SOURCE: “Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney,” in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 27-61.

In the following essay, Hansen discusses differences in the way Disney was viewed by Adorno and Walter Benjamin, finding in their respective analyses important keys to their opinions on twentieth-century American mass culture.

Walter Benjamin's reflections on film and mass culture repeatedly revolved around Disney, in particular early Mickey Mouse cartoons and Silly Symphonies.¹ Theodor W. Adorno took issue with Benjamin's investment in Disney, both in direct correspondence and implicitly, in his writings on jazz and, after his friend's death, in the analysis of the culture industry in his and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. These scattered references to Disney encoded central questions concerning the politics of mass culture, the historical relations with technology and nature, the body and sexuality. They demonstrate, in an exemplary way, a mode of...