Extreme Makeover: Lady and the Tramp Edition

As readers of The Trojan Mouse will know, modern Disney has taken on a woke new identity completely at odds with their roots. This makes for massive culture clash whenever new Disney meets its old self. The latest example of this clash is Disney's live action remake of Lady and the Tramp, just released on Disney+, the Mouse's new streaming platform.

Bringing this charming old relic in line with their dogmatic new belief system is no easy task. While the changes aren't quite as dramatic as those in the remakes of Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty (Maleficent) and Jungle Book, they are still glaring, and not for the better.

The original Lady of the Tramp came out in 1955, in the midst of the Disney Golden Age. It is the final chapter of what I call Disney's domestic trilogy, following Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Each of these movies works as a strong cautionary tale for young women tempted to venture outside the warm, protective confines of the so-called "cult of domesticity" that dominates our cultural memory of the 1950's especially.

The original Lady pits its sheltered, thoroughly domesticated Lady against the philandering devil-may-care Tramp in a contest of worldviews. Tramp tempts Lady into a bohemian life of adventure and thrills and Lady counters with a loyalist preference for her duties as the protector of her humans and their baby. As you would expect in a Golden Age product, Lady's values win the day and Tramp leaves his swinging bachelor lifestyle to join her, first risking his life to defend the human baby and then settling down to father children of his own.

The challenge for the modern, woke Disney brand is how to pay tribute to this cutesy old charmer while gutting it of its "problematic" elements. In more zealous hands, it might have been easier. They could have just made Tramp's bohemian outlook defeat Lady's conservatism and end the story with them both on the road in polyamorous bliss, leaving those oppressive humans and their "civilized" norms behind them. But corporate Disney isn't usually comfortable alienating markets as huge (and politically diverse) as pet owners.

Fortunately, the woke religion offers a lot of outs and Disney takes advantage of them all. The first is the diversity indulgence. Introducing diversity to a formerly white-dominated space gets a story all kinds of woke brownie (pardon the color-biased language) points. Eager for the credits, the new Lady moves the action to New Orleans to retain the period setting while providing a half-hearted rationale for the scrupulously diverse casting.

After checking off the boxes for minority representation (including tiny cameos for a Korean doctor and a Guatemalan waiter), Lady does its best to excise the political incorrect bits from the original. Gone are the Siamese cats and their song, replaced lamely by a half-baked and pointless (but inoffensive!) musical number. Also scrubbed are the Mexican chihuahua and the beaver with the speech impediment.

The gender stereotypes are tougher to get around, being so deeply ingrained in the original and the setting, but the writers at least give it a college try. Tramp doesn't rescue Lady with his fighting prowess this time (instead he gets her to pretend she has rabies). She also gets a chance to rescue him later. The new Lady is less successful pushing Darling, the woman of the house, out of the cult of domesticity, but it tries to make up for it at the end. Stepping out of her protective bubble, Darling hands the baby to Jim Dear and dresses down the villain as Jim Dear watches. It's a pointless scene that makes sense only as a limp apology to the feminists in the audience.

Bizarrely, given the reputation of modern progressives as the sexual liberators, the new Lady is actually far more reticent on sexual subtexts than the original. Tramp's promiscuity is gone as a plot point. Even the Lady/Tramp puppies from the original ending are gone, replaced by a pair of adopted puppies. The remaining romance is painfully dull and sterile, epitomized by the bizarre update on "He's a Tramp," which makes little sense with such a sparse romantic subtext (and looks supremely weird with live action dogs dancing around with CGI-doctored lip syncing).
 
After cutting out the political incorrectness and traditional romance of the original, the new Lady takes on its greatest challenge with the worldview contest at the heart of the story. Leaving Lady's motivations mostly intact (though they do shift her away from a strict devotion to the baby and towards a more general sense of family belonging), they do the heaviest lifting with the Tramp. The original Tramp is a wild bachelor in need of domesticating. The new Tramp is an embittered stray, whose independence is a transparent front for the wound he suffered when he was abandoned by his owners.

The moral of the story thus shifts from the triumph of domesticity to the defeat of the dog catcher and the adoption of the stray. It's hardly a Revolutionary twist, but at least it neuters the story's core Loyalist message.

The individual changes the new Lady makes are mostly cosmetic, little nips and tucks to make the story slightly more tolerable to Disney's woke gatekeepers while preserving its original appearance. But the collective effect of this modern facelift is to turn what was once a warm and charming story into something stiff and empty. Man's best friend becomes a soulless corporation's mindless automaton. 

Memes over Memory: The Corn Pop Saga

As a Gen X/Y hybrid and non-combat veteran of the Meme Wars, I appreciate the maniacal tomfoolery of the internet age as much as anyone. But every once in a while, our trollish hooliganism crosses a line and puts something really valuable at stake. There are memes so dank and corrosive that they are eating through our cultural memory.

The case in point is the hullabaloo around Uncle Joe Biden's latest fish story. As Biden related it on the campaign trail, as a very young man he took a job as a lifeguard at a black community pool in order to get to know black people better. There he crossed paths with a gang calling themselves the Romans and their leader "Corn Pop." After kicking Corn Pop out for breaking the rules, Biden found Corn Pop waiting for him in the parking with a straight razor. Instead of fighting, however, they bonded, and Uncle Joe found himself officially initiated into the black community.

This is the face of most people born after 1980 when listening to this story:

Then, as we anticipate our favorite takedown artists on social media responding, we shift into the next gear, breaking out the popcorn for Corn Pop:

Sure enough, social media warriors were lining up to dunk on Biden for the story. A representative example is The Root's Michael Harriot, who offered up a wicked blow-by-blow comic tweet thread.

As Harriot writes, it sounds like "some white kid tried to make a gang fairy tale for a 6th grade play." For me, the story immediately triggered clips of Michael Scott (Steve Carell's character from The Office and one of the biggest meme stars on the interweb) trying to relate to his black coworkers. There's a running gag where his black coworkers make up stories about growing up in the ghetto to play to Michael's after-school special level of understanding of the black community (a refresher here).

And so the first instinct after laughing in incredulity is to wind up for the dunk. I mean who doesn't love serving up Michael Scott/Joe Biden a plate of humiliation?

The only problem is that Joe Biden's fish story seems to be largely true (allowing for the usual big fish exaggerations). And it wasn't even a new story. He recounted it in his memoirs over a decade ago, and WaPo brought it up in an article in July.  Multiple community members corroborate a bunch of the details, including the existence of Corn Pop.

Why should an apparently true story (again allowing for exaggeration) strike us as so ridiculous? Why do we so instinctively reach for the rotten tomatoes to fling? Biden's story could be an outlier, the exceptionally rare instance of a tall tale turning out to be true. But it strikes me as much, much more likely that is our reactions that are the problem here.

As soon as Biden opened his mouth and mentioned Corn Pop, the man disappeared and the meme took over. We stopped hearing a 76 year old recalling (and, yes, perhaps embellishing) his memories of a bygone era, and instead saw a familiar clown that we've been programmed to mock. And mock we did, regurgitating the appropriate memes and digs to generate the requisite sick burns.

As much as I love memes and the lèse-majesté they are capable of visiting on the powers that be, this is an example of some bad cultural programming. Trashing Biden for Corn Pop is false Wokeness, or a phony Red Pill, depending on which side of the culture war you're firing from. It's evidence of how the memers can be memed, losing all perspective in pursuit of the perfect put-down.

What perspective then can we gain if we set down the popcorn and pick up the Corn Pop? Maybe our elders, even Joe Biden, have some relevant, valuable memories. 

Our gut reaction is to ridicule the idea that a cheesy white suburbanite could find some common ground with a corny urban black kid at a community swimming pool. After pondering it for a day, I'm more inclined to mourn that we consider that kind of encounter too ridiculous to be plausible.

To reference another cringy relic from an earlier age I'm reminded of West Side Story. The only time the (ballet dancing, Broadway singing) gang members get along is when they are ridiculing the grinning, Biden-like organizer of the neighborhood dance. Yes, we too can enjoy some temporary unity by ganging up to mock Biden. But are we really mocking the idea that we could ever really get along?


P.S. As an aside, I was thinking about the ridiculousness of the name Corn Pop. It's a tough name to square with contemporary image of the black gangsta. For me the first name that pops(!) into my head is NBA YoungBoy, a 19 year old rapper who has already done time for attempted murder. I have a very hard time imagining NBA YoungBoy calling himself Corn Pop and palling around with a cheeseball like Joe Biden.

But I'm also a big fan of old movies and the old NBA, so I have a few other cultural references to help me put Corn Pop in context. Back then, at least through these modern eyes, there wasn't such a huge corniness differential between prominent blacks and whites. Black celebrities had what we would consider "white" names. Their nicknames weren't quite distinctly "black" either. Contrast Kobe Bryant's self-bestowed "Black Mamba" with his dad's "Jellybean."

The Knights Who Say Oui

A few years ago, I dubbed the league of woke multinational corporations the "Knights Who Say Ni." In addition to being a reference to the nonsense-spouting tyrants from Monty Python, this name stands for their adoption of "Ni Marx, Ni Jesus" as their unspoken motto. Meaning "neither Marx, nor Jesus," this phrase (the title of a French book predicting a new kind of leftism) epitomizes the left's embrace of big business while retaining their hostility to Christianity and its morality. Today, the Knights Who Say Ni maintain their onslaught, their latest venture into the culture wars being the demonetization (the corporate version of demonization) of prominent conservative YouTuber Steven Crowder.

As the Knights Who Say Ni's demands are shifting from mere shrubberies to more substantial targets, they are practically begging for a challenge. In Monty Python, when the Knights escalate the heroes eventually tire of their demands and refuse them. Their modern equivalent have yet to hit such a barrier, however. No matter how shrill and unhinged the puppet-masters of the woke Big Business become, they find a contingent of conservatives willing to bend the knee on matter of principle. Thus the Knights Who Say Ni have come to enjoy the support of a nominally antagonistic order. We shall call them the Knights Who Say Oui.

Their figurehead is (the appropriately named) David French, a National Review writer who enjoyed a few days of notoriety as Bill Kristol's presidential nominee for the NeverTrump contingent of the conservative media. French is a Sir Robin like figure, his stature the product not so much of his own gallant efforts than the crows of his traveling minstrels, both pro and con. Kristol and his other friends in the neoconservative wing are all too happy to prop him up as a role model and then defend his honor when he is attacked on their behalf. From the other side, populist-leaning conservatives like to use French as a punching bag for wimpy conservatism. The most recent and explicit jab thus far came from Sohrab Ahmari with his "Against David French-ism," laying the blame for the litany of conservative culture war surrenders at the feet of his philosophy. 

Though I'm sympathetic to the spirit of their argument, when Ahmari and the contingent he represents attack French for being too nice, I think they are misunderstanding the core creed of the Knights Who Say Oui. Nor do I take French's entertaining rebuttal - highlights including a tortured Game of Thrones analogy and his boast that he "literally placed his body" in between Christian students and protesters - at face value.

Conservatives angered and frustrated by unchecked progressive cultural assaults tend to see naivete or weakness in French's failure-to-stands (French doesn't help when he crows about pro-life culture war victories that are directly downstream of Trump's election, which he vociferously fought against). They saw the same in the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. They are just too darn nice to fight back! The constant tendency among friendly critics is to classify "French-ism" as a sort of unnecessary martyrdom. They see Neville Chamberlain - a man on the right side but using the wrong tactics for a threat as grave as Hitler.

Missing from this tragic picture, however, is any actual tragedy for the actors involved. To be sure, French, Romney and the NeverTrump host came out of 2016 with egg on their face, but what else? Romney actually increased his stature, waltzing into a shoo-in Senate seat in Utah. French's position in conservatism is unchanged. Though associated with surrender, these chivalrous knights haven't actually surrendered anything.

Consider French's dorkily expressed central point in his response to Ahmari: "the Valyrian steel that stops the cultural white walker is pluralism buttressed by classical liberalism, not Christian statism." In English, he's saying that upholding the political philosophies embodied in the Constitution is the only way to stop the left, not reverting to a medieval Crusader mentality of holy culture war. He would later summarize his position on Twitter, his points being that politics is not war, that decency is not optional and that personal liberty doesn't get in the way of the "Highest Good."

None of these points match the situation on the ground of culture war - deplatforming, personal abuse and restrictions on speech are the battlefields du jour.  So what is French actually getting at? He is nominally speaking aspirationally of the way things could or ought to be, but there is a real place that fits his description. It is the noble center of American politics and culture war.

In the noble center, where Ni and Oui coexist, outright war is forbidden (though greatly encouraged overseas). In the noble center, disagreements can occasionally get heated, but they rarely descend to outright indecency. Thus Romney, though savaged by the far left and then by the far right, can shrug his way right back into power. French, though loathed by the far left and disdained by the far right, retains his pulpit to preach at his fellow pundits - the intelligentry to coin another phrase. 

Finally, they are able to preserve their sense of chivalry by continuing to fight for the Highest Good, which is ultimately defined as membership in the noble center. Jousting in formal tournaments where the rules are in place to prevent any accidental career fatalities provides chivalric thrills without requiring any actual dragon or ogre slaying. Leave the actual cultural sacrifices to the revolting peasants or bourgeois interlopers (along with the very occasional rogue knight) who don't understand or refuse to abide by the rules.

It is fitting that French should be fascinated by HBO's Game of Thrones (though hardly in keeping with French's stern reprimands of the President's supremely vulgar tastes). It envisions a world where knightly pageantry has dissolved into constant barbaric war, with every shred of decency beaten out of even the noblest of knights, and the Higher Good entirely dependent on the whims of a carousel of tyrants. This is the ultimate risk-free escape for a Peer of the Intelligentry, where peaceful decency reigns and knight errantry is limited to shouts of "Ni! and "Oui!"

Excerpt from The Trojan Mouse - Wreck-It Ralph and Disney's Great Awokening

Having just wrapped up the first draft of my first book (The Trojan Mouse: How Disney Is Winning the Culture War, to be released this summer), I want to share an excerpt detailing one of the more interesting and blatant examples of progressive messaging in the latest crop of Disney movies.

Below is my analysis of 2012's Wreck-It Ralph from the chapter on Disney's "Great Awokening" (a term I first encountered at Spotted Toad's blog):

Though unheralded for much more than its charm and cleverness, Wreck-It Ralph represents something much deeper and more significant in Disney’s ideological evolution. It also serves as a vivid illustration of burgeoning quasi-religious progressive movement that was breaking out in America’s cultural power centers, beginning in academia and percolating outward to Hollywood, New York and Silicon Valley. A number of conservative commentators have dubbed this ideological ferment the “Great Awokening.”

Building on the established and widely shared loathing of racism, the Awokening gathered -isms and -phobias old and new into its widening funnel. The suck zone of this outrage tornado - a single circle of common ground encircled by the chaotic swirl of competing grievances - centered on straight white males. In this mythology, white men furnish the main supply of villains. As this mythology is post-spiritual and materialistic but intensely moralistic, whiteness, with its implicit power, becomes a synonym for vice*, and victim status for virtue. *The temptation of the reactionary of the present, just as it was for the colonizers of the past, is to make whiteness a synonym for virtue. To do so is to break as fully from Christian ideology as the Woke movement does today. For the moment, however, the anti-white ideologues enjoy the high ground, while the white supremacists enjoy nearly universal cultural condemnation. As such, the much greater ideological threat to present-day Christians and conservatives comes from the former

This mythology had its early prophets in the Disney Renaissance. Villains like McLeach, Gaston, Ratcliffe, Frollo and Clayton embodied the stereotype of predatory exploiters and victimizers (of animals, native cultures, and women of color). But each of these had their virtuous white male antithesis - Cody, the Beast, John Smith, Phoebus and Tarzan. The Awokening’s evolutionary next step was to bring down even the benevolent patriarchs and institute a new victim-driven power structure.

It would fall to Wreck-It Ralph to bring the Awokening to Disney. It would not do so with ideological guns out and blazing, as the emerging class of internet-oriented “Social Justice Warriors” would do, but with humor, charm and a skillful knack for postmodern storytelling. Beneath the smiling, winking coating, however, lay a similarly revolutionary set of values and beliefs.

Ralph’s setting is straight out of Pixar’s postmodern kitchen - a world of sentient video game characters in an arcade, dependent on oblivious consumers for life and purpose. Under Pixar’s brain trust, it’s easy to imagine this project following the usual Pixar route of longing for a connection with the player and finding spiritual fulfillment in bringing joy to a child or a nostalgic adult gamer. At Disney, however, Ralph’s creative team of Moore, Johnston and Lee would show far more interest in the social power dynamics within the video game world, treating the setting as a fun staging ground for a culture war.

The story follows two characters with a case for overthrowing the existing power structure. The title character Ralph is an unwilling bad guy forced to live in a garbage pile when he wants to live in the penthouse with the “good” characters. With each game, the program celebrates the player’s win with the little character ritually tossing Ralph off the roof. In another game world, he meets a partner in grievance in princess race car driver Vanellope. Vanellope has been kept from pursuing her passion - racing - by King Candy because of a disability, a glitch in her programming. To make matters worse, the abled racers, a band of tweeny bopper popular girls, bully her cruelly.

Both seeking to right these social injustices, Ralph and Vanellope join forces. Ralph hopes to win a hero’s medal, shed his bad buy label and gain access to the penthouse, while Vanellope wants to force her way back onto the race stage. Disney’s newly awokened values begin to show in which of these grievances the story ultimately validates as legitimate and which it dismisses.

Ralph, a big, ill-mannered working-class schlub disdained by the penthouse residents, might have had better luck with an older, union-oriented progressivism. But in the new progressive mythos, no one is comfortable with a big powerful white guy taking charge. Indeed, the arcade characters’ foundational myth tells the story of Turbo, an old-school racer (an old white guy, naturally) who couldn’t handle losing power and popularity and began invading other character’s games and taking them over. “Going Turbo” was the ultimate social crime - refusing to accept one’s place in a new social hierarchy. Thus, when Ralph breaks out of his game and attempts to prove his heroism in another game, he is justly accused of going Turbo, and eventually all hell breaks loose as a result.

Condemnation of any attempt to overthrow a social hierarchy might seem to be a deeply conservative notion, but Ralph is careful to flip that rule when the social dynamic in question is different. In Vanellope’s game, the ruler is an old white male, King Candy. As it turns out, he is the original Turbo in disguise, and he only gained his power by sabotaging Vanellope’s code and kicking her out of a game that was hers to begin with. Thus, fighting to overthrow Turbo’s patriarchal reign is not Ralph forgetting his rightful place but Vanellope regaining hers. Having embraced his lowly status as video game bad guy and destroyed Turbo to restore Vanellope to her kingdom (which she promptly declares a democracy and unilaterally declares herself president), Ralph returns to his duties as his game’s designated scapegoat. Grateful that he’s no longer trying to bust his way into the penthouse, the penthouse dwellers let him eat cake in the dump.

Lest there be any mistaking these story choices, Ralph reinforces them emphatically with its subplot. The hero to Ralph’s villain in the game world is Fix-It Felix, a pint-sized, high-voiced repairman who magically repairs Ralph’s societal damage. Bashful, apologetic, slightly effeminate and utterly non-threatening, Felix is the story’s preferred alternative to embarrassingly manly and dominant heroes of Disney’s past. As the Ralph/Vanellope relationship is strictly platonic, Felix does the romantic heavy-lifting. His romantic foil is a Sergeant Calhoun, a hard-bitten, gravel-voiced female platoon commander (voiced by 6’ lesbian comedienne Jane Lynch) hunting down the alien bugs Ralph accidentally lets loose.

Their relationship is a painfully illustrative of the alternative, woke social order. An effeminate, self-effacing man shyly courting a butch, militant woman represents a joyful overthrow of social norms and a pointed contrast to Ralph’s hard-learned lesson not to mess with a parallel norm that has him at the bottom. Though tempered with both silliness and sweetness, the Felix-Calhoun relationship is punctuated with a scene that gives literal form to the violent subversion the story preaches. The writers contrive a scene that requires Calhoun to slug a cheerful Felix in the face over and over again (each time he fixes his busted face with his magic hammer) to get them out of a jam. Played for laughs, it nevertheless illustrates how willing the new orthodoxy is to embrace even the cruelest excesses of the old it seeks to replace. That Felix is so happy to be abused in service of the woke social order (just as Ralph ultimately learns to accept his own villainous part) makes him the ideal white male.

Wrapped in Pixar-style trappings, loaded with cleverness, fun and sweetness, Ralph’s woke messaging goes down easy. Well-received by critics and the mainstream, Ralph’s success was enough to entrench Lasseter’s new recruits at Disney and, with them, the woke ideology. Lasseter rewarded each of the leaders of the Ralph with places high up in the Disney brain trust, where they would exert a powerful influence on the rest of Disney’s slate.