Walter Benjamin on Mickey Mouse
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| :So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes it’s own life in them. | :So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes it’s own life in them. | ||
| ==See also== | ==See also== | ||
| - | *[[Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde]] by Esther Leslie | + | *[[Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde]] by [[Esther Leslie]] |
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Walter Benjamin on Mickey Mouse. Fragment written in 1931; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften, VI, 144-145. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.
- From a conversation with Gustav Glück and Kurt Weill —Property relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see it is possible for the first time to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body, stolen.
- The route taken by a file in an office is more like that taken by Mickey Mouse than that taken by a marathon runner.
- In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.
- Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.
- These films disavow experience more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have experiences.
- Similarity to fairy tales. Not since fairy tales have the most important and most vital events been evoked unsymbolically and more unatmospherically. There is an immeasurable gulf between them an Maurice Maeterlinck or Mary Wigman. All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is.
- So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes it’s own life in them.
See also
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