by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Ubiquitous Alice
Through the sheer cultural saturation of the Disney product in general, the studio’s version of Alice In Wonderland (1951) arguably provides more immediately recognizable images than Lewis Carroll’s original work.Superficially, this is understandable – the film makes little attempt to resituate or alter the original work and thus is an attempt at a literal reading of the text. This could potentially account for the films initial lacklustre public response(1): Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, with its nonsensical imagery and structuralist shennanigans, demands its beatified place in the literary cannon precisely because of its flagrent encouragement of the reader to decode the undecipherable Wonderland themselves.The initial critical failure of Walt Disney’s Alice is therefore laden with irony, as its inability to creatively engage and re-adapt the text is the exact reason the film reads as such an unimaginative re-enactment.
Disney himself had a long and lasting affection for the text, and earlier in his career he made a series of cartoons involving Alice with plans of making a full live action film when he arrived in Hollywood (2). When this feature animated project began in earnest, Disney had heated debates with colleagues over what could and could not be altered with the text. One suggestion of Disney’s was to enliven what he saw as a dull Alice “by giving her a companion with whom she could get into comic situations and gag routines. His ideas was to bring in the March Hare for this purpose, as a running character who would keep popping up at unexpected moments all through the film… he was crushed when it was explained that he would be attacked for tampering with a classic”(3). All attempts by Disney to incorporate other characters as stronger leads were met with similar fears(4), which ironically resulted in the supporting cast lacking the vitality of their counterparts in the original book. Disney’s himself felt far from optimistic about the final product, having a clear distaste for certain key features of the film such as seeing Alice herself as “prim and prissy”(5), and the film as a whole “’filled with weird characters’”(6). The commercial paranoia that filled Disney studios in working with such a well-loved text ultimately resulted in the critical undoing of the film. This hesitation to reinterpret the text – despite Carroll so clearly inviting such an act of his readers – resulted with a string of self-conscious and awkward English clichés like the cockney Bill the Lizard and the aristocratic Dodo. Ultimately, the film was “a kind of surrealistic vaudeville show, replete with strong episodes of wild humour but weak in terms of warmth and cohesiveness”(7). The studio’s desperation not to offend suppressed any genuine creative reading of the text. Curiouser and curiouser would be any later attempt by Disney studios to animate Alice – the other side of the double edged sword implies that the fear of Disneyfication is distinctly absent in later films, so ironically a more creative Alice may have been produced. Doubtlessly, this would result in the very accusations the 1951 version was so frightened off – a McDisney Alice could be held as literary treason, despite the version that struggled so earnestly to be a loyal and obedient reading falling so very, very flat.
Urban Alice
As the case in many Betty Boop cartoons, Betty In Blunderland (1934) chronicles an escape from the urban to the fantastic. Judge for A Day (1935) shows Betty enduring the trials of contemporary city life and then daydreaming about being “judge for a day”, passing down punishment onto those that caused her irritation. The traditional dichotomy of city/country is generally absent from Betty’s world: as Stop That Noise (1935) demonstrates, the country is just as threatening as the city. The fantasy realm into which Betty so frequently ventures into mirrors that of her New York depression-era audience – viewing cartoons at the cinema was itself a mode of escapism not only for her contemporary audience, but for her creators, Dave and Max Fleischer. Betty escaped into her fantasy world just as her audience escaped into Betty’s “reality” – she mimicked their desire to experience an alternate universe.
Carroll’s story is an intertextual point of reference in Betty In Blunderland – as the title indicates, however, this is not Alice In Wonderland, but rather Betty in a confused, muddled-up Wonderland, a Blunderland. The film opens with a shot of a jigsaw puzzle box with a John Tenniel-like illustration, and pans left to Betty lying on the floor doing the actual puzzle. As she sings happily “I found a little rabbit’s foot”, the Grandfather clock takes the form of a ‘real’ grandfatherly figure and sings as she drifts off to sleep. Following the White Rabbit (who escapes from her puzzle – how is a city girl going to know what a real rabbit looks like?) through the mirror in her room, Alice follows him through a candy cane lined path to a Subway station (what else – again, how is a city girl going to know what a real rabbit hole looks like?). Once in ‘Blunderland’, Betty exhibits city-girl savvy and only partakes of the Shrink-Ola soda fountain after seeing others use it before her to get through the small door. She readily identifies the Mad Hatter – like her audience, she has read this story before – and it is out of his hat the she pulls out Carroll’s characters from the original story. As she introduces herself through her song “How Do You Do?” the characters – including Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Walrus and the Carpenter – dance happily around Betty, Carroll’s narrative going out the metaphorical window. A dragon (perhaps a Jabberwocky?!) escapes the Mad Hatter’s upturned hat and suddenly kidnaps Betty to the horror of her new friends a chase ensues. Turtles transform into machine gun-equipped armored vehicles, a unicorn attacks the dragon with its horn and a seal flings pinch-angry crayfish with its flippers. Stopping suddenly at a cliff edge, the Jabberwocky flings Betty and the Carroll characters through the air and as they land find themselves back in Betty’s room, the characters morphing into the now complete jigsaw. Except, of course, the White Rabbit who is grabbed by Betty as he tries to escape. “Come back you rascal!” cries Betty, winking to the audience as she places the final piece and finishes the puzzle.
Betty In Blunderland continues to position Betty as a sexualized adult-female, dissimilar to the childish Alice of the original text and the Disney film. A comparison with this Alice emphasises Betty’s status as a sexually developed entity. The White Rabbit, before running through the mirror, gives Betty a flower (plucked from the puzzle) and before he makes his dash through the looking glass, stops and blows Betty a kiss that forms a tangible love heart shape in mid air, melting away as he runs off. He is clearly attracted to Betty, and it is on these terms that she pursues him – his amorous attentions are something she is curious to pursue. Betty’s sexual adventure takes a dramatic turn towards the literal as the awning of the subway station turn into a long human tongue, literally sweeping her into the subway in a licking motion. As she falls downwards, the first things she falls through are clotheslines (in the style of those seen in high density apartment living during the period, strung between buildings). Upon these lines are female undergarments – primarily bras and corsets. Betty’s greatest concern falling is her skirt flying up and exposing her, which she remedies by attaching a peg to hold her skirt down. After she drinks from the Shrink-ola, unlike Alice , Betty has no tears or even moments of disorientation at her new size – bodily changes do not upset womanly Betty as they do junior Alice (post-pubescent Betty has been through it all before). Indeed, Betty’s motivation for initially visiting Blunderland is to pursue the romantic advances of the White Rabbit. Her abduction by the Jabberwocky implies a sexual motivation – Betty is a single, attractive female. As the Wonderland characters fight to save Betty, it is a rescue from a sexual predator. Returned ultimately to her room, she stops the White Rabbit from escaping once again and returns him to the puzzle, ending her adventure.
This notion of Betty Boop as a sexually functional entity contending with threat and advances reflects immediately the urban inner-city world of the Fleischers.
“Sex and violence… were unavoidable in neighborhoods where thousands of people lived in a tiny area. Betty Boop herself, frequently the object of both sex and violence, was an inhabitant of this world… [There are] a number of films in which Betty contends with the hazards of life as a single girl in the big city” ( 8 )
Although Betty In Blunderland features a more censored Betty than had initially appeared, elements of the original Betty can still be seen despite the Hays Production Code considering her “too racy” at the peak of her fame in 1934 (9) This tamer Betty Boop lost her public allure and the cartoon was cancelled in 1938 (10) , but this example demonstrates that the Fleischer’s were trying to work around the Hays code to present Betty as a sexual adult rather than by outwardly denying her any sexual elements. In Betty In Bluderland, Betty is encoded as the ultimate anti-Alice; she’s happy to pursue sexual advancements, she has no fear or discomfort with her own body and the only real risk takes the form of sexual predators. These all are specific to Betty as a single woman in a bleak, urban world and these factors haunt both her reality and her fantasy life.
Political Alice
During the 1960’s, Alice in Wonderland was adopted by the drug cultureculture, and by association with the hippy movement gained a new political aspect. The bizarre imagery and hallucinatory logic in the original text made it an obvious candidate for LSD user popular iconography (11), and it became associated with a a subversive spirit as Alice was reclaimed from the conservative context of traditional literature. Carroll’s Alice, of course, has long been viewed in political terms in relation to her transgressive inability to conform within a world of significant institutionalised threat: she “changes her form continually: she is continually threatened and continually in danger” (12). It is in this spirit that Czech animator and surrealist Jan Svankmajer tackles the tale in Alice (1988). A dark and symbolic work, his signature combination of stop-motion found-object animation combined with live action articulates his response to the political conditions in Czechoslovakia in the context of the repression that followed the Prague uprising of Spring 1968.
As an active member of the Prague surrealist group, Svankmajer shares with them a fascination with Alice In Wonderland, once described by Andre Breton as “the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason” (13) In Alice, Svankmajer fuses a Surrealist fascination with the dream state with his own impression of childhood as an experience, not steeped in blissful nostalgia, but laced with specific non-adult concerns. In his own words, Svankmajer’s Aliceis “fermented by my own childhood, with all its particular obsessions and anxieties”(14). This relationship between the dream state and childhood proved integral to Svankmajer’s approach to filming Lewis’ text:
”Dreams are an extension of childhood. It is, for me, certainly a message, perhaps an auguty, sometimes a puzzle or even subject for analysis. It depends what kind of dream it is and, chiefly, how its ‘mysterious’ content excites me as a waking person, for not all dreams have the same emotive charge. Alice as I filmed it and how, of course, Lewis Carroll conceived it on paper, is an infantile dream.” (15)
Svankmajer’s adaptation is concerned foremost with the processes by which reality is distorted by the child to become the dream. The dream space of this Alice – like Betty – relates directly to their respective realities. Just as Betty finds subway stations not rabbit holes, Svankmajer’s Alice sees her reality mirrored in her dreamland, but it is far from a ‘wonderland’. The animal skeletons, old broken toys and other paraphernalia that litter her small playroom all appear in her dream. The relationship between dream and reality become clear in the opening sequences. As in both the Disney film and the Carroll text, Alice sits on a picturesque riverbank as an older girl (her sister in the original book) reads. Alice throws rocks into the river. We soon realize, however, that even this is a fantasy for Alice – she is in fact sitting in a small cramped room where she is imagining sitting on the river bank throwing rocks into the river: we see her sitting on dirty floor, throwing stones into a stained teacup, and to her right sits a small worn Victorian styled porcelain doll (later this doll is literally animated to take the role of the beshrunken Alice), and a larger doll sitting next to the smaller one, denoting the older girl or woman. There is no indication here that she is “playing” Alice In Wonderland and thus has (like Betty) a previous knowledge of the text, or rather that she is just imagining that she is somewhere pleasant rather than the cramped filthy room she is in. Either way, through its initial depictions of reality and fantasy in the child’s mind, even before any appearance of White Rabbits or rabbit holes, Svankmajer suggests that the reality of Carroll’s Alice is already a superior fantasy to his Alice: Fantasy is thus relative to the reality from which you escape.
Like much of Svankmajer’s work, it is impossible to evade politics in Alice Notions of childhood and the dream state do not work parallel to these concerns, but rather in conjuncture with them:
” As a child during the war I used to be repeatedly chased by foreign soldiers in my dreams. I used to escape from them across the courtyards of the blocks of houses where we lived. And the following morning I would review my nocturnal dream-like flight from the balcony on the fourth floor overlooking the courtyard, and invent new variations of evasions of the next nights. Thus equipped, I was able to expect my next harrowing dream calmly and with the realistic hope that this time I would succeed in escaping again. I mention this experience from my childhood because it could come in useful if we reversed dreams into reality and vice versa, thus creating a model for prevention against real repression” (16)
Alice ’s wonderland – like her reality – is a world of stained walls, cold floors, dirt and chicken wire. Her imagination is literally repressed in this sense by her real environment, and her real world is endlessly ruled by the politics of poverty and conflict – the caterpillar is an old sock with false teeth and glass eyes. Nails come out of bread rolls, cockroaches out of food tins and in sardine cans we find not sardines, but oil-soaked keys. The March Hare is crippled in a wheelchair, and the fast edited, highly mechanized industrialized nonsense at the Mad Hatters tea party leaves Alice astonished at the rigorous (but ultimately futile) production line. The March Hare pins buttered pocket watches onto the Mad Hatter like war medals. The climactic courtroom scene recalls the notorious and farcical political trials many Czech artists suffered after the 1968 uprising under the ruling Communist regime:
King: Start reading here.
Alice (reading): ‘I’m profoundly sorry for what I did’
King: Your apology will be taken into account.
Alice : I’m not sorry for anything at all!
King: Say what you are supposed to say; you should have said, “I ask the court for the severest punishment”.
Alice : What do you take me for?
King: Stick to the text of I’ll have the court cleared.
Alice : But you can see the tarts are all here (eats one)… almost all of them.
As Alice feasts on the tarts, the King and Queen cry “Off with her head”. The White Rabbit – whom happily beheads at the royal will with a pair of scissors – moves towards Alice but as she shakes her head “No”, her head morphs into a spectrum of other characters: The Mad Hatter, The March Hair, The Fish and Frog Footmen and, ultimately, the Queen herself. “Which one?” asks the voiceover, mimicing the inquiry of Svankmajer and other Czech artists as they wonder who to blame for the condition of their country under militant Communist rule. When Alice awakes, the Rabbit has gone but his scissors are discovered hidden in a drawer. “He’s late as usual”, she says aloud. “I think I’ll cut his head off”. Complying with Svankmajer’s advice, Alice adapts the techniques acquired within her dreams to fight the repression that dominates her reality.
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1. Mosely, Leonard. Disney’s World New York: Stein and Day, 1985. p. 213.
2. ibid.
3. ibid.
4. ibid.
5. Shickel, Richard The Disney Version: The Life, Times And Commerce Of Walt Disney New York: Simon And Schuster 1968 p.295
6. ibid.
7. Watts, Steven The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney And The American Way Of Life Columbia: University Of Missouri Press 1997; p.285
8. Holberg, Amelia S. “Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star”. American Jewish History Volume 87, Number 4, December 1999, p. 296.
9. Holberg, 291
10. ibid.
11. Fensch, Thomas “Lewis Carroll – The First Acidhead” in Aspects Of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild Ed. Robert Phillips New York: Vanguard 1971 p.424
12. Schilder, Paul “Psychoanalytic Remarks On Alice In Wonderland” in Aspects Of Alice p.291
13. Levin, Henry “Wonderland Revisited” in Aspects Of Alice p.176
14. O’Pray, Michael “Jan Svankmajer: A Mannerist Surrealist” in Dark Alchemy: The Films Of Jan Svankmajer Ed. Hames, Peter. Westport: Praeger 1995, p.74
15. Hames, Peter “Interview with Jan Svankmajer” in Dark Alchemy p.106
16. Svankmajer, Jan Transmutation of the Senses. Prague: Edice Detail, Central Europe Gallery and Publishing House, 1994. p.84.
