The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life.

Four years ago, when the Wald Disney Corp. made a bid to transform the Manassas National Battlefield Park into a theme park, intellectuals reared up in protest and ultimately defeated the project, even though it enjoyed the strong support of local businesses and politicians. Perhaps if the Ramada Hotel chain or Donald Trump had been behind the attempt to annex Manassas the outcome would have been the same, but the fact that it was Disney lent a particular color to the rhetoric of highbrow dissent. Was it not universally understood, after all, that the name "Disney" signified everything sentimental, false, and Philistine in American culture?

The day is now long past, but as Steven Watts reminds us in his valuable if uneven study, Walt Disney and his works once received adoring hosannas from the intelligentsia. Elite Disneyphiles in the 1930s included Gilbert Seldes, Sergei Eisenstein, Mark Van Doren, and Arturo Toscanini; comparisons to Leonardo, Hogarth, Daumier, and Matisse were routinely preferred, except by those critics who saw in Disney something entirely new and unprecedented in art. Disney himself affected an aw-shucks indifference to this kind of attention while it lasted, but the steady decline of his cultural reputation after 1940 was clearly galling to his mammoth ego.

The full reversal of Disney's critical fortunes was marked by the 1968 publication of Richard Schickel's scathing The Disney Version, which took Disney's measure in relation to the values of the counterculture and pronounced him vulgar, sentimental, and dehumanized, an assessment which has since become more or less entrenched as an upper-middlebrow shibboleth. Disney died shortly before the Schickel book appeared, but he had long before adopted a defensive populist posture in relation to his many detractors. "The critics think I'm corny," he told his studio associates. "Well, I am corny. As long as people respond to it, I'm okay."

With The Magic Kingdom, Professor Steven Watts, hitherto a cultural historian of the early American Republic, presents us with a fresh opportunity to evaluate the life and work of this architect of modern American culture. Although a confessed Disneyphile and the beneficiary of unprecedented cooperation from both the Disney Archive and the Disney family, Watts has produced an admirably even-handed work that should hold considerable interest even for those cynical souls who find themselves congenitally out of sympathy with the Disney aesthetic.

Watts defines that aesthetic here as the depiction of people, objects, and scenes in which dark or messy dimensions have been wiped away. But that doesn't keep him from exploring those same dimensions of Disney's own character. Driven, mercurial, domineering, manipulative, hard drinking, puritanical about sex but fond of grade-school potty humor, this Disney stands in stark contrast to Uncle Walt, the sunny television presence who warms the memory of anyone who grew up in the '50s.

The real subject of The Magic Kingdom, however, is not Disney's psychology but his work and its underlying cultural significance. Of course, no undertaking is more fraught with potential for intellectual pratfalls than the deep reading of popular culture (a point that Watts gamely acknowledges with a pre-emptive epigram from Walt Disney: "We just try to make a good picture. And then the professors come along and tell us what we do.") In attempting to draw out the deeper political and aesthetic meanings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi, Watts registers some hits and some misses. The most persuasive political analyses here are often also the most obvious ones. For example, it seems safe to hazard that the national mania for Disney's "Three Little Pigs" and its hit theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" in 1933 had something to do with the Depression. The political explication of the later Disney products of the Cold War era is similarly spot-on. Watts may be reaching a bit, however, with the observation that Mickey Mouse's eclipse in popularity by the more belligerent Donald Duck in the late '30s subtly reflected a gradual rethinking of America's global situation. Perhaps people were simply tired of the mouse and ready for a new cartoon character? In other places Watts is simply too much of a historian and not enough of a critic, as when his discussion of Disney's status as an Artist ends in stalemate, with some of Watts' grandest claims for Disney the auteur suddenly dampened into nothingness by the following disclaimer:

In many ways, of course, such

high-falutin aesthetic maneuvering was

at best incidental, and at worst

unintended or unconscious. Most

of the time Walt Disney simply

followed his instincts in utilizing

humor, comedy, and music in pursuit

of mass entertainment, and any

explicit thoughts about art lay deep

in the shadows.

Still, everything in this book stands well above the current, permissively silly academic standards for the discussion of pop culture. And Watts succeeds admirably in generating an understanding of how a young nobody from the Midwest named Walter Elias Disney became a major mogul of movies and television and eponymous ruler of a theme-park kingdom.

Hardbitten Disneyphobes will come away from The Magic Kingdom fortified with the knowledge that the first movie tie-in merchandising campaign was for Disney's Snow White all the way back in 1937; confirmed Disney lovers will profit from the book's wealth of anecdotes concerning Walt Disney and the Disney studios. Those in between can benefit from a new perspective on a man whose influence on global popular culture has yet to wane, three decades after his death.