JAMESFEST #4: Mouse Heaven

The average person would be primed, after three musicals in a row, for James to have continued on that track. And arguably he did, with Kenneth Anger’s short film Mouse Heaven. Although not technically a musical per se, this short 10-minute film features copious shots of various Mickey Mouse toys and memorabilia “dancing” and “singing” to pop songs. Sometimes the toys move in a stop motion herky-jerk fashion; sometimes seeming to tell a narrative or singing to the music, sometimes simply existing as artifacts of a forgotten time.

And these depictions of one of capitalism’s most pervasive icons really are forgotten—Mickey Mouse’s design has become so commodified and codified over the years that the character barely reads as “mouse” anymore. The design is all soft, rounded lines, big eyes, and a pleasant smile. Modern Mickey looks like he was grown in a lab to never have a single negative thought about anyone or anything.

It’s not really a reflection of the character as it was created, but most people aren’t watching old Mickey Mouse cartoons, so the angrier, more violent, more selfish, more human version of Mickey might not read as familiar to a contemporary audience. That human quality is also not present in the figures Anger spotlights. Here, Mickey looks decidedly rat-like, his snout elongated, his fur matted. This is not a creature you want greeting children at the entrance of something called “The Happiest Place on Earth.”

Here is a totemic figure, one idiosyncratic and even off-putting, before he was sanded down into myth over the years. Like the founding fathers, the reality of figure is transformed into sanitized fable. With no dialogue and just a few songs, Anger strips away the modern perspective of Walt Disney’s most famous creation. It feels like busting down a plaster wall of a Modernist house to see the bones of the person that used to live there. This is America, this is capitalism, this is the inexorable march of time if you have the money to guarantee it.

Anger’s film seems to view this practice with palpable contempt, letting only a few of the cutest and more recognizable Mickey toys share the spotlight. The bulk of the film’s focus is on the almost demonic form this creation once had and the sense of it as an icon of worship.

This, too, is mythmaking: The footage of these toys and tchotchkes are from collector Mel Birnkrant, a hobbyist obsessed with collecting all sorts of early 20th-century memorabilia. Birnkrant’s collection goes further than Mickey, and if you read his extremely charming Web 2.0 blog, you’d realize that it’s obsession in the way an eccentric collector is obsessed. It feels less, for Birnkrant, like worship or nostalgia, and more like fascination, and with Birnkrant himself never on screen, his collection becomes our collection, his obsession ours.

This is one of the many threads that make America what it is, and whether you prefer the clean, rounded edges or the ghastly rodent face, Mickey remains an icon—of fascination, of interest, of worship all the same.

This is Part 4 of Jamesfest.

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