Garry Apgar introduces his book by stating that Mickey Mouse “has been a part of our mental and emotional universe for over eight decades.” Walt Disney launched the phenomenon in 1928 with his revolutionary sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, nurtured MM to stardom during Hollywood’s heyday in the 1930s, presented him to new generations of postwar Mouseketeers on television’s “Mickey Mouse Club,” and enlisted him as the official greeter at the ever-growing global Disney empire.
All along the way, the Disney vision was fueled by a dedication to mass-marketing that exemplifies America’s commitment to a box-office culture based on personality—in this case, even if it has mouse ears.
Along with such earlier chroniclers as Richard Schickel (The Disney Version, 1968) and Neal Gabler (Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 2006), Apgar views Mickey Mouse as “the fictional extension of Walt Disney” and “a protean expression of the qualities, values, and dreams of the man and country that spawned him.” Disney himself admitted that “the life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound up with my own personal and professional life.” Until 1946, Disney himself was Mickey’s screen voice, and Walt’s wife Lillian once said that “Walt and Mickey were so ‘simpatico,’ they seemed almost like the same identity.” So, in many ways, this narrative about Mickey Mouse’s cultural journey is also a portrait of Walt Disney; but Apgar’s larger story is told within the framework of American popular culture rather than as a traditional life-and-times biography.
His central objective is to assay how and why this invented figure became one of the most important pop icons of the 20th century. Why does Mickey Mouse share that spotlight with Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and a can of Coke? As a cultural historian, Apgar views Mickey Mouse’s rise to eminence through the prism of three successive phases of America’s media culture.
To begin with, Mickey was born as a Jazz Age baby—in an era when, as Gilbert Seldes wrote in The 7 Lively Arts (1924), a unique American (that is to say, non-European) culture emerged from the cartoons, jazz, musical comedy, and movies invented by mass media. Fifty years later, Christopher Lasch argued in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) that the media, “with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans.” At the end of the century, Neal Gabler described in Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998) how mass entertainment had become “the most pervasive, powerful, and ineluctable force of our time.” A generation before Instagram, Gabler understood that we had come to see ourselves as the stars of our own life movies.
The chief link to Mickey’s emblematic significance is that he has always been associated with the American Dream. Apgar connects Mickey to the national idea of an American Dream—first described in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America—and establishes how, even in the bleak years of the Depression, movie audiences associated Mickey Mouse with the dream “of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” From his earliest appearance in Steamboat Willie, Mickey-the-dreamer was projected as a heroic figure who overcame impossible obstacles with irrepressible humor.
The formative years of Mickey’s invention as a cultural icon lasted from the 1928 release of Steamboat Willie to Fantasia (1940). As Apgar smartly argues, it wasn’t simply the artfulness of Disney’s cartooning that drew people to the box office; it was the music that animated these cartoons. Time noted that what was novel about the early Disney cartoons was music: “It hopped, it jangled, it twitched, it plankety-planked.” A music critic wrote in 1931 that the important discovery made by Walt Disney was the relationship between “visual and aural phenomena.”
For instance, when a stream of bubbles appears on the screen, Mickey will almost certainly prick them with a pin, and as they explode they will play a tune in which the frequency of the wave-vibration of each note will be inversely proportional to the size of the bubbles.
Jerome Kern celebrated Disney for using “music as language.” Disney cartoons embraced the music of the times, always incorporating a cross-section of American popular music, jazz, even classical music. Mickey’s Follies (1929) has various characters sing Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” and “O Sole Mio.” In The Birthday Party (1931), Mickey and Minnie perform a dueling piano version of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” Disney’s masterful, full-length feature Fantasia was entirely pegged to classical music, including the Nutcracker Suite, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours.
In addition to chronicling how Mickey rose to cultural eminence, Apgar is intrigued by how he “was received by the intellectual and artistic elite, and by the public at large, en route to becoming a ubiquitous planetary presence and a charged expression of the American spirit.” With exhaustive documentation and lengthy endnotes, Apgar makes his case by presenting a veritable who’s who of American art and culture that have incorporated MM into their work: Notable examples include the films of Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg; the writings of Rex Stout, Carson McCullers, and John Updike; the artwork of Thomas Hart Benton, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol.
Apgar also deals with how America’s changing values in the 1960s and beyond transformed the symbol of “Mickey Mouse” from admiration to ridicule and scorn:
Yet he remained a “protean expression of the qualities, values, and dreams of the man and country that spawned him.” Like Mom’s apple pie, Mickey invented a shared experience that extends around the globe. Apgar concludes that Mickey’s lasting significance is that “an urge to remain young and to live in the moment is not a solely American impulse, it is inherently human.”
This well-written cultural study is researched with academic rigor but deserves a wider audience because of Apgar’s ability to illuminate the ongoing relationship between media and a culture of personality. It is also a gorgeous book: After being unable to find a publisher, Apgar was rescued by the Walt Disney Family Museum, and particularly Diane Disney Miller, who provided sufficient funding and no interference; he was told, “It’s your book.”
In his acknowledgments, by the way, Apgar notes an early article—“Mickey at Seventy-Five” (2003)—appeared in The Weekly Standard and was part of “the collective germ that sprouted into the present volume.”
Amy Henderson is a historian emerita at the National Portrait Gallery.
