In the course of his painful plunge into the depths of a toxic relationship recorded in his book In the house of dreams (Anagram), Carmen Maria Machado ends up running into the archetype of villains queer And inevitably that stop along the way takes her back to Disneyan mythology. I think a lot about villains queer: in the problems they pose, the pleasure they provide, and their audacity. I know I should have a very specific political answer regarding them. I know, for example, that I should be offended by the Disney cast of vain and mannered scoundrels (Scar, Jafar), drag queens sinister (Úrsula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated dumplings hate men (Cinderella’s stepmother, Maleficent) ”, he writes in his book.
Directed by Craig Gillespie —a filmmaker who did not shrink from exploring the relationships between a pathological incel (involuntary celibate) and an inflatable doll in Lars and a real girl, or by delving with cynical claw into the murkiness of Tonya Harding in her recent biopic-, Cruella get one of those villains back queer to reexamine it in another light. If in the animated original the character evoked an imitation drag by Marlene Dietrich girded in expressionist lines, now Emma Stone suggests the short distance that could exist between little Dorrit and an outrageous Vivienne Westwood. You might think that Disney is trying to launch its feminist response to Joker (2019) by Todd Phillips, a film marked by its nihilism for wounded masculinities, if it weren’t for the fact that the Mickey Mouse emporium had already explored that trend of re-evaluating villainy under the prism of ambiguity with its franchise Descendants (2015-19), starring the four teenage children of Cruella, the witch of Snow White (1937), Jafar and Maleficent, and with the 2014 film in which Angelina Jolie gave a splendid life camp to the wicked nemesis of Sleeping Beauty (1959).
It was precisely in Maleficent, directed by a special effects technician like Robert Stromberg and presumably safe from all intellectual pretense, where a singular cultural short-circuit could be detected: a transparent consumer product, born of the need to exploit every corner of an imaginary universe, had just citing, unintentionally, Robert Coover from the fascinating Bramble rose, a sharp deconstruction of fairy tales in which a Sleeping Beauty appeared dreaming of “an affectionate old witch, hideously ugly and vaguely menacing, and yet more dear to her in her dreams than any prince, even courting princes.”
One might think that this mannerism in the villains responds to a programmatic ‘lgtbiphobic’ moralism: Disney has been a recurring target of progressive looks
This unexpected intertextual relationship between a Disney film and the work of one of the pillars of North American postmodernism is perhaps one more element that invites us to rethink the Disney not so much as the Kingdom of Fantasy, but as the Kingdom of Paradox. And, in this sense, the relationship of that imaginary universe with what queer provides stimulating friction. On the one hand, it could be thought that that mannerism in the villains and those lesbian currents in the Disney villains that Carmen Maria Machado pointed out respond to a programmatic moralism lgtbiphobic inside the studio. After all, Disney has been a recurring target on the part of progressive looks, not entirely exempt from a certain rejection of nuance. There are, for example, those who have seen in Pixar a response to Disney’s conservatism, when, in reality, both firms come from the same aesthetic trunk and perhaps only their ways of formalizing a moral vision diverge that, in both cases, is far from being transgressive. or revolutionary.
Where Disney places family, Pixar places company; in this sense, works like SA monsters (2001), Reverse (2015) and Soul (2020) are an open book. In his brilliant video essay Evil Queens: A Gay Look at Disney History (2020), James Somerton echoes two homophobic pieces of evidence in the golden age of the study. On the one hand, the moment when Walt Disney disgusted the animator Art Babbitt’s behavior for signing up for piano lessons during the production of Fantasy (1940): “What the hell is wrong with you: are you a fag?” On the other, the final dismissal of the young actor Tommy Kirk after his homosexuality was discovered. But Somerton knows that the reality was much more complex: many of the study employees were homosexual and, sometimes, some messages that could be deciphered by a glance camp —The gaze of the one who understands and reads a coded wink between the lines— filtered into the final work, as is the case with the short The bull Ferdinando (1938) or the long heterodox The wacky dragon (1941), both chaired by characters who embody clear disagreements in relation to their respective gender roles. Dissidents that both films accept, celebrate and do not sanction.
Kaa was not a girl
In a Facebook post, the writer Alberto Mira recalled the importance that those hidden messages in the Disney corpus had had in his own formation queer. Mira puts the accent on the dubbing voices and on the transgender quality of the vocal tonality of a professional like Sterling Holloway, voice, among others, of the serpent Kaa of The jungle book (1967): “Holloway’s voice (imitated in the dubbing) spoke to queer children of gender mysteries that we had not yet been told. It was the voice of the Chesire cat in the great Alicia from Disney. What was said: queer to the core, like so many things in that movie. And I believed for decades that Kaa was ‘girl’. And it is not. Kaa’s voice, unclassifiable, but certainly not heterosexual, belonged to a man who the references confirm as “single” but who never came out of the closet as homosexual. He died in 1990 and worked for a study of traditional values ”.
It is a paradigmatic example of ‘camp’ communication: the ‘queer’ child deciphers what is filtered between the lines and what the uninitiated eye will never detect
What Mira describes is a paradigmatic example of communication camp: the boy queer decipher what seeps between the lines and what the uninitiated eye will never detect. Maybe the potential queer of Disney villainy is nothing more than pure inheritance of codes camp that one can recognize in the bad guys of genre cinema — Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton — and in the excessive emotionalities of melodrama — Bette Davis, Joan Crawford. In the end, Carmen Maria Machado also ends up reaching the conclusion that, after this equivocal formal association between what queer and evil, something liberating beats: “Let them be agents, and then release them,” says the writer, using the same verb that Elsa intoned in Frozen, perhaps the first Disney production where sexual dissent was embodied not by the villain, but by the heroine.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/disney-villains-come-out-of-the-closet/
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