Thursday, March 1, 2007

Mickey's ecstasy of influence

I'm catching up with my reading, this week, and in the February issue of Harper's, I was blown away by "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," Jonathan Lethem's terrific meditation on/manifesto about/enactment of: love and theft, contamination anxiety, the creative commons, the gift economy, the beauty of second use, and "usemonopoly."

Now, I've read plenty of arguments in favor of relaxing copyright law. In fact, I've made the argument myself, writing for the website Feed back in 1999, shortly after Congress extended copyrights held by corporations from 75 to 95 years. (The Walt Disney Company, eager to ensure that their 1928 animated short "Steamboat Willie," starring the prototype for Mickey Mouse, would not pass into the public domain in 2003, orchestrated the extension.) But Lethem's argument in favor of relaxing copyright is particularly brilliant -- and besides, it comes not from one of the usual suspects, e.g., mashup artists and other musicians who rely on audio samples, but from a successful novelist.

Lethem persuasively argues that hand-wringing over originality and appropriation in art is a canard, because: "literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time" (at least since Shakespeare); "blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of 'open source' culture"; "without 'The Flintstones' -- more or less 'The Honeymooners' in cartoon loincloths -- 'The Simpsons' would cease to exist"; and so forth. He suggests that copyright is a "right" in no absolute sense, but rather a "government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results" -- hence a "usemonopoly." And speaking of Disney, Lethem accuses them of "source hypocrisy," because:

The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' 'Fantasia,' 'Pinocchio,' 'Dumbo,' 'Bambi,' 'Song of the South,' 'Cinderella,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Robin Hood,' 'Peter Pan,' 'Lady and the Tramp,' 'Mulan,' 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'The Sword in the Stone,' 'The Jungle Book,' and, alas, 'Treasure Planet'...

Lethem suggests that a shorthand term for "source hypocrisy" might be "Disnial."

Most entertainingly of all, at the end we learn that the bulk of the essay was cobbled together from multiple other writings on copyright and creative appropriation. After all, to quote a line that Lethem lifts from an interview with UVA social historian Eric Lott, author of "Love and Theft" (which documents the admiration/cultural appropriation in blackface minstrelsy; and whose title was lifted by Bob Dylan): "appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production." This is certainly true of long-form magazine essays, and Lethem masterfully lays bare the device. He even admits that the idea of a collage text is not an original one, pointing to Walter Benjamin's "Arcades Project," Eduardo Paolozzi's collage novel "Kex," and recent essays on/enactments of plagiarism by David Shields, David Edelstein, and others.

Phew! It's a real tour de force. Well worth reading. And while you're at it, check out this video of Neo-Mickey, a gorgeous cartoon designed and storyboarded by Matthew Cruickshank, and animated by Barry Baker. The video was posted earlier this week to Cruickshank's blog; I think it's a proof-of-concept cartoon for a proposed video game. You may or may not agree that Neo-Mickey is a good idea, or cool, or funny, or sufficiently Mickey-esque. But how can you disagree with the argument that living artists ought to have a chance to appropriate Mickey, just like the Disney Co. has appropriated beloved pop culture icons of the past?

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:36 AM

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