Mickey Becomes a Rat And We All Like It: Why Are Our Heroes All Dark?

As a kid I loved Mickey Mouse -- his high, shrill voice, and his madcap love of life. I wanted to be a mouseketeer and join all those nice, well-kept kids on the Disney TV show who seemed to embody the ideals of what America was all about.

But what's happened to Mickey? I read today that Disney is about to launch a new Mickey video game in which our hero's sunny personality is going "dark side." Mickey, that loveable mouse, will become a rodent and wander through a cartoon wasteland meeting bitter and disappointed characters who resent his success. In making Mickey more sinister, Disney follows in a trend toward media characters who are no longer Mr. Nice Guys. Now television doctors like House, cutthroat lawyers like Glenn Close in Damages, grumpy comedians like Larry David, and philandering working fathers like Don Draper in Madmen -- all have deeply dark, self-destructive sides to them.

When I was growing up and loving Mickey, television characters were meant to be role models of normality and sanity. I and many of my generation grew up feeling that families like those in Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet had their ups and downs but were basically havens in a heartless world. Fathers never lost their tempers and always knew, while mothers kept their quiet wisdom and love in their suburban kitchens. Cowboys were good, and the bad guys were bad, and there was no confusing the two.

Of course, my own family living in the multicultural Bronx lived in a walk-up apartment utterly unlike the suburban world I saw on television. My dad worked in a factory and there was only one bedroom in our apartment and surely no den for him to smoke his pipe in. My mom took in sewing to make ends meet, and wasn't the leisurely homemaker that Lassie's Mom was. While it was comforting to see those ideal images, it was also confusing. While they had no dark side, we certainly did. My Dad yelled, my Mom was depressed, both of them were disabled, and I was not particularly agreeable myself.

Now our television shows are filled with confused men and women who philander, masturbate, harbor homicidal thoughts if not actions, take drugs freely, have anonymous sex, sabotage others and abuse themselves. And we like that.

When I was a kid I desperately wanted the normality I saw on TV. It was a strange normal though, with talking mice and unreal people -- but it was something to aspire to. Yet there is a comfort now in the idea that Don Draper and House are no better or worse than I am. They, like all of us, have to live in a morally ambiguous world in which there is no bright star showing the way to the right road. It's tough being a human, or a mouse, and maybe our dark sides, if we acknowledge them, will show us the light.

 

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Comments

[Kinephoto]

Perhaps we have been gravitating toward "dark heroes" because their serious failings give us an implicit pass on our own bad behaviors. The old "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Beaver" paradigms often seem far more threatening today, as we recognize our inability to live up to today's high expectations (e.g. parenting).

We'd rather take solace in the belief that "I may be screwed up, but I'm not nearly as bad as Don Draper/Tony Soprano/etc." and pat ourselves on the back by dismissing the old movies and TV shows as artifacts of a long-ago, saccharine­-saturated and totally irrelevant America.

So why do the shadows of that old America still loom so large, and bother us so much?

Regarding the "Mickey Mouse reimagined" or "Mickey Mouse reboot" (or whatever the pop-culture savants are calling the debut of the "new" video game rodent): Mickey wasn't "dark" in the old Disney black-and-white shorts, any more than Bugs Bunny was "dark" a decade later. The old Mickey was just impish, fun-loving and a little mischievous. When movie audiences started demanding that a cartoon character also serve as a role model for their children, those characteristics had to be toned down substantially.

As both a worldview and aesthetic, "dark and edgy" is a dead-end; even worse, it has become a cliche and a bore. Like the current teen girl mania for all things vampire, it seems overdue for at least a temporary retirement.

[cybexg]

"Now our television shows are filled with confused men and women who philander, masturbate, harbor homicidal thoughts if not actions, take drugs freely, have anonymous sex, sabotage others and abuse themselves"

WAIT....I can understand how all the above EXCEPT "masturbate" (masturbation) is bad. What is so dark, evil, etc. about masturbation?

[PW1206]

Warren Spector - the guy who's spearheading the interestingly-named Epic Mickey - has actually said part of his goal with the game is to bring Mickey back to his roots, before he was turned into a kind of bland everyman character, to the time when he was madcap and even a little rascally. Spector - who's well-known in the gaming community for developing the Deux Ex and Thief games (which, if dark and intelligent subject matter in entertainment interest you, are amazing) - is a massive Disney fan, and it looks like he's going to try to marry Disney history to modern gameplay and storytelling.

He talks about the project at length here: http://gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2009/10/05/warrens_2D00_collection.aspx

[BlackJAC]

The sinister darkness makes things interesting. We've seen so much rotten behavior in the Real World that Ozzie & Harriet are saccharine by comparison. House's crankiness could just as easily be a coping mechanism for all the suffering he's seen as a doctor, especially when a patient dies and you have to tell the family how it happened and go right back to work shortly thereafter.

[seawolf77]

Freud wrote a piecce called "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" which detailed man's darker side as the place where he acceses his greatest pleasure. It was right before the two world wars so it was very prescient, especially considering the two arch villians of that war, Hitler and Stalin. What did Vonnegut say in SLaughterhouse Five " The greatest dish in all the world is revenge."

[PhineasGage730]

Because our generation, unlike your own wants realism. Back then it was more about showing a world that didn't exist which helped people live vicariously through them while their life was miserable (a little extreme and bleak I know). And maybe people really believed those type of families (Leave it to Beaver) existed, but now with things like columbine, or V Tech and all the other terrible things we see in the news (and experience personally) we know it's not realistic. Sure Glenn Close is a shark...but isn't that the truth. With all taht's going on in this country I would recent a show about a happy go lucky lawyer that has good intentions...or a Banker for that matter. And who wants a hero like the 60's batman when we know he would get eaten alive...we need the batman we have in Christian Bale...cause lets be honest, he still seems more honest that a lot of the police that we hear about, beating innocent people...racially profiling.

I'm sort of going on a rant so I'll stop. Basically, for me, darker heros are realistic. I'd be insulted if I saw some happy go lucky character walking through life with a smile on his face. We've come to see that the world is a little more gray instead of black and white, good and evil. We know even the good guys have an edge to them. If they didn't they wouldn't win.

[BlackJAC]

The Christian Bale Batman is a lot closer to reality than the Adam West Batman, 'cause anybody who spends his nights and fortune dressing up as a bat to go beat up muggers and purse-snatchers isn't going to be completely well-adjusted especially after watching their parents get killed in front of them at the age of 10. Further, Batman was created to be a darker foil to Superman.