Walt Disney was a name to conjure with when I was a kid. The movies of the 1960s and 1970s were no classics but there were still rereleases (Snow White left me terrified of the Queen for years), the Wonderful World of Disney TV show, the comic books and the legend Disney had built up over years. Small wonder BABES IN TOMORROWLAND: Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 by Nicholas Sammond intrigued me. Alas, like The CIA Book Club the title is clickbait; unlike that book, the content did not intrigue me and I DNFed.
Sammond’s focus isn’t a bad topic: with 20th century urbanization and the new medium of moving pictures, bringing up kids suddenly seemed harder than ever before. Would movies expose them to bad influences? Would living in the city make it easier for them to fall into vice and sin? A boom in child-rearing advice followed, and of course, never went away. Walt Disney cannily promoted himself as a safe haven: you could trust him to turn out quality, family-friendly movies that would be safe for kids. However Disney is little more than a subplot and Sammond draws unconvincing conclusions — did you know the subtext of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Fantasia is that if you leave your kids unsupervised, they’ll screw everything up? The child-rearing stuff wasn’t interesting to me without that.
REACTION! Chemistry in the Movies by Mark Griepp and Marjorie Mikasen seemed full of promise when I started reading and they discussed Jekyll and Hyde topics such as the recurrent use of mirrors in the film adaptations (a point I wish I’d included in Watching Jekyll and Hyde) and speculate about the makeup of Jekyll’s formula. However the movie is also wrong on one point and as it moves on to Invisible Man, The Absent-Minded Professor and more it makes many curious choices. How do you write about cocaine’s history as an anesthetic and not mention the film Edge of Sanity? Why include Back to the Future — yes, plutonium is a chemical, but needing it to power the DeLorean hardly makes this a movie about chemistry? Ultimately the creator seem more interested in real-world chemistry than the movies and I needed more of the latter.
As Paul in Let No Man Put Asunder has the ability to see Kirlian auras I thought an interlibrary loan of PICTURING AURA: A Visual Biography by Jeremy Stolow might be useful. It was, but it was also a slog to read through. Stolow’s history of efforts by mystics, Russian Senmo Kirlian and multiple other parapsychologists to visualize, photograph and explain the human aura is way too credulous about the psychics he profiles and suffused with academic jargon. Among the interesting stuff was the career of screenwriter/parapsychologist Thelma Moss, an arguments that Russians weren’t as big on psi-research as legend tells (Soviet scientists found it incompatible with Marxist ma terialism). Among the weaknesses are that Stolow identifes the paranormal nonfiction magazine Fate as science fiction, making me wonder, as with Reaction!, what errors I’m not catching.
The winner of the week was Samantha Cole’s HOW SEX CHANGED THE INTERNET AND HOW THE INTERNET CHANGED SEX: An Unexpected History. Cole shows how sex goes back to the earliest days of the Internet: a bulletin board providing AIDS information, a Playboy centerfold that became the first digitally transmitted image, sex workers discovering the Internet offered safer ways to conduct their business. Standing against all this were censors, squeamish social networks and nervous hosting companies who flinched from useful sexual information as much as they did hardcore porn. This was a good history with some interesting points (people focus on the damage deepfakes could do in politics rather than their primary use, humiliating women); there’s surprisingly little about child porn which may reflect Cole’s frustration with Protect The Children rationales from anti-sex crusaders.
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