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From mice to men: Miracle , mythology and the ‘Magic Kingdom’

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17430430701823521

1743-0445

Michael Silk, Jaime Schultz, Bryan Bracey,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Abstract Within this essay we address sport film as particularly lustrous, affective and sensuous mediums onto which various socio-political trajectories become mapped and within which popular forms of culture are appropriated. Focusing on the 2004 Disney release of Miracle, we propose that the film is an emplotment of the past – a sanitized reconfiguration of history – that can best be understood through reference to the geo-political realities of the present: one in which the spectres of the Cold War are being rolled out in multiple popular cultural forms as part of the United States response to the events of September 11 2001. We argue the events of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games US ice hockey semi-final victory by the US over the USSR were detached from their historical moorings in the soft/ideological battles of the Cold War. Instead, as part of the commercially bastardized, insipid, yet seductively effervescent filmic popular, this ‘great moment in sport history’ re-emerged in our present, or more accurately, was narrated or retold, as a ‘sanctioned’ sporting discourse that mobilizes the affective orientation of popular-commodity-signs in the substantiation and appropriation of US corporo-political needs through a myopic expression of American jingoism, militarism and geo-political domination. Notes 1 CitationMonaco, ‘Movies and National Consciousness’. 2 CitationCook, Screening the Past. 3 CitationBurgoyne, ‘Modernism and the Narrative of Nation in JFK’; CitationCulbert, ‘This is the Army’; CitationLeab, ‘I Was a Communist for the FBI’; CitationNeve, ‘On the Waterfront’; CitationStreet, ‘Citizen Kane’; CitationWinston, ‘Triumph of the Will’. 4 CitationGiroux, Breaking into the Movies; Grossberg, ‘Reading the Past’. 5 CitationGiroux, Breaking into the Movies; Grossberg, ‘Reading the Past’ 6 CitationMcConnell, ‘Being a Contender’, 37. 7 Cf. Cook, Screening the Past. 8 Around 590 according to CitationPearson et al., ‘Sport Films’. 9 CitationHall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’. 10 CitationBaker, Contesting Identities; CitationBriley, ‘American Sport in Film’; CitationCasper, ‘Knockout Women’; CitationCole and Cates, ‘The People's Horse’; CitationDaniels, ‘You Throw Like a Girl’; CitationGiroux, ‘Private Satisfactions’; CitationKusz, ‘I Want to be the Minority’. 11 CitationAndrews, ‘Excavating Michael Jordan’; CitationClarke, New Times and Old Enemies; CitationGiroux, Disturbing Pleasures; CitationGrossberg, We Gotta Get out of this Place; CitationSilk and Falcous, ‘One Day in September’. 12 CitationHall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’. 13 CitationGiroux, ‘Cultural Studies as Performative Politics’; Grossberg, ‘Reading the Past’. 14 CitationRosenstone, ‘The Future of the Past’; CitationBell, ‘Televising History’; CitationJohnson, ‘Historical Returns’. 15 CitationWhite, Tropics of Discourse; Bell, ‘Televising History’. 16 Giroux, Breaking into the Movies. 17 CitationSilk et al., ‘Performing America's Past’. 18 CitationWang, ‘The Cold War’. 19 Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’. 20 CitationGiroux, ‘Animating Youth’. 21 CitationChapman, ‘Representing War’; CitationFukuyama, The End of History. 22 CitationBryman, The Disneyization of Society; CitationCole et al., ‘McPowering Adolescence’; Giardina, M. Sporting Pedagogies; Giroux, ‘Animating Youth’; CitationMcChesney, Rich Media. 23 CitationWasko, Understanding Disney. 24 Giroux, ‘Animating Youth’; CitationGiroux, The Mouse that Roared; Giroux, Breaking into the Movies. 25 Giroux, Breaking into the Movies. 26 Giroux, ‘Animating Youth’. 27 Giroux, ‘Animating Youth’ 28 Giroux, ‘Animating Youth’ 29 Giroux, Breaking into the Movies, for example suggests that in both The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, the female characters are constructed within narrowly defined gender roles. All of the female characters in these films are ultimately subordinate to males, and define their sense of power and desire almost exclusively in terms of dominant male narratives. In Aladdin, Disney proffers a cultural politics and place associated with Arab culture and magnifies popular stereotypes already primed by the media through its portrayal of the Gulf War. Such racist representations are further reproduced in a host of supporting characters who are portrayed as grotesque, violent and cruel. 30 CitationGiardina, Sporting Pedagogies. 31 CitationWhite, ‘The Modernist Event’. 32 CitationHealey, From the Ruins of Colonialism, 5. 33 White, ‘The Modernist Event’. 34 CitationNora, ‘Between Memory and History’, 20. 35 CitationGrossberg, ‘History, Politics and Postmodernism’. 36 Cook, Screening the Past. 37 CitationHutton, ‘Collective Memory’, 311. 38 Cook, Screening the Past. 39 CitationBarthes, Mythologies. 40 CitationRowe, McKay and Miller, ‘Come Together’. Similar arguments have been made about Disneyland's reconstruction of Main Street America. Wiener (in Giroux, Breaking into the Movies, 105) for example argues that Disney's version provides an ‘image of small towns characterized by cheerful commerce, with barbershop quartets and ice cream sundaes and glorious parades’ within a present that appropriates that past to portray a world ‘without tenements or poverty or urban class conflict... a native white Protestant dream of a world without blacks or immigrants’. 41 CitationHall, ‘Encoding/decoding’. 42 CitationUrry, Global Complexity, 89. 43 CitationReno, ‘Harrumph’. 44 Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’. While this is a significant date, as CitationLadson-Billings, ‘Its Your World’, proposes, it takes history to determine whether it will become a teleological fault line. For Ladson-Billings there are an infinite number of chronological combinations – pre-4 April 1968 (assassination of Martin Luther King) and post-4 April 1968; pre-summer of 1963 and post-summer of 1963 (bombing of the little girls in the Birmingham, Alabama church); pre-summer of 1955 and post-summer of 1955 (murder of Emmett Till). Following Ladson-Billings, we feel it important to problematize the appropriation of this day in September as simply ‘9/11’ – absent of any year denotation. 45 CitationKay, ‘Hollywood's Ideological War’; CitationKlindo and Phillips, ‘Military Interference’. 46 CitationWalsh, ‘Hollywood enlists’. 47 Neve, ‘On the Waterfront’. 48 Walsh, ‘Hollywood enlists’. 49 Klindo and Phillips, ‘Military Interference’; CitationRobb, Operation Hollywood. 50 Walsh, ‘Hollywood enlists’. 51 Bush Advisor Meets Hollywood Execs. 52 Silk has argued elsewhere that media sport has been thrust into the contemporary lexicon of consensus within which the taken for granted shift to the right appears as an uncontested terrain. Thus, like other forms of the corporate media that have accepted censorship and severed, if not suspended, their critical relationship to government (CitationButler, ‘Explanation or Exoneration’), the sport media has become a myopic expression of American jingoism, militarism and geo-political domination (Silk and Falcous, ‘One Day in September’). 53 CitationDe Cillia, Reisgel and Wodak, ‘The Discursive Construction’; Cole and Andrews, ‘The Nation Reconsidered’; CitationHogan, ‘Staging the Nation’; CitationKinkema and Harris, ‘MediaSport Studies’; CitationRiggs, Eastman and Golobi, ‘Manufactured Conflict in the 1992 Olympics’; Silk and Falcous, ‘One Day in September’. 54 CitationCarmichael, Framing History; Wang, ‘The Cold War’. 55 CitationSilk and Andrews, ‘Beyond a Boundary’. 56 Wang, ‘The Cold War’, 48. 57 Miller et al., Globalization & Sport. 58 CitationBairner, Sport, Nationalism and Globalization. 59 Kinkema and Harris, ‘MediaSport Studies’. 60 CitationFabos, ‘Forcing the Fairytale’. 61 CitationDallmayr, ‘Lessons of September 11’. 62 CitationHedetoft, ‘The Nation-State Meets the World’. 63 CitationCoffey, The Boys of Winter. 64 CitationSwift, ‘Miracle, the Sequel’. 65 CitationMcDonald, ‘Do You Believe in Miracles’. 66 CitationKellner, Media Culture. 67 Silk et al., ‘Performing Americas Past’. Perhaps not surprisingly in a Disneyized version of U-S-A patriotism does not offer any notion of class struggle or class difference in 1980s USA. Indeed, difference is only ever presented among the team through college hockey rivalries easily overcome through cohering to the greater cause (USA). While perhaps an analytical stretch, this speaks to the emergent 1980s Reaganism in which class struggle was displaced from the political agenda, difference individualized, and overcome through individual effort. 68 ‘The Good Guys Win in ‘Miracle’. Chicago Sun Times, 9 February 2004, 37. 69 CitationSobchak, ‘Introduction: History Happens’. 70 CitationPaquin, ‘Review: Miracle’. 71 CitationCarter, State of the Union Address. 72 CitationBowman, ‘Post-Cold War Propaganda’; CitationHolleran, ‘Miracle on Ice’. 73 Cook, Screening the Past. 74 Giroux, ‘War Talk’. 75 CitationHarvey, The New Imperialism. 76 Holleran, ‘Miracle on Ice’. 77 CitationCarrington, ‘Audio Visual Review’. 78 CitationWieting and Polumbaum, ‘Prologue’. 79 CitationFarred, What's My Name?; CitationSaeed, ‘Whats in a Name?’ 80 Elsewhere, Silk et al., ‘Performing America's Past’, have expanded on the differences between Miracle and Rocky IV. Of course, Rocky IV was not the only sports film to use the East-West conflict as a central narrative line at this time. For example, American Flyers (1985) (starring Kevin Costner) centred around cycle road racing and featured plucky American riders facing nameless opponents, and, along with Top Gun (1986) (starring Tom Cruise) represented the Soviets as machine-like automatons. 81 CitationMunfa, ‘Yo America’. 82 CitationMunfa, ‘Yo America’ 83 Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the Other’. 84 Munfa, ‘Yo America’. 85 CitationButryn, ‘Posthuman Podiums’; CitationButryn and Masucci, ‘It's Not About the Book’; CitationHaraway, Modest Witness; Silk et al., ‘Performing America's Past’. 86 O'Keefe, ‘Evil empire(s) on ice’. 87 CitationEbert, ‘Miracle’. 88 Kinkema and Harris, ‘MediaSport Studies’. 89 Bowman, ‘Post-Cold War Propaganda’. This is somewhat ironic, given that Brooks’ tactical focus for Olympic victory has been read by some as being similar to an ideology of totalitarian socialism. For example, CitationAloff, ‘Letter from New York’ suggests Brooks was not interested in the virtuosity of individual players, rather he encouraged a collectivity that could join their hearts and minds, at least for a period of time, to work for a goal larger than personal ambition. 90 ‘The Good Guys Win in Miracle’, 37. 91 CitationGiroux, ‘Animating Youth’. 92 CitationBillig, Banal Nationalism, 36. 93 Giroux, ‘Animating Youth’. 94 Bell, ‘Mythscapes’, 71. 95 CitationHardt and Negri, Empire. 96 Wang, ‘The Cold War’, 46. 97 CitationRowe, McKay and Miller, ‘Come Together’, 120. 98 CitationRowe, McKay and Miller, ‘Come Together’, 133. 99 CitationJohnson, ‘Defending Ways of Life’. 100 CitationJohnson, ‘Defending Ways of Life’, 216. 101 Tony Blair, 12 October 2001, in Johnson, ‘Defending Ways of Life’, 217. 102 Johnson, ‘Defending Ways of Life’. 103 Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’. 104 Hardt and Negri, Multitude. 105 Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’. 106 Fukuyama, The End of History. 107 Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’. 108 Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’, 137. 109 Baudrillard, ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’ 110 Hardt and Negri, Multitude. 111 Hardt and Negri, Multitude 112 Hardt and Negri, Multitude; Hardt and Negri, Empire. 113 CitationMorris, ‘Theses on the Questions of War’. 114 Wang, ‘The Cold War’. 115 CitationClinton, ‘Olympic hockey film’. 116 Hogan, ‘Staging the Nation’. 117 Aloff, ‘Letter from New York’. 118 Cole and Cates, ‘The People's Horse’, 124. 119 Hogan, ‘Staging the Nation’. 120 CitationAhmed, ‘Homeland Insecurities’; CitationGiroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism; Harvey, The New Imperialism; McLaren and Martin, ‘The Legend of the Bush Gang’; CitationMerskin, ‘The Construction of Arabs as Enemies’; CitationSivanandan, ‘Race, Terror and Civil Society’. 121 Giroux, Breaking into the Movies. 122 CitationBrookey and Westerfelhaus, ‘Hiding Homoeroticism’. 123 Silk and Falcous, ‘One Day in September’; Silk and Andrews, ‘Policing Our Crisis’. 124 CitationCorner, ‘Epilogue: Sense and Perspective’, 135. 125 CitationCorner, ‘Epilogue: Sense and Perspective’, 135 126 Giroux, ‘Animating Youth’. 127 Hardt and Negri, Multitude.