Conversely, art becomes a mimetic language devoid of any cognitive or explanatory relationship to the world; it merely reflects and depicts the world: the “language” of painting, music, theater, literature. One of the fundamental issues for early film makers was indeed whether film constituted a scientific or artistic language. Sigfried Kracauer described this dichotomy in the work of the two early founders of cinema at the turn of the 20th Century: “Lumiere, a strict realist, and Méliès, who gave free rein to his artistic imagination. The films they made embody, so to speak, thesis and antithesis in a Hegelian sense.” Lumiere’s films were documents of everyday events, such as Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory or Arrival of a Train. Melies favored phantasmal tales such as A Trip to the Moon or The Impossible Voyage, which utilized primitive but nonetheless effective cinematic and theatrical special-effects (double-exposures, jump-cuts, costumes, stage-magic tricks). Kracauer noted

Lumiere told Méliès that he considered film nothing more than a “scientific curiosity,” thereby implying that his cinematograph could not possibly serve artistic purposes. Méliès [responded he] “specializes... in fantastic or artistic scenes, reproductions of theatrical scenes, etc...which differ entirely from the customary views of the cinematograph -- street scenes or scenes of everyday life.”

Soviet film theory of the 1920s, exemplified by the writings and films of Sergei Eisenstein, saw film as a site where art, science, and political struggle become inherently unified. Integral to this synthesis was montage, the juxtaposition of one shot to the next: a process as artistic as it was scientific. Montage was not merely a “horizontal linkage” of one shot to the next, but a “vertical stacking”" of one shot on top of another. Montage theorized an escalating, ascending process of conflicting images as opposed to a static, linear narrative flow.

Eisenstein argued the “shock” of dialectical montage generated a film form that was not merely a representation of the world as image (art) or observation and classification of the world (science), but a dynamic, cognitive process which combines art and science. Eisenstein proclaimed, “We have taken the first embryonic stages towards a totally new form of film expression. Towards a purely intellectual film, freed from traditional limitations, achieving direct forms for ideas, systems, and concepts, without the need for transitions and paraphrases. We may yet have a synthesis of art and science.”

In sharp contrast, Adorno’s strongest criticism of cinema stemmed from his position that film is inherently unable to serve any mimetic or artistic function. Adorno argued that

mass culture represents a priestly hieroglyphic script which addresses its images to those who have been subjugated not in order that they might be enjoyed but that they might be read....the images are seized but not contemplated. The film reel draws the eye along just like a line of writing...the technology of the mass work of art accomplishes that transition from image to writing in which the absorption of art by monopolistic practices culminates.

Thus, film as a “language” is not artistic (mimetic images) but scientific (classificatory writing). The film image (presumably including the animated figure), it inherently a classificatory representation of reality (hieroglyphic writing) rather than a mimetic representation of reality (hieroglyphic images), and as such has a much greater potential for reification of the world, for turning the world into an object.

Miriam Hansen suggested Adorno’s interpretation of film as writing rather than imagery is “a major source cinema’s ideological complicity, because it allows the film image to function as an advertisement for the world ‘as is.’” Not only does the image reify the world, but the image, in turn, becomes commodified; Fredric Jameson noted, “the ultimate form of commodity reification in contemporary consumer culture is precisely the image itself.” Thus, Adorno’s solution did not lie in a new technological form that could synthesize art and science (cinema), but rather new aesthetic forms of art (12-tone music, the literature of Kafka and Beckett) which returned the cognitive-value to art regulated to mere representation of the world by modernity.

Benjamin’s work, like Adorno, certainly reflected a pessimism of modern progress in the modern era. Also like Adorno, Benjamin's critical work often emphasized high-modernist literary figures such as Kafka, Baudelaire, and Brecht. “However, “The Work of Art” essay argued the place of film as a potential area where revolutionary change in mass consciousness could occur for the better. In this regard, Benjamin’s essay can be understood as both an extension and an elaboration of the Left’s overall vision of film and revolutionary change in the era between the World Wars. The nature of cinema itself was considered inherently distinct from other art forms. Erwin Panofsky argued

The processes of all earlier representational art conforms, more or less, to an idealist conception of the world...they start with an idea to be projected into shapeless matter and not with the objects that constitute the physical world...it is the movies, and only the movies, that do justice to that materialist interpretation of the universe.

Benjamin himself used the analogy of a painter-as-magician and cameraman-as-surgeon: the former created a representation of reality from a distance, the latter immersed himself into reality to re-assemble, and re-represent, reality. In contrast, Adorno did not equate film with a materialist production of art, but rather as pure assembly line production.

Films, as “non-organic” works of art, do not critique or challenge capitalist practices, but mirror them, not only at the level of representation but in their very manufacture. Benjamin himself shared Adorno’s concern for the relationship between film and capitalist production, and while Benjamin may have underestimated the eventual role of industrial capitalism in cinematic production, he certainly was not ignorant to the potential dangers.

Nonetheless, Benjamin saw in the photographic film image and the cinematic apparatus a potentially liberating force through the medium’s inherent ability to radically redefine the very nature of human perception: to freeze a given moment in time, and reveal components in the image not immediately recognized.

Process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow-motion, can capture images which escape natural vision.

The photographic image thus becomes a means or method of inquiry by which human perception is expanded, a process with profoundly political consequences. In Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966), David Hemmings portrays a fashion photographer in 1960s Swinging London. A photo he shoots in the park begins to haunt him, and he obsessively enlarges it until the extreme background of the photo becomes visible; he learns that he has photographed what appears to be a murder. The “Blow-Up” of the film's title refers to both the process of photographic enlargement but suggests demolitions, a “revolutionary” explosion of perception and consciousness Benjamin himself described:

The film...extends our comprehension of the necessities that rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have locked us up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of a tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.

It is this fundamental change in the mimetic apparatus (photography, film) and how this change necessarily affects the relationship between the viewer, the image, and the world itself that Benjamin envisioned as redefining and even challenging the boundaries that separate art and science in modernity:

As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison to the stage set, the filmed behavior item...can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science...it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value to science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.

Benjamin, much like Eisenstein, argued that film could serve as a site for a “language” both mimetic (artistic) and scientific (classificatory). Moreover, it is the process of cel animation that this separation becomes even more problematic, where the painter (the magician) and cameraman (the surgeon) are both integral to the creative and production process.

Disney: Benjamin Verses Adorno

The very virtue of the animated cartoon is to animate...to endow lifeless things with life, or living things with a different kind of life. It effects a metamorphosis, and such a metamorphosis is wonderfully present in Disney’s animals, plants, thunderclouds, and railroad trains. Whereas his dwarves, glamorized princesses, hillbillies, baseball players, rouged centaurs and amigos...are not transformations but caricatures at best, and fakes, or vulgarities, at worst.

Benjamin saw Mickey Mouse as manifesting a synthesis between art and science: a cartoon figure (artwork) created by a technological process of (animation) which gives it life (movement and motion). Mickey Mouse was seen as both a sexually-undefined figure as well as figure that synthesized attributes of the animal, the human being (the organic), and the machine (non-organic). Mickey Mouse perpetually attempted to manage the world around it, a world itself a hybrid of the organic and inorganic, ranging from living trains to hippos whose teeth could be played like xylophones.

The universe depicted by Disney in the early Mickey Mouse cartoons suggested both Charles Fournier’s phantasmal utopian vision of a unification of nature and technology as well as a nightmare world of technology run wild suggested by Max Weber, Franz Kafka, and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (and, later, Chuck Jones).

In contrast, Adorno found quite little to embrace in Disney’s animation. Adorno did not see Mickey Mouse as a revolutionary figure or a critique of modernity, but rather saw him as a “regressive” figure, typical of the “pseudo-individual” created by mass culture: figures whose “uniqueness” was determined by their freakishness, figures whose non-conformity is determined by standards of non-conformity foisted upon them by The Culture Industry. Mickey Mouse's manic, frenetic activities did not represent social struggle, but instead were akin to the “pseudo-individual” jitterbugs of the Jazz Age whose dancing had the “convulsive aspects reminiscent of St.Vitus dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals.”

In short, Benjamin argued the viewer laughed with Mickey Mouse in his modern struggle in a “collective laughter...and therapeutic eruption of mass psychosis” -- Adorno believed the viewer laughs at Mickey Mouse’s antics: “The laughter of the cinema is...anything but good and revolutionary, instead, it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism.”

Indeed, the issue for Adorno was Disney’s seeming contempt for the eccentric and the cinematic pleasure the viewer attains through the ordeal of the eccentric as a primer for one’s own unfreedom: “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.”

Animation and Ideology: Disney Verses Warner Bros.

Animation is both a mimetic representation of the world and a technological process of animating drawn images, ultimately creating a world that not only defies and redefines laws of gravity, physics, time, but erases the difference between humanity and animality, and the differentiation of organic and inorganic matter itself. Kristen Thompson suggested, “The cel animation technique has several unique features which would tend to promote formal play of a disruptive kind. Hollywood film making has largely recuperated these figures by subordinating them to its ideological purposes.”

It is equally important to consider how any subversive ideological aspects of animation, (such as Jones’ critique of cold-war militarism), was also negated by the regulation of animation to a medium for children. In the specific case of WB cartoons, which were made for theatrical use, they ultimately became a staple of Saturday morning cartoons. At the TV broadcast level, they were subsequently re-edited (read: butchered) to fit programming needs. Understandably, the overtly racist cartoons, which featured the vulgar stereotypes of African-Americans or the grotesque caricatures of Asians that populated the WWII-era animated shorts, were removed from circulation during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

Moreover, the more violent content was removed to comply with children’s programming guideline, and entire sections were cut to create space for more commercial time, especially easy to do in the context of a Roadrunner cartoon given its construction as a series of episodic events rather than a linear narrative. As Thompson argued, “The ultimate ideological result of the assumption that cartoons were for children was a trivialization of the medium.” Indeed, by marginalizing these cartoons to mere objects of adolescent amusement, the “cognitive” value of the cartoon is effectively and completely negated, specifically any validity as political critique.

The inherent radical aspects and even dangers of the animation process itself were negated by Disney in the mid-1930s in what might be called an act of Culture Industry self-censorship. The formal shift mirrored an ideological shift as well. Hansen noted, “Mickey’s perverse streaks were sanitized, his rodent features domesticated into neoteric cuteness, the playful anarchic engagement with machinery was functionalized to comply with the work ethic; and outlandish fantasy gave way to an idealized, sentimentalized world.”

Disney’s formal and ideological transition is certainly epitomized by Disney's first animated feature, Snow White (1937), which strictly adhered to the rules and conventions of classical Hollywood cinema: a linear and teleological narrative, continuity editing, and a concealment of the mimetic apparatus (not making the viewer aware of the camera or the animation process itself). The frenetic chaos of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons gave way to a predictable narrative flow in keeping with both Hollywood cinema and the Culture Industry; any self-referencing of the animation process or breaking the barrier between spectator (viewer) and spectacle (cartoon) was eliminated.

Despite the fantastic world of the fairy tale, the Disney adaptation depicted and demanded a world of diagetic and narrative inner reality. The human/animal/machine hybrids were replaced with a pastoral world of a dominated and domesticated nature: Snow White’s forests fall somewhere between pastel Expressionism and Kitsch.

This formal softening of Disney’s animation mirrored a soothing of ideological contradictions within the cartoons and also legitimized existing gender and class structures. The sexual ambiguity of the characters becomes one of age rather than gender: Snow White is a eroticized and virginal “child-mother” who both serves and maintains, as if by instinct, the male homeosocial order of the Seven Dwarves, themselves both “dirty old men” and prepubescent boys. Class differences simply disappear. The Dwarves’ famous motto is the song “Whistle While You Work,” and recreation is instrumentalized in order to make the workplace more bearable: work becomes a form of child’s play. Furthermore, the dwarves work in idyllic mines where diamonds and gems are harvested in abundance, a far cry from the actual economic conditions, and more specifically, the conditions of labor in the 1930s (such as West Virginia coal mines).

Compared to Disney’s idyllic rural towns and forests, one can certainly compare the sharper edge lost in Disney animation with the stark, angular 1950s modernist design of the Mojave Desert in the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons: stones and cactus become transparent, schematic outlines; the desert sands and mesas are garish hues of yellow, pink, and navy blue; precariously balanced plateaus and mountains become as jagged and abstract as the surreal landscapes of Yves Tanguey, most noticeable in There They Go-Go-Go! (1956) and Scrambled Aches (1957).

Moreover, the Coyote’s exploits are not accompanied by lush symphonic melodies, but mechanistic, modernistic, manic, and even menacing jazz themes (while Carl Stalling is credited as “musical director” and arranged the scores, much of the actual music, including the Coyote’s signature theme "Powerhouse" was composed by Raymond Scott in the 1930s: Warner Bros. purchased the rights to Scott’s music in the early 1940s).

As noted, Adorno frequently and notoriously spoke of jazz as a mass culture instrument of regression and pseudo-individuality: the pathetic “convulsive jitterbugs” crowding Jazz Age dance floors (one can only speculate what Adorno would have made of slam-dancing and mosh-pits). For Adorno, jazz served as a soundtrack for human suffering, and likewise jazz music accompanied the Coyote as a figure trapped in the cycle of modern rationality and regression, a problematic figure whose suffering become both a critique of modernity as well as a spectacle of bourgeois sadism.

In the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons, one is presented with a truly epic theater of the absurd, akin to Brecht or Beckett. Like Brecht, there is a constant breakdown of diagetic reality and distancing of the viewer to the action, an estrangement between the spectator and the spectacle, or in Brecht’s terms, a tactical shift from “representation to a commentary on the representation.”

Unlike Disney’s cartoon feature films, the cartoons of the Warner Bros. auteurs (Jones, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freling) routinely reference and violate the cinematic barrier between spectator and audience: Jones’ Duck Amuck (1953) is legendary in its deconstruction of background, foreground, audio synchronization, and the animation process itself.

In There They Go-Go-Go!, the Coyote stands under an elaborate trap-door mechanism, attempting to dislodge the boulders that are clogging it with a pole in order to crush the Roadrunner, who, of course, has long since departed. The Coyote's raison d'être is a stubborn, even pathological need to make the invention work, and in a Brechtian moment of lucidity, he holds up a sign up to the viewer which reads, “What in Heaven’s name am I doing?” -- he is crushed an instant later.

There is no plot in a Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon, simply the movement of one situation to the next; moreover, the situations are absurdly identical (the Waiting for Godot of cartoons?). The Coyote’s attempts to catch the Roadrunner are superceded by his attempts to design an ever more elaborate and cunning means to capture the Roadrunner, endeavors which invariably insure his own destruction.

In regard to gender, the Warner Bros. cartoons also recall the question of sexual ambiguity presented and subsequently abandoned by Disney. The Coyote embodies a distinctly masculine quality, and it is quite natural to refer to the Coyote as “him.” However, the gender of the Roadrunner is never quite certain, and if not female, is certainly feminized, such as the inexplicably long, vampish eyelashes on the Roadrunner...

The Coyote’s occasional attempts to “seduce” the Roadrunner fail based on the assumption that the Roadrunner is indeed a male instead of possibly being a female. In Going! Going! Gosh!, the Coyote dresses in drag and imitates a hitchhiking woman; the Roadrunner stops, but is wearing a long blonde wig: "I already have a date!" his/her sign reads before the Roadrunner speeds away. In Ready, Set, Zoom! (1955), the Coyote dons a “Acme Female Roadrunner Costume,” which is identical to the actual Roadrunner save for its baggy fit on the Coyote.

However, the ruse does not attract the Roadrunner, but instead a score of ravenous and apparently sex-crazed (male) coyotes! This question of gender its itself important to the degree that these cartoons not only provide a critique of modernity, but explicitly the ideology of Futurism: the Roadrunner as a feminine foil to Futurism’s celebration of power: masculinity and the machine.

Benjamin and Jones: Futurism and War

The cinema emerges as the foremost battleground of contemporary art, not because of a futurist or constuctivist enthusiasm for technology, but because film is the only medium that might yet counter the catastrophic effects of humanity’s (already) ‘miscarried reception’ of technology that had come to a head with World War I." The epilogue of Benjamin’s essay explicitly responds to the current historical “situation of politics that Fascism is rendering aesthetic.”

As D.N. Rodowick noted, “Benjamin expressed this duality...as a conflict between the politicization of aesthetics in the Soviet films of the 1920s and the aestheticization of politics in the Nuremberg rallies, captured so powerfully on film by Leni Riefenstal in Triumph of the Will (1937).” Moreover, it is important to consider that Benjamin’s epilogue is not only concerned with Fascism, but Futurism, and it is specifically Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti rather than Hitler or Mussolini who is attacked in the conclusion of “The Work of Art” essay.

Benjamin’s need for this explicit attack of Futurism is to point out the fundamental distinction between the revolutionary aesthetics of Dada verses the fascist aesthetics of Futurism, a distinction central to Benjamin’s underlying political project. In Futurism's final logic, the “aura” of the machine and the beauty of speed and power became an aestheticization of progress and, ultimately, the elevation of warfare as the paradigm of “art”: the war-machine as object d'art. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism” proclaimed: “We will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of Freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.”

Dada and Futurism have a rather complicated and ambivalent relationship. Futurism was ground-breaking in developing the modernist avant-garde of literature, music, and visual arts; it also certainly served as an influence on Dada. Both Dada and Futurism breach the man verses machine dichotomy and postulates an inherent similarly between the organic (man) and inorganic (machine); here one might recall Francis Piciaba's wonderful artwork such as Portrait of Tristan Tzara, which depicts one of Dada's founder’s as a schematic flow chart not unlike an electrical blueprint, or Machine Runs Fast, in which two arrangements of pistons and gears are designated “man” and “woman.” It is also this relationship between man and machine and early cinematic comedy that Gilles Deleuze has discussed regarding the films of Chaplin and Buster Keaton:

Keaton’s biographers and commentators have emphasized his liking for machines, and his affinity in this respect with Dadaism rather than Surrealism...this is the first important aspect of his difference with Chaplin, who advanced by means of tools, and is opposed to the machine...There are very different socialist visions, the communist-humanist in Chaplin, the other anarchistic-mechanistic in Keaton.

Deleuze may have overestimated Surrealism's “opposition” to the machine; Benjamin specifically took Surrealism to task for “the movement’s over precipitous embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of the machine.” Indeed, Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism all share a vision of the similarity, rather than the dichotomy, between men and machines.

This relationship between the body (organic) and machine (inorganic) was also an integral facet of early animation, specifically Disney. One might consider early Mickey Mouse as a Keatonesque figure (Dada creature) rather than a Chaplinesque figure (surreal creature): in other words, Mickey Mouse as “mechanistic-anarchistic” study of the relationship of man and machine, rather than a “communist-humanist” political struggle of man verses machine (as Benjamin would have it).

As for Wile E. Coyote, this relationship between man and machine becomes a thoroughly Beckettesque and Kafkaesque scenario: a useless creature trapped in a dehumanizing and self-annihilating world. Unlike the sometimes cloying nobility of Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” in his struggle against the machine, the Coyote becomes an absurd, unsentimentalized, and even unsympathetic character to the degree he is the active agent in his own self-destruction through his pathological drive towards mastering both progress (his increasingly complicated contraptions) and nature (the Roadrunner).

In this regard, the Coyote becomes a violent critique of not only Futurism’s inexorable logic of the aesthetic beauty of technological destruction, but the very dialectic of modernity: technological progress and human regression. The Coyote pursues his quest seemingly in order to master his circumstances and his surroundings. As Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, “Reason is the organ of calculation...neutral in regards to ends; its element is coordination, the schema of an activity [is] more important than its content.”

Or, as Chuck Jones described the Coyote, “He persists in a course of action long after he has forgotten his original reasons for embarking on it.” Inevitably, every plan and attempt fails, and the viewer is only left to wonder in what way the particular plan and implementation will go horribly wrong.

Not only does the Coyote depict a struggle with the Modern Age that the character inevitably fails to win (Kafka, Beckett), one has to remember the specific context of these cartoons, which date from 1948-1961: the Cold War. Certainly, one must first consider the tenor of Jones’ work of the 1940s, as well as animation as a whole in the World War II era. A strong supporter of FDR, he made Hell Bent for Election (1944) for the UPA, and with Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), he made a series of patriotic shorts featuring the character Private Snafu.

In the early 1940s, it was not uncommon for Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck to battle German troops or even Hitler rather than Elmer Fudd. References and running gags regarding and reinforcing proper war-time conduct such as buying war bonds, observing gas and meat rationing, avoiding limiting unnecessary travel, and civil defense were even more common subtext in the WWII-era cartoons. While the patriotic slant of these WWII cartoons may be historically understandable and the anti-fascist sentiments even laudable, the obvious fact that these cartoons function as virtual propaganda should not be overlooked.

It is in the Cold War era that that Jones’ animation takes on a far more pessimistic treatment of war. The dialectic conflict of man and machine and the dynamics of technology and dehumanization, integral to Disney’s early cartoons, is literally “blown-up” by Chuck Jones in his cartoons of the 1950s. The Coyote’s continual self-destructive experiments are part of an overall critique of modernity’s dialectic of technological progress and human regression and more specific to the 1950s, a critique of the logic (or illogic) of the Cold-War and the Arms Race.

Perhaps Jones' most overt commentary on the Arms Race is Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2 Century (1953). Daffy Duck portrays a pompous and over-confident science-fiction hero (or “your heroship,” as sidekick Porky Pig refers to him) in search of Planet X, which the Earth seeks to conquer for its natural recourses. Instead, he becomes involved in a ferocious battle with Marvin the Martian who claims the planet for Mars (both the Roman God of War and also "Red Planet" referencing Communism and the Soviet Union).

The battle escalates into a conflict of evermore technologically advanced weapons (again, courtesy of the Acme Corporation), finally resulting in the complete annihilation of Planet X save for a small clump of dirt the combatants vie for. Shoving the Martian off what remains of the planet, Duck Dodgers proudly proclaims victory for planet earth. The camera pans down to Porky Pig, precariously holding onto a root under the “planet.” “Big Deal!” he spits, looking at the audience with almost Brechtian contempt.

It is no coincidence that the Coyote favors elaborately planned yet haphazardly constructed and executed explosive traps and/or airborne assaults his attempts to capture the Roadrunner, all of which end with the Coyote’s own destruction, often depicted in a frantic attempt to put out the burning fuse, or his famous plunge to the ground, taken from a bird’s eye view; such shots actually resemble military footage from bomb-bay cameras as bombs are dropped, a device also parodied at the end of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963).

Again, one can consider the location of the Coyote’s constantly failing experiments: a surreal modernist version of the Southwestern deserts of the U.S., home of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. In this way, the Coyote is a metaphor of the rational logic, or rational illogic, or the arms race and that guarantees victory by mutual destruction. As Herbert Marcuse observed, “It may be justifiable, logically as well as historically, to define Reason in terms which include slavery, the Inquisition, child labor, concentration camps, gas chambers, and nuclear preparedness.”

Perhaps one of the more striking aspects of the Coyote's attempts to capture the Roadrunner is his pathological attempt to master the Roadrunner’s speed by developing an even faster mode of travel: rockets, catapults, sails driven by electric fans, or “Acme Jet-Propelled Roller Skates.”

The Roadrunner, as noted, might be seen as an almost archetypal Futurist creature, one whose very existence is based on the celebration of motion and speed; as Marinetti wrote, “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed.” The Roadrunner ignites fires and snaps freeways like rubber bands as it passes; yet more importantly, he can come to an instant stop.

While “animal,” a sort of surreal roadrunner/ostrich hybrid, the Roadrunner's voice is nonetheless a mechanical car-horn; one of the repeated failings of the Coyote is his inability to distinguish the “Beep! Beep!” of the Roadrunner to the “Beep! Beep!” of an oncoming truck (one might also remember the Roadrunner was a popular sports car).

One might argue that the Roadrunner is a Futurist “animal-machine” devoted to speed for its own sake. However, in that the Roadrunner is a feminine (or feminized) creature, rather than masculine, the Futurist equation of virile masculinity and raw machine power, which reaches its own “acme” in war, is turned on its head. It is the Coyote where one sees the Futurist ideal of “man” (gender specific) and “machine” rendered an absurd parody. Not only is the (masculine) Coyote unable to harness the machine's virile and destructive power, the Coyote lacks the essential ability to control speed, motion, and progress itself.

Ultimately, the Coyote can be seen as an embodiment of one dialectic of modernity: technological progress and human regression. The Coyote, guided by the twin intellectual processes of cunning and instrumental reason, becomes a figure whose relationship with technology and progress inexorably results in being overtaken and destroyed by the very course of progress he has created and attempted to master, an issue with profound political stakes in the Cold War era.

Conclusion

Certainly, it is only pure speculation how Benjamin and Adorno may have assessed these cartoon. Perhaps Benjamin would have appreciated Wile E. Coyote as a dialectical study of humanity and technology; a scathing critique of Futurism, and a violent satire of Cold War military “reason.” It is equally likely that Adorno would have disdained these cartoons for the same reasons he disagreed with Benjamin on Disney. For Adorno, perhaps nothing could have been more horrific than finding any humor in the Coyote’s exploits: a regressive response in which the audience learned to mockingly laugh at its own dehumanization, its own incompetence, its own potential for self-destruction in the Atomic era.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arato, Andrew and Elke Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books,1969

Blum, Cinzia Sartini. The Other Modernism. F.T. Marinetti's Futurist Fiction of Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbera Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form. Edited and Tranlated by Jay Ledya. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1977.

Hansen, Miriam. “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer.” New German Critique 56 (Summer 1992): 43-73.

“Of Mice and Ducks: Adorno and Benjamin on Disney.” The South Atalntic Quarterly 92:1 (Winter 1993): 27-61.

“Not a One-Way Street: Benjamin and Cinema.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25 (1999): 306-43.

Horkheimer, Max and Thodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1997.

Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” In Signatures of the Visible, 9-34. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Jones, Chuck. Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times on an Animated Cartoonist. New York: Avon, 1989.

Kracauer, Sigfried, “From The Theory of Film.” In Mast, Cohen, and Braudy, 9-20.

Marcuse, Herbert. “A Note on Dialectic.” In Arato and Gebhardt, 444-51.

Marinetti, Filipio Tomasso. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” In From Modernism to Postmodernism, ed. Lawence Calhoone. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Mast, Gerald, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Panofsky, Erwin. “Style and Medium in Motion Pictures.” In Mast, Cohen, and Braudy, 233-48.

Rodowick, D.N. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Thompson, Kristen. “Implications of Cel Animation Technique.” In The Cinematic Apparatus, ed . Stephen Heath and Teresa de Laruentis, 106-18. London: MacMillian, 1980.

Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism. New York: Verso, 1989.

Zezik, Slajov. A Zezik Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmund Wright. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.

(Originally written as a final project for the course "Disney, Adorno, and the Culture Industry," taught by Prof. Jack Zipes at the University of Minnesota, Fall Semester 1999.)

comments are welcome: doylegreene_57@msn.com

written contents © copyright 2004 Doyle Greene, all rights reserved