RSL, Disney and Conrad Richter's The Light in the Forest

Next-to-last RSL audio book available from the county library consortium, and this time we have lots of topics to cover.

( 'The Light in the Forest': Summary and some commentary. )

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While stuck in traffic last Sunday night coming home from michelle_nine's wedding (!!), I played some of the more intimate boy/boy scenes in The Short History of a Prince for synn. In the context of other roles he has played, it prompted her to ask after RSL's sexual orientation, which got us talking about whether one can or should speculate on an actor's orientation based on the parts (s)he takes and conviction with which (s)he portrays his/her characters, and whether the actor's previous roles influence a viewer's/auditor's interpretation of a current one.

I admit that since RSL read Walter so convincingly in Short History and infuses so much subtext into (House/)Wilson, among other things, it was easier to consider the possible homosexual subtext in the months True Son spends with Half Arrow in the woods, or the scenes in which the slightly older translator/guard Del Hardy shares his bed. It also raises the question of whether RSL chose to read The Light in the Forest in part because of the boy's sexual ambiguity, or if he read it in such a way to emphasize that ambiguity, or if it's all a big contrived coincidence and I should shut up now.

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Curious about what sort of scholarship has been done on the book, I Google-Scholared it and found an excellent article from the Journal of American Popular Culture by Jeffery P. Dennis called "The Light in the Forest Is Love: Cold War Masculinity and the Disney Adventure Boys" (2004). Dennis writes about how in the 1940s and '50s, the Disney company, reacting to a post-WWII emphasis in America on heterosexual masculinity, shifted traditional cinematic depictions of adventurous male adolescence from pairs of boys enjoying intimate homoromantic bonds and ignoring girls—in essence, buddy films with young protagonists—to individual boys pining for or being seduced by girls while restricting relationships with other males to carefully-distant friendships or rivalries, with the filmmakers relegating homosexual behavior to quirky side characters or creepy/threatening villains. One of Dennis' examples is the film version of The Light in the Forest, which Disney apparently adapted in 1958 and completely changed around so Johnny falls for a coy servant girl and turns his back on his (primitive/homosexual) Indian heritage to be with her.

It's an easy and fascinating read, especially if you're interested in film, queering texts and the buddy genre. The Light in the Forest stuff is mostly discussed in the James MacArthur section if you want to skip down, but I really recommend reading the whole thing.

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So then I picked up the film version to see what Dennis was talking about. ( Witness the path the book didn't take. )

What struck me the most about this little exercise—book, article, movie—is how much Disney, perhaps as much as or more than Hollywood in general, has shaped my expectations of how stories are told. Richter didn't sink into predictable plots or contrived endings; the movie did. I didn't realize where those expectations came from until Dennis pointed out what was going on and I saw how Disney twisted Richter's story into what we expect from a mainstream narrative today.