
The Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) is a comprehensive Marxist lexicon which, upon completion, will span 15 volumes and over 1,500 entries. Of the nine volumes published so far in the original German, two volumes have been published in Chinese since 2017. In 2019, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung teamed up with the HCDM team to advance its "globalization" into English and Spanish, with the ultimate aim of recruiting a new generation of Marxist scholars from around the globe to the project and expanding its readership and reach. The below entry is one of a selection of these translations that are made available on our website.
For more information about the project and other translated entries, check out our HCDM dossier.
A: mīkī māus. – F: mickey mouse. – G: Micky Maus. – R: mikki-maus. – S: mickey mouse. – C: mǐqí lǎoshǔ 米奇老鼠
M is a fictional character, internationally ubiquitous like hardly any other. His circular ears are easily recognisable, along with his round head. Due to this geometrical abstraction, M can be considered a Fordist cultural industry icon. The character’s many other features, including even his four-fingered gloves, are changing or have been adapted over the years to different historical and media circumstances. Due to its masque-like nature, prevalence, and ambivalence between human and animal, the M character elicits several projections. The utopian, historical-philosophical assessment of the character in the initial years of its creation, particularly by Walter Benjamin, gave way to a more critical position on the character – and often generally related to the activities of the Disney corporation, a critical stance that was accompanied, despite many harsh prosecutions on the part of Walt Disney of copyright law infringements, by several adaptations and appropriations of the character.
1. The anthropomorphic mouse first debuted on 18 November 1928 in the black-and-white cartoon film Steamboat Willie. The cinema’s effective press work let the combination of music and image become a sensation (Gabler 2006, 126) that enabled the then-independent Disney Productions studio to produce many subsequent films. The character soon was marketed on other media platforms and in different contexts: as a stuffed animal and toy, as a logo that marked watch faces, dish ware, clothing, and other merchandise, for which by 1929 the Disney corporation already had its own dedicated team (deCordova 1994, 206); in 1930, as a daily comic strip, which was influenced by Floyd Gottfredson over the years, and the figure’s transformation from a maverick adventurer to a state-loyal, responsible, and respectable middle class character; in comic books such as the Mickey Mouse Magazine (1933-40), which were imitated around the world, including in Europe (e.g., Topolino in Italy, later Micky Maus in Germany); in other publications such as Big Little Books; in the M Clubs, fan clubs which accompanied many cinema matinee showings and already garnering a million members by 1932. Television series such as the M Club featured M’s Mouseketeers (off and on from 1955 to 1996); as a radio play The M Theater of the Air (1938), later being featured on records, cassettes, and more; as a M full-body costume since 1934, which was used at Disneyland starting in 1955. Since 1981, M graced many video productions and computer video games now marketed on the M Clubhouse website; M appeared in shows on ice and finally, as a mascot, symbol, and logo for the Walt Disney Company. In this vein, since the 1950s, the M figure has come to be associated with disneyfication, “that shameless process by which everything the studio later touched, […] was reduced to the limited terms Disney and his people could understand” (Schickel 1968/1985, 225), and similarly, with disneyisation, the phenomenon that increasing parts of society are being subsumed under the Disney theme park principal. This refers to giving consumption a narrative, so that products get imbued with a story, and to the omnipresence of merchandising and “performative labour”, which consists of presenting a mundane service “akin to a theatrical performance” with emotional exuberance (Bryman 2004, 8 et sq.). The friendly mouse conceals, among other things, the miserable working conditions within the theme parks (cf. Inside the Mouse, 1995) as well as the sweat shops, where Disney merchandise is manufactured (Budd/Kirsch 2005, 5).
2. A critical examination of the mythical Disney narrative must scrutinise the erasure of its inconsistencies and representation of the character as a bourgeois subject possessing a personality, biography, and birth date. Walt Disney ceded his rights over Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to Charles Mintz of Universal Pictures and needed a new character, which he claimed to have sketched on a train from New York to Los Angeles. It is thought to be very likely that Ub Iwerks, the animator of the early M films, developed the character together with Disney based on Oswald (Watts 1997, 51), transforming it from a rabbit to a mouse, having, to a certain extent, “taken back” the character (Eliot 1994, 60).
Esther Leslie (2002) highlights other aspects. She interprets M as a reflection of the modern, urban society of the 1920s; she posits that it is a “more practical version” of the Black Square by Kasimir Malevich (82). While Malevich’s black square was meant to represent the zero point of painting, with M the zero starts to dance; M’s ears, drawn as black circles which in the early years were graphically static regardless of perspective even when the figure moved, mark the transformation of popular culture to a cultural industry forged during the global economic crisis of the early 1930s via mass-marketed products. At the same time, the uniformity of the M signifier should not mask the heterogeneity of its material aspects. The different materialities of the character are neither coherent nor can they be attributable to any kind of entity. These aspects of M do not converge to a whole, rather, they are to be examined as different parts and parcels, in the different ways they are produced, function, and analysed according to their various constellations and adaptations.
Consequently, the emergence of M is to be examined in the context of other comic and cartoon figures, particularly the internationally acclaimed Felix the Cat (1919-36) by Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan, the Krazy Kat cartoon figure by George Herriman (1913-44), popular among intellectuals of the time, whose complex design has been adopted and readapted, or Bosko (1929-38), having emerged nearly at the same time, who looks like M without ears. All these characters are influenced by vaudeville and by minstrel shows in particular, the latter of which manifests itself in M’s initially white, then yellow four-fingered gloves. M is seen as a figure in blackface, copying Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (1927) (Rogin 1998, 29). In the transition from silent to talking films, M transforms and universalises the tramp figure that Charlie Chaplin depicted, thus preserving the grotesque slapstick aesthetic, before this genre was replaced by “classic Disney production” (Wasko 2001, 110-19). The emblematic turning point was exemplified in Disney Studio’s first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), with its “sentimental modernism” (Watts 1997, 104 et sq.).
3. In Walter Benjamin’s writings, the early, black-and-white version of M as the “Micki Maus” or “Micky Maus” persona takes on a historical-theoretical meaning, related to the films produced between 1928 and 1935. In a short annotation from 1931 (SW 2, 545 et sq. [GS VI, 144 et sq.]), in the essay Experience and Poverty (1933, SW 2, 731-36 [GS II, 213-19]), and in the first four versions of The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility (1935/36, GA 16; SW 3, 101-33; SW 4, 251-83), Benjamin develops the utopian potential of the ambivalent character as a “dialectical image” (Hansen 1992/2012, 179) whereby “a way of life in which everything is solved [ein Dasein, das […] sich selbst genügt]” “must come as a tremendous relief [erscheint erlösend]” (Benjamin, SW 2, 735 [GS II, 218]). The annotation referring to a conversation with Gustav Glück and Kurt Weill formulates theses regarding why “the public recognizes its own life” (SW 2, 545 [GS VI, 145]) in these films: the fragmentation, the hybridisation, the narrative of the fairy tale; moreover, the films reflect that “experience has fallen in value” (SW 2, 731 [GS II, 214]). In a separate section, which was left out in the last version of the Work of Art essay, the “[c]ollective laughter” unleashed by the M films is understood to be “psychic immunization” against “sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions” through “preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis” (2010, 31 [GA 16, 84; Second Version]; cf. Lindner 2004, 155). The “laughter”, Benjamin notes in another fragment, in reference to the Chaplin films often cited in conjunction with M, “loosens up the mass” (SW 2, 792 [GS VI, 103]) and thus, according to the Third Version of the Work of Art essay, assumes the same function as the “class struggle which loosens the compact mass of proletarians” (SW 3, 129, En. 24; transl. corr. [GA 16, 123, Fn.]).
In 1936, Theodor W. Adorno criticised Benjamin’s laughter theory and claimed that “the laughter of a cinema audience […] is full of the worst bourgeois sadism” (CCorr, 130). Along these lines, Adorno also argues together with Max Horkheimer in the chapter on cultural industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment, whereby they indirectly acknowledge Benjamin’s cartoon film utopia as “exponents of fantasy against rationalism”, but at the same time, virtually in a historicisation, opine that cartoon films “merely confirm the victory of technological reason over truth” (DiaEn, 2002, 110). Leslie (2002, 170) shows that for Adorno and Horkheimer cartoon films assume a critical position in analysing the culture industry. When they are amused, the spectators practice masochistic behaviour. Rather than loosening the masses, laughter turns people into “monads” whose “collective of those who laugh parodies humanity” (DiaEn, 112). This assessment specifically refers to the Donald Duck cartoons that made their way into film theatres since 1937. This analysis is congruent with Benjamin’s concern that the colourised “M films” would display “the cozy acceptance of bestiality and violence as inevitable concomitants of existence” (SW 3, 130, En. 30 [GA 16, 132 et sq.; Third Version]). This points to the “applicability of the Disneyian method for fascism”, which he evidently wanted to examine more closely (GA 16, 146). Indeed, after initial rejection, the mouse was well received in Nazi Germany for a while and the M logo even adorned an aircraft squadron of the Condor Legion (Laqua 1992, 106).
Siegfried Kracauer also critiqued the development of the Disney films, albeit with a different emphasis. Instead of “pictur[ing] the unreal”, the Disney feature films followed the “camera-reality” and subjected themselves to its perspectives (Theory of Film, 1960/1997, 89 et sq.). In contrast, he formulated in his review of Dumbo (1941) that cartoon films seek “dissolution […] of conventional reality” (2012, 140). Kracauer already shows preference in the Outline of his Theory of Film in the Marseille notebooks (1940/41) to “the materialisation of imagined phenomena”, as exhibited in the M films early on, since here, “[t]he actual carrier of the plot is the materialisation process itself” (2005, 647), which begs the question of how collective imaginations could not only be created but also modified. In any case, Kracauer does not expand on these reflections any further.
Miriam Bratu Hansen interprets the M character, in reference to Benjamin, as a “disruption”: “an emergency break that might yet derail the catastrophic continuum of history” (1992/2012, 170), not in the least because it acts as an “antidote to the violent return of modern civilization’s repressed”, due to its hybridity between two and three dimensions, between human and animal, and between physical and mechanical forces (165). The visual space [Bildraum] and the collective body [Kollektivleib] mutually permeate M, giving the resulting “optical unconscious” a seemingly redeeming quality (178). In contrast to its “blackness”, this effect could not be reduced to one simple difference, rather, the hybrid figure supposedly resolves widespread dichotomies (179).
4. The assessments and analyses – in particular, the criticism of the Donald character – by the Frankfurt School are replicated in Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s analysis Walt Disney's ‘Third World’: How to Read Donald Duck, which was published in 1971 in Chile but following the coup, it was banned, along with other leftist books. Based on Benjamin’s utopian “globe-encircling M” (SW 3, 118), now “[w]e all live in an enormous Disney comic” threatening to “strangle critical analysis”, as different self-referencing ‘circles’ – round like the mouse’s ears – are closing in (Dorfman/Mattelart 1971/1991, 94): “The reader is entertained by Mickey entertaining himself” is the formula the authors use to analyse the inner workings of the “spectacle” (76) through the lens of the Situationist International. While their study primarily focuses on Carl Barks’s “imperfect Donald”, they recognise in M the “boss in this world” and “Disney’s personal undercover agent”, through whom “the power of repression dissolves into a daily fact of life” and combines “church lottery” and “intelligence agency” (91) into one. The authors’ utopia is a world without Disney: “What happens after Disney will be decided by the social practice of the peoples seeking emancipation” (99). This assertion is contradicted by Douglas Brode regarding the US-American masses: “Disney entertainments serve the function of angering and liberating those masses” (2004, xxvii). The groundwork was laid for the 1960s counter-culture through the Disney motifs, narrative structures, and characters.
Brode’s interpretation does not by any means weaken the multifaceted criticism of the Disney studies, as was developed based on the 1968 Richard Schickel study and inspired by the Disney corporation’s renewed success under the leadership of the ‘Team Disney’, consisting of Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Frank Wells, which led Disney to become one of the largest corporations in the world. In any case, even in 1993, Susan Willis wondered why there had not been any serious criticism of Disney (1). Meanwhile, the criticism includes, along with the historical revision undertaken by the corporation (Watts 1997), a criticism of Walt Disney’s role himself, who, in the late 1940s, served as an FBI informant (Eliot 1994). The criticism also approaches charting the “ideological contours of economy, politics and pedagogy” of the Disney films as a “vehicle of culture production” (Bell/Haas/Sells 1995); as well as the maintenance of a “clean image”, including propagation of heterosexual, family- and security-oriented content while suppressing the bad working conditions in the entertainment parks.
Alongside attempts to continue Dorfman and Mattelart’s deconstructive polemic regarding the Disney films of the 1990’s (Byrne/McQuillan 1999), and to analyse their racism and more recent marketing strategies touting diversity in the films (Cheu 2013), there is criticism of the apparently consistent presentation of history portrayed as free from contradictions in the theme parks (Wallace 1996), as well as the investigation of the makeup of the global audience (Wasko/Phillips/Meehan 2001). While earlier approaches formulated a problem-analysis targeted at the criticism of capitalist production of the Disney corporation, rendered taboo by the childish innocence of their products, more recent approaches are based on the assumption “that we are all Walt’s children” (Budd/Kirsch 2005, 12) and that nowadays such criticism must bear this in mind.
5. M’s contour is not just the silhouette of the film projector inscribed with two film rolls (Rickels 1991, 66), but also the rationalisation and Taylorisation of the production process of cartoon films, which was organised by Disney in accordance with the Fordist model starting in the late 1930s. As early as the 1930s, the easy reproducibility was already being appropriated into other genres, such as pornography, in the most often eight-paged Tijuana Bibles or Fuck Books depicting Mickey, Minnie, and Donald in sexually explicit scenes. Also in Horst Rosenthal’s self-published Micky in Gurs noteboook, which used the mouse character to depict his interment in Gurs in 1942, using this international figure to underscore the absurdity of the Nazi racial ideology, or Will Elder’s Mickey Rodent!, published in early 1955, a few months before the inauguration of the Disneyland theme park, parodying many implications of the Disney world.
In 1971, the Air Pirate Funnies exhausted the character’s potential, with a nod to the Fuck Books, and used the slogan ‘the line belongs to us’ to put the character’s copyright into question as a parody (Frahm 2010, 308). However, they lost their case in a long-protracted court proceeding with Disney (Levin 2003). The corporation is often accused of obsessively controlling their copyright (Budd/Kirsch 2005, 5). The most consequential interpretation of M in the comic world was ushered in by Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1980-91), whose depiction of the Shoah won international acclaim and contributed to the establishment of the graphic novel format. The Jews are depicted with mouse heads, which also reflects the frequent rejection of M in Nazi publications as “Jewish” (Laqua 1992, 35 et sq.).
The Disney corporation’s practice of washing history clean of its contradictions relates to its own characters, whose multifaceted ambivalence has not fully been explored. Even though John Updike claims that M cannot cast off his origins in the “1930’s proletariat” (1992, 13), this is only one of M’s masks, aside from the jazzy, Jewish, blackface, Douglas Fairbanks, liberating, sexless machine, or goody-goody mouse. The historical truth cannot be found behind these masks. Instead, it can be detected in the constellations that these projections provide, whereby analysing them, already at the point of describing their functionality, runs the risk of only adding a new projection to it.
Bibliography: Th.W.Adorno, W.Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. H.Lonitz, transl. N.Walker, Cambridge 1999 (CCorr); E.Bell, L.Haas, L.Sells (eds.), From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, Bloomington Indianapolis 1995; W.Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version]”, transl. M.W.Jennings, Grey Room, no. 39, Spring 2010, 11-37; D.Brode, From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture, Austin 2004; A.Bryman, The Disneyization of Society, London 2004; M.Budd, M.H.Kirsch (eds.), Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions, Middletown 2005; E.Byrne, M.McQuillan, Deconstructing Disney, London 1999; J.Cheu (ed.), Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability, Jefferson-London 2013; R.deCordova, “The Mickey in Macy’s Window”, E.Smoodin (ed.), Disney Discourse, New York-London 1994, 203-13; A.Dorfman, A.Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971), New York 1991; M.Eliot, Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince: A Biography, New York 1994; O.Frahm, Die Sprache des Comics, Hamburg 2010; N.Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of American Imagination, New York 2006; M.B.Hansen, “Micky-Maus” (1992), Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 2012, 163-82; Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, published by The Project on Disney (K.Klugman, J.Kuenz, S.Waldrep, S.Willis), Durham-London 1995; S.Kracauer, “[‘Marseiller Entwurf’ zu einer Theorie des Films]” (1940/41), Werke, vol. 3, ed. I.Mülder-Bach, Frankfurt/M 2005, 521-779; id., “Dumbo”, The Nation, 8 November 1941; id., “Dumbo” (1941), Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture, With an Afterword by Martin Jay, ed. J.v.Moltke, K.Rawson, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 2012, 139 et sq.; id., Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), introd. M.B.Hansen, Princeton (NJ) 1997; C.Laqua, Mickey Mouse, Hitler, and Nazi Germany: How Disney's Characters Conquered the Third Reich, Maryland 1992; E.Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde, London-New York 2002; B.Levin, The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Counterculture, Seattle 2003; B.Lindner, “Mickey Mouse und Charlie Chaplin: Benjamins Utopie der Massenkunst”, D.Schöttker (ed.), Schrift–Bilder–Denken: Walter Benjamin und die Künste, Frankfurt/M 2004, 144-55; L.A.Rickels, The Case of California, Baltimore 1991; M.Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Melting Pot, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1998; R.Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (1968), revised and updated by author, New York 1985; J.Updike, “Introduction”, C.Yoe, J.Morra Yoe (eds.), Mickey Mouse Art, Vienna 1992, 7-13; M.Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory, Philadelphia 1996; J.Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, Cambridge-Oxford-Malden 2001; ead., M.Phillips, E.R.Meehan (eds.), Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Project, London-New York 2001; S.Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, Columbia (MO)-London 1997; S.Willis, “Critical Vantage Points on Disney’s World”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 92, 1993, no. 1: The World According to Disney, 1-6.
Ole Frahm
Translated by Rebecca Ellis
→ advertising, beauty, class consciousness, Cockaigne, comic, commodity aesthetics, commodity fetishism, consumer society, consumptionism/consumerism, convert, counter culture, Critical Theory, cultural industry, Cultural Studies, culture, dispersion/distraction, enjoyment, entertainment, false consciousness, fiction, film, Frankfurt School, happiness, Hollywood, ideology critique, illusion, kitsch, laughter, leisure, manipulation, mass art, mass communication, mass culture, media imperialism, myth, objectification, pop music, popular art, popular culture in capitalism, product aesthetic, reconciliation, reification, repression, resignation, subculture, subversive, surrealism, television, value categories, vanguard, visual culture, wit/joke, work of art
→ Avantgarde, falsches Bewusstsein, Fernsehen, Fetischcharakter der Ware, Fiktion, Film, Frankfurter Schule, Freizeit, Gegenkultur, Genuss, Glück, Hollywood, Ideologiekritik, Illusion, Kitsch, Klassenbewusstsein, Komisches, Konsumgesellschaft, Konsumismus, Kritische Theorie, Kultur, Kulturindustrie, Kulturstudien (Cultural Studies), Kunstwerk, Lachen, Manipulation, Massenkommunikation, Massenkultur, Massenkunst, Medienimperialismus, Mythos, Popmusik, Populärkunst, Produktästhetik, Resignation, Schlaraffenland, Schönheit, Subkultur, subversiv, Surrealismus, umfunktionieren, Unterhaltung, Verdinglichung, Verdrängung, Vergegenständlichung, Versöhnung, visuelle Kultur, Volkskultur im Kapitalismus, Warenästhetik, Werbung, Wertkategorien, Witz, Zerstreuung