THE EMPIRE'S OLD CLOTHES: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds

by Ariel Dorfman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 1983

This sociopolitical critique of certain mass-media successes--Babar and Donald Duck, the Lone Ranger, Reader's Digest, the Chilean comic Mampato--originated in a series of essays written by Chilean novelist Dorfman (Widows, p. 321) in 1972, under Allende; but it is not limited to demonstrating, yet again, the perfidiousness of superheroes and formula solutions. Dorfman is too much the artist and democrat for that. On Babar, he's heavy-handed. In a celebrated essay years ago, Edmund Leach identified Babar's world with French colon society of the 1930s, and also recognized the different way that adults and children respond to its fantasy; Dorfman belabors the first, obvious point, and nowhere (in the book as a whole) grasps the second. The interwoven Disney references put a familiar, facile case: children identify with Donald's mature, responsible nephews against the foolish, wayward Donald, thereby losing their ""natural rebellious energies."" (To lots of kids, the nephews are toads.) The Lone Ranger analysis, though endless at 55 pages, does make the vital point--through focusing on a single, conservationist episode--that such fictions ""flee toward reality."" And reality can change: the Lone Ranger faded with Watergate, Tonto ""decided to talk."" As a critique of the comic-book superhero, born of the Depression (and extinguished also by team-ups), this is probably as good as any. On the Reader's Digest, Dorfman is splendid: ""the more he reads the Digest, the less [the reader] needs to change""; he acquires ""all the wisdom of maturity without any of its dilemmas."" His dissection of the Digest's conscious and unconscious wiles ends, indeed, by eliciting a sneaky admiration for this little marvel (which the facts of its Nelson-Rockefeller-assisted world-takeoff might have tempered). The Chilean comic Mampato, Dorfman finds, exactly paralleled in fantasy-fiction the fall of Allende--a coincidence that he attributes, plausibly, to the creator's internationalization of Establishment thinking. ""To go against the grain is political, to flow with it is entertainment."" Finally, taking a clue from Stephen Jay Gould, he arrives at a non-judgmental, even acritical explanation for the universal popularity of American mass culture: its appeal ""to the child the audience would like to be."" The only rejoinder, then, is to question; to plant some ""seeds of doubt."" Healthily inconclusive and welcomely undogmatic.

Pub Date: May 16, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION