The Critics: ‘Walt Disney’ by Neal Gabler

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  11.20.06 | 8:15 AM ET

imageIf the world is slowly but surely becoming one giant theme park, as we often suspect, then Walt Disney is that future world’s founding father. So we think it’s worth pointing out a new biography of Disney by Neal Gabler, the media critic who wrote the terrific book Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani recently reviewed Gabler’s Disney biography, observing that Disney has long been derided by critics as “a purveyor of the synthetic, the sanitized, the puerile and the cloyingly cute,” but that recent critiques have been more favorable. Gabler’s book would seem to fall in the latter camp. Indeed, according to the book’s publisher, Gabler is “the first writer to be given complete access to the Disney archives.”

Writes Kakutani:

As Mr. Gabler sees it, Mickey Mouse’s creator and alter ego “refined traditional values,” “reinforced American iconoclasm, communitarianism and tolerance and helped mold a countercultural generation.” He also credits Disney with helping establish “American popular culture as the dominant culture in the world,” and encouraging and popularizing “conservation, space exploration, atomic energy, urban planning and a deeper historical awareness.”

Thankfully, such breathless hyperbole is largely confined to the opening and closing sections of this book; the remainder is devoted to giving the reader a thoughtful, incisive and largely straightforward account of Disney’s life and career, from his Midwestern childhood to his apotheosis as the nation’s “Uncle Walt” and the proprietor of the world’s most famous amusement park.

Disneyland combined nostalgia for a halcyon, nonexistent past with utopian fantasies of Tomorrowland. As Mr. Gabler sees it, the park embodied both its creator’s candified memories of his own youth—a boyhood idyll in the small town of Marceline, Mo., would be memorialized in the park’s Main Street—and his need to turn what he saw as a threatening world into a safe, controllable habitat.

Related on World Hum:
* ‘Will Disney Abandon Book-Lovers for Pirates 2.0?’