Kenneth Anger F*cks Around With Mickey Mouse

Kenneth Anger is a lot of things to many people. Some call him a revolutionary for making the blatantly gay Fireworks in a 1950's landscape that would not look too kindly on his cinematic wet dream of being raped by sailors. Others call him a scandal monger, having published the infamous Hollywood Babylon books, accounts of some of the most wicked days and nights in the early history of Tinseltown. However, he is not accorded the title he has most earned these days: elderly director. Having disappeared for several decades, Anger has returned in the last few years, utilizing modern filming equipment but still as obsessed with avant-garde as ever.

Some have written off his 2004 Mouse Heaven as a minor work, but I feel it deserves a second look. A ten minute montage of antiquated Disney memorabilia, Anger comments on a lot of different concepts that are linked to the idea of the Mouse House as an American icon and mainstay in popular culture.

The first is the blatant fetish America has for buying toys of this particular rodent. One of the most interesting sequences is when a figurine with hinged arms is manipulated to the tune of "Teddy Bear Picnic" as if it were masturbating, with each pause in between lyrical lines accented with a squirting sound that obviously stands for ejaculation. We as Americans can not find relief until we buy more of these toys. One figure becomes two, and the song continues as Mickey Mouse jerks off. The sexual impulse to buy breeds more impulses, multiplying into more useless merchandise.

When confronted with his "mate", it is a pretty androgynous Minnie Mouse the audience meets, as if Mickey were merely courting a cross-dressing doppelgänger of himself. He serenades his twin with an old swing time tune of confessing a secret to a lover. Obviously something queer be afoot here.

The puppet sequence again returns to the question of who buys who when purchasing Mickey toys, the consumer or the corporation, who has children across the world spellbound by the figurines. Who is whose addict? Who needs who? "I'm your puppet" the song cries out, but it never says who is pulling the strings, Disney or us? An almost S&M gas mask for Mickey flashes by in a panorama of increasingly bizarre renditions of Mickey as the singer begs "make me do right, or make me do wrong". More ghastly looking figures flash over the scene of the carousel losing control in the homoerotic Strangers on a Train. The circus, full of manipulated freaks, is falling apart.

The figures dance as the song now proclaims how "I'm not gonna talk about it". No one will want to address the problems because the show is just so cute, who would possibly want to spoil the fun? A 1940's automoton flashes. We as consumers are the robot, praying to the gilded god of Mickey. Multi-dimensional, he is a universal icon among the stars, and we are forever encased in his cage, Made in China labeled on the bars.

This is no simple Logo TV short, obviously, but no one ever said Kenneth Anger was simple. This movie seems like the missing chapter of one of his notorious books, an account of a lurid affair between two manipulative forces, engaged in a snake-eating-it's-tail motif until destroying themselves. Sadly for us, we, our culture, our children, are engaged in a struggle with our favorite figure of luxury. And Disney World is just still growing.