The Politics of Vision

Dianne Sachko Macleod’s “The Politics of Vision: Disney, Aladdin, and the Gulf War” is not only a thought-provoking essay, it is a marriage of film and real-world. She sets up her argument in the first paragraph when she states, “Fewer critics, however, have credited Aladdin’s success to another media event: the televised staging of the Gulf War that was taking place while the film was in production at Disney Studios. Mirroring and magnifying popular serotypes of Arab culture, Aladdin played to an audience already primed by media.” I thought this quote was important because what Macleod expands on in her essay. The concept of the article was exciting for me because I did not know that this war (which correlates so much to Aladdin) was going on during the film. I also appreciated the fact the she explains how to audience is primed. In Psychology 101, we just started learning about priming and this is very representative of how the media, in innocent (Disney) or adult (news) forms, can alter the way we think about things. Her thesis is located at the end of the first section when she states, “I shall argue that both Aladdin and Operation Desert Storm contrived to achieve their goals semiotically, by playing up stereotypes of the Orientalist Other…”. Her clear thesis statement sets up the reader with a concrete idea of what she is going to argue and helps to outline what the readers are going to see in the essay.

         Several parts of Macleod’s essay briefly reminded me of Carl Hiaasen’s book “Team Rodent”.  Macleod discusses Disney’s overbearing protection of its copyright (179). Similarly, Hiaasen writes about Disney suing a school for having Disney related images on their windows. Additionally, Macleod’s sentence structure and vocabulary choice reminds me of a reserved version of Hiaasen’s fictional writing-style. Notably to me, she calls Disney a “conglomerate” (181) and varies her sentence structure; She adds rhetorical questions like “how could I, an art historian, write about something I could not illustrate?” (180), which bring her word to life.

         I like the way Macleod breaks up her essay into Aladdin and then Operation Deseret Storm; However, several times I lost the connection between the two concepts. Overall, I think it was easier to understand, instead of comparing them sentence by snetance. I liked the song lyrics and quotes from Aladdin. They helped to prove her point that stereotyping of Arab culture is prevalent in the film. I thought it was unnecessary to add the information and monetary values of the Pentagon; Macleod seemed almost scatterbrained when she tries to connect the “gadgetry” from Pentagon to the Middle East. I think it detracted from the main point that the Pentagon plays a dynamic role in the media industry. I think it is important that Macleod brought the essay back to Aladdin in the final paragraph and refers to the façade of “innocence” that Disney continues to try to portray. Since the essay features many stereotypes and racist examples from films and news-based media, this brought it back to the main point I was interested in: Disney and racism.