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PARTISAN REVIE_W
I have spoken of the departures taken, and the compulsive but
empty returns, in terms of geography; but one can talk of them, too,
in terms of the mind. Known points are left behind here, too, and boun–
daries blur. For example, after Donald is kissed by YaYa, an eruption
of patterned shapes occurs in the air. Donald is, we gather, seeing stars.
But where what we see on the screen ceases to be Donald's ecstatic
vision of things one cannot tell. Is the cock
figh~
between the two men,
for example, something in Donald's head, or is it really happening?
If
it is really happening, is it Donald who visualizes the men as cocks, or
is it just anyone? As the film progresses, and especially with the opening
of the third package, these departures from known mental points be–
come more and more critical, the returns to home base more and more
far-fetched.
But Disney has a hearty enough appetite for the material with
which he is dealing, eventually to
let
"the center fall apart," and cease
to attempt these meaningless returns. He finally surrenders to his material
and lets it have its own way with him-much as Donald Duck, after
he has pulled at the ribbons tying the third package, lets himself get
sucked into the kaleidoscopic vortex they promptly form, and there be
translated. From the moment Donald gazes into the portfolio at the night
sky above Mexico City, and a face materializes out of a star, and he falls
in, questing a kiss, we are returned to known points only by way of
echoes-echoes of former adventures in the film, or echoes of objects
we have seen spilling through the air out of the pinata.
Disney has finally allowed himself to be pulled, as it were, inside out;
for instead of viewing the world from a periphery, as in the first section,
we view it now from blind center. We have a nightmare view. With
Disney's surrender to this view the material attains a sort of integration
again, a nightmare integration. From this point on it is monstrous; it
is, as Mr. Gibbs points out, lewd, and it is, too, psychopathically chaotic,
very hard on the eyes. It is, in short, as much an ordeal to view as a
real nightmare is to undergo. But it at least has so to speak found out
what it is. And it manages, too, as nightmares will, to dredge up some
rather inspired images.
This section of the film deals with exactly the thematic material the
first section dealt with, now from inside out. As in the first section,
"things fall apart." Landscapes, objects, persons are shattered or blur,
suffer translation, as if they were of no more body than reflections in
water. Nothing holds its shape. And through this section, as through
the first, runs the theme of a quest that, after nightmares suffered,
attains its object only to have the moment emptied of all meaning.
Donald pursues various female faces and forms that materialize, out of
air, invitingly. But as he closes in for the kiss, as he dives at the face,
it turns into a flower and his head goes through it as through a paper
hoop-he emerges wearing a collar of petals, a clown's collar. Or per-
