Neal Gabler's bio of Walt Disney purports to be about the triumph of the American imagination - yet fails to re-imagine its subject
His face, both debonair and plain, examines you with liquid eyes from every shelf. He is Walt Disney, animation's Edison, the subject of enough freshly printed biographies to prompt the megacorp that bears his name to cut the ribbon on a chain of bookstores.
This deep delve into Disney's character began in 2006, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of his death from cancer. For everything puritan that he represented, Walt was a chain smoker - one of his few faults according to Neal Gabler, the man behind the most voluminous and ballyhooed of these bios, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.
The title is a real misnomer; while Disney's deep well of invention and consistently spot-on artistic instinct get their due, it's the man's tenacity that is the book's hero, that oft mythologized do-or-die spirit that characterizes the all-American self-made man.
It's what propels Disney to rise above his station: a nomadic upbringing in Kansas and Chicago, a spotty high school record, and a couple of ill-fated attempts at setting up a world-class animation studio in the American Midwest. Throughout this, Walt's early years, Gabler casts him as a small-town dullard looking to make his mark, a man buoyed in spite of repeated defeats by the 19th century values of humility, hard work, and Horatio Alger optimism.
The book goes on...and on...and on (close to 700 pages!), and yet, despite accumulating triumph after triumph, Walt never becomes any more interesting. Yes, the word "ego" rises here and there, and Walt's later years are marked by a latent taste for alcohol, but that's it; that's all the character development we get. Could it be that Walt Disney was less dimensional than one of his animated creations?
One doubts it. The fault, I suspect, lies in Gabler's civil but nevertheless rah-rah tone. There's no mistaking his dislike for Richard Schickel's 1960s bio of animation's God, which began the new cultural practice of Disney-bashing. This biography is definitely an act of reparation. But while Walt deserves nothing less, it is not a balancing act.
A true revisionist version of Walt does surface briefly on page 615 (yes, it takes that long to get to it!), when Gabler goes intellectual and defends Walt's films not as symbols of the Old Order conformity the sixties were rebelling against, but as anti-establishmentarian weapons, supporting Boomer values from cultural inclusiveness to respect for the environment.
Thought of Walt Disney as no more than the humble tycoon he purported to be on his weekly television show?
You'll think little different after triumphing over Walt Disney: The triumph of the American Imagination.
