Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, 1971

Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean, and Armand Mattelart, a Belgian, collaborated on the book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, which is excerpted here. In the years following its publication, the book became well known around the world, and an inspiration for scholars assessing the role of culture in international relations.

It would be wrong to assume that Walt Disney is merely a business man. We are all familiar with the massive merchandising of his characters in films, watches, umbrellas, records, soaps, rocking chairs, neckties, lamps, etc. There are Disney strips in five thousand newspapers, translated into more than thirty languages, spread over a hundred countries. According to the magazine’s own publicity puffs, in Chile alone, Disney comics reach and delight each week over a million readers…

Attacking Disney is no novelty; he has often been exposed as the travelling salesman of the imagination, the propagandist of the “American Way of Life,” and a spokesman of “unreality,” But true as it is, such criticism misses the true impulse behind the manufacture of the Disney characters, and the true danger they represent to dependent countries like Chile. The threat derives not so much from their embodiment of the “American Way of Life.” It is the manner in which the U.S. dreams and redeems itself, and then imposes that dream upon others for its own salvation, which poses the danger for the dependent countries…

The Disney industrial empire itself arose to service a society demanding entertainment; it is part of an entertainment network whose business it is to feed leisure with more leisure disguised as fantasy. The cultural industry is the sole remaining machine which has purged its contents of society’s industrial conflicts, and therefore is the only means of escape into a future which otherwise is implacably blocked by reality. It is a playground to which all children (and adults) can come, and which very few can leave.

So there can be no conflict in Disney... The characters move about in the realm of leisure, where human beings are no longer beset by material concerns. Their first and last thought is to fill up spare time, that is, to seek entertainment. From this entertainment emerges an autonomous world so rigid and confined… history has become pastime, work has become adventure, and everyday life has become a sensational news item.

Disney’s ideas are thus truly material PRODUCTIONS of a society which has reached a certain stage of material development. They represent a superstructure of values, ideas and criteria, which make up the self-image of advanced capitalist society, and facilitate innocent consumption of its own traumatic past. The industrial bourgeoisie impose their self-vision upon all the attitudes and aspirations of the other social sectors, at home and abroad…

The only relation the center (adult-city folk bourgeoisie) manages to establish with the periphery (child- noble savage-worker) is touristic and sensationalist. The primary resources sector (the Third World) becomes a source of playthings; gold, or the picturesque experiences with which one holds boredom at bay. The innocence of this marginal sector is what guarantees the Duck-burger his touristic salvation, his imaginative animal-ness, and his childish rejuvenation. The primitive infrastructure offered by the Third World countries (and what they represent biologically and socially) become the nostalgic echo of a lost primitivism, a world of purity (and raw materials) reduced to a picture postcard to be enjoyed by a service-oriented world. Just as a Disney character flees degenerate city life in search of recreation and in order to justify his wealth through an adventure in paradise, so the reader flees his historic conflicts in search of recreation in the innocent Eden of Donald & Co. This seizure of marginal peoples and their transformation into a lost purity, which cannot be understood apart from the historic contradictions arising from an advanced capitalist society, are ideological manifestations of its economic cultural system. For these peoples exist in reality, both in the dependent countries and as racial minorities (“nature’s” bottomless reservoir) within the U.S. itself.

…Just why is Disney such a threat?

The primary reason is that his products, necessitated and facilitated by a huge industrial capitalist empire are imported together with so many other consumer objects into the dependent country, which is dependent precisely because it depends on commodities arising economically and intellectually in the power center’s totally alien (foreign) conditions. Our countries are exporters of raw materials, and importers of super-structural and cultural goods. To service our “monoproduct” economies and provide urban paraphernalia, we send copper, and they send machines to extract copper, and, of course, Coca Cola. Behind the Coca Cola stands a whole structure of expectations and models of behavior, and with it, a particular kind of present and future society, and an interpretation of the past. As we import the industrial product conceived, packaged and labeled abroad, and sold to the profit of the rich foreign uncle, at the same time we also import the foreign cultural forms of that society, but without their context: the advanced capitalist social conditions upon which they are based. It is historically proven that the dependent countries have been maintained in dependency by the continued international division or labor which restricts any development capable of leading to economic independence.

It is this discrepancy between the social-economic base of the life of the individual reader, and the character of the collective vision concerning this base which poses the problem. It gives Disney effective power of penetration into the dependent countries because he offers individual goals at the expense of the collective needs. This dependency has also meant that our intellectuals, from the beginning, have had to use alien forms to present their vision, in order to express, in a warped but very often revealing and accurate manner, the reality they are submerged in, which consists of the superimposition of various historical phases. It is a bizarre kind of ambiguity (called “barroquismo” in Latin American culture), which manages to reveal reality at the same time as it conceals it. But the great majority of the people have passively to accept this discrepancy in their daily subsistence. The housewife in the slums is incited to buy the latest refrigerator or washing machine; the impoverished industrial worker lives bombarded with images of the Fiat 125; the small landholder, lacking even a tractor, tills the soil near a modern airport; and the homeless are dazzled by the chance of getting a hole in the apartment block where the bourgeoisie has decided to coop them up. Immense economic underdevelopment lies side-by-side with minute mental super-development.

Since the Disney utopia eliminates the secondary (productive) sector, retaining only the primary (raw material) and tertiary (service) sectors, it creates a parody of the underdeveloped peoples. As we have seen, it also segregates spirit and matter, town and countryside, city folk and noble savages, monopolists of mental power and mono-sufferers of physical power, the morally flexible and the morally immobile, father and son, authority and submission, and well-deserved riches and equally well-deserved poverty. Underdeveloped peoples take the comics, at second hand, as instruction in the way they are supposed to live and relate to the foreign power center. There is nothing strange in this. In the same way Disney expels the productive and historical forces from his comics, imperialism thwarts real production and historical evolution in the underdeveloped world. The Disney dream is cast in the same mold which the capitalist system has created for the real world.

Power to Donald Duck means the promotion of underdevelopment. The daily agony of Third World peoples is served up as a spectacle for permanent enjoyment in the utopia of bourgeois liberty. The non- stop buffet of recreation and redemption offers all the wholesome exotica of underdevelopment: a balanced diet of the unbalanced world. The misery of Third World is packaged and canned to liberate the masters who produce it and consume it. Then, it is thrown-up to the poor as the only food they know. Reading Disney is like having one’s own exploited condition rammed with honey down one’s throat.

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: International General, 1975, originally published 1971). Translation by David Kunzle.