The South Atlantic quarterly [0038-2876] 92.1 (1993). 27-61.

Unfamiliarity with Benjamin’s writings makes the specifics of Hansen’s argument difficult to follow; she uses Benaminian terminology without explanation. References to Disney in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno, states Hansen, encoded “questions concerning the politics of mass culture, the historical relations with technology and nature, the body and sexuality.” Hansen discusses the way Disney films featured in the inter-war period debates over the intersection of art, politics and technology. Benjamin’s mickey mouse induces therapeutic collective laughter, thereby disarming the destructive effect of technology. Mickey Mouse also heralds an imagination that does not rely on experience, thereby preparing the way for survival in a horrific world. Adorno’s mickey mouse, which he associates with jazz, represents bourgeois sadism. The most relevant observation in the article for my purposes is that Adorno and Eisenstein understood more clearly than Benjamin that the precise rhythmic matching of acoustic and visual movement was Disney’s particular aesthetic innovation. This observation relates to the idea of transference which allows individual alienation to “leap into collective, public recognition” (39). This transference is brought about by “a series of staged shocks,” vis-a-vis the synchrony of the aural and visual, which induces laughter.
Also of interest is the suggestion that some of the Silly Symphonies of the early 1930s blur boundaries between humans and animals, mechanical and organic, living and inanimate objects, master and slave, labor and play, and that such blurring had a utopian appeal. The role of sound in this blurring might prove a productive line of inquiry.