I was marched down the hall to the lunch room and ushered to a seat across from this lady wearing a blue suit and pearls, just like June Cleaver. She had a three-ring binder and a bunch of papers on the table in front of her, and, since the table was kid-sized, she looked really big, looming behind it like a Charlie Ray lady. When I was seated, she looked up with a big smile, called me Davey, and asked me if I liked animated cartoons. I knew then I had made a terrible mistake. But what could I do? I said yes, I liked cartoons, a lot—and that my name was Dave. She smiled again, not meaning it this time, and persevered. And what about Donald Duck? she asked. Did I like Donald Duck? Yes, I liked Donald Duck, I told her, although I withheld my opinion that the Duck was the only Disney character who had any soul, any edge, that he was sort of the Dizzy Gillespie of Disney characters. This was not the sort of insight one shared with June Cleaver.
Well then, she said, what did I think about Donald’s relationship with his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Did it bother me that he screamed at them all the time? Did this frighten me? Did it, perhaps, remind me of . . . my mom or dad!? She looked at me solemnly, expectantly. I wanted to tell her that, first, Donald Duck was a cartoon. Second, he was an animal, a duck, and, finally, he was only about this tall. But I couldn’t. I could tell from the penetration of her gaze that she wasn’t really interested in ducks, and I felt my face getting hot. My inquisitor smiled faintly, triumphantly, taking this blush as a tell-tale sign of guilt, which it wasn’t. I felt like a downed American pilot in the clutches of the Gestapo, determined to protect the secrets of his freedom.
Clearly, this lady wanted to know stuff about my parents, and since, in all my peregrinations through five states and thirteen grammar schools, I had never met any other adults who were even remotely like my mom and dad, I was dedicated to concealing their eccentricity. Because it had its perks. I had seen enough of my friends’ home lives to know this. According to their parents, my parents let me run wild. I got to do things that my friends never could, because my parents were weird. But they were not like Donald Duck! My dad was cool and poetic—like me, I thought (wrongly!). And my mom was not cool at all. She was serious, high-strung, and fiercely ironic, like Joan Crawford, always bustling around: painting bad paintings in the back bedroom and reading books while she cooked dinner (setting the occasional paperback aflame)—always starting up little businesses, and telling me stuff about Maynard Keynes or Karl Marx when she gave me my allowance. (Keynes and Marx, I should note, marked the poles between which my mom’s sensibility flickered on a daily, nay hourly, basis, for reasons that were not always apparent. This made things exciting, since you never quite knew if you were dealing with the sky-walking entrepreneur or the hard-eyed revolutionary. My dad was more reliable in the realm of fiscal theory. He thought money was something you turned into music, and that music, ideally, was something you turned into money. It rarely worked out that way, but, in this at least, we were of one mind.)
Anyway, that was my folks. Donald and Daisy they weren’t, but neither were they Ward and June, so I was scared and covetous of my perks as an outlaw child. I didn’t know quite how to respond, and then, amazingly, I did. I told the truth. Donald Duck, I said, was not like my mom or dad. He was like my dog, Darwin the Beagle, excitable but lovable. Like, whenever people would walk by in front of our house, Darwin would just explode, squawking and baying and bouncing along behind the brick wall until they went past; and since the beach sidewalk in front of our house was a well-traveled thoroughfare, Darwin was one busy beagle. But when you yelled at him to stop, he just stopped and walked over to you, tilting his head and giving you that look so you had to give him a big hug.
The giant lady just looked at me, but not the way Darwin did. She didn’t move. She sat there like a statue and didn’t blink. She didn’t write anything down. She just looked, and now I was pissed, because I had given her a great answer. I knew this because, after thirteen grammar schools, I knew how to deliver a professional, precocious answer—how to build those extended point-by-point analogies that boosted your score on the tests they gave you when you came to a new school. But June Cleaver wasn’t buying. She turned over a piece of paper and asked me about the Road Runner cartoons. Did I like them? Yes, I did. Did I identify with the Road Runner or the Coyote? Again, I wanted to tell her that I didn’t identify with cartoons. They were just cartoons. But, in truth, I sympathized with the coyote, so I said, “Wile E. Coyote.”
Wrong! Clearly, wrong again, from the look on her face, but I was committed and I wanted to win, so I pressed on. I identified with the coyote, I said (like a pitiful slut), because he was always sending off in the mail for stuff from ACME that didn’t work, like when I sent off for that Lone Ranger Badge and Secret De-coder, and when it came, it was just this dumb piece of cardboard. Again, I considered this a very suave, precocious kid answer. But again, nothing. She didn’t write anything down, and I couldn’t believe it. I was flunking a quiz on cartoons! So I withdrew into sullen hostility. This was my standard response to intransigent adults. My little brother, on the other hand, being a little brother, invariably turned silky sycophant, so I have no doubt that a few hours later he was sitting there smiling away at June Cleaver, saying yes, our home was pretty much a Satanic cauldron.
I folded my arms and stuck out my lower lip. June turned the page and asked me if I liked Tom and Jerry. A testy nod from little Davey. And was I ever, perhaps, frightened by the violence? she asked emphatically. A moment of thought and then, with an edge of icy sarcasm that would have impressed even my mom, I said: “Oh yeah, I’m always terrified.” And she wrote this down! Thus, I discovered virtue’s invulnerability to contextual irony. And I couldn’t take it back! For years, I would replay this scene in my head, wishing that I had said something more sophisticated, like Claude Rains in Casablanca: “I am shocked, shocked!” Something like that, but I didn’t, damn it. I had never felt quite so betrayed by the adult world—until six months later when the “results” of this “study” hit the news nationwide.
Even Dave Garroway talked about it on The Today Show, and he was shocked, shocked. Children were being terrorized by cartoons! We trembled at Donald Duck in the role of an abusive parent. We read the Road Runner as an allegory of fear. And, worst of all, we were terrified and incited to violence by the aggressive carnage we witnessed in The Adventures of Tom and Jerry. And maybe so. Maybe some kids actually said this stuff, but speaking for the student body at Santa Monica Elementary I can assure you that we were mostly terrified and incited to violence by those enormous, looming ladies. They were real, not cartoons, and we knew the answers they wanted. But like good, brave little Americans, we were loathe to provide them, since they did not coincide with our considered opinions as citizens of this republic.
So, we did our best, you know. We told the truth and were betrayed—for our own good—and I am being perfectly candid when I tell you that this experience of betrayal was more traumatic and desolating to me than any representation I have ever encountered. All of the luxurious freedom and privacy I had felt in California dissolved in that moment. Because those ladies, in their presumption that we couldn’t distinguish representations from reality, treated us like representations, to be rendered transparent and read like children’s books. What’s more, we kids knew whereof we spoke. We held symposia on “issues of representation” at recess, and it turned out that everyone knew that if you ran over a cat with a lawn mower, the cat would be one bloody mess and probably die. Thus, when the much-beleaguered cartoon, Tom, was run over by a lawn mower and got only a shaved path up his back, we laughed.
It was funny because it wasn’t real! Which is simply to say that the intimidated, abused, and betrayed children at Santa Monica Elementary, at the dawn of the nineteen fifties, without benefit of Lacan or Lukács, managed to stumble upon an axiom of representation that continues to elude graduate students in Cultural Studies; to wit, that there is a vast and usually dialectical difference between that which we wish to see and that which we wish to see represented—that the responses elicited by representations are absolutely contingent upon their status as representations—and upon our knowledge of the difference between actuality and representation.
What we did not grasp was just exactly why the blazing spectacle of lawn-mowered cats, exploding puppies, talking ducks, and plummeting
