Dumbo in infant drag; Dumbo in white goo. Night 5: Clowns celebrate, Dumbo visits mom, Pink Elephants

7

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/ritual-in-apocalypse-now.html

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THREE: Restoration (Secular) Day 5: Dumbo learns to fly. Ends flight on telephone wires along with crows. Night 6: Dumbo triumphs in the Big City, barnstorming aerial show Day 6: newsreel, final trip into sunset.

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Why A Stork? The Opening of Dumbo Why does Disney open with that fairytale about babies being delivered by storks, and why does he milk it for about seven minutes and forty seconds (over a tenth of the film)? Well, it’s a device that allows them (for it’s not just Uncle Walt, especially not on this one, where he was unusually hands-off) to do a number things, only one of which is to avoid biological reality with those details that are so often embarrassing to well-reared citizens, not to mention many others. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that’s the least of its uses. Perhaps the most important thing is that it proclaims, from the get-go, that this is a FAIRYTALE, or if you will, a MYTH. That puts you in the proper receptive mode so you don’t worry about pesky details of verisimilitude and plausibility. Instead you’re prepared to bask in the sights and sounds in a different, perhaps even deeper, way. It’s in that more expansive mode that, once the credits have rolled, we see the opening storm:

And we hear these words on the voiceover: Through the snow and sleet and hail... through the blizzard, through the gale... through the wind and through the rain... over mountain, over plain... through the blinding lightning flash... and the mighty thunder crash... ever faithful, ever true... nothing stops him. He'll get through.

I reminds you of the creed of the U.S. Postal Service: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” This isn’t going to be a movie about the postman, is it? No, but right now we’re going to see a bunch of deliveries. It sounds so dramatic. It’s also deeply mythic. Many origin stories begin in storms. Whether or not this is an origin story, that’s for a later post. But the storm sets up that feeling.

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As the storm dissipates we hear the sounds of an airplane engine on the sound track. But do we see an airplane as the clouds move off to the left? No. We see, first, a lone stork against the night-time moon, and then a whole flock of storks, each carrying a bundle:

At the same time the dramatic voiceover gives away to a light jaunty song, “Make Way for Mr. Stork” and that song contains these lyrics: “You may be poor or rich It doesn't matter which, Millionaires, they get theirs like the butcher and the baker.” The sentiment is egalitarian, deeply American, and sets us up for the snobbishness the elephant matrons display toward Dumbo and toward his mother. The storks do some flying; then they peel off and head for the ground, giving us a shot like this:

You can see most of Florida there and you can see the curvature of the globe. It’s a simple and obvious thing, but did you see any shots like that in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or in Pinocchio? What other films have such shots? Fantasia, of course, but that’s a very strange creature of a film, very. There are others, of course, science fiction films, for example. But such

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shots of the curvature of the earth from the sky—this is not, of course a realistic rending, notice “Florida” written on the ground—are not standard shots. But we’ve got one here in this cute little myth of a cartoon. And we’ll have another one just a bit later. What’s more this is not merely an establishing shot through which the camera zooms to get us close to the action. No, there’s action right here, the storks are flying and heading for land. Here you see them dropping their precious cargos with parachutes:

You can see the circus grounds below. The parachutes will land, the bundles will open, and the infants will join their mothers. We see this several times, but no little elephants. In fact, the morning comes and we get another aerial shot:

The circus train is on the tracks and being loaded. We see the loading and we see Mrs. Jumbo make a last anxious scan of the sky, looking for a parachute destined for her. No luck, a matron shoves her into the train. And the train heads out, giving us a number of landscape shots such as this one:

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We see vast vistas and have a wonderful sense of movement and bustle as the train moves along the tracks. There are a few shots of such scope in Snow White and in Pinocchio, but they’re establishing shots. The camera moves through them, but nothing else does. Dumbo is quite different. Space isn’t simply where people and things ARE, it’s where they MOVE, freely and with a sense of purpose. Once the train is well under way, the camera returns our attention to the sky where we see this stork, on a cloud, with a bundle, and in a blue uniform of some sort:

He fumbles about, sighs, and consults a map (look at all the roads):

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Then heads down to deliver his bundle to the moving train. We get another aerial shot, this time in bright day:

He lands on the train while it’s moving and, with suitable ceremony, delivers the baby elephant to Mrs. Jumbo. At last! Even before we see Dumbo’s ears we know he’s different from all the other infants. He’s special. We know this because his mode of delivery is different from that of all the other infants. Not just a little different, but a LOT different. • • • •

The other storks were realistically rendered, this one is not. The other infants parachuted down to stationary parents; Dumbo is hand-delivered on a moving train. The other infants just appear as the cloth unwraps around them; the courier unknots Dumbo, but not before Mrs. Jumbo signs a receipt. The others are not named; this one is, and with a song.

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This is the language of myth and symbolism. It says this one is different. He’s going to be something. Dumbo is playing the role of a culture hero, a trickster, even a demigod if you will. (And he’s so cute!) He messes up, is ostracized, scapegoated, and sacrificed—not to death. No, not to death. But he IS publicly humiliated and that is a form of sacrifice. Why? Well, I’ve been thinking about that, but I’ve not got my thoughts together. So far my thoughts connect the aerial opening with the later crows, who also fly. They connect the infants being flown out of the storm cloud with that strange moment in Pink Elephants when the male tosses a bolt of lightening, hits the female on the head, and SHAZAM! The screen is filled with dancing elephants. That’s reproduction for you, no delivery needed.

An exercise for the reader: Look at Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Dumbo. Compare the spatial scope of shots in the film. I’ve already indicated that neither of the other two has any global shots. What’s the spatial scope of the shots that they do have and that Dumbo has? My sense is that Dumbo covers a wider range of scales.

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Electric Juice for Animals and Machines Now that Akira Lippit (Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife) has alerted me to the significance of electricity in animals and animals in animation, it’s time to revisit Pink Elephants on Parade. Not the whole thing, just the electric sequence. The sequence has six phases of which the electric sequence is the fifth. By way or review, here’s a lightly annotated list of them: 1. Elephants from Elephants: Origins, with Dumbo and Timothy Mouse still on screen here and there. March music. Ends when elephants fill the screen with pinkness and we hear a trumpet fanfare. 2. An Elephant State of Mind: Elephants parade in what appears to be a mental hospital. Vocals. Psychedelic patterning as elephants collide. Ends with the walking creature made of elephant heads. Transition to... 3. Elephant Odalisque: Eyes of head transform into bouncing pyramids (of the Egyptian variety). Orientalism. Slinky music, dancing harem elephant, ending in The Eye. Fanfare, part the curtain. 4. Elephant Couple Dance: Two elephants, male and female, green and pink chiaroscuro outlined against a black background. Dancing, skating, boating, skiing. A wash of snow fills the screen and... 5. Hot Elephant Juice: This is the sequence we’re examining. 6. Elephant Machines: Music morphs from Latin to accelerating mechanical music paced by a three-note trumpet motif repeated and repeated and repeated. Machine Age hustle and bustle leading to an explosion of elephants. At the very end they come down from the top of the screen and become pink clouds in a dawn landscape. First, a caveat: This is a virtuoso piece of effects animation. To appreciate it you need to step through this sequence frame by frame. Screen shots only hint at what’s going on.

Elephant Juice The sequence starts when a spray of snow filling the frame cuts to our elephant pair encased in ice and shivering, but shivering to a Latin beat the quickly thaws them out.

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Their trunks touch and the electric elephant juice produces an explosion.

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This sequence is filled with quick changes in color scheme, often from one frame to the next. That’s why you need to step through it a frame at a time. You don’t see these changes when you watch the sequence at speed, but you sense a vibrating energy on the screen. Notice also the shading on the elephants in the first frame (airbrush?). That’s a lot of effort for something that’s going to play for no more than a frame or two. And Disney did this film on the cheap, by his standards. Now we’re into the dance. The couple dances around with and under that electric arc, an obvious and marvelously apt way of visualizing the connection between a joyously dancing couple. The dance quickly evolves so that he—I’m assuming the larger elephant is supposed to me male—takes charge of the electric bolt, ending up rubbing it on his rump while he shakes his booty.

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Is that a pelvic thrust? As Pappa Siggy used to say, it’s all hidden in plain view. The crackling arc becomes a spear, he tosses it and, SHAZAM! Reproduction in the mechanical age. Lots of elephants shaking they booty to beat the band.

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The camera now zooms in on one of the couples. concentrating on them for a few seconds, no more, with appropriate color jazz (only some of which is in these frame grabs):

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The couple now transforms into a pair of automobiles, an utterly crucial transformation. This, in effect, establishes the equivalence of animals and machines.

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We’re there. And from cars to trains speedboats and beyond. We’re now in the 6th phase of the Pink Elephants sequence. The Latin music is gone, we just have straight beat and simple phrases that get faster and faster. Various vehicle noises—train whistles, honking horns, engine sounds, etc.—are mixed in as well.

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The sequence ends the only way it can, in an explosion that returns us to the “real” world. Up in a tree.

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Now Dumbo will, with the help of the crows, learn to fly. That is to say, he will take a behavior that came to him naturally in his drunken state and incorporate it into his repertoire of deliberate learned actions.

Remarks Man will have conquered the machine. Not just any machine, but the newest high tech machines: airplanes. Dumbo will fly in triumph; the military will design and designate bombers on his image; and he’ll end up wearing an aviator’s cap and goggles. That is, in the logic of myth and symbolism, this movie is about, not just the reunion of a very young child with his exiled mother, but also about animals, humans and technology in the mid-20th Century. The Pink Elephants on Parade sequence is absolutely central to this mythology. Yes, it DOES perform a dramatic function, as I argued in my original Dumbo essay. It gives Disney a way of getting Dumbo into the tree without actually gives us ocular proof that he CAN fly and without exposing him to the indignity of tripping around drunk and eventually stumbling his erratic way into flight. But it also provides the symbolic variousness that allows Disney to assert an identity among animals, machines, and humans. As I’ve said before, this is a metaphysical film in a metaphysical medium. As the figure of the whale was for Melville in Moby Dick, so the figure of the elephant is for Disney in Dumbo. Lest you think the comparison between Dumbo and the white whale is silly—and it is, a bit—let me remind you that the man who animated Dumbo, Vladimir Tytla, also animated the demon in Night on Bald Mountain. That monster of a whale was once an infant and his mother no doubt found him irresistibly cute.

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Metamorphosis, Identity, and Metaphysics in Dumbo and Fantasia Things do not always appear the same. Depending on your point of view a disk can appear circular or elliptical and a square can appear trapezoidal. The visual system must learn about such transformations if we are to be able to reliably identify objects under various circumstances. But some things would seem to undergo intrinsic transformation and yet retain their identity. Consider the riddle of the Sphinx: What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening. Now we’ve got a real puzzle. The riddle asserts an identity over difference. And can one and the same thing have three different forms? The answer to the riddle is, of course, man, who crawls on four limbs in infancy, walks on two as an adult, and requires the aid of a cane in old age. The riddle is something of a trick, interpreting arms as legs in one case and a cane as a leg in another. Still, the underlying, if exaggerated, point holds, that people do change form over time. More generally, living things change form. And some such transformations are more extreme than that in the Sphinx’s riddle, e.g. the acorn and the oak, the caterpillar and the butterfly. I want to look at how metamorphosis is handled the Pink Elephants episode of Dumbo and in three episodes in Fantasia: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The Rite of Spring, and Night on Bald Mountain. There are subtle differences which are worth noting. I end up arguing that the varying treatment of metamorphosis in the different episodes is evidence of an underlying sense of how reality works. If these "laws" of identity and change are violated, then you cannot even have a coherent fantasy world.

Pink Elephant Metamorphosis Consider the pink elephants in Dumbo. The sequence starts with Dumbo blowing bubbles through his trunk. Here he’s blown a big one:

It shimmers and shakes a bit, and then starts changing in what seems like a directed way:

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Notice that the bubble’s surface never breaks or tears. The transformation appears to be smooth and continuous. And that will remain so all the way to elephanthood.

That’s a pachyderm! All the way from a sphere without a break. Alas, not quite. Close but not quite. Elephants have holes through them, spheres don’t. As far as I can tell, elephants have three holes: 1) the gastro-intestinal tract, and 2-3) two nostrils. Disney’s animators will craft a small joke out of this business a bit later. But let’s return to the sequence. After we’ve gotten one full-blown elephant is that that elephant blows a second (out of his trunk, as Dumbo did), the second a third, and the third a fourth. The three then merge their trunks together, like this:

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All of a sudden we’ve got a continuous body. But how many holes? If one elephant equals three holes, then, unless some holes got eliminated in the merger, four elephants should equal 12 holes. For it’s only the tips of the trunks that have merged. As far as we can tell, which admittedly isn’t very far, each trunk still has its two holes intact. But then things happen. That hole in the middle of the combined flare gets larger and larger and the edges start peeling back and splitting. Then—here’s the small joke—a parade of elephants comes out through the bell:

Surprise! Thirteen holes. Unless those parading elephants originated within the existing four, or came in through the back door, there has to be another hole that they’re coming through, one whose other end we can’t see from the front. Twelve holes, thirteen holes, it doesn’t really matter. Nor does it really matter that elephants have three holes and spheres have none. What we see on the screen, which is but a 2D projection of the 3D ‘reality’, is a smooth deformation from a sphere to an elephant form. From that first sphere through to the first full-fledged elephant we see one single object displaying a succession of forms. That’s the point. Few real-world objects behave like that. But then a pink-elephant isn’t exactly a real world object.

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This strange pink object then duplicates itself three times and from THAT comes a multitude of pink strangeness traipsing its around on the screen. The identity of that first elephant is lost and the identity of further elephants is irrelevant. They’re must more elephants. And more metamorphosis to come. In one case an elephant becomes a snake becomes a harem dancer becomes an eye. In another case elephants become cars and trains. It’s a world of elephants.

Metamorphosis in Fantasia Metamorphosis occurs in thee episodes in Fantasia. It happens in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, first when the sorcerer forms smoke into a butterfly:

And then when Mickey activates the broom:

In the first case something with an indefinite (unnamable?) form is given a recognize able form while in the second a stick on a ‘platform’ (the broom’s brush) sprouts arms and the arms sprout hands.

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We’re in the realm of magic, and that magic is explicitly presented as such. The shapeshifting, of the smoke, of the broom, is caused by external agents. In Night on Bald Mountain women are conjured out of fire—form from formlessness— and transformed into animals and then imps:

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This isn’t ordinary magic, if you will, as with the sorcerer and his apprentice, but it isn’t natural either. For lack of a better word, call it demonic. The other case of metamorphosis is in The Rite of Spring, where a fish sprouts legs on the way to becoming an amphibian:

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We are to understand, of course, that it is not the same creature that is shifting shape, though one could read that from the successive images on screen. Rather, we’re being shown morphological changes taking place across generations of creatures. This process is presented as a natural one. As Deems Taylor clued us in his presentation of the episode: “Science, not art, wrote the scenario of this picture. . . . Finally, after about a billion years, certain fish, more ambitious than the rest, crawled up on land and became the first amphibians.” Yes, the change we’ve seen is natural, but it is nature as verified and explicated by science. It’s NOT trickery. It’s real.

Comparative Metamorphosis and Reality In two episodes of Fantasia, thus, the metamorphosis of things originates outside the things themselves. The sorcerer and his apprentice direct changes in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice while the demon directs the change in Night on Bald Mountain. In the third case, The Rite of Spring, there is no external source of change. The change is presented as coming from within the changing things, the successive generations of animals. Wait, wait, wait! You’ve missed one.

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One what? Metamorphosis. Oh? Chernobog himself, the mountain. Ah, you’re right! As far as we can tell, THAT change is inner-directed as well, but it’s not natural and science has nothing to say about it. First we see a mountain, and then it becomes a demon.

Not only does it change shape, but something that was animate has become animate. That’s what’s, well, evil about Chernobog. He crosses the line between the animate and the inanimate. The broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a bit like that as well. It’s an inanimate object that Mickey’s brought to life. He attempts to kill it, though, and that’s when things go haywire. The broom fragments simply reconstitute themselves as full and complete brooms, and alive too. Mickey’s created life that he cannot control. But the sorcerer can. And so that episode comes to an end, with order restored.

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But who or what restored the order at the end of Night on Bald Mountain? No one or nothing that we can see. The point then, is that, there IS a sense of Reality at work in these cartoons, these animations. They may involve fantasy, but there’s an order nonetheless. One very basic form of order has to do with the integrity of things, with their selfidentity. If something changes its form, there must be an explicit way of accounting for that change. Magic provides that account in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In the case of The Rite of Spring, the change comes from within the natural world, but we require science to verify that change, and Disney presents that verification from a point outside the story itself, the Deems Taylor narration. Without that verification the change we see on screen would be inexplicable, or, worse, evil. Night on Bald Mountain is just strange, uncanny. We see Chernobog manipulate the creatures in his hand—the fire, the women, the animals and imps—and in that respect the metamorphosis resembles that of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, though rather more extreme. But there is no account within the episode itself for Chernobog himself, nor is one given in Deems Taylor the introduction. It’s just happens. It’s uncanny. The Pink Elephants episode of Dumbo presents a somewhat different case. We have no sorcerers or apprentices waving their hands, there is no science, nor is it totally uncanny and outside an possibility of explanation. It’s framed as a hallucination that has been induced by alcohol. And pink elephants have something of folkloric existence as the subjects of alcohol induced hallucination.8 Dumbo himself starts things off by blowing the most extraordinary bubbles. It turns out that, when drunk, he’s something of a magician at bubble-blowing. But then the bubbles themselves take over. Within this frame the bubble substance seems to be alive, as though it is in fact elephant substance in disguise. Once it reveals itself it keeps on going. What’s interesting is that both Dumbo and Timothy Mouse (see him in Dumbo’s cap) observe the elephants marching around, including around the edge of the screen:

And that screen can only be the motion picture screen. It doesn’t correspond to anything in the fictional world we’re watching. 8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_pink_elephants

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So, we’ve got an account of where the elephants came from: Dumbo blew a big bubble. And we know that both Dumbo and Timothy mouse see the elephants, so there’s a degree of intersubjective reality there. And within that reality, those elephants become a world and, in particular, breech the distinction between living things and machines. What happens on screen is different from what we’ve seen in the Fantasia episodes. The string of metamorphosis events is longer than in any of the Fantasia episodes and its framed differently, not as magic, not as a scientific account of the natural world, and not as an uncanny world beyond order and control. And yet it IS framed. It has a beginning and an end. And it changes the action, putting Dumbo is a situation where he can recover from his indignities and restore his mother to society. Whereas Fantasia as a whole attempts to account for the world and so is a cosmology9, Pink Elephants attempts to account for the world within Dumbo and so becomes a metaphysics, albeit a cartoon metaphysics. Elephants can be and become anything. It’s all elephants, all the way down.

9

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/11/disneys-fantasia-as-masterpiece.html

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How Dumbo Ends: Crows Left Behind Having already examined the opening of Dumbo (in Why a Stork?), let’s now take a look at the ending. Nothing deep here. Just stating what’s there for everyone to see. Let’s go way to the end, when the action’s over. Dumbo’s triumphed in the circus. Immediately we get a montage of newspaper and magazine covers:

This next one is particularly important. Not only because it references the war, but because it identifies Dumbo with a bomber whose nose was designed to look like him:

Military aircraft were as high-tech as technology got in 1941—still are in 2012 for that matter. That identification—between an animal and technology—is at the heart of the mythological dimension of the film. Then, of course, the inevitable Hollywood contract:

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Timothy Mouse gets to play the big shot and ... what could possibly be more successful than making it in Hollywood? The montage goes by quickly and gives way to this shot, the circus train, Casey Jones, Jr., riding merrily along:

Notice the extreme anthropomorphic make-over on the train, though it is, of course, absolutely standard in cartoons. A nominally inanimate being, a steam locomotive, has been given an allbut-human face. Notice also the curvature of the earth, as though the train is literally at the top of the world, thus echoing the aerial shots from the beginning. The sound track features “When I See An Elephant Fly,” but it’s not being sung by the crows. It’s being sung by the elephant matrons who earlier had ostracized Dumbo and his mother. As the train goes by we finally see that last car with Mrs. Jumbo sitting in the rear:

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The car is Dumbo’s private car, Dumbo’s and his mom’s. Notice the sleek aerodynamic styling. This is very modern and contrasts with the other cars on the train. Now we see Dumbo with his crow “posse” flying behind him:

Notice his aviator cap, which identifies him with the Dumbombers. This elephant flies with the latest fashion. And the crows are now in formation behind him, thus reversing their earlier situation when they had to lead him. He now leads them. Dumbo breaks away from them and rejoins his mother

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while the crows take up formation at the top of a telephone pole. We’ve see these before, of course, when Dumbo first flew and ended up landing on telephone wires, and the crows landed on him. We’ve got more high technology, 1941-style: the telephone system. And the crows, those jive talking happy go lucky good-hearted African American crows, they aren’t in the circus train. Never were, never will be.

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The film ends with the train rolling off into the sunset while the crows are up on the telephone pole, watching it go, and talking about getting Dumbo’s autograph. They helped Dumbo find himself, helped him become a hero, and they’re still outsiders. I’m reminded of the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck’s abusive and alcoholic father is dead, Jim’s been freed, and Huck decides to “light out for the territory” to avoid civilization: “...I can’t stand it. I been there before.” When Dumbo puts on a few more pounds he won’t be able to fly and he’ll just be another circus elephant, him and his mom. Those crows won’t be able to help him them. Besides, they’ve got their own problems. The happy ending is only in the movie. The world is bigger than that.

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Dumbo as Myth 1: Beginning and End What does it mean to say that Dumbo is a myth? The word has various meanings, but I mean it in the sense used by anthropologists and literary critics. In that sense myths are stories that tell members of a culture something fundamental about the world, often about how the world itself came into being, but not stated in realistic or rationalistic terms. More often than not the members of the culture regard their myths as true, but set in Old Times when things were different. Of course, no one in Disney’s audience regarded the movie as true in that sense, not quite. Nor do I. But Dumbo does have many of the features of myths proper and it’s those features that interest me. Why do I think this is a mythic tale? What it comes down to is that that’s the best way to account for those pink elephants on parade. While they do provide dramatic cover for a besotted Dumbo to fly up into a tree, they do much more than that, as we saw in Animals in Cartoons: Tripping the Elephants Electric, where following remarks by Akira Lippit, I argued that animals show up in Golden Age cartoons as “a gesture of mourning for the disappearing wildlife” (Lippit, Electric Animal, p. 196) and machines are anthropomorphized as a way of restoring an animal presence. That equivalence between animal and machine is stated most clearly in the pink elephants episode, but it resonates throughout the film. That gives Dumbo a mythic dimension that is not inherent in a story of mother-infant separation that otherwise drives the dramatic action. Why is that story one about an odd-ball infant? What’s the point of that? Is it simply a variation on the ugly duckling story? I think not. While Dumbo’s oddness is a personal characteristic, if you will, it also carries mythic freight, as I’ll suggest a bit later in this post. But the scope of this post is limited. I’m not going to try to unravel the whole mythic underpinning. I just want to set things up by looking at how the movie begins and how it ends.

Out of Chaos The film begins in a storm, with lightening, thunder, snow, sleet, hail, and rain. If you look closely near the bottom of the screen, especially during the lightening flashes, you’ll see there is a strip of land, with hills and mountains:

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There’s a sententious voiceover about someone getting through all the bad weather, and then, SHAZAAM! the scene changes. The storm dissipates, to the sound of an invisible airplane, and we see naturalistic storks flying in a moonlit sky, each with a bundle hanging from its bill. The soundtrack now has a song about storks delivering, well, whatever. And then we see the earth below. The storks start heading down and dropping their bundles, which seem to have parachutes attached. For a more detailed account of the opening, see Why a Stork? The Opening of Dumbo. That opening establishes three regions: 1) the storm/chaos, 2) the sky (above), and 3) the earth (below). The storm makes no difference between sky and ground. Both are there, though the a viewer may miss the ground if she blinks at the wrong time. What we have, then, is chaos giving way to a division between the sky and the earth. If we think of Dumbo as only a story about motivation, action, and character, then the point of that opening would be to emphasize the perseverance of the storks, which is the burden of the voiceover. If we think of Dumbo as myth things change. The interest in character doesn’t appear, but something else DOES appear, a typical mythic theme: chaos giving way to a differentiation between the sky and the earth.

Genesis Consider the Judeo-Christian creation story in Genesis, which is, after all, what most of Disney’s audience would have known in some form or another. The opening line is (King James translation): “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” That’s the basic distinction we’re looking at in Dumbo and it’s right there at the beginning of Genesis. Of course, there’s a bit more to the creation than that: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Without form and dark, that’s pretty much how that storm is. It’s not until the second day that God differentiated the sky (the “firmament” also called “Heaven” in the King James translation) from the waters, and it’s not until the third day that dry land was formed. And that’s not the end. But this process starts by asserting the distinction between heaven and earth. Of course, the narrator in Genesis explicitly asserts that the world is being created and that it is God Who is doing it. Dumbo isn’t like that. There is no assertion that the world is being created, much less that God is at work. But the on-screen imagery presents certain things in a

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certain order. Those things and their order roughly follow the what happens in the opening verses of Genesis: First, undifferentiated chaos in the form of a storm. Second, we see the sky (and the storks). Third, we see the ground below. Now, in making this comparison I’m not trying to argue that Disney’s team had Genesis in mind at the beginning of Dumbo. I’m not even arguing that Genesis was lurking down there in the subconscious, though perhaps it was. The argument I’m making is even stranger, and more difficult to conceptualize. I’m arguing that the ancient tellers of Genesis and the modern creators of Dumbo had similar problems to solve and they produced solutions that had similar terms. The tellers of the Genesis myth—for I’m assuming that the story existed in oral tradition before it was written down—wanted to explain where the earth came from. The tellers of Dumbo wanted to explain where the modern world came from, though not historically. Not only is that a complicated story, as history usually is, it’s not the right KIND of story. History just tells who did what when and where. But the modern world is strange; it contains things quite different from the 19th century world, like airplanes. Where did those things come from IN THE NATURE OF THINGS? That’s why we have those storks. They provide a folkish answer to the question: Where do babies come from? And that question is a deep and mysterious one. Parents may tell that tale to children because they don’t, for whatever reason, want to tell them about sex. But even if they did tell the truth, what would that get them? More questions is what, more questions. Now they have to explain how a male seed, sperm, and a female seed, an ovum, somehow mix and become this thing called a zygote, and this zygote divides—how does it do that?—and divides and divides and becomes a baby. Does that explain anything? Not really. It just provides a platform for more questions that don’t have good answers. Thus, we have this film that starts in a way that echoes origin myths and quickly presents us with an origin fairy tale in the form of a kid-friendly story about babies. The opening of this film has MYSTERY OF ORIGINS stamped all over it. But, so goes my argument, the mystery isn’t about Dumbo. We know where he came from; he was delivered by a stork. But what about those ears? The stork story doesn’t tell us anything about them. Nor does the movie. It tells us nothing about where they came from. But, it DOES use them in an interesting way. Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s return to the beginning of them. We have the storm, and out of it we have those storks. The storks are creatures of the sky, but their bundles contain creatures of the earth, as we soon find out.

Oppositions That is to say, in the structuralist language used by the late Claude Lévi-Strauss, we have an opposition between the sky and the earth. Now, of course, oppositions are common in stories. But it’s one thing to talk of, say, an opposition between good and bad. We can put Dumbo, his mother, Timothy Mouse, and the crows on the side of good and the ringmaster, the clowns, the matron elephants and the pesky boy on the side of bad, or something close to it. That opposition would seem to be driving the plot of the movie. But an opposition between the sky and the earth, that’s a bit different. That would seem to be rather more incidental to the story. And by itself, perhaps it is. What we have to do is consider it in relation other elements in the story. Storks are creatures of the sky. They’re birds. So are crows. But lions, tigers, bears, camels, and other animals are creatures of the earth, as are elephants. What is Dumbo? He’s an elephant, and so a creature of the earth, no? Well, yes. But it turns out that he’s also a creature of the sky, like the storks and the crows. That is, something about Dumbo goes against the essential nature of earth creatures, such as elephants.

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If creatures must be either of the sky or of the earth, then Dumbo doesn’t fit. He’s an anomaly. Yes, birds do walk on the earth, and some of them swim as well, but it’s their ability to fly that makes them distinctive. At least in myth logic, and that’s what we’re talking about, myth logic. A flying elephant, that just doesn’t make any sense, which is the central point of the song sung by the crows, who are birds good and proper—except that they wear clothes. And that IS Dumbo’s problem from the beginning, isn’t it, that he doesn’t fit in? But his anomalous status is not presented as being able to fly. It’s presented as a cosmetic issue: he’s got big ears. That’s why he’s ridiculed. The discovery that he can fly in fact provides him a way of fitting in. At this point it looks like I’ve talked myself out of the argument I was setting up. On the one hand, Dumbo is anomalous because he’s a creature of the land that somehow is able to fly. On the other hand, being able to fly is what gives him, not only a place in the circus, but a unique and favored place. The characteristic that makes him an anomaly also resolves his anomalous status. That’s like saying black is white, or A = not-A. That just doesn’t make any sense. But it does. In myth logic. Buy I’m not going to untangle it in this post. I just want to set up the problem.

Into the Sunset With that in mind, let’s skip over just about everything that happens in the film and take a look at the end–the very end, after Dumbo’s landed safely in his mother’s lap—and Timothy Mouse is nowhere to be seen— while she’s sitting in the modern aerodynamically-styled private car his success has brought them. As we watch the train heading off screen to the left the camera zooms to the crows standing on a telephone pole and then follows the train into the sunset as the crows chatter away on the soundtrack:

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The end is the opposite of the beginning, and in many ways. Of course the plot has been resolved, but at the very beginning, when we first saw the storks in the sky and the earth below, we hardly even knew what the plot was about. But even without knowing anything about the plot we can see that imagery is opposite. The film started at night, and in a storm. It ends during the day and in clear weather. That difference is not dictated by the plot in any strong way. As far as plot requirements are concerned it would have been just as easy to have Dumbo and his mother marching triumphantly into the ring, ready to perform. Ending the movie on crow chatter over a train ride into the sunset is “merely” an aesthetic choice. But it plays into myth logic, as the difference between night and day is important to the film’s rhythm. The film opens in a stormy night (day one), the tent is erected during a stormy night (day two), Mrs. Jumbo is jailed during a night (day three), Dumbo is banished during a night-time meeting (day four), and, of course, Dumbo and Timothy Mouse see pink elephants during the night (day five). It’s during the intervening days that circus acts go awry and plans are thwarted. Again, that’s not dictated by plot requirements in any strong way, but represents aesthetic choice, choice that follows the logic of mythic oppositions. The storks are the first living creatures that we see, and we see them flying in the sky. The crows are the last living creatures we see. While they are creatures of the air, like the storks, they’re not flying and they’re not in the sky. But they’re not exactly on the ground either. They’re on a telephone pole. The pole is dug into the ground, but the crows themselves are up off the ground. And they’re wearing clothes, while the storks at the opening were not. Further, those storks were naturalistically styled while these crows are not. Those opening storks did not talk, while the crows are most talkative. [Note that the stork who delivered Dumbo is, in these terms, more like the crows. He’s clothed, talks, and cartoonistically styled.] Now, let’s look back into the film a bit. Where were the crows when we first saw them? They were up in a tree. And a telephone pole is something like a man-made tree. It’s dug into the earth, and it has “branches” at the top. It’s also high tech.

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The opposition between the sky and the earth on a stormy night has been reduced to and transformed into an opposition between the top and the bottom of a telephone pole on a sunny day. The crows are at the top and the train tracks are at the bottom. And, as we’ve seen, a whole lot more is tied up in that transformation from sky vs. earth to telephone pole vs. train tracks.

What Next? Where I’m going with this argument is that Dumbo is Disney’s myth of modernity. Modernity is many things; in this film it’s machines, electricity, and mobility—home, for Dumbo, moves about from place to place. How do we fit those very modern, very artificial things, into the more “natural” world scheme of small-town 19th Century America? That’s Disney’s problem. It’s not a problem about history. It’s about myth and symbolism. Dumbo, and his pink elephants, solves part of Disney’s problem by providing a way of assimilating machines and electricity to the animal world. Just how Disney does this, and why it works in terms of myth logic, that’s what I’m after. I may get to in the next post, or the one after that. I don’t know what it’ll take. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Dumbo as Myth 2: Realigning the World In Dumbo as Myth 1: Beginning and End I concentrated on the very beginning and the very end of the film, noticing that the end was the opposite of the beginning in mode of presentation. The story begins during a storm and asserts the difference between the sky and the ground. Birds live in the sky while other animals live on the ground. The story ends during the day and focuses on crows, creatures of the sky, sitting atop a telephone pole, which is sunk into the ground. Now let’s take a look at the terms in which Dumbo takes his success and ask, once again: Why?

Success Dumbo’s success comes, of course, during a circus act featuring him. He failed the first time, when he tripped on his ears and collapsed the elephant pyramid rather than landing triumphantly on top. He succeeded the second time, but was humiliated because he was made-up as a clown and was soaked in white goo. The third time, as the cliché has it, was a charm. He flew. And in the Big City, which is important. The film started in winter quarters somewhere in South Florida and played in a few small towns. But Dumbo triumphs in the Big City where, of course, the clowns had been anticipating their own triumph. Once Dumbo had dunked the clowns and shown off his flying skills he took mild revenge on those matrons who had spurned him an his mother, spraying them with peanuts as though his trunk were a machine gun:

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That’s the last thing we see in his act. Of course, it wasn’t planned. Then we see him flying with Timothy Mouse in his hat proclaiming: “You’re makin’ history!”

And the next thing we see is the presses rolling:

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There’s high tech for you, mid-20th-century style: newspapers just flowing off the presses. Then we see several headlines, including “Dumbombers for Defense!” And then we return to the train, in motion, where Dumbo is at last re-united with his mother. While the story was effectively over once Dumbo had demonstrated that he could fly, this elaborate coda is nonetheless critical. For one thing it assures us that, yes, Dumbo really is reunited with his mother. That’s closure, as they call it these days. His separation from his mother was the event that drove the plot, and it wasn’t even his fault. He was separated from her because of what she did to protect him. Now he’s reunited with him, wearing his aviator’s cap and without Timothy Mouse. This could easily have been accomplished without all the hoopla, without Making History. But the making of history WAS the point, though in Myth Logic, not in the ordinary logic of interpersonal (that is, inter-elephant) relationships. The fact that we see history made BEFORE we see the happy reunion puts the making of history WITHIN the mythological scope of the reunion plot. That means that the equivalence between Dumbo the flying elephant and those high-tech bombers is no mere decorative accident. The point is not so much that the high-tech was military—though that was obviously salient in 1940 when Dumbo premiered and when the European war would have been on people’s minds—but simply that it WAS high tech. Disney prepared us for this equation with Pink Elephants on Parade, when two elephants became juiced (on electricity, that is), reproduced, and then morphed into cars and trains.

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And even earlier than that, even earlier. Way back in the beginning, when the movie went from the chaos of the opening storm to the calm moonlit night with the storks, during that transition the sound-track had the sound of some kind of engine zooming by. That’s the same sound we heard when Dumbo pulled out his dive in his final act, just before he would have gone into the white goo (as the clowns had planned). Dumbo, this big-eared oddball elephant was Disney’s vehicle for assimilating Big City High Tech ways to the small town intimacy of the circus. In Myth Logic.

Winter Quarters Let’s go back to the beginning and continue on to see how Disney sets things up. We’re following those original storks, the ones we saw immediately after we left the storm (to the sound of an airplane engine). Those storks do not land; rather they descend a bit and drop their bundles into the winters quarters of the circus. We know it’s the winter quarters because that’s what the label on the roof says:

The bundles are now slung beneath parachutes and they’re dropping into what appear to be permanent dwellings for the animals rather than tents or railroad cars.

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And, as we can see, this happens at night. But there’s no bundle for Mrs. Jumbo, though she scans the sky for one. But there is, alas, no bundle for her:

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Why not? The question I’m asking is about myth-logic, which is different from the questions we presume Mrs. Jumbo to be asking. Why didn’t Disney have Dumbo delivered at the same time as the others? Perhaps it’s a matter of drama craft. He wanted to create expectation and suspension. That accounts for the delay, but not for many other things.

Dumbo is Different, Why? It’s not simply that Dumbo himself is different from other elephants because his ears are so large. Rather, the circumstances of his arrival are different, and in ways that cannot be explained simply by the desire to create suspense. That alone does not explain these differences: • • • • • •

The stork delivering Dumbo is not realistically rendered, like the other storks. The stork delivering Dumbo wears clothes and talks. The stork consults a map (suggesting he might have been lost?). The stork asks Mrs. Jumbo to sign a receipt. And then sings a naming song. And, Dumbo is delivered during the day and on the circus train while it’s in motion.

There’s more going on here than dramatic delay and a gag or two, such as having the stork snatched away by a mail hook at the very end of his song:

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And it’s not as though we can’t see that Dumbo’s ears set him apart from other elephants. That is, Disney’s artists surely aren’t worried that we’ll miss those ears and so are piling on all sorts of differences so we’ll get the point. The point isn’t simply about the ears. It’s also about all those other things too. Let’s return to Lévi-Strauss, whom I mentioned in the previous myth post. He argues that myth is, above all, an attempt to draw a line between nature and culture and so between humans and animals. Something like that is going on here. I say “like” that because, of course, this story centers on animals, not on humans. But there is a clear distinction between animals that wear clothes and animals that do not. The elephants wear clothes, caps and blankets, while, with one exception, the other circus animals do not. The exception is Timothy Mouse, who is Dumbo’s companion and protector. The crows wear clothes. And the stork who delivers Dumbo wears clothes, but the other storks do not. Further, the animals that wear clothes also talk, with two exceptions. Dumbo never talks. One could, I suppose, attribute this to the fact that he’s an infant. That’s not very convincing, though, not in a cartoon where a locomotive going up a steep hill chugs out “I think I can I think I can” (this happens just before the tent raising sequence). Dumbo doesn’t talk. He’s got big ears and, in time, he flies. But talk he does not.

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The other non-talking elephant is his mother. She speaks only once, to utter his name, Jumbo Jr., but otherwise she never says a word, though the other elephants chatter up a storm. She defends Dumbo physically, closing an opening against the other elephants as they insult her child, but she doesn’t speak in his defense. Nor does she speak to him when he visits her at night. So, what I’m suggesting, then, is that all those differences attending Dumbo’s ‘birth’ are about something other than the fact that he also has big ears. We’re dealing with what Bruno Latour calls the collective, and about how the collective is constituted. By “the collective” Latour means society and when he talks of constituting society he means, not simply relations among people, but relations among all the beings that make up society, people, animals, plants, inanimate objects, the land, the sea, resources, bacteria, concepts, all of it. All of it must be gathered to constitute society. [See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1993; Politics of Nature, 2004; Reassembling the Social, 2005.] That’s what Disney is doing. He’s reconstituting the collective so that it can accommodate a bigeared elephant and, oh by the way, all this high tech electricity stuff too. I’m going to leave the electricity to the next post. And I’m not going to say much more about technology in this post. But I do want to say something about work and home.

Tent Raising On the second night we have the tent raising. Why make such a big deal of that? What does it have to do with the plot? Not a great deal that I can see. It shows Dumbo working hard to be useful, but other than that it doesn’t advance the story all that much. That is, if you think the story is just about Dumbo, his mother, and their travails. But it’s about more than that, as I’ve asserted above. It’s about the circus as a microcosm of the world. To that end, Disney is willing to devote two and a half minutes of the film to establishing the circus as a place of work. That is, we see it as a place of work before we see it as a place of entertainment. Further, we see it primarily as a place of work, even during the sections where we’re watching that entertainment. The tent raising is the first point in the film where we see humans. And the humans we see are faceless roustabouts. They work together with the elephants to erect the big top. That’s what this is about: work. The circus may be recreation to the audience, but it is work both to the performers and to those who support the performers. The elephants play both roles. The provide the muscle power to raise the tent and they perform an act under the tent. During the parade the following day we see that the animals are bored. The parade may be exciting to the townspeople, but the animals have done this before. It’s nothing special to them. And the young boy teases Dumbo, he’s having fun; he’s taking recreation. When Mrs. Jumbo protects her son and punishes the boy, not only is she overstepping the line between humans and animals, but she’s also overstepping the line between work and play. She and Dumbo may not have been in the ring at that time, but they were nonetheless on display. They were at work, and their work is to provide entertainment for the humans. The other elephants may have rejected Dumbo because he was an odd looking elephant. But that in itself was of no consequence to the humans who ran and who attended the circus. A freak is good entertainment, and that’s what he was, a freak. But if his mother won’t let him serve as a freak, won’t let him work, well then that’s a problem.

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And so she’s locked up. Once Dumbo discovers that he can fly, of course, why then he can return to work, if in a somewhat different capacity. Not only that, he provides a model for those bombers. More work.

Meanwhile... This film is being made by people for whom entertainment is a business. The story of the circus is thus their story. They work so that others may be entertained. And Dumbo? Perhaps he’s a figure for animation in the context of the movie business at large. As for technology, Disney worked hard at being the most technologically advanced studio in the animation business and, more generally, in the movie business. But that’s just an aside. There’s still a lot to work through. For example, what do we make of Timothy Mouse? He serves Dumbo in a way that Jiminy Cricket served Pinocchio. Pinocchio’s needs were different from Dumbo’s, so his diminutive is different. In both cases we have, in effect, one person who’s been divided into two components, one that’s growing and one that’s guiding. If Timothy Mouse is, then, just one aspect of a being for whom Dumbo is the other aspect, what do we make of the fact that it’s Timothy Mouse who concocts the act that brings about Dumbo’s downfall? Whoops! At the same time, thinking of Timothy Mouse as an aspect of Dumbo solves a problem. Remember when we noticed that there are two kinds of animals in this story, those with clothes and those without? At that same time we observed that the animals with clothes also talked, with two exceptions: Dumbo and his mother. If Timothy Mouse and Dumbo are, however, two aspects of the same being, then that solves our problem. Timothy Mouse is the voice of Dumbo. And he’s also the voice of Mrs. Jumbo. In the his first scene he decides to scold the elephant matrons for the way they’ve shunned Dumbo. He is, in effect, speaking on behalf of Mrs. Jumbo, defending her son against the matrons as she’d earlier defended him against the boy. And yet he’s also the source of the idea that fails so badly that, far from making Dumbo a star, it gets him banished from elephantdom. Oh my! What a mess. This calls for extreme measures. Like morphing pink elephants. And jive-talking crows. Next time.

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Dumbo as Myth 2.1: Interlude on Method Or, a Prolegomenon to Myth Logic, Disney Style This business of making it up as you go along, while it has its charm, also presents problems. Once lost in the bushes you might find your way back out by following the light breaking through the underbrush, but you might just wander even deeper into strange territory. Sometimes it pays to stop walking and to think. That’s what I’m doing here. The first thing I want to do is to separate what I will call the core story from the costuming and sets used to present it. One cannot tell a proper story that is about only some being that is born and separated from its mother. It has to be some particular kind of being, whether a flea, an angel, or, in this case, an elephant. So that’s what I do in the first section. The rest of the post is about the costumes and sets. My larger argument is that Dumbo is as much about the costumes and sets as it is about the emotions and actions in the core story.

The Core Story goes like this: 1. An odd infant is delivered to its mother. 2. That infant is ridiculed by the mother’s companions but defended by mother, of course. 3. The infant is threatened by some other creature, and the mother punishes that creature. 4. That creature’s protectors separate the mother from her infant and lock her up. The infant is devastated. 5. The infant attracts a protector who defends him against mother’s erstwhile companions. 6. The infant then precipitates a disaster that injures mother’s companions and results in the infant being ostracized by said companions. 7. Infant visits mother and both are comforted. 8. Infant has a vision and is changed, discovering a new capacity that is rooted in the very oddness that caused all the trouble. 9. Infant triumphs and punishes mother’s companions. 10. Infant and mother are reunited and happy.

The Funny Animal Principle In this particular story the infant, its mother, and her companions are elephants. There are other animals in the story, including a mouse, who becomes the infant’s mentor. There are also humans in the story. Though some of the humans play important roles, they are secondary to the elephants, the mouse, and some crows. That’s strange, though there have been many such strange stories told. It’s strange because we are humans and we identify with those core animals as though they are humans. I don’t know quite what to make of this conceit, common though it is. I can talk about its effects, indeed I have done so at some length, but that seems like talking around it without really getting at the heart of things. For it is this conceit, this convention, that gives the story a metaphysical dimension that is not inherent in the core story. It’s that metaphysical dimension that I’m calling Myth Logic, as though that explains anything. It doesn’t, not yet anyhow.

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However it works, let’s call it the Funny Animal Principle. When applied to a core story involving a small handful of key characters, the Funny Animal Principle extends that story from a merely personal one to one about the boundaries and nature of society. When told as a story about humans the core story doesn’t have this social resonance, not even when the humans are creatures of greater complexity and sophistication than the central characters of Dumbo. Apply the Funny Animal Principle, though, and voilà! instant society-wide amplification and resonance. The Funny Animal Principle is about ontology, in that it exploits ontology as a cognitive construct10 (in particular, see The Great Chain of Being as Conceptual Structure11). The Funny Animal Principle systematically violates the principles of ontological cognition. By violating that structure it is somehow able to imply the whole world that is implied by that structure. This conceit works because the ontological violation is transparent and conventional. No one comes away from a funny animal cartoon believing that animals can actually talk and expecting them to do so upon the next encounter. I don’t know what will be required to deliver on the implications of the previous paragraph.

Three Groups The characters in Dumbo can be arranged into three groups. First we have the characters who are not in the circus. This group includes the storks, the crows, and the members of the circus audience, including the boy who ridicules Dumbo. The characters in the circus can be arranged into two groups, though it’s not clear how to do so. I want to put Dumbo, his mother, and Timothy Mouse in one group. And I want to put the roustabouts into that group as well. The other group includes the matron elephants, the ringmaster, the clowns and the animal handlers. Can that division be made by defining a sorting criterion rather than simply by listing the characters in each group? Note that this division comes into being on account of Dumbo himself. That division is a consequence of his being odd. And that division disappears when Dumbo learns to fly and converts that ability into a successful circus act. But, even when the circus is once again a united group, the crows are still outside that group. And what about the larger world organized around and implied by those Dumbo-styled high-tech bombers? That world is certainly outside the circus. Myth Logic is about why Dumbo’s oddness brings that division into being and it is Myth Logic that dictates what must be done in order to dissolve that division. And it is Myth Logic that allows this core story, which takes place among characters within the circus, to reach out beyond the circus to society at large. It is society at large that validates Dumbo’s identity as a flying elephant.

Aesthetic Gaps Here I’m thinking about Pink Elephants on Parade. Superficially that episode seems unrelated to the rest of the story beyond the fact that, hey! it’s about elephants. And yet, as I have argued, it is thematically central to the story. I’m calling that apparent mismatch an aesthetic gap. The idea is that artists as skilled and experienced as those at Disney do everything they can to make a story work seamlessly. If, nonetheless, they can’t quite pull it off and there’s something in the final film that sticks out like a sore thumb, it must be important to the story. So important that they included it even if they couldn’t figure out how to make it blend-in. 10 11

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ontological%20cognition http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/08/great-chain-of-being-as-conceptual.html

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Disney is not the only artist who has such gaps. I first learned about them with Shakespeare. For example, one of his very finest plays, The Winter’s Tale, has a 16-year hole in the action between the third and fourth acts. And it achieves a happy ending when a statue is wheeled onto the stage and the statue comes alive. Can there possibly be a more clunky ending than that? And yet it works. The play is magical. Well, so is Dumbo. Pink Elephants on Parade sticks out like a sore thumb, a very pink sore thumb. But it’s necessary. Without it Myth Logic would fall flat. With it, the film flies.

Transformation in Pink Elephants At the moment I’m thinking that we need to look at transformation in Pink Elephants. We begin with simple and visible geometrical transformation, a bubble changes shape from a sphere to an elephant. And THEN it becomes pink, as though it had become ensouled. Then stuff happens, including the hospital bed and, all of a sudden, we’re looking at this Orientalist fantasy of a pseudo-elephant babe doing the hootchie-cootchie. Sex!—but in a plausibly deniable form (recall the veil-dance of the goldfish in Fantasia). After this we focus on a pair of elephants, presumably one is male and one female. We follow them for awhile as they dance, skate, and ski. Is this courtship, albeit highly abstracted? Then they dance electric and SHAZAM! two become many. Reproduction? I think so, albeit highly abstracted. And THEN, and only then do they—or at any rate, two elephants, exactly which two hardly matters—transform into machines: cars, trains, motorboats. This order is important, geometry first, then social relations (courtship and reproduction), and then geometry again, this time from elephants to cars. It’s going to take a fair chunk of apparatus to pull that off. The crucial insight is that we’ve gone from a logic of physical appearance to a logic of social relations. There is this notion that comes out of the anthropological study of taboo (Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Valerio Valeri) and evolutionary psychology that social relations provides the richest ‘template’ for abstract thought. So—here comes the tap-dancing and hand-waving—if Disney wants to ‘insert’ machine age technology into a pre-machine world via Myth Logic, he’s got to tap into the logic of social relations to do so. For is not Myth Logic but the projection of human relations onto everything? And Pink Elephants on Parade—in conjunction with the Funny Animals Principle—is Disney’s way of doing that projecting. ***** That’s what I think is going on. Now all I have to do is demonstrate it. Ha!

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Dumbo as Myth 2.2: Machines and Fordism OK, so we’ve got this interplay of animals and machines in Dumbo. We’ve got Akira Lippit’s assertion that animals show up in early cartoons as “a gesture of mourning for the disappearing wildlife” (Lippit, Electric Animal, p. 196); we’ve got the locomotive, Casey Jones, Jr. puffing “I think I can, I think I can” as it goes up the mountain; and we’ve got pink elephants transforming themselves into cars. I want to do a bit more thinking about this dialectic of animals and machines. Most generally machines present humans with three problems: 1) A metaphysical problem. 2) A common sense problem. 3) As a problem of social organization. Let’s run through them in order and so how, of if, they show up in Dumbo.

Machines as Metaphysical Problem The metaphysical problem was set by Descartes, Leibniz and others and is still with us. In its deepest form it involves specialized and often technical discussions that are mostly the province of specialized and learned intellectuals, though it does filter down to the common world. As such it doesn’t translate well into films, where robots and computers come across as strange kinds of people. That is, the metaphysical problem becomes expressed as the common sense problem. Dumbo doesn’t deal with this issue at all. But the common sense world is another matter.

Machines in the Common Sense World The common sense problem is simply that of living in a world where there are machines. To someone born and raised in the world of machines they present no more, and no less, of a problem than plants, animals, humans, and all sorts of man-made things. To someone born and raised in a world without machines, they DO present a problem: how does one comprehend and deal with these strange things? So, imagine that you reached adulthood without ever having seen a car or an automobile. You’re used to seeing humans and animals move across the land and you’re used to seeing them pull carts and wagons. How do you react the first time you see a railroad train? How do you make sense of what appears to be a thoroughly artificial device moving over the land under its own power? It doesn’t make sense. Animals can move, but this isn’t an animal. It’s a machine. You can see the parts, the levers and the wheels, you can see the smoke coming out of the fire box. But there’s no flesh there. It’s a bit spooky, no? There’s no ready-made place for such a thing in your conceptual system. And so we have Henry David Thoreau writing this at the middle of the 19th century (Walden, 1854): When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion . . . with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in gold and silver wreaths . . . as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.

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Disney’s audience, of course, lived in a very different world from Thoreau’s. They grew up with trains and automobiles. These moving machines don’t present the Disney audience with this common sense problem. However, the anthropomorphic and metaphorical conceptual tropes that originated in the 19th century still persist. So it is common and ‘natural’ to anthropomorphize all kinds of machines, and cartoons commonly did and still do so. Disney’s audience was also born and raised in an world with elephants. Elephants are animals, just like mice, dogs, horses, and bison. But they are not native to North America. They are thus exotic. They are, in that sense, much stranger than automobiles and steam locomotives. It’s almost as though, in identifying elephants with cars and locomotives as he does at the end of Pink Elephants, Disney is domesticating the elephant rather than naturalizing the car or the locomotive.

This is just the sort of trickery on which myth logic thrives, equating something that’s strange, but natural, the elephant, with something that’s familiar, but artificial, the car. Disney pushes the trick one step further at the end of the film when he identifies Dumbo with bombers. While airplanes were not new in 1941, they weren’t so familiar as cars and trains. Everyone knew about and had ridden in cars and trains, but relatively few had flown in an airplane. Airplanes were thus a bit exotic, like elephants. Now we’ve got an equation between something that’s both strange and natural, the elephant, with something that’s both strange and artificial, the airplane. Of course, if elephants are strange in America at large, they’re not so strange within this little film, which is saturated with them. To borrow a term from Lippet, Disney has used the elephant as a semiotic facility (Electric Animal, p. 196). By making this strange beast into a familiar friend, Disney can then use it to naturalize technological artifice of even the most exotic kind.

Machines as a Problem of Social Organization Then there’s machines as a problem of social organization, that of the mechanization and routinization of every day life, but especially of the work place. This is the domain of so-called “scientific management“, and that certainly WAS a problem in Disney’s world, certainly for his audience and, for that matter, for his employees, as Disney was relentless in his desire to breakdown his process into distinct steps that could be parceled out to different workers.

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The Fordist production line loomed large in the live of many in Disney’s audience and it certainly loomed large in the imagination. For example, it was central to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, which came out in 1936, just a few years before Dumbo. And it remained salient for some time. There is, for example, the famous chocolate factory episode12 of I Love Lucy (1952) in which Lucy and Ethel take jobs in a candy factory and manage to all-but destroy a production line. At first glance it would seem that there’s nothing like a production line in Dumbo. This is, after all, set in a circus, which is about a series of unique acts, not factory assembly. I note, however, that the film emphasizes the circus as a place of work for its employees, not as a source of entertainment for the audience. And there is that early tent raising sequence that depicts a kind of work that is repetitive. It’s not an assembly line, it’s not timed to a clock, but it IS work, and it is demanding. Now, look at the beginning of the Pink Elephants sequence. First we see Dumbo blow a bubble that turns into a large pink elephant. And then we see this:

What is that if not the production of one elephant by another? That quickly gives way to repetitive imagery that dominates the early part of that sequence:

12

http://www.lucylibrary.com/Pages/ill-guide-2.html

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Nor is this the first time Disney’s given us this kind of relentlessly repetitive imagery. It was there in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice with the maniacally multiplying brooms:

Here’s what Nicholas Sammond says about that episode in Babes in Tomorrowland (2001, pp. 176-177): It is not hard to in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” a tale about the anxiety attendant on regimes of scientific management, and the resolution of that anxiety through the their mastery. In the hands of the master, the magic derived from the book created illusions of beauty, which took the natural shape of butterflies. Left to his child—and Mickey was discursively constructed as Disney’s child—that magic became a dangerous, uncontrollable force that threatened to destroy the master’s work and everything with it...Mickey animates the broom and sets it to work doing a simple repetitive task. He dreams that he has control over the machinery of the universe but awakens to discover that he has set in motion a juggernaut of automation.

That situation comes to a happy end when the master returns and restores order. The scene in Dumbo is framed differently—a drunken dream rather than out-of-control magic—and it evolves differently. In fact, it evolves to a point where elephants decide to become cars. For if you look

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closely at that bit you’ll see that the pair of dancing elephants leaps into carhood rather that it being something that happens to them, like the original bubble was transformed into an elephant. Now, let’s be clear, I’m not trying to argue that those repetitive elephants somehow stand for or symbolize an assembly line, nor do I think that Sammond is making a similar assertion about the brooms. Rather, we’re saying that the imagery in the Disney films has they same relentless repetitiveness that is characteristic of Fordist assembly lines and that that imagery gets its salience from the increasingly pervasive presence of assembly line work for people in Disney’s audience. Beyond that, Sammond is specifically interested in how Disney construes children (e.g. Mickey as the sorcerer’s son/apprentice) and the passage I quoted is in the general context of discussing the contemporary application of management techniques to raising children and managing the home. With all that in mind, let’s look at the Wikipedia’s summary of the opening section of Chaplin’s Modern Times:13 Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where he screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok, throwing the factory into chaos. Chaplin is sent to a hospital. Following his recovery, the now unemployed factory worker is mistakenly arrested as an instigator in a Communist demonstration.

So, Chaplin has a breakdown from factory work and ends up in the hospital. What do we see in the first sections of Pink Elephants? First, a bunch of pink elephants marching on and on, and then we see a non-pink elephant in a hospital and looking horrified.

Of course, I’m not arguing that Disney’s team had Modern Times in mind when they designed and executed this sequence, though they must have known the film. I’m simply noting a general pattern similarity a suggesting that it was “in the cultural air” at the time. And remember, when Dumbo was being made, tensions within the company were building to the point of many of the workers going out on strike. I take it, then, that the machine as a problem in social organization is very much a concern in this film, which also deals with the oppressive and self-serving ways of management 13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

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in the person of the ringmaster. However, the burden of the “argument” about ‘scientific’ management has been displaced from the workplace itself and into the oddest and least “natural” sequence in the film, the Pink Elephants sequence. In Fantasia Fordism was packaged as magic gone amuck while in Dumbo it has been packaged as a drunken delusion. In Dumbo, that drunken delusion ultimately lead to success. But a discussion of that would require a discussion of the whole film. I’m not yet ready for that.

Elephants, the Circus, and Myth Logic Here’s what we’ve got: Dumbo is a film about an exotic kind of animal, the elephant, that is set in an exotic kind of work place, the circus. The exotic animal is used to domesticate the machine and the exotic workplace is used to domesticate factory work. Such are the peculiar workings of myth logic.

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Dumbo as Myth 2.3: A Bit of Circus History Disney, of course, did not create this little circus out of whole cloth. He drew and depended on a history, not only of the circus itself, but of circus movies. While the word “circus” dates back to ancient Rome, the modern circus originated in 18th Century England while the traveling circus dates to the second quarter of the 19th Century in America. Joshua Brown was the first to adopt the canvas tent as a performance venue in 1825. At roughly the same time Hachaliah Bailey organized a traveling menagerie around an African elephant and others soon entered the menagerie business, with some adding circus performances as well. “With that,” writes Dominique Jando, “the unique character of the American circus emerged: It was a traveling tent show coupled with a menagerie and fun by businessmen, a very different model from that of European circuses, which for the most part remained under the control of performing families.”14 By mid-century some 30 circuses toured the country15 and became quite popular, perhaps the most popular form of mass entertainment in the country. [I say “perhaps” because I’m getting this information from articles about circuses; I’ve read articles about minstrelsy that claim it as the most popular form of entertainment. As far as I can tell, nothing of importance hangs on the truth of these claims. Both were popular forms of entertainment.] William C. Coup, P.T. Barnum’s manager, conceived the circus train in the early 1870s and thus completed the configuration we see in Dumbo.

Jumbo, the Real One You may recall that Dumbo’s mother was Mrs. Jumbo and his given name was Jumbo, Jr. Jumbo was a real circus elephant, the greatest circus attraction in American history. He traveled in a private railroad car which Barnum called “Jumbo’s palace car”, a crimson and gold boxcar with huge double doors in the middle to give Jumbo easy access up a ramp. Twelve feet tall at the shoulders and weighing six and a half tons, Jumbo could reach an object 26 feet from the ground with his seven-foot trunk.16

Nor is Dumbo’s parentage the only allusion to circus history. The “Save my baby!” act in which Dumbo achieved his initial, if humiliating, triumph was the invention of Paul Jung, one of the great clowns in circus history.17

Circus Films Of course, Dumbo wasn’t the first circus film.18 Charlie Chaplin made one, the Marx Brothers made two, Charlie Chan did a circus film, and Tod Browning’s Freaks is one of the greatest horror films ever made. The genre continued after World War II though the circus itself isn’t as much a presence in American life as it was before the war. Dumbo, however, uses the circus in a way that seems a bit unusual for Disney. The circus’s association with small-town America plays to Uncle Walt’s nostalgic streak. It’s thus a comfortable and comforting setting. The comfortable exoticism of the elephants is dead center in the weakest aspect of the Disney sensibility. 14

http://www.circopedia.org/index.php/Short_History_of_the_Circus http://www.history-magazine.com/circuses.html 16 http://www.history-magazine.com/circuses.html 17 http://www.circopedia.org/index.php/Paul_Jung 18 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus#In_music.2C_films.2C_plays.2C_and_books 15

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Disney, Ironic? And perhaps that’s what made the setting such a useful one for the strategies of Myth Logic. Disney could depend on a range of conventional expectations in his audience and therefore could work against them. He needed those conventions as a foil. For the film exploits the circus setting in ironic ways that are not characteristic of other Disney films, before or since. In the first place, this circus is not depicted as a source of wondrous entertainment. It’s depicted as a place of hard work done by bored and cynical animals, avaricious and cruel clowns, and a megalomaniacal ringmaster. Dumbo himself is treated rather cruelly by those vicious and snobbish matrons. This circus is not at all the Magic Kingdom of Disney’s TV series and theme parks. But it is a rather biting depiction of mid-century America.

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Bleg: The Subconscious Mind In Dumbo Timothy Mouse implants an idea into the ringmaster’s mind by talking to him in his sleep:

He explicitly says: “I am the voice of your subconscious mind. Your inspiration.” What would this have meant to Disney’s audience in the early 1940s? Of course, his audience was large and, presumably, diverse and relatively few of them would have had a college education. Judging from a graph in Caplow, Hicks, and Wattenberg, The First Measured Century (p. 53) fewer than 10% of adults had a college degree and only about 25% had graduated high school. I, of course, thought “Freud and psychoanalysis” when I heard that term, especially in that context. But the Freudian term is “unconscious” rather than “subconscious”, and, as the Wikipedia entry for “subconscious”19 points out, Freud explicitly rejected the term. Rather, “subconscious” is a lay term that sometimes erroneously substitutes for “unconscious” and sometimes means, well, the subconscious mind. Which came in vogue early in the last century. I queried Google’s Ngram Viewer on “subconscious” and “unconscious” and discovered a thing or two. First, “unconscious” appears far more often than “subconscious”, with peaks just after 1920 and in the mid-1950s. Given that the Ngram Viewer is running against a database of books rather than of print in general that seems to make sense. But it would be interesting to run the query against popular periodicals and popular books. Second, “subconscious” peaks just after 1920, but then falls, never to rise again. A bit more sleuthing turned up an ad20 from Popular Science in March of 1923 touting Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion by one Emile Coué,21 who “stands out today as 19

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subconscious http://books.google.com/books?id=CioDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=%22subconsci ous%22&source=bl&ots=N2iOvaZTVc&sig=o7R2BkKuZ-oOeFL4CSmYvF181Q&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SrYnUOvSGsP26AGjsIHgCQ&ved=0CFEQ6AEwAw #v=onepage&q=%22subconscious%22&f=false 21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émile_Coué 20

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the man who has discovered just what to do to put in operation the great forces in our subconscious mind to help us achieve whatever we desire.” I’ve not read the book and what little I’ve read about it suggests that it’s not going to say anything about mental mice giving you inspiration while asleep. But it does have the feel of the kind of pop psych that was likely rather well known. Further, Coué’s ideas were picked up by Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller, which seems to be the right popular ball park. So I’m guessing that Coué and similar writers are more responsible for the early 1920s peak of “subconscious” than Freud is and that this strain of thinking is more likely to have been known to Disney’s 1940s audience than psychoanalysis is. Comments?

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Dumbo as Myth 2.4: Talking Animals Unlike Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which has no talking animals, Dumbo has many of them, and talking humans as well. In this post I want to look at who talks, and in the case of Dumbo and his mother, who doesn’t, and examine how that talk, or silence, functions in the film. The first talker we encounter in Dumbo is the stork who delivers him. Then we hear the elephant matrons, and one line from Mrs. Jumbo, when she utters her son’s name, which is the only line she speaks in the film. Later, after the tent’s been put up in the middle of a stormy night, after the opening day parade, and after Dumbo’s had a bath, we hear the first human talking, a barker drawing the crowed to the side shows and the menagerie (plus crowd chatter). The next human to talk is the brat who taunts Dumbo (more chatter). I’m going to start with those talking humans, move on to the others, and then move on to the animals, talkers and non-talkers, move to the peculiar case of Timothy Mouse, and conclude with a comparison to Pinocchio.

Humans Talking So, Dumbo has concluded his bath, he ventures toward the crowd as he hears the barker and gets noticed by a big-eared boy, who taunts him, remaking how odd he looks—with lots of crowd chatter in the background. This leads to the first crisis in the movie, when Mrs. Jumbo spanks the boy and then goes berserk. That brings the ringmaster running: “What’s going on?...Surround her.” Thus yet another human speaks, one who’s the boss of the circus and thus the authority in the story. We hear from him several more times. We hear him when he introduces his spectacular new act, an introduction which prompts cynical remarks from the elephants actually performing the act. But we also hear him at night, in his tent. The first time is when he’s talking to his assistant about a new act and later that night when he’s gotten the brilliant idea suggested to him by Timothy Mouse. In that conversation with his assistant we don’t see either of them directly. Rather we see them in silhouette against the tent wall. THAT’s what I want to talk about. We see the same motif while eavesdropping on the clown conversation, which is the other major bit of human-talk in the film. While I’ve previously suggested that this may have been a cost-saving measure—the budget was tight on this film—it also has thematic significance. Just who are those clowns, anyway? Would we recognize them as individual people? Would we know how to match voices to faces? That would be difficult. They’re wearing make-up during their act, which disguises them. And we don’t see their faces in the silhouette views, though we can see whether or not a clown is talking. But it would certainly be difficult to match those voices to faces if we saw them. The effect is one of depersonalization. These voices don’t come from particular individuals. They’re just ‘in the air’ as it were. They’re voices of The Organization, not of people. That is, the voices underline the operations of the circus as a social mechanism for turning entertainment into profit. They thus play into the thematics of Fordism and machine as social organization that I discussed in Dumbo as Myth 2.2: Machines and Fordism.

Animal Talk Most of the animal talk comes from the elephant matrons, the crows, Dumbo’s stork, and from Timothy Mouse, but not from either Dumbo or his mother. So, on the one hand we have the

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matrons and, on the other, we have Dumbo’s associates (the stork, Timothy Mouse, and the crows) but not Dumbo himself. The stork and the crows are outsiders to the circus, which forms the core community in the film, a matter I’ll return to in the next post. The stork brings Dumbo into the world while the crows help restore him to society. But once their tasks have been complete, the stork and the crows are not needed. Within the circus community, Dumbo and his mother do not talk to one another, nor do they talk to the matrons. But they communicate with one another quite a bit, nonverbally. When Dumbo is first delivered Dumbo sneezes Mrs. Jumbo ends up rocking him in her trunk. She does the same thing when he visits her at night. They don’t talk, but they do touch. And they touch at the very end of the film, when Dumbo flies into her arms as she’s setting at the rear of the train. Their major scene occurs after Dumbo steps in the mud in the opening day parade. She baths him and they have a grand time playing together, first with Dumbo in the bath and then afterward, as he plays hide-and-seek amid her legs.

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Their bond, and their relationship, is deeper than language. The point is so obvious that it seems trite, but one reason the point is obvious is that a most of the work on non-verbal human communication has been done after Dumbo was filmed and viewed. We are heirs to a lot of writing, both scientific and popular, that wasn’t available to Disney and his audience. The film separates verbal and nonverbal communication and builds its central relationship, that between Dumbo and his mother, on nonverbal communication. And THAT is hardly a trivial statement about human psychology and society. I note in passing—for I want to move on to Timothy Mouse—that there’s a lot of nonverbal communication, shouting and elephant trumpeting, in the two disaster scenes, Mrs. Jumbo’s panic and the collapse of the elephant pyramid and, subsequently, the Big Top itself.

Timothy the Talking Mouse Timothy Mouse first appears when the matrons shun Dumbo after his mother has been imprisoned. He first sympathizes with Dumbo, then he scares and chastises the matrons, and then he seeks Dumbo out and befriends him. In the last third of the film he negotiates Dumbo’s

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relationship with the crows and, judging from a magazine cover in the concluding collage, negotiates Dumbo a nice fat Hollywood contract. Before those negotiations, however, he brokers a very peculiar deal with the ringmaster. The deal is peculiar in the first place because the ringmaster doesn’t know what’s going on. Timothy speaks to him in his sleep. It’s peculiar in the second place because it backfires. It was supposed to secure Dumbo’s place as a star in the circus, but it just makes matters worse, ending in the collapse of the Big Top and the matrons declaring Dumbo to be a non-elephant. This was not Timothy Mouse’s fault, of course, nor was it Dumbos. But then, we’re not dealing with ordinary cause-and-effect logic, either. We’re dealing with Myth Logic. Within the peculiar conventions of myth logic this deal has to be made, and it has to collapse, thus forcing Dumbo to seek help outside circus society.

Dumbo and Pinocchio A full explanation of that logic will have to wait for the next post. But I can lay the foundations here by comparing Dumbo with Pinocchio. Consider this table of relationships: Role Parent Child Little Mentor Supreme Authority

Pinocchio Geppetto Pinocchio Jiminy Cricket Blue Fairy

Dumbo Mrs. Jumbo Dumbo Timothy Mouse Ringmaster

It’s perhaps a bit of a shock to see the Blue Fairy and the Ringmaster equated to one another in that way. After all, the ringmaster is presented as a thoroughly dislikeable and despotic character. Yet without him there’d be no circus. In contrast, the Blue Fairly is presented as kind and wonderful, especially since she comes to Pinocchio’s rescue once he’s messed up by joining Stromboli’s marionette show. Yet she did make a deal with Pinocchio, and Jiminy, and we can only assume that, if they hadn’t managed to come through, she’d have let Pinocchio remain a puppet. In both cases our protagonists have to screw-up royally before they can succeed. Pinocchio runs off with Stromboli while Jiminy was having trouble waking up—actually he runs off with Honest John the fox and Gideon the cat who then take him to Stromboli and, by the time Jiminy is there to offer advice, it’s too late. Dumbo ends up in an impossible act that was negotiated on his behalf by Timothy. It’s not Jiminy’s fault that he was unable to persuade Pinocchio to go to school once he’d been hooked him and it’s not Timothy’s fault that Dumbo’s awkwardness impedes him from performing the role he’d negotiated for him. In both cases the result is the same; the child protagonist ends up in even deeper trouble. If Jiminy’s mythic blunder is one of omission—he doesn’t wake up in time—while Timothy’s is one of commission—he negotiates a bad deal—we can attribute that difference to the overall difference of their respective stories. [Putting on my tap shoes.] Pinocchio has to negotiate the transit from inanimate puppet to live boy, a transit that, in myth logic, requires the role of Supreme Authority to be played by a supernatural creature, the Blue Fairy. Dumbo only has to negotiate the transit from physically deformed elephant to flying elephant, which, though something of a stretch, is not as extreme as from nonliving to living. So, myth logic allows the role of Supreme Helper to be a merely human, but nonetheless stern taskmaster. In the case of Pinocchio and his helper, Jiminy Cricket wants something from the Supreme Authority, a gold medal, while Timothy Mouse wants nothing from the ringmaster. In

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fact, he’s trying, surreptitiously, to help him with his problem—finding a climax for this new act he’s dreamed up—while the Blue Fairy has no problem she’s trying to solve. These differences between these two sets of characters in these two films all seem of a piece to me, though I can’t quite sum them up in a simple paragraph ending in a simple sentence. It’s all Myth Logic.

Growth A more pressing problem is why the protagonist has to fail before succeeding. That fact that that’s just how it goes is of little use. Why does it go just like that? Both movies present us with stories about protagonists who have to grow. In one way or another growing means moving beyond yourself. Neither of our protagonists did anything to acquire a mentor; the mentor just showed up and volunteered for service. And so both must move beyond that mentor. Dumbo fails at an act Timothy set up for him. But he flies with the encouragement of some wise-ass crows AND without the magic feather they gave to him. In parallel, Pinocchio saves Geppetto from drowning even as Geppetto was urging him to save himself. Thus both protagonists were pushed beyond themselves. Further, myth logic requires that Pinocchio, who was created by a wood carver, must pass through a living creature in order to become a boy. And Dumbo, who was delivered from the air, must himself learn to fly in order to take his place in the world. More later.

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Dumbo Interlude: The Bear That Wasn’t As I was working on Dumbo it became clear that I needed to know more about the emergence of “funny animals” cartoons. While Akira Lippit’s insights from the end of Electric Animal (which showed up in the post Animals in Cartoons: Tripping the Elephants Electric) were on the mark I wanted more, that is, more specifically about animation history. I think I found, if not IT (such ITs are never really found, are they?), at least something that promises to be very useful. It’s The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture (2009), by Paul Wells. The title’s promising and so is the book. I’ve read through a very interesting introduction and hit pay dirt in the first paragraph of the first chapter, “The Bear Who Wasn’t: Bestial Ambivalence.” Here’s that paragraph: In Chuck Jones’s adaptation of Frank Tashlin’s children’s book The Bear That Wasn’t22 . . . a bear emerges out of hibernation into a Metropolis-style factory, where he is viewed as “a silly man, who needs a shave, and wears a fur coat.” Though he maintains he is a bear, his protestations are ignored and he is put to oppressive, repetitive work in the factory, until he too denies his own identity. Finally, reminded of his intrinsic place in the natural order by the passing of a flock of migrating geese and the onset of autumn, he escapes the human world and goes back to hibernation. Tashlin’s pessimistic tale was written in 1946, and in its depiction of an inhumane hierarchy of foremen, managers, vice-presidents, and presidents, and even downbeat zoo animals, it shows a hopeless view of humankind as it seeks to rebuild the postwar world.

Now, we don’t have a factory in Dumbo, but as I pointed out in Dumbo as Myth 2.2: Machines and Fordism, the factory method of repetitive production is alluded to at the beginning of the Pink Elephants episode where elephant after elephant after elephant parades by, as though they came off an assembly line; and, of course, that episode ends with elephants transforming themselves into machines (cars, trains, and motorboats). Similar, Fordism lurked in Fantasia behind those repetitive brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And, while the circus organization doesn’t have a deep hierarchy of functionaries, hierarchy is nonetheless soundly criticized. In general, the ringmaster-owner is not presented as a sympathetic figure and, in specific, during the pachyderm pyramid act, the one that brings down the house, literally, we hear one elephant remark to another: “To hear him talk, you’d think he was going to do it.” So, Taschlin’s 1946 book and the 1967 Chuck Jones cartoon are explicit about a critique that was only implicit in Dumbo. Disney’s feature is explicitly about a circus, which is about as unlike a factory as one could imagine. And yet elements of oppressive hierarchy are there and, for that matter, circus work is presented AS work for the animals, and their cynicism is presented frankly as well. What I’ll be arguing in my last post on Dumbo is that the film hangs Disney on a dilemma. On the one hand it ends up as a celebration of the new and the modern, hence those Dumbombers for Defense and that streamlined high-tech caboose in which Dumbo lives with his mother at the end of the circus train. In the 1950s Disney would become one of the nation’s most prominent prophets and propagandists of high technology, which he celebrated in TV programs about atomic energy (Our Friend the Atom) and several programs about man in space. His last

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_That_Wasn't

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project, EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was to be another celebration of technology, though it didn’t work out that way once it was build (after his death). In fact, EPCOT as Disney conceived seems to have been an attempt to reconcile technology with Disney’s somewhat sentimental attachment to traditional small-town life. That, I’ll be arguing, is the other aspect of Dumbo. The circus is a small town. Everyone knows everyone. Except that this small town is rootless. It travels from town to town, from city to city, putting on a show. In fact, that traditional small town has all but been destroyed by the modern industrial world, the very world Disney wants to celebrate. The best he can manage is to put the town on a train in a circus headlined by a high-tech flying elephant. But I digress. My point is that The Bear That Wasn’t displays some of those same themes and motifs that are there in Dumbo. In both cases we have animals imagined as “floating” somewhere around and about and in-between the world of machines and men. That bear is mistaken for a man who hasn’t been broken to Fordist harness. Dumbo’s mother doesn’t allow a human child to pester her son and so breaks from her assigned role as entertainment, the hired help as it were. And Dumbo’s problem is to find a way he can fit into the circus world as a performer. Needless to say, I’ll be interested to see how Wells develops the rest of his book from a very promising opening paragraph of the first chapter (I’ve not yet read beyond it). ***** It turns out that Tashlin was not happy with what Jones did with his story. He was initially enthusiastic and supportive of the project, he kept hands-off once he’d given approval. After all, he knew, had worked with, and respected Chuck Jones: what could go wrong? A little thing. As Taschlin explained to Mike Barrier in 1971:23 Well, they destroyed the cartoon with one little thing. I saw that, I almost cried. I never talked to Chuck about it, I've never talked to him since. It was a terrible thing. This bear, he goes to sleep under a factory, when he wakes up they try to convince him he's a [man], as you well know, and he keeps insisting he's a bear, and that's the point of it. Up front in the beginning of this thing, when they are telling him he is a man and he is insisting he's a bear, they put a cigarette in his mouth. Now, the picture was destroyed there, because by the acceptance of a cigarette—you never saw where he got it—by putting a cigarette in his mouth, he was already a man. You know what I mean? Psychologically, the picture was ruined. It stopped working from that point on. So that was a terrible experience.

“Destroyed” is perhaps too strong a word. But I DID notice that cigarette, and I saw the film before I read this interview. Can’t say that I thought much about it, but, who knows? I remember it there drooping out of the bear’s mouth. Definitely, the film would have been better without out it.

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http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Interviews/Tashlin/tashlin_interview.htm

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Dumbo as Myth 3: Modern Times It’s been a long way through, this analysis of Dumbo. Now’s the time to put it together. First I use a psychoanalytic framework to look at how them film ends, with the Dumbombers and, before them, those strange pink elephants. Then I take a detour through evolutionary psychology and arrive at the nature/culture problem which the film transforms into the relationship between the infant-mother relationship (nature) and circus work (culture). From there we have to go outside Circus World entirely, into Pink Elephant Land, and into the countryside where we meet the crows. It is only by going outside the circus that Disney solves a problem that arose within the circus: What do you do with an unnatural elephant? But then all of culture is unnatural as well. Solving Dumbo’s problem is thus a proxy for solving all those many problems. That solution, though, is a fragile thing, as I suggest at the very end.

A Little Crude Psychoanalysis Not psychoanalytic thinking in any deep and rigorous way, but some ideas inspired by psychoanalytic thought. First, that the human life-world begins in the relationship between mother and child. For the infant the world consists of mother and the rest. Second, that one’s mind and personality are organized as “layers” where the deepest layers emerge earliest and subsequent layers are built upon the earlier one. This is also, of course, a Piagetian idea, though he was interested in cognition and reasoning, not feeling and desire. Dumbo, of course, centers on the relationship between Dumbo and his mother. They’re physically separated as a consequence of her attempting to protect him from taunts by a human boy. We don’t actually see and thus experience their relationship restored until the very end of the film. I emphasize what we see because we can easily infer, after the film is over, that their relationship was probably restored sometime shortly after Dumbo’s triumphant flying act. But we don’t SEE that in the movie. What we see is a quick cut from the triumphal act to a bunch of newspaper and magazine covers depicting events that must have taken weeks if not longer. I mean, seriously, how long would it take to design a new bomber, test it, get it into production, and get it into use? That’s a couple of years. Now, I’m not saying this either to argue that a lot of time has in fact passed between triumph and the scene we’re actually shown or to suggest that Disney is playing fast and loose with the facts. Of course he is. That’s ground zero for this kind of movie-making. This is myth and such matters are irrelevant (my inner Groucho Marx just said you mean ‘irrelephant’ don’t you?). All that matters is what happens on the screen and what happens is this:

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First we see Mrs. Jumbo sitting contentedly in that sleek, modern, high-tech caboose. Then we see aviator Dumbo, with an aviator’s cap and no Timothy Mouse, flying with his crow posse. And then, finally hooray! hooray! he lands happily in his mother’s arms. The pleasure and satisfaction we feel at that moment includes those accoutrements and they are not merely ornamental. They belong to the mythic fabric of this film. It would have been easy enough and just as emotionally satisfying to have them reunited privately in a tent, or perhaps in scene where she’s released from her cage and Dumbo runs joyfully to her. Our emotional satisfaction comes from the fact of reunion, not from the specific circumstances. But that’s not what Disney did. What he did was quite different. The effect, I’ve more or less been arguing, is to bond us to the high tech modern world at the most basic level of the psyche, the mother-child bond. Our pleasure in the reunion radiates outward to its circumstances: the sleek caboose, the bombers, and those crows. Though they’re left behind at the very end, they too are included in that bonding. I’ll come back to this a bit later, where I can frame it a bit differently. For now, let’s stick with infancy. ***** One feature of infant life is that the infant is carried about from place to place. The infant doesn’t have to exert any muscles, nor any will. The infant may even be opposed to being moved. No matter. The infant is transported. Which means the visual scene changes without the infant doing anything. It’s almost as though the infant could fly, no? And Dumbo is a film about a flying elephant, though it takes awhile for Dumbo to make that discovery. This involves something of a paradox. For, when Dumbo finally flies, that’s an act of growth, maturation, even of independence. But, through our identification with Dumbo, it also restores US, the viewers, to a more primitive mode of moving about in the world as we identify with him: Wheee, I can fly! Note that much of Dumbo’s flying in the act is gliding and soaring where Dumbo doesn’t move a muscle. That’s one thing. And then there’s the actual experience of watching a movie. You don’t do anything, but the camera moves about and cuts from one scene to another. The film-maker in effect becomes a parent moving the infant about in the world. With these two things in mind, camera motion and flying, let’s revisit Pink Elephants on Parade. It begins when Timothy Mouse and Dumbo drink water that’s been accidentally spiked with alcohol. Drinking, that’s oral, no? And orality is the earliest stage of psychological development in psychoanalytic reckoning; the neonate experiences the world through its mouth, especially, of course, its mother’s breast. So Dumbo and his mouse companion drink something and find themselves in another world. Strange things happen. And they wake up high in a tree without any notion of what happened. We, the viewers, are in pretty much the same situation. We see them there in the tree and have no idea how that happened, for we didn’t see them get there, however that may have happened. Their situation is as much a surprise to us as it is to them. Of course, Disney could have show them flying up into the tree so that we know what happened even though they don’t. But he didn’t do that. He staged the sequence so that our experience of them being up a tree is pretty much like their experience of it. How’d WE get here? And during that lost interval we have this strange experience of a world populated by pink elephants in which, in the final act, those pink elephants become pink cars, trains, and boats. And then we learn to fly.

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In short, at this pivotal point in the film, when Dumbo’s been humiliated as the stooge in a clown act, with the prospect of that act becoming more dangerous for him, when his only solace is a visit with a mother whom he can touch, her trunk at least, but not see, at this point Disney takes us on a proto-psychedelic trip to this strange world where everything is elephants. We see troops of elephants marching and making music, we see them in courtship, at play, skiing, dancing, and we see them transformed into machines. And then, WHAM, we find ourselves up a tree. Physically, that vision is irrelevant. Metaphysically, mythically, it is not. Mythically it is the heart of the movie. When Dumbo finally learns to fly, he “drags” the pink elephant imagery with him and it’s still with him, and us, when he flies into his mother’s arms at the very end of the film.

Evolutionary Psych, Crude as Well Now let’s pretend we’re evolutionary psychologists. As such we believe that we’ve got Stone Age minds but we’re living in a modern world that is full of things that didn’t exist in the Stone Age and that requires us to do things that weren’t done in the Stone Age. How does the Stone Age mind manage it? Well, it learns, it learns. But that’s not quite the point. The Stone Age mind was adapted to operate in a world that had a certain range of objects and requires a certain range of actions and responses. Like a Swiss Army knife—a standard evpsych metaphor—the Stone Age mind has ‘appliances’ built for that world. How do you adapt those appliances to a new world? The Stone Age world didn’t contain airplanes. So how does the Stone Age mind learn to deal with airplanes, to fly them and to travel in them with comfort and ease? The problem isn’t so much one of knowing which knobs to turn, which gauges to read, and so forth. The problem is getting airplanes and railroads and telephones and work gangs and so forth linked into the deeper brain systems organizing motivation and emotion. That’s done by expressive culture: ritual and art. Like Dumbo. The core story, the one I described above in loosely psychoanalytic terms, is about infant-mother attachment, to use the word John Bowlby used when he recast the psychoanalytic account of the infant-mother relationship in more contemporary terms, terms consistent with primate ethology and the emerging disciplines of cognitive science. The infant strives to maintain proximity to mother, not to satisfy physical needs such as thirst, hunger, or warmth, but simply for the satisfaction of social interaction. Correlatively, mother strives to maintain proximity to the infant for the same reason. And that’s what drives Dumbo forward, Dumbo’s desire to regain his relationship with his mother. That much the evolutionary psychologist can understand. But when Dumbo finally restores that relationship, it is because he succeeds at work, as a performer. But work, in this sense, is meaningless in evolutionary psychology. Animals must do various things to survive, some of them are often physically taxing; but they don’t have to punch a time clock nor do they collect wages. They don’t work. Work in this sense is a creature of culture. The plot of Dumbo thus pits nature, if you will, in the form of mother-infant attachment against culture, in the form of work. Work is unnatural, but then Dumbo’s large ears are unnatural as well.

Nature and Culture At this point we’re deep in the territory of myth logic. We’re also deep in one of the thorniest thickets of modern thought, the discourse of nature and culture. What about human life ways is natural and what is cultural? How do you draw the line? In Dumbo Disney has displaced that question to the interior of human society by setting it in a story about thoroughly acculturated animals. These animals are born and bred to the circus;

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they do not live in a state of nature. Yet they have natures, as it were, though Dumbo’s exceptionally large ears are not part of his elephant nature, that is, his animal nature. Those ears are not themselves deeply problematic. The matrons ridicule him when Dumbo’s ears pop out, but that’s all. It’s annoying, but no more. Dumbo marches proudly in the circus parade and plays happily with his mother.

The trouble starts when, after the opening parade (and after Dumbo’s had his bath) members of the public are invited to view the menagerie;, the animals are put on display, they’re put to work. One obnoxious boy, whose own ears aren’t too shabby, not to mention his buck teeth, decides to taunt Dumbo:

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Not only does he make faces, but he blows in Dumbo’s ear and, when Mrs. Jumbo moves him away from the kids, that is, moves him out of the line of work, the kid goes after him and attempts to drag him back. Mrs. Jumbo has had enough of this and spanks the kid:

And then CHAOS and CONFUSION! The next thing we see is the crowd running wild and the ringmasters intervening. What we don’t see is Mrs. Jumbo doing anything to the kid that would result in permanent physical damage, much less death. Nor does she approach anyone else BEFORE the panic. It’s only after the crowd has panicked and the ringmaster has come on the scene with his whip that she becomes violent and out of control. Her violence is clearly a reaction against actions taken against her. Now, if the boy’s own mother or father had been with him and had decided to punish him for his treatment of Dumbo, little would have happened. He was clearly being cruel to Dumbo and deserved punishment. There might have been some comment about punishing him on the spot and publicly, but no one would have questioned the punishment itself. It was merited and just. But Mrs. Jumbo was NOT the boy’s parent. If she’d been human she only would have crossed one line, the one that says you can’t punish a child who isn’t your own unless you have

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express or implied permission (e.g. the institutional authority of a school). As she’s an animal she’s crossed another, and far more consequential line, that between animals and humans. Note that, as Disney has staged it, this line IS NOT one between nature (animals) and culture (humans). It is entirely within culture, as I mentioned above. These animals have been assimilated to human culture in the circus. We’ve seen the elephants work alongside humans in erecting the tent and we’ve seen the animals treat the opening day parade as a rather boring bit of work. This line between animals and humans is thus one drawn within culture. http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/dumbo-script-transcript-disney-elephant.html That’s not the only line Mrs. Jumbo crossed. As Mrs. Jumbo begins removing Dumbo from view we hear kids saying - Aw, let me see! - Boo! - You can't hide him from us. - Yeah, his ears are still stickin' out. - Come on! - We wanna see him! - We wanna laugh. - Sure, that's what we came for.

Indeed, that’s what they came for. They want their laughs. They want their money’s worth. In effect, as far as they’re concerned, they’ve paid for the privilege of taunting the animals. Mrs. Jumbo “forgot” that she and Dumbo were at work, where their job is to entertain humans, even at the cost of their dignity. Perhaps that’s why the elephants are so disdainful of clowns, a disdain on full display when, later in the film, they learn that Dumbo has been made into a clown. They fixed him good. - What do you mean? - Wh-What did they do? - Did they beat him? - What is it, darling? - Tell us. - Come, come. I demand to know. Oh. Well, they've gone and made him-- Oh, dear, I just can't say it. - Out with it! Made him a clown. A clown? - No! - Yes. Oh, the shame of it. Let us take the solemn vow. From now on, he is no longer... an elephant.

And so poor Dumbo no longer has a role in elephant society. His only attachment is to the circus itself, a place of work. Well, not quite. There’s his new buddy and mentor, Timothy Mouse who joined him some time before this disgrace. In a sense Timothy is responsible for that disgrace, at least partially. For he plays a crucial role in the chain of events that brought it about.

Timothy Mouse to the Rescue, Sorta’ Timothy Mouse enters the story, conveniently enough, just after Dumbo’s mother has been imprisoned, separating him from her. He overhears their conversation: Well, I heard today that they have put her in solitary confinement. - No! - You don't mean it! Oh, how awful for her! Well, l-I must say, l-I don't blame her for anything. You're absolutely right. It's all the fault of that little-F-R-E-A-K. Yes, him with those ears that only a mother could love.

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What's the matter with his ears? I don't see nothin' wrong with 'em. I think they're cute. Ladies, ladies! It's no laughing matter at all. Oh. Oh, she's right, girls. Don't forget that we elephants have always walked with dignity. His disgrace is our own shame. - Yes, that's true. That's very true. - Oh, indeed it is. Well, frankly, I wouldn't eat at the same bale of hay with him. - No. Right. - Me either, dearie. -I should say. -Nor I. That's just how I feel about it. Here he comes now. Hmm. Pretend you don't see him.

He upbraids them: So ya like to pick on little guys, huh? Well, why don't you pick on me? A proud race. Overstuffed hay bags!

And they, of course, are terrified of him. Disney is playing on the traditional enmity between elephants and mice. Not only is this a cross-species friendship, but it is between traditional enemies. Disney’s also playing on the disparity in size between the elephant and the mouse. Though baby Dumbo is considerably larger than his mouse companion, that little mouse is now his caretaker, as befits an adult. For we must assume that Timothy is an adult. He acts autonomously and doesn’t seem to depend on any other creature. He’s his own man, as the saying goes. This interspecies friendship is, of course, unnatural. But it IS within the bounds of circus society. For Timothy is one of those animals that wears clothes, in fact, a rather nice circus uniform with a feather in his high hat:

But just what Timothy do in the circus? What’s his line of work? All we see him do is befriend Dumbo. If he has any ‘ordinary’ role to play, this film knows nothing of it. I conclude that, though he’s a circus creature, he’s a very marginal one.

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This relationship, however important it is to Dumbo, and it is VERY important, is thus socially marginal. They’re of two different species and both are marginal to the circus where they live. The first thing Timothy does, after befriending Dumbo, is implant an idea in the mind of the sleeping ringmaster, that Dumbo should top the pyramid of pachyderms. THAT ends in the disaster that gets Dumbo ejected from elephantdom. Timothy didn’t intend that, of course. He had nothing be the best intentions. Things just didn’t work out the way he’d planned, nor, for that matter, how the ringmaster had planned. And so Dumbo becomes a clown and the matrons feel so vicariously humiliated that they divorce themselves from himn: “His disgrace is our own shame. The act goes well, very well. For the clowns, the crowd, and the ringmaster. But not for Dumbo. He’s humiliated, playing the role of a human infant as a clown. Now Dumbo has nothing left but the circus, Timothy Mouse, and his mother. They may be separated, but she still loves him, and he her.

Outside of Circus World: Pink Elephants and Crows It’s at this point that we leave the circus world entirely. But not before Dumbo visits his mother, a visit arranged by Timothy. Revivified by maternal contact—literally contact, she rocks him in her trunk—Dumbo walks back toward his quarters, wherever they are, with Timothy. And they get drunk. And we have the Pink Elephants sequence. I’ve said so much about this pivotal sequence that I won’t repeat myself. Much. But I will recall the psychoanalytic remarks I made at the beginning of this essay. First, the earliest and deepest layer of the psyche is associated with mother and orality, both of which are in play at this point in the film. Dumbo’s just visited mother and he’s just gotten drunk. Second, an infant’s life involves being transported from one place to another without having to do anything and whether or not the infant wants to. That’s what happens to the audience of a film, where the camera is, in effect, the mother surrogate moving the infant around. This is particularly important in the Pink Elephants sequence as it is so contextually strange. One moment we’re down on the ground, watching Dumbo and Timothy get drunk. A few minutes later we, along with them, are up in a tree, with no idea how we got there, and listening to crows chatter away about us. At this point the circus world is but a memory, albeit an important one. But that world has no direct power over Dumbo or Timothy. Nor do the crows. At first they’re bemused and dismissive, but after a little singing and dancing, they become sympathetic and lend a little sympathetic magic to the cause, the ‘magic feather.’ It’s not magic at all, just an ordinary crow’s feather. But it does the trick. Dumbo flies, deliberately this time. Then again in the circus, that time without the feather. It’s all Dumbo all the way. Success. Dumbo’s found his way back to the circus. That is, he’s found his way back to the workplace. And then, at the very end, he’s reunited with his mother. Everyone’s happy. But the crows do not join up with the circus. Nor is there any indication that they wished to do so. They seem quite content to wave goodbye to Dumbo and continue their lives out in the boondocks somewhere anywhere. Those crows, of course, are stylistically black, and Disney’s audience would have recognized that, as would a contemporary audience. While blacks are not outsiders to the circus Disney has depicted in the film—remember the roustabouts and some of the animal handlers—

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this particular crew IS outside circus society. The problem that arose within that society—what to do with this big-eared elephant?—could only be solved by going outside it. Finally, I note that the crows, unlike the storks at the very beginning, are clothed and, of course, they speak. They are not ‘natural’ crows. They’re acculturated, though their culture is not that of the circus world.

Disney’s Paradox What, then, do we make of this whole film, all 68 minutes of it? When Disney introduced Dumbo on his TV program he said it was his favorite of all they pictures they made: “From the very start Dumbo was a happy picture. It really started from a simple idea and, like Topsy, it just grew. We weren’t restricted by any set story line, so we could give our imaginations full play.” Well, yes, it is a happy film. But only in the ending. The separation between Dumbo and his mother is often quite distressing to young children who see the film, the Pink Elephants sequence is, at least, very strange, and there’s quite a bit of physical and psychological cruelty in the film. As we’ve seen, it’s a wide-ranging film, one that in the end is an attempt to make sense of the modern world, a world that had plunged into war as Disney was making the film. As I suggested in my post on The Bear That Wasn’t, Disney uses this story of the separation between an infant elephant and his mother as a vehicle bonding his audience to the high technology of the day, and by implication, the social order implied by it. Those Dumbombers for Defense make only the briefest of appearances in the film, but they come at a critical moment, just before Dumbo is reunited with his mother. Not too long before they appeared we had this strange pink elephants interlude in which we see a world entirely populated by and constituted of pink elephants. In particular, it ends with pink elephants being transformed into pink cars, trains, and speedboats. Very shortly after the Dumbomber headline we see Dumbo himself, this time wearing an aviator’s cap, and without Timothy Mouse. He then lands in his mother’s arms as she sits at the rear of a streamlined caboose, that is, a railroad car styled after an airplane. In the 1950s Disney would become one of the nation’s most prominent prophets and propagandists of high technology, which he celebrated in TV programs about atomic energy (Our Friend the Atom) and several programs about man in space. His last project, EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was to be another celebration of technology, though it didn’t work out that way once it was build (after his death). In fact, EPCOT as Disney conceived it seems to have been an attempt to reconcile technology with Disney’s somewhat sentimental attachment to traditional small-town life. And that, of course, is what Disney had in the circus setting that dominates the film. The circus is a small town. Everyone knows everyone. Except that this small town is rootless. It travels from place to place putting on a show. In fact, that traditional small town has all but been destroyed by the modern industrial world, the very world Disney wants to celebrate. The best he can manage is to put the town on a train in a circus headlined by a high-tech flying elephant. And the problem that arose within that town, the big-eared elephant, could not in the end be solved within that town. It required the benevolent intervention of those jive-talking highstepping crows, most stylish. As myth it’s convincing. As social analysis, diagnosis, and prescription, it falls apart. Which is where we are today.

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