The Extended Universe:
How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World
by Vicky Osterweil (Haymarket Books)
This is a book about the Disney corporation and its role in contemporary society. It traces the Disney’s corporate and cultural practices from Walt Disney’s initial creations (which he lost control over, a sort of Original Sin that would motivate his choices) to the modern day aesthetic dominance of The Franchise as a concept. Much as the ideas themselves, The Franchise was not created by Disney, but the corporation has come to embody and perfect it. The idea itself is a paradigm that determines social and fiscal practices, usually in concert.
It is polemic, and we love polemics here. In a mixture of both business history, legal theory, and media criticism. The author aims at the numerous ways that the Disney formula is malign. What and how that means has changed over the years, but the takeaway is their mastery of making the public, private. Disney’s winning formula was to take old stories and convert them into something salable, which works to push out the public forms both by writing over them in people’s minds and putting a legal lock on them. This only works its way further out with the franchise system and its conceptual dominance of locking in a sort of collector mentality to art. As the corporation grows even more global, the process drives creation in ways that are not in line with either good aesthetics or sound business practice (at least in a conventional-wisdom sense). All of this makes the world a worse place.
The three-fold conceptualization of the book neatly divides into the good, bad, and ugly of it. To start with the ugly, the book is about intellectual property. The author does not believe in private property. Ergo, it is like making a vegan a judge on Bakeoff: the results are correct, but within a set of known parameters. With that in mind, the piracy chapter itself is well-written. But throughout the book in general, there are a lot of productive places that the book could go, that it does not. Even if the answers are right, it is going to be necessarily outside of the scope of a majority of readers.
The good is the business history. This extends beyond history proper and into the contemporary practices. The closing few chapters are the best, in that the three-fold method produces more insight into the how and why of the Disney corporation. It expresses a big picture look at the dissatisfaction that people have with the modern media landscape, and gets into why it developed and continues in that fashion. The earlier history of the company is equally well-detailed, but the book could have been an expansion on the conclusion and been just as interesting.
The media theory sections are shallow and reductive. I first thought this was an argumentation technique of a sort of soft straw man, but the author treats her own arguments the same way. It is all very introduction to semiotics, offering the sort of critiques that Disney itself makes, complaining about CinemaSins by doing its own CinemaSins.1 Often, it feels like apology, where the author grapples with her own feelings about some work. This would work in a stricter polemic, but instead of offering targeted gripes, the opinions are extrapolated as if a consensus position. Again, as something of a theme here, it works, but is limited.
In general then, I like it, but it gets caught up between doing too much about too many things and too little about one particular thing.
My thanks to the author, Vicky Osterweil, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Haymarket Books, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 