Wednesday, March 30, 2022 — 5
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Surprise! Your favorite movie is a little bit fascist

Surprises from the man who taught me how to love a good movie

Musings about pop-out cakes

WALT DISNEY, I think, is 

probably more influential than 
Jesus. So why do I feel like crit-
ics shy away from critical analy-
ses of Disney films, especially 
the classics? Just because they 
are cute and enormously popular 
to the point of being mytholo-
gized does not make them safe 
from insufferable people like me. 
In fact, I have never seen a Dis-
ney film in the same light after 
taking U-M class FTVM 333, 
or Fascist Cinemas. My capac-

ity to enjoy these films without 
picking them apart to a pulp has 
significantly reduced. I’m not 
talking about The Lion King — 
that would be too easy — but 
about the much more subtle ways 
that Disney flirts with fascism. 
If your favorite form of escapism 
is a Technicolor song and dance, 
be warned: The innocence of any 
Disney classic crumbles under 
just a little socio-historical scru-
tiny.

Consider the bare-bones plot of 

any Disney fairytale. The protag-
onist — usually a young woman 
— wants relief from her current 
situation, whether she is poor, her 
family is mean to her or her life is 
boring. She is surrounded by cute 
little bunny rabbits and birds as 
she sings about her fantastical 
hopes and dreams. Except they 
aren’t so fantastical, because she 
always gets married in the end, 
hence “happily ever after.” How 
far is this from the myth of the 
American dream? How many 
Disney films can you name that 

don’t have a rags-to-riches story, 
an emphasis on benevolence and 
“good morals” over ambition and 
individualism? 
Furthermore, 

how does this relate to fascism?

“Fascist” might be a flashy 

buzzword, but it shouldn’t be 
thrown around indiscriminately; 
it is a set of ideas, an amalgama-
tion of strategies, that a dictator 
or governing body might employ. 
It’s not just in the leader, though 
— for a society to be considered 
“fascist,” a set of values is deeply 
embedded into its culture. In the 
most simplistic way possible, fas-
cism is characterized by a cult 
of tradition, nationalism, anti-

intellectualism, contempt for the 
weak, selective populism and a 
frustrated middle class. But the 
list goes on. There are ten pil-
lars that contribute towards a 
more general fascism, according 
to Yale professor Jason Stanley’s 
book “How Fascism Works: The 
Politics of Us And Them.” Any of 
history’s fascist dictatorships you 
might think of may use five or six 
or seven of these strategies, but 
not necessarily all of them. In a 
similar fashion, Disney films do 
the same thing.

Of course, I could get specific 

with it. Let’s go back in time to 
1937, the year of “Snow White 
and the Seven Dwarfs.” As a 
juicy time capsule of escapism 
demanded by the Depression-era 
U.S., the film is consistent with 
several of Stanley’s fascist ten-
dencies. Our protagonist, Snow 
White, is a princess by birthright 
but a lowly maid by the order 
of her evil stepmother. But she 
doesn’t mope and whine about 
her situation — instead, our prin-

cess is complacent and pleasant. 
Snow White fits nicely into the 
natural hierarchies of worth 
that a fascist society demands: 
She recognizes that her role as a 
woman is one of submission and 
patience, and as a perfect fascist 
woman she is virtuous and pure. 
The film also makes an “us versus 
them” distinction; the stepmoth-
er-slash-queen is evil because of 
her individualistic values of self-
ishness and ambition, values that 
threaten the altruistic purity of 
Snow White and the rest of the 
“good guys.” And don’t forget the 
dwarfs themselves — Grumpy and 
the other guys are just cartoonish 
iterations of the fascist “every-
man,” with their admirable work 
ethic and apparent infatuation 
with labor. The dwarves valorize 
self-sufficiency and give rise to 
the distinction of hardworking 
versus lazy. “Snow White and 
the Seven Dwarfs” puts forth a 
damning thesis of rural idealism 
and rejection of modernity, a tale 
of happy endings and a mythic 
utopia over a backdrop of tragedy 
and loss of hope during the Great 
Depression.

It doesn’t stop here — ask me 

to consume any piece of media 
that holds significant cultural 
power, and I will find a source 
of propaganda. Don’t even ask 
me about Marvel’s big fat crush 
on the military (surprise, Disney 
also owns Marvel). You might 
be reading this and notice that 
the films I describe as “fascist” 
don’t exactly align with textbook 
examples of fascism. But that’s 
the problem. Fascism is often 
understated. It slips through 
the cracks — it’s something that 
doesn’t get noticed until it’s too 
late, and that’s the point.

Lest we forget that films, 

especially fancy ones from big 
studios, were probably (and still 
might be) the most effective 
mediums of cultural influence. 
Through these films, micro-signs 
of nationalism and indulgences 
in utopia — the core ideas of fas-
cism — are flirting with Ameri-
can audiences. I’m not arguing 
that Disney movies are abundant 
sources of propaganda, but that 
inklings of fascist ideas might 
wriggle their way into our minds 
so that we don’t see much of a 
problem.

WHOEVER SAID “KIDS say the darnd-

est things” has obviously not heard their 
father share personal information before. 
When moving me into my apartment this 
year, my dad walked around the room in 
his self-possessed, serene way, a half-smile 
on his face. Without an ounce of malice, 
he laughed to himself about me, “You’re so 
spoiled. When I was in grad school, I shared 
a room half this size with three roommates. 
We had two beds — whoever got home last 
had to sleep on the air mattress,” adding, 
“the first person home had to make din-
ner.” My father, who would rather enjoy the 
sweet sound of a grating silence than tell me 
about his personal life, let slip a tiny detail 
of his college experience. It was not what I 
expected. 

Most other things I know about my dad’s 

childhood are bits I’ve pieced together, infor-
mation stolen away from family members or 
weaseled out of him while he sat in the pas-
senger seat, tapping out work emails on his 
phone as I drove around to accrue hours 
for my Level 1 driver’s license. Here’s what 
I’ve known for a while: My dad grew up in 
Chennai, India and he skipped two grades 
in school, so he was consistently smaller 
than everyone else in his black and white 

class pictures. From what I understand, he 
and his dad (my grandpa) had a distant rela-
tionship, but they watched movies together 
sometimes.

If you ask me what my favorite movie is, 

I probably won’t tell you the truth in order 
to maintain my (nonexistent) respectability 
in Daily Arts. Well, here it is: I love “Willy 
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” I love 
the brightly filtered shots of mountains of 
playfully imagined sweets, worth more than 
the GDP of a small country. There truly is 
no other word to describe the music except 
for charming — the melancholic violins and 
bells ringing with a simplicity that brings 
you back to a sweeter, simpler time, telling 
you how to feel and doing it well. The swirl-
ing, terrifying boat scene montage — which, 
yes, does feature a chicken being beheaded 
— still scares me, but I dreaded the scene 
so much I was curious to see it whenever I 
rewatched the movie, which was often; at 
first at the insistence of my dad, but later it 
was me that began asking that we watch the 
movie more times than I can count. 

Once, when I was in elementary school, he 

mentioned that he watched the film with his 
dad — the only memory he’s shared with me 
of his father. When my dad was 19, he came to 
the unknown (Toledo, Ohio) for grad school. 
My grandpa died shortly after, and my dad 
couldn’t fly back to India for the funeral due 
to his immigration status. When he finally 

made it back a year later, his old dachshund 
ran up to my dad at the front door of his fam-
ily home and collapsed in his arms, dying 
a few minutes later. It’s worlds away from 
what I’ve had to go through, but it seems a 
distance from who he is now as well — my 
dad is just my dad, who loves intentionally 
pronouncing words wrong to irritate every-
one (including me), blasts his Simon & Gar-
funkel music too loud on speakers that he’s 
set up in the basement and buys strawberries 
on his way back from work if he hears that 
I’ve come back home from Ann Arbor.

When I moved back home in the second 

semester of my freshman year of college, 
it was just the two of us, but by then I had 
my own secret. My dad has always hoped 
I would become an engineer, enamored by 
the stability it would give me, but by this 
point, I was staying up late researching how 
to transfer out of the College of Engineer-
ing; I had stopped understanding why it all 
mattered, the physics and math and pro-
gramming. It hit me that this was it, that the 
tangibility of calculating the physical plausi-
bility of structures and taking soil samples 
was what I had chosen to do for the rest of 
my life, instead of learning about the books 
and ideas and people I had always ached to 
know more about. The reverse wasn’t the 
most exciting prospect for my father, who 
has moved the earth and the sky in order for 
me to have a more stable life than he does. 

Maybe a better child would have stuck with 
engineering, but I jumped into aimlessly tak-
ing various classes: environmental science, 
creative writing, anthropology, architecture. 
During the week, we had intense conversa-
tions about my (lack of a) major, but on Sun-
day nights, we took a break: We watched 
movies like “Parasite,” “Knives Out” and 
“Soul,” and would visibly jolt backward dur-
ing jump scares and sit in our basement for a 
while afterward, breaking down the movie, 
and of course, looking up everyone involved 

in the production on Wikipedia. What I don’t 
think my father realizes is that he taught me 
how to love movies, that I learned from him 
— from the man who took me to the library 
on weekends, who bought a Detroit Institute 
of Arts membership so we could go together 
and whose love language is reading Wikipe-
dia articles on authors I offhandedly men-
tion — that sometimes art can say what you 
cannot.

DURING AN EARLY scene in “Singin’ in 

the Rain,” there’s a moment that I’ve always 
found memorable, and mildly confusing. A 
man throwing a party shows off a massive 
cake and tells movie star Don Lockwood 
(Gene Kelly, “An American in Paris”) that 
there’s something “special” about it. And 
then Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds, “How 
the West Was Won”) pops out with a big 
performer’s smile, but when she looks down 
at Don, a man she had literally just rejected 
and lied to and generally belittled out of 
spite for the fact that he was being a jerk, 
her smile fades and is replaced with a look 
of shock.

The idea of a woman popping out of a cake 

being more surprised than the people wit-
nessing said moment is kind of absurd. But 
at the same time, isn’t the idea of a woman 

popping out of a cake already absurd?

It’s a trope that I’ve heard about more 

than witnessed: It happens occasionally in 
the context of celebrity events and histori-
cal parties, as well as films and TV shows 
(including “The Bachelor”). The point here 
is that it’s not a common part of life, but is a 
recognizable trope; if I were to ask someone 
about “those cakes that people jump out of,” 
most people would know what I was talking 
about. There’s a societal understanding or at 
least acknowledgment that pop-out cakes 
exist, and a general association with them 
as signs of surprise, celebration, wealth and 
status.

Truthfully, I can’t believe I haven’t ques-

tioned the idea of pop-out cakes sooner, 
because they are even more bizarre the 
more you think about them. There are so 
many pieces that go into the creation of a 
pop-out cake, and every single one of them 
is strange. As a result, I have a lot of ques-
tions.

Who came up with this?
The answer is apparently the Romans 

— which, unlike someone popping out of a 
cake, is not much of a surprise. It was origi-
nally with pies; it became popular among 
the English to make it appear as if live ani-
mals were popping out of pies (which is how 
we get “four-and-twenty blackbirds”). But 
I more want to know who exactly came up 
with this idea, the same way I want to know 
how someone looked at a pineapple and said, 
“That looks edible!” or how someone looked 
at the sea and said, “This looks like a great 
spot to build Venice.” I want to know who 
looked at a cake and said, “You know what 
would make this better? If it was bigger, but 
instead of more cake, it had a person inside 
of it.” It’s a chain of thoughts that will for-
ever baffle me.

Who even makes these cakes?
In my opinion, it’s not worth asking how 

these cakes are made — there are videos and 
instructions about DIYs on the internet. I’m 

more interested in how it feels to make this 
kind of cake, especially for bakers that are 
making pop-out cakes made of real cake. 
Most pop-out cakes are made of cardboard 
and covered in frosting to make them look 
like real cakes. For a true cake maker, it must 
be humiliating to have your one true passion 
be reduced to making a prop so that some 
rich guy can feel cool when a girl jumps out 
of his cake.

Some of them don’t bother with cake alto-

gether — you can rent fake pop-out cakes for 
a decently steep price. The ones made of 
real cake are even more expensive — which 
means that these bakers are making a cake 
with a giant part of it taken out but charg-
ing more than a fully-intact cake would cost. 
Maybe they’re the real winners here.

If you’re in the cake, how do you know 

when to pop out?

Because I cannot imagine that sound 

travels well through layers of cardboard and 
frosting. Is there a signal, like a musical cue, 

that you have to hit at exactly the right time? 
Obviously being crouched in the sweaty, 
cramped space within the cake would be 
torturous enough, but then there’s the 
attempt to smash through the cake and get 
out gracefully at the exact perfect moment. 
What if you’re too early? It would be simply 
mortifying; a smashed-through pop-out 
cake cannot be un-smashed-through.

Then there’s the other part of it: the 

moment when you emerge. If you’re in the 
unfortunate position of being Kathy Selden, 
you might find yourself face-to-face with a 
very famous man that you just emotionally 
destroyed mere hours before. I don’t know 
who I would expect to see the moment I 
jumped out of the cake, and I can’t imagine 
it would be easy to control my emotions. In 
all truth, Kathy’s only slightly stunned face 
is impressive; I probably would’ve fallen out 
of the cake altogether.

Courtesy of Warner Bros

LAINE BROTHERTON
Digital Culture Beat Editor

MEERA KUMAR

Book Beat Editor

KARI ANDERSON

Daily Arts Writer

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