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Issue 8. Mélanges/Miscellaneous

The mouse-shaped Collective Dream.

A review of Esther Leslie. Hollywood Flatlands. Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde.

Author: Ole Frahm
Published: May 2004

A review of Esther Leslie. Hollywood Flatlands. Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso. 2002.

There are some brilliant histories of animation; there are several very interesting books on the history of the Frankfurt School. But most people will be surprised to learn that these two very different histories have several connections that merit to be explored in a thoughtful, book-length essay. There are only a few lines by the "great thinkers of the Frankfurt school" like Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor W. Adorno on animation scattered across their works, but as Esther Leslie convincingly shows in Hollywood Flatlands, these mirror in a strange way the history of the animated cartoons themselves.

After reading the book one wonders why it took such a long time for this topic to get examined carefully. Especially Walter Benjamin's remarks, in the different versions of his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, on Mickey Mouse are so crucial to understand this most important cultural icon of the twentieth century that the topic was probably too obvious to become the main subject of a book.

Fortunately, Esther Leslie now has picked up the subject. She is an expert on Walter Benjamin, and the best parts of Hollywood Flatlands prove this. Especially the third chapter is one of the most impressive discussions of Benjamin I ever read. One reason for this is how Leslie contextualizes Benjamins isolated observations on Mickey: she shows why Mickey became a subject for Benjamin. She reconstructs the debates in the 1920s, especially on abstraction in art, the experience of the surface, and the question of reproduction and mass culture, by discussing the animated films and other experiments of Walter Ruttman and others. Demonstrating how intellectuals like Benjamin and likewise his good friend Siegfried Kracauer believed in the importance of "the street" for utopian thinking in the 1920s, Leslie points out how dismayed they were when the Nazis took over control of this public space: "In the last days of the Weimar Republic the everyday is a battleground, and the revolutionaries are on the losing side. It was little different in Moscow. Benjamin, for one, found a new figure of utopia. It was not a new regime, but came in the form of a four-fingered warder of the collective dream and it was mouse-shaped"(79), Leslie writes at the end of chapter two.

The third chapter illuminates Benjamin's reading of Mickey Mouse within the context of his essays on Karl Kraus, on the Destructive Character, and on illustrated books. Leslie researched which articles on Mickey Mouse Benjamin used and found important quotes and images that explaines for instance why Benjamin wrote of the "earth encircling Mickey Mouse" (110). (It is a pity that the illustration this quote is referring to is not reprinted but only described vividly - as Leslie's 'illustrations' are not mere pictures but form an integral part of

her argument.) There has been a lot of literature on Benjamin over last 15 years: Leslies philological or, to be more precise, materialistic approach is refreshing.

Unfortunately, this is not true for the whole book. The chapter on Adorno, Donald Duck and the culture industry, for example, is everything but illuminating, some sentences appearing identically in different paragraphs. And why Leslie considers Leo Trotsky to be someone whose writings should be discussed in the context of the Frankfurt School she may know - but the reader is not told.

Nevertheless, it should be stressed that Hollywood Flatlands is not only a book on critical theory. It tells the history of the animated cartoons from the point of view of critical theory. Leslie focusses on Disney but also considers other developments. She expands about the relationship between Leni Riefenstahl and Walt Disney, between Sergei Eisenstein and Disney, and about the strike at the Disney studios. Several anecdotes, some historical facts and most estimations of the history of animated cartoons will be interesting even for those who think they know it well enough. It is the way how Leslie is writing history - pointing out specific constellations that illuminate specific questions, thereby using the methods of the Frankfurt School convincingly - that is impressive. Some important questions concerning the relation between twentieth century mass culture and fascist asthetics that have been raised by the critical theory remain unaswered here - but perhaps this is due to this subject having to be discussed over and over.

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