Deconstruction Zone — Part 2
Read Deconstruction Zone — Part 1 (Or: Semiotics Means Never Having to Signify You’re Sorry)
A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination but does not advance our knowledge.
— J. Black, 1803
In my last column I began to analyze postmodern critique as it is applied to animation. As stated before, the problem is not postmodern theory itself: though the tenets of semiotics are largely incomprehensible to those not grounded in modern linguistic theory, the ideas are not inadmissible. The problem, dear readers, is the adoption of theory as dogma, especially when the proponents fail to research their subject adequately or invoke historical and cultural alternatives that supply equally valid — or, in fact better — explanations of a given artifact.
Although I have been focusing on a representative text (“The Same Thing We Do Every Night:’ Signifying Same-Sex Desire in Television Cartoons,” by Jeffery P. Dennis, Journal of Popular Film and Television, V. 31, No. 3, Fall 2003), I have noted that other semiotic analysts utilize theory to promote ideology. Dr. Dennis, as I have noted, holds several advanced degrees and is certainly no slouch. However, in this article the blind acceptance of semiotics and a blind eye toward animation history and culture seduces a learned author and turns what might have been an interesting thesis into postmodern piffle.
After postulating that Ruff and Reddy, and most certainly Yogi Bear and Boo Boo were gay romantic partners by reason of codes embedded in their cartoons, Dennis goes on to allege that “During the 1970s the increasing visibility of gay identities added romantic partnerships to the conceivable codings of same-sex dyads... forcing producers to defuse the possibility through continuous demonstration of heterosexual desires. As a consequence, same-sex dyads all but disappeared from animation, replaced by characters involved in heterosexual romances...” In other words, greater public awareness of gays terrified producers out of making cartoons with same-sex dyads.
It may have been that the HB cartoons and virtually every other cartoon studio turned to the superhero (which Dennis does not mention) and rock-band genres as a result of shifts in tastes among audiences and changing definitions of what would entertain prepubescent consumers in a new decade. Dennis also fails to mention the name Fred Silverman, who was far more influential in what animation presented in the 1970s than Umberto Eco or Roland Barthes would ever be. It is difficult, and in the final analysis somewhat risible to believe that animation changed styles in the 1970s because producers and broadcasters suddenly worried that a generation of cereal-munching kids gained the enlightenment to code cartoon buddies as “gay.”
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