To my surprise, the somewhat notorious Disney film Song of the South (1946, Harve Foster, Wilfred Jackson) is actually available for screening. I had heard that Disney would not release it but apparently that meant for U.S. distribution. The film has been released in Europe and Asia and thus there are copies available on DVD and for streaming, though I have to say that the copy I found online for streaming wasn’t a very good copy. I must admit that I had fond memories of the film, though that was from my youth, some 40+ years ago. Watching it again after all these years, I just had the overwhelming feeling of how a film that is mostly just a nothing film has become infamous not just because of its racism but because Disney has refused to release it in America. My sense is that if they had just released it years ago, no one would care one wit about the film, except as something of a museum piece, a film that reflected the racism of the time period.
I say the film is “mostly just a nothing film” because it has little in the way of a story and the film doesn’t plumb any depths that I can see. In terms of the story, a young boy’s father has left him, not abandoned him, but left him temporarily. And now the boy, Johnny (Bobby Driscoll), goes through a kind of shallow coming of age narrative that includes the kindly Uncle Remus (James Baskett) becoming a surrogate father figure for the destitute Johnny. But the film never really explores in any meaningful way the real trauma of a child being abandoned by a parent, nor explore meaningful coming of age experiential moments in a young child’s life. I did appreciate Uncle Remus’s stories, rendered through animation. The short vignettes of Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear are genuinely enjoyable and probably what has given the film the fondness fans have for it. (Interestingly, my memories of the film largely reside in these animated sequences, so they did make an impression!) None of this really matters, of course, since the source of interest in this film resides in the racist elements.
A Racist Film
As has been documented by many writers (see below for some of them), the racism in Song of the South stems from several elements: the most troubling – sickening really – is the depiction of Reconstruction era African Americans living a blissfully carefree life of work and song. The song sequences of African Americans singing “spirituals” give one the impression of some typical sugar-coated Disney film, with characters expressing their love and joy of life through song. That signifier of contentedness is reinforced by the main black characters, including Uncle Remus, who also seem perfectly happy with their lot in life. Of course, the reality of post-slavery blacks, especially in the south where this film is set, was anything but carefree, a horror show of lynchings, beatings, verbal and psychological abuse, daily humiliation (this was the time period when the KKK and other white supremacist groups emerged), penury wages, segregation and of course a general denial of their civil rights.
The other elements include black characters who are offensively stereotyped, via stereotyped “black vernacular” language and (happily) submissive behavior. Moreover, that Uncle Remus ends up being a kind of surrogate father figure for the white boy Johnny would seem to be a kind of progressive thread but set during this time period when many black kids must have suffered greatly, one would think that Uncle Remus might use his time more valuably, by helping black kids instead of a white child whose only issue is that his father is spending some time away from the family. (Check out Suzane Jardim’s fantastic piece on the many stereotypes of African Americans including how Uncle Remus is not only a kind of male “mammy” figure but is also an “Uncle Tom” figure and “Magical Negro” – “the eternal assistant to the white hero” – all rolled into one!)
Of course, the film also depicts the norm for the time period represented, that blacks were subservient to whites, whites living in mansions, wearing fine clothes, and owning expensive objects, set against the poor (but happy!) and degraded African Americans. (The film does give us some poor white folks for good measure, and interestingly, the two poor white boys are coded as kind of the villains of the film, threatening to drown a puppy, perhaps Disney’s attempt at being progressive for the time, coding some whites as bad and blacks as good, though it is just so fascinating to me that even these poor white kids are not coded as explicitly racist.) The other obvious racist element here is that the film must be centered on a white child, not a black one.
These latter elements are more racist in an anachronistic way, so it is hard to blame Disney for these choices. However, the former elements are less anachronistic, as has been registered by many articles, e.g., there were some protests even when the film was released, signifying that the really offensive elements in the film were offensive even when the film was released in 1946. (For some documentation on how the film was offensive even at the time of its release, check out the Wikipedia page on the film and a couple of really good pieces on the film: “Just How Racist is ‘Song of the South,’ Disney’s Most Notorious Movie?” and the book review – on a book I haven’t read but sounds fascinating, Jason Sperb’s Disney’s Most Notorious Film – “Bristling Dixie.”)
A Radical, Progressive Remake
And that then gets to why I think this film should be remade. While I think the original story is shallow, the seed is there for a film that could be quite special. First, the film would need to make the central child – boy or girl – black not white. The film would still be set in the Reconstruction era but of course a more realistic Reconstruction era, when blacks suffered greatly. In this context, we would get a black child who must deal with the trauma of this place and time. Uncle Remus would then have some real work to do, in trying to help this child deal with a reality that tries to determine the child in the most horrific way possible, by telling the child that he or she is nothing more than an inferior Other to be denied his or her sense of an agentic, independent, equal in every way self. In this way, the animated sequences could function in a way similar to Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, Guillermo del Toro), were the young girl Ofelia uses her imagination to make sense of her disturbing, traumatic reality. The only difference would be that Uncle Remus would trigger this alternate reality, though it would be more than an alternate reality; Uncle Remus’s stories would also act as coming of age facilitators, helping the child to better cope and come to terms with his or her monstrous reality. Indeed, Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear could become more substantively allegorical, with the predatory Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear consuming Br’er Rabbit to feed their insatiable appetite for power and gain, Br’er Rabbit becoming a source of cheap labor and a cowardly way to feed their need for supremacy over Others.
“Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”/A Dark Musical
And what about the music in the film, especially the feel-good song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”? The interesting thing to me about “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” especially as it is sung by Uncle Remus early in the film, is that it strikes me as kind of a “return of the repressed” moment in the film, a happy escape world for Uncle Remus, an escape from a deplorable reality. Of course, that isn’t what the film gives us, but that could be how it would function in a remake, Uncle Remus himself longing for an alternate reality that is utopian.
I don’t know if Disney would dare do this, but I also love the idea of making the film a dark musical, along the lines of the play Billy Elliot or Lars von Trier’s masterpiece Dancer in the Dark. The “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” song/sequence would still work, though as a light amidst the darkness and/or replayed ironically, the black child singing it as a lament of what he or she doesn’t have instead of an affirmation of some faux happy state of being. More to the point, new songs could be introduced, sung by both the main character black child and Uncle Remus/African American workers, the new songs then being reflections and expressions of their still dreadful degraded state of being, the slavery era not that far behind them and the Jim Crow era beginning to emerge. (Hmm…maybe we could even have a new character introduced, um, Br’er Jim Crow, or is that too over the top???)
A Complex Coming of Age Narrative
In terms of the white child and family, I suppose we could still have a white family and a white child, though of course the roles would be radically reversed, with the white family relegated to supporting players. I think it is important to include a white child, as a way to make this a deep and complex coming of age narrative, the black child encountering a different form of coming of age, where he or she must not only come to grips with his or her castrating (racist) reality but also deal with the typical coming of age experiences that children go through, e.g., first love and a burgeoning sexuality, identity/peer issues, disillusionment with adulated adults, and so on. In this way, we could see what should be, the white child giving the black child and us a norm in which to measure what is for the black child, a degraded norm. That is, with the white child, we would see a typical child’s life/norm, free from the choking reality of racism, though it would be interesting to show how white kids are instinctively not racist, racism a conditioned state of being, and then, from that, show how white kids too are dehumanized by a racist environment.
I think it goes without saying that this remake would have to be directed by a black director, and there are many great ones to choose from.
Finally, making this remake might be a way out for Disney. Not that this would be a good reason to remake the film, but remaking Song of the South in a cutting edge, radically progressive way would make amends for this dark mark in Disney’s history, not to mention that they could finally release the original Song of the South for posterity, um, in the extras of a DVD/Blu-Ray release of the remake!
*Much thanks to my daughter Peyton for planting the seed of this blog post and brainstorming with me on what a remake of Song of the South would look like!