Mickey Mouse Monopoly and the sinister effect of cross-marketing on spontaneous play

This week I watched "Mickey Mouse Monopoly,"a video by Chyng Sun and Miguel Picker about Disney, childhood, and corporate power. I highly recommend it!



The reason I wanted to blog about it is that I was struck in particular by the discussion in the video of how marketing towards children affects their play, particularly their storytelling. The stories Disney tells in its movies are in many way secondary to the merchandising of products related to the movies, and as such those products become embedded with the particular narratives Disney has attached to them.

In essence, when a child is given a toy for which she already knows the story, her spontaneous creative abilities become displaced. She uses her Cinderella doll to tell the (Disneyfied) version of Cinderella, she plays out the (Disneyfied) story of the Little Mermaid in her Ariel swimsuit. She already knows what happens in the story, so she does not create her own. I remember experiencing this myself as a child - my friends and I would decide to play, for instance, Sleeping Beauty. If there were the right number of friends, it all worked out: we could have one princess, three fairies, a wicked queen, and a prince. But if more than three friends wanted to be fairies, or worse if more than one of us wanted to be the princess, a wall was hit. That's NOT HOW IT GOES, someone would protest. After all, we'd seen the movie a dozen times. We remembered.

One of the things I got out of Fragile Moments was that play is how children learn, and how large a part reiteration plays in that learning process. So in repeating the stories we'd been told by Disney films, my friends and I were not only not learning anything new ourselves, but reinforcing the messages in those films. Some of those messages are innocent or even lovely, but many of them are not. I have distinct memories of being a little girl and thinking about how when I grew up and was beautiful, I would look a particular way, and that way was directly modeled on the consistently wasp-waisted and willowy Disney heroine. I was told by Disney that that was what a pretty lady looked like, and moreover that pretty women were always the good ones who lived happily ever after, so of course I wanted and intended to look that way (despite some nagging suspicions that with my big nose and puffy hair, flat chest and long face, I bore a closer resemblance to an Ugly Stepsister.)

Through marketing, Disney has the power to approve certain narratives and not others, and this is particularly sinister when one considers Disney CEO Michael Eisner's 2005 pronouncement: "To make money is our only objective." This is an above-board admission that disrupting children's play is an effective way to be profitable. It really made me reflect on Fragile Moments, and how much learning hinges on the spontaneity of play. Upsetting, to say the least!

Works cited:

Mickey Mouse Monopoly : Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power. (2001) Producer, Writer: Chyng Feng Sun . Director, Co-Producer: Miguel Picker. An ArtMedia Production. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byaMd_PNyIY

Wien, C. A. & Callaghan, K. (2007). Fragile moments: Artists co-constructing creative experience with children, parents and early childhood educators. Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Exchange.

Eisner - Yes!

I really enjoyed The Arts and Creation of Mind. Eisner’s theory of arts education meshes well with my study of philosophy of art – both hold that “art” is not the painting in a gallery or book on a shelf, but the whole realm of artistic thought and production – perceptual exploration. Closer to greenish than green, as Eisner put it.

I chose Eisner for this entry because I agreed with him so much, and I’ve actually found it hard to write, because just want to pull quotes and say “what he said!”

I was particularly taken with the section where he discusses the arts as language, in the sense of being a lens though which we experience everything else. They “make possible a certain quality of experience we call aesthetic.” He poses the question of how we could teach other subjects as “a process in which artistry is at work.” I think that’s a simply beautiful idea! In my experience, there absolutely is art in mathematics, science, history, athletics – in everything, really. Because I view art in the Kantian definition, being that which is purposive without being purposeful, it allows us to enjoy the parts of other disciplines whose usefulness is not readily apparent. We can enjoy the beauty of a balanced equation without knowing how it applies, we can enjoy the depth and complexity of cellular structure without knowing how it helps us cure a disease or develop a new crop. We can enjoy history as literature, instead of dismissing it as just some stuff that happened to people who aren’t alive anymore. None of this is a cheapening of other subjects, but a strengthening, I think.

In an ideal world, I think the practice of dividing school into subjects, core and otherwise, would be phased out. Perhaps this is partly a function of coming from a philosophy background – I have often joked that one can be a philosophy scholar simply by studying whatever one is passionate about, and calling it Philosophy of that.

References:

The arts and the creation of mind. Elliot W Eisner. Language Arts. Urbana: May 2003. Vol. 80, Iss. 5; pg. 340

The Critique of Judgement [1892]. Immanuel Kant. Translated with Introduction and Notes by J.H. Bernard (2nd ed. revised). London: Macmillan, 1914.

Arts Autobiography

I began dance classes at the age of nine. I wanted piano or voice lessons, but those were expensive, and ballet was subsidized by the city, and I also think my parents had the idea that dance would help their supremely bookish and unathletic daughter to get out of her head a little.

Boy, did that backfire. Ballet put me further into the darkest parts of my mind, fuelled by hours in front of a long mirror in a skin-tight leotard, watching my peers develop waists and breasts while I maintained my little girl swayback, round belly, and flat chest. My turnout was horrible, and my memory for sequences worse. It didn’t matter that I actually loved moving to music – that wasn’t ballet.

I quit ballet when I was 16, unable to deal with the constant reminder of not being good enough, but the monster had already been born, and by the end of high school I had a full-blown case of anorexia. In the last few months of high school I began my recovery, and vowed to never dance again. My relationship with the arts was at that point, to put it mildly, strained.

Then, in university, I met a man who talked about dance in a way I’d never heard before. He made it sound so free, and easy, and joyful, and I remembered those few moments when in a jump or a turn I had let go of my self-loathing and enjoyed feeling my body move through space. I joined his dance company, and have been doing modern dance ever since, both as a dancer and a choreographer.

I wrote my MA thesis on philosophy of dance, and I would love to see joyful and unrestricted dance as part of the public school curriculum. It breaks my heart that dance, especially ballet, hurts so many young people, when it has the potential to give them a beautiful perspective on the wonderful things their bodies can do.

I am especially excited by the idea that dance and other arts curricula can be a part of cultivating healthy body image in young people – and even that there can be a logical intersection between arts education and physical education. Making art with one’s own body as the medium can be so empowering, and powerful, and such a good antidote to the idea that only one particular shape and size of body is aesthetically acceptable.

This is a dance piece I choreographed for the Only Human Dance Collective show this year. It is about the dual pressures of the internal drive towards perfection, and the external stresses of teachers (dance and otherwise), media, and impending adulthood.



And for extra bonus dance goodness, this is a 30-second solo of mine from that same show. It is, loosely, about giving birth.

Mixed reactions to "Play Held Hostage"

Reading "Play Held Hostage" was kind of a rollercoaster for me! I went into it expecting to do a lot of head-nodding - I'm no fan of the idea of "excellence" as it's often practiced, and I certainly value play. But while doing the reading, I found myself not so much nodding vigorously as tilting my head, and occasionally rolling my eyes.

It seemed over-the-top to me, almost shrill in tone. Linda Cameron does offer the caveat that she might sound more passionate than rational, and I agree with her on that. Is play really in such jeopardy that it warrants such phrases as "Teachers and students are to be mere puppets, to comply, conform, and to serve..."? In my (limited) experience, children DO play, and teachers and parents care about much more than grades. I've never met one of these parents who pushes their child to get high grades at the expense of happiness, or kids who didn't have time in their day to experiment and create.

On the other hand, I agree very strongly with Cameron's indictment of toystores. I took these picture in Chapters once because I was so appalled by the gendered costumes available there.

And after our class discussion on Thursday, especially following the video we watched, I see her point more and more. Those parents who prioritize structured activities, and the children deprived of play, DO exist, and I need to be careful not to take my own experience as anything more than one anecdote in a sea of data.

My other reaction when reading the paper was that Cameron had a very strong sense of nostalgia for the type of play she did as a child, the "out until the streetlights came on" model (so many of these theorists have a particular attachment to the streetlights rule!) I'm wary of nostalgia, as we tend to have pretty inaccurate recollections of how good things used to be. I was a kid who was largely left to her own devices, and honestly, I would have loved to have piano lessons or even a little more pressure to perform well in school. Again, though, there is always a balance to be struck. I also needed to remind myself that Cameron's speech is just that, a speech, and not a formal paper, and as such, the passion is well-placed.

The main thing I came away with after this paper and Thursday's class is that I need to know more, read more, understand more about play. Exciting!

Sources:

Cameron. L (2006.) Play held hostage by the 'bully' excellence. Touchstone 36th Annual Conference Proceedings: Council of Drama and Dance in Education, 6-10

Harper, S. [Producer-Director]. (2009). Lost Adventures of Childhood [Motion picture]. Canada: CTV.