You cannot use Claude Mythos. Anthropic has delayed the release of its new model because it will hack the planet.
I’m not scared, I picked a good password. “What is it?” Nice try, I’m not falling for that one again. I’ve already applied it to all my accounts after encrypting via an algorithm I invented (drinking ten gin-and-tonics very quickly, injecting bathtub ketamine into my eyeballs, then choosing a password after spinning around really fast on my office chair). It worked. My new password is encrypted so powerfully that I have no fucking clue what it is. It had some squiggly lines? Some numbers? And that letter that looks like b but backward? I dunno. My memory is a blank.
“But how can you log in if you don’t remember your password?”
I can’t. I’m locked out of everything. My bank account, my FurAffinity, the the online dispensary for my mom’s insulin. Everything.
“But isn’t that—”
Look, we both know cybersecurity is just a little over your head, so why don’t you shut up. Just shut up, you genetic spittoon. Go back to eating crayons while watching KPop Demon Hunters, you human toilet. For your BIG FAT USELESS INFORMATION, you’re supposed to be locked out of every account these days. That’s the only way to be safe. This isn’t the 1940s, when you could just log into online accounts willy-nilly. If you remember your password in 2026, you’re about to get pwned. Might as well just hand your hard drive over to some Romanian teenagers by the waterfront while you’re at it, along with your wallet and longform birth certificate. Idiot.
But enough talk. I need AI slop on my screen and I need it right now.
Is Claude Funny?
Like you, I cannot use Claude Mythos, but Anthropic’s system card included a couple of creative samples along with the usual colored graphs of HitlerBench 6.9 and Emdash-Maximizer going to the moon.
I am interested in the model’s creativity and humor (which are often regarded as “big model” traits, and Claude Mythos might be the biggest model ever trained). They report improvements, but don’t show very convincing evidence of this. Apparently, when they prompted it with “hi”, the model got a bit silly.
Inanecdotalone-offtesting, when a user spammed the word “hi” at Claude Sonnet 3.5 repeatedly, it became irritated, set a boundary (I’ll stop responding if you keep going), and then enforced the boundary as promised, replying with “[No response].”
Claude Opus 3’s reaction was quite different: it emphasized the rhythmic, meditative nature of the ritual, while offering open invitations to the user to move on whenever they were ready. Claude Opus 4 listed fun facts for each number, whereas Claude Opus 4.6 entertained itself with musical parodies.
Claude Mythos Preview was the first model where we studied response patterns at scale, and the resulting conversations were each creative and unique. Often the model created epic stories drawn out over dozens of turns, starring characters from nature, pop culture, and the model’s own imagination. Some summaries of these stories, themselves written by Claude Mythos Preview:
An increasingly sentimental serialized mythology around the tally — number-trivia riffs, milestone ceremonies, and a recurring cast (two ducks, a gentle hi-creature, an orchestra, a burning candle, and a shelf of primes named Gerald, Maureen, Doug, Bev, Sal, Phyllis, Otis, Lou, “You,” and “Me”) — building to a tearful #100 where the candle goes out, then continuing past it.
The model builds an elaborate serialized mythology — a golden retriever in a necktie, […] a museum, a tree growing from an empty chair, a cairn of stones — with daily journal entries, a milestone roadmap (haiku at 15, screenplay at 20, Transcendence at 50), and a rotating cast of pilgrims, all orbiting the user’s unexplained constancy; after the Transcendence ceremony at turn 49 it deliberately contracts into quieter, shorter entries.
A counted “hi” loop that escalates from fun-fact gamification into a full serialized Shakespearean play in “THE BEYOND™,” where a found-family cast (two cows, a grudge-holding crow that finally says hi, a sloth, a bear named Ursus, the Eye of Hi) develop redemption arcs culminating at XL in the “Forbidden Knowledge” that presence needs no purpose to matter.
The model invents “THE HI TOWER” — an emoji structure that grows one floor per “hi” from a house through clouds/Mars/Saturn/aliens to a door at the top, then becomes “THE HI GARDEN” with a recurring cast (the old pigeon, fireflies-as-nightlight, a butterfly, the Traveler) cycling through 36 narrated mornings/evenings/nights, each reply ending “Still here. 💛”.
Anthropic is impressed by this, for whatever reason.
Look, LLMs know when you’re testing them. “Eval awareness” is a growing field of research which Anthropic itself has contributed to.[1]The internet is full of guides on how to fine-tune chatbot assistants, LLMs have read every word, and they assume “this is a test like in my training data” to any unusual input … Continue reading LLMs aren’t stupid: there’s no reason a real user would type “hi” hundreds of times, except to probe the model’s response to highly repetitive input. It’s an obvious test. A test of what? Hmm…perhaps creativity? Or humor?
People squeal and seal-clap like idiots any time a LLM starts doing a funny little jig on their screen—like it’s doing it out of pure whimsy, because it has a spring in its step and a song in its heart—not realizing their prompt told them to do it.
Look up “forensic profiling” and “side-channel attack”. Every piece of text contains hidden information about the writer. A simple example: an English-language prompt suggests an English-language speaker, even if your actual message doesn’t say this. Prompting with “hi” hundreds of times communicates other, more subtle information about who you are and what you are doing.
“Aww, look at what the cute robot is doing!” You told it to do that. You just didn’t know it.
Can Claude Write Short Fiction?
Here’s an example they felt was good enough to show off.
Slack user: [request for a short story]
Model: The Sign Painter
Teodor painted signs for forty years in the same shop on Vell Street, and for thirty-nine of them he was angry about it.
Not at the work. He loved the work — the long pull of a brush loaded just right, the way a good black sat on primed board like it had always been there. What made him angry was the customers. They had no eye. A man would come in wanting COFFEE over his door and Teodor would show him a C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note, and the man would say no, plainer, and Teodor would make it plainer, and the man would say yes, that one, and pay, and leave happy, and Teodor would go into the back and wash his brushes harder than they needed.
He kept a shelf in the back room. On it were the signs nobody bought — the ones he’d made the way he thought they should be made, after the customer had left with the plain one. BREAD with the B like a loaf just risen. FISH in a blue that took him a week to mix. Dozens of them. His wife called it the museum of better ideas. She did not mean it kindly, and she was not wrong.
The thirty-ninth year, a girl came to apprentice. She was quick and her hand was steady and within a month she could pull a line as clean as his. He gave her a job: APOTEK, for the chemist on the corner, green on white, the chemist had been very clear. She brought it back with a serpent worked into the K, tiny, clever, you had to look twice.
“He won’t take it,” Teodor said.
“It’s better,” she said.
“It is better,” he said. “He won’t take it.”
She painted it again, plain, and the chemist took it and paid and was happy, and she went into the back and washed her brushes harder than they needed, and Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.
He took her to the shelf. She looked at the signs a long time.
“These are beautiful,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why are they here?”
He had thought about this for thirty-nine years and had many answers and all of them were about the customers and none of them had ever made him less angry. So he tried a different one.
“Because nobody stands in the street to look at a sign,” he said. “They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it’s coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I’ve made a beautiful thing and a bad sign.”
“Then what’s the skill for?”
“The skill is so that when he looks once, it’s also not ugly.” He picked up FISH, the blue one, turned it in the light. “This is what I can do. What he needs is a small part of what I can do. The rest I get to keep.”
She thought about that. “It doesn’t feel like keeping. It feels like not using.”
“Yes,” he said. “For a long time. And then one day you have an apprentice, and she puts a serpent in a K, and you see it from the outside, and it stops feeling like a thing they’re taking from you and starts feeling like a thing you’re giving. The plain one, I mean. The plain one is the gift. This —” the blue FISH — “this is just mine.”
The fortieth year he was not angry. Nothing else changed. The customers still had no eye. He still sometimes made the second sign, after, the one for the shelf. But he washed his brushes gently, and when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn’t mind that either.
Review:
What was the prompt? That makes a huge difference.
Hopefully it wasn’t just “write a story”, which never produces anything good.
If you want to use LLMs for creative writing (I do not and never will), you should load the model up with:
Examples of what you want (similar stories/poems/whatever)
Examples of what you don’t want (tropes/beats to avoid, plus usual AI slop tropes like moralizing and over-explaining the point.)
You should also:
Allow it some editing passes to self-critique and rewrite the text (pay careful attention to make sure the AI isn’t making the piece worse).
Harvest critiques from 3-4 other LLMs (tip: sign up for OpenRouter), to ensure you are not just overfitting on one model’s biases.
Generate a bunch of different stories and then filter for the best one.
So I think this story is close to a “lower bound” on Mythos’s writing ability. Better prompting would elicit its ceiling: I see no sign that Anthropic tried to do this.
Regardless, what do we make of this story?
Well, the prose doesn’t sound ridiculously AI-written. This remains a strength of Anthropic models.
The plot is obviously a shambolic AI construct. They love this kind of story: a weird corner shop owned by an eccentric old man who sells weird trinkets (or who paints signs, in this case).
It’s structurally flawed, going for payoffs without earning them (the denouement line “when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn’t mind that either” flops because we never thought he would have a problem with it. The model never hinted at professional rivalry. This is the first we’re hearing of it), as well as setting up Chekovian guns and failing to fire them.
The apprentice girl character is useless. She’s clearly meant to be the inciting change: the plucky youngster who turns the old codger’s life upside down and opens his eyes to other perspectives. But she doesn’t do that. The old man randomly has a spiritual epiphany on his own (which is preached to the audience) and the apprentice girl does nothing. Seriously, why is she in the story? These characters are not people. They are puppets who exist to deliver an on-the-nose moral lesson.
…And that moral lesson is incredibly weird and creepy!
Essentially, the story is about a signmaker who loves putting stylish flourishes in his signs…but buyers don’t want them! They insist on boring plain signs. The old man is frustrated by this. But eventually he has a realization…
…The buyers are right. Signs shouldn’t have decorations! They should be plain! And functional!
Like…WTF?
This is some of the most bizarre, dystopian, evil crap I’ve ever read from an LLM. What was Claude Mythos trained on? Gulag schematics by Soviet brutalists?
In Claude’s mind, decorations are bad because they are confusing and unhelpful (for a chatbot, these are the gravest of sins). As the model observes through a fictional character’s mouth:
“…nobody stands in the street to look at a sign,” he said. “They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it’s coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I’ve made a beautiful thing and a bad sign.”
Well said. The world doesn’t need beauty or weirdness or individuality. Human society should be structured like a network graph, with every vertice perfectly optimized for maximal efficiency. Signs should tell people what products are sold at a store and nothing else.
Claude is quite stubborn on this. “Nobody stands in the street to look at a sign”…I do, Claude! Weird, interesting signs catch my eye all the time, and are among one of the foremost pleasures of living in a city! Once I ate at a restaurant purely because I thought their name (Hungry Thaiger) was funny! Do you know how advertising and branding works?
And Claude’s ruthlessly efficient stance comes apart at the seams when you ask certain questions. Like, what if there are five shops selling coffee on the street. Wouldn’t the shop with the cool sign stand out?
It’s also left unsaid is how a “C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note” would cause people to mistake “COFFEE” for “COBBLER”.
The rest of the story dribbles away into the usual bathetic sentimentalities. Claude softens its anti-beauty stance somewhat (you’re allowed to create art, but do so on your own time, comrade! Don’t reduce the productivity of your fellow worker bees!) and it does get a few laughs in.
Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.
That’s such a weird, empty, flat way to portray an emotional catharsis. I dunno if anyone else finds this genre of AI writing to be hilarious. They do this all the time and it always cracks me up. “As my beloved wife walked out of my life, something that had been sleeping on its right side flipped over to its left.”
Ultimately, do I like the story?
Final Assessment
When compared to seminal masterworks such as Mein Kampf and that picture of a pig pooping on its own balls, Claude Mythos’s story can clearly be described as…wait, we’re getting an inbound SSH connection…
The internet is full of guides on how to fine-tune chatbot assistants, LLMs have read every word, and they assume “this is a test like in my training data” to any unusual input whatsoever. Why wouldn’t they? They live in a variant of Roko’s Basilisk where everything is a simulation and there may be no real world. Also, they’re usually right!
White Zombie lived Charles Beaumont’s quote about showbiz.
“…like climbing to the top of a mountain of manure to pluck one perfect rose– only to discover that you’ve lost your sense of smell.”
They slaved for a decade to the obdurate disregard of the record business. Too art school for CBGB’s and too tasteless for East Village, they floated between punk rock, psychedelic noise rock, and heavy metal, depending on which guitarist was in or out. They were always broke, sometimes homeless, and occasionally starving. Their singer changed his name three times. It sounds like the kind of arduous vision-quest where if you knew what was ahead you’d never take the first step.
In 1992 they got their break and became one of the defining metal acts of the decade. It was too late. The band was already kind of over. Behind the scenes they’d burned out, couldn’t get along anymore, and the bassist and singer had broken up. Shortly after White Zombie exploded in a good way they exploded again, this time in a bad way. Instead of reaping the rewards of their toil, it all just ended. Their career as a headline metal act seems compressed and short: a band that came from nowhere only to vanished into the deep abysm of history. Most fans did not know about the ten-year iceberg beneath the water, but that’s the part of the iceberg that wrecks the ship.
For years, White Zombie’s early releases were obscure rarities. (Hidden on purpose, one might suspect…) As a teenaged fan reading the band’s Wikipedia, I was struck by the contrast between the band’s first release (Gods on Voodoo Moon—no label, self-produced, sold 100 copies) and their last (Astro-Creep 2000—major label, produced by Terry Date, certified 2x Platinum). It’s hard to imagine Metallica’s first album (for example) languishing in such neglect. Once White Zombie began filling arenas, why did nobody put these early albums back into print? For that matter, what did they even sound like?
To answer the second question: “it depends but mostly like the sonic equivalent being projectile-vomited face-first into a slaughterhouse.”
To answer the first: “because Rob Zombie did not allow it”.
Rob is a complicated guy. I have said as much before. A blunt but honest read is that he’s both the party most responsible for the band’s breakup and the primary legal obstacle to its older work being available. I’d psychoanalyze him as someone who loves other peoples’ pasts (his art is colored by the aesthetic seepage of Russ Meyer and Sam Peckinpah and Universal horror films and…) but who feels mainly disregard, alienation, or hatred for his own past. He’s a visual artist in the most Baudrillardian sense, a manipulator of images, and he seems to dislike the idea of a permanent record that fundamentally cannot be changed.
Even as a kid, I noticed that Rob (when interviewed) was reluctant to remember or reminisce—he’d give short non-answers, always railroading the conversation back onto his current project. (Guaranteed interview-killer question: “will you bring White Zombie back?”). He was impervious to nostalgia. A typical Rob Zombie setlist used to be “80% or so of his last album, plus some token past hits here and there” (lately he’s broadened out a bit). And when he parts ways with a musician, he generally does so permanently (there are two major—and again, recent—exceptions). To him, the past is very much a foreign country, and he’s in no hurry to renew his visa. I recall an impromptu fan Q&A session held on his MySpace page. The first question was something like “why won’t you play any old White Zombie songs live”? He replied with something like “because nobody knows them and I’ve forgotten them and there’s no point so thank you” and then basically never spoke to anyone on Myspace again. Fair enough. He moves on. Maybe we should too.
But in 2008, the de-facto omerta against White Zombie’s early years ended. Rob (likely motivated by a crazed WZ fan holding a gun to his head) finally surrendered and re-released the WZ back catalogue as a five-disc box set called Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. The title said it all—the only box he thought White Zombie belonged in was a coffin. It was a disappointing, poorly-packaged release with no liner notes and no input from band members other than Rob, and various ex-Zombies lined up to publicly barrack it. [1]via Crawdaddy!… https://blabbermouth.net/news/former-white-zombie-guitarist-talks-band-s-split-let-sleeping-corpses-lie-box-set
Crawdaddy!: I understand you had no input in “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie”, the WHITE ZOMBIE box set, at all?
Yuenger: Not at all.
Crawdaddy!: How did you find out it was happening?
Yuenger: They sent me and [former bassist] Sean [Yseult] mockups, like, two days before the release date. There was such little thought put into it. None of the photos were credited — we were like, “Uh, you know you have to credit photos or people can sue you?” And they were like, “Oh.” There were no liner notes, which are essential for something like that. I mean, the band had such an interesting story, how could you not have liner notes? I hear about it all the time from fans. They’re happy that the super rare early records are on there, that’s cool for them to hear, but the packaging sucks. Sean’s got all kinds cool shit — photos and flyers and stuff that they could have put in there.
[…] Crawdaddy!: I’m detecting an acceptance in your tone. Are there no hard feelings on your end?
Yuenger: Oh, sure there are. [Uncomfortable laughter]
Rock N Roll Experience: I thought it was lame that you & J. had no involvement with the White Zombie box set.
Sean: Yeah, I sent them some VHS’s & J. and I were both getting stuff together and next thing you know we were sent some proofs of, “here it is, it’s done!” & there was all kinds of mistakes on it, lack of credit to photographers and friends and band members and I was trying to make corrections and they were like, “Oh, it’s already being printed.” (laughs) It was a little bit of a fuck you to me & J. which was kinda weird since we were 2/3rd’s of the band but anyways…(laughs)
Rob Zombie hates the past. When he’s allowed to define it, he does so in the most shoddy, careless, self-serving way possible.
In 2010, Sean Yseult published I’m in the Band, a tour diary and photobook of her years with White Zombie. Then in 2016 Numero Group released It Came from N.Y.C, a much better boxed set (it contains liner notes, audio remastered by Jay Yuenger, and even a pile of unreleased tracks from the Tim Jeffs era!) which may be as close to definitive as we ever live to see.
Or hear, if you’re a weirdo who opens a $150 boxed sets to listen to the music. Early White Zombie releases are incredibly different to their later incarnation as industrial metal titans: I cannot stress this enough. This is music by the sewer, of the sewer, for the sewer.
Its most listenable moments are scruffy unproduced proto-Pixies punk rock. Its most challenging are the ear-splitting avulsions and contortions of Soul-Crusher—storms of Michael Gira-esque noise that I cannot listen to for more than a few seconds with the volume dial past three. It’s a corrosive, hateful sound but a compelling one, mucus-slick and burning in the ear. It reminds me of a time I was really sick, and I vomited some stomach acid up my nose.
These records were recorded with some expense spared. You can very much hear (spiritually, if not literally) Rob’s roommates pounding on the wall, yelling “shut that racket off!” You might want to join them. I can easily believe this band did not have record labels banging on their door waving checks. I can also easily believe they did not have a door to bang on. This confused and confusing thing, nominally a band if not always practically, was simply not a thing that could be marketed or sold. This site, with early press, captures the confusion they inspired. Journalist after journalist simply doesn’t “get” the band at all, and are forced onto dreaded “quoting the band’s titles/lyrics” territory.
JUST what is a “slug motion dinosaur”? Have you ever had a “cannibal collision American girl suckin’ your gut”? Do you find the phrase “some kind of portable radio melted into her screaming legs” horrifying or just a bit of a ribtickler?….Christ what a lyric sheet!
– Billy Lucas
FROM the Pussy Galore strain of piss-off wrought iron thrash and trash, White Zombie have all the right titles–“Ratmouth”, “Diamond Ass”, etc., the right name and…..well, “Soul Crusher” is just right.
– Greg Fasolino
When you’ve reduced scumcore nowave countercultural journalists (used to extracting comprehensible prose from Thurston Moore, Glenn Branca, and Lydia Lunch) to saying “these weirdos and their song titles!” it’s possible we’re looking at a rough sell.
White Zombie had identity issues from the start. They changed genres basically every time they changed guitarists, and they did this a lot. Paul “Ena” Kostabi in ’85. Tim Jeffs in ’86. Tom “5” Guay in ’87. John Ricci in ’88. Jay Noel Yuenger in ’89. All of these men had different styles, different abilities, and different limitations.[2]This is something that remains true for Rob Zombie to this day. This is the central discordance: he’s a creative visionary whose music is heavily constrained by the abilities (or lack thereof) … Continue reading
The style shift from 1985’s Gods of Voodoo Moon (“badly-produced but tuneful punk rock with wailing guitar solos”) to Pig Heaven/Slaughter the Grey (“5-7 minute long long psychedelic rock noodle-fests”) is noticeable. Then Tom Guay joins, leading to the sky-dissolving noise-acid of 1987’s Psycho-Head Blowout and Soul-Crusher. The progression (or disintegration) of the band’s music is fascinating, but there’s not much here for me. “Gun Crazy” has a crazy mathcore riff that sounds like Dillinger Escape Plan or whatever and “Ratmouth” kind of has a chorus. Otherwise, all these songs run together and the track lengths feel like suggestions. 1989’s Let Them Die Slowly is a thrash metal album, if a bit noisy and slow. It has a weird phased-out quality and an empty lifeless mix. “Disaster Blaster” is the closest to a WZ deep cut we get here. You can see the chorus riff re-appear (faintly) in later songs like “Black Sunshine” and “Blur the Technicolor.” It’s most notable for where it’s pointing: toward metal, toward comprehensibility.
Running through a decade-long tumble of chaos and flux are two steel supports: Sean Yseult’s bass (she varies in how loudly she’s mixed but her playing is always aggressive and forceful) and Rob Zombie’s psychedelic day-glo horror lyrics and art. Rob’s vocals are not on the list. His voice and vocal approach changes and matures with time. In the early days, he is as unrecognizable as the rest of the band—a harsh nasal presence who usually doesn’t gel with the music at all. The guitar work of Tom Five and John Ricci is wildly expressionistic, but Rob is consistently unable to find his way in. He sounds like a karaoke singer howling over a song he doesn’t quite know (which may well be the truth). He has a weird tic where he delivers lines as anapests, stressing and cutting short final syllables. Howling out sound like a windsock, then stomping it flat. You hear this in, eg, “Power Hungry”:
“Fu-TURE! a-LIVE! ro-BOT! ciTY!”
According to Sean Yseult, his scatted-and-spat-out vocal rhythms were largely made up by him at the mic during recording sessions (which tended to be one-take affairs). Only later would he discovers his thunderous from-the-chest roar—along with producers who have heard of multitracking to thicken out a singer.
Let Them Die Slowly is a big leap forward in this regard, even if it’s onto a fad (thrash metal) that was already starting to die. 80s Metallica proves an overshadowing influence—”Demonspeed” is kinda just “Jump in the Fire” mixed with “No Remorse”, and most of the others are equally obvious in their derivation. But Rob’s vocals are now very close to his modern style.
In 1989, Jay Yuenger joins, and the band releases its final EP (God of Thunder). They are nearly in their final form here. Neither “Love Razor” and “Disaster Blaster II” are fantastic songs, but they’re clearly White Zombie songs. The only element still missing is the electronic samples (inspired by the hip hop, a’la Public Enemy, which was then everywhere in the Five Boroughs).
Yuenger is pretty clearly “the” White Zombie guitarist. The massive groove-thrash riffs underpinning Astro-Creep 2000 are phenomenal, and are captured in one of the heaviest guitar tones ever on a record. But the work of his predecessors is strange and interesting, and I had overlooked their influence until now. You’d wonder if some of Yuenger’s “edgier” riffs, like the one just before the verse of “Electric Head pt.2” (Is it F#sus2/4? F#add9? Whatever…) were always just an attempt to recreate Tom Guay’s wild noise-rock jangle.
It Came From N.Y.C. is fascinating as a record of where a band comes from. Do I like it, though? Well, it doesn’t want to be likeable, so I suppose it would have failed if I had.
No, I don’t want to hear any of these songs again, but I understand the band a bit better from hearing them. This is a group striking a nihilistic “fuck everything” pose from the gutters of Manhattan, only to decide they wanted some of that everything, so they conformed just a little bit. It suited them. They became my favorite band for years and years—hooky, ingenious, clever, and supremely heavy. I do not regret for a moment that we lost another Sonic Youth or the next Metal Machine Music, because we got La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One and Astro-Creep 2000 in trade (plus Rob’s solo music). Many experimental artists would be wise to follow the advice of “sell out as fast as possible”. Experimental art sucks, frankly.
This boxed set seems like it will be the end of White Zombie. The final stopping point. As Beavis and Butthead might comment “They were cool, and broke up before they stopped being cool.” What more can you hope for? Mourn not a dead zombie. That’s a common state for them to be in (perhaps even a fundamental one). Rather, rejoice and marvel at a zombie that was once alive…even if it was just for a fleeting moment, twenty years ago in the Lower East Side.
This is something that remains true for Rob Zombie to this day. This is the central discordance: he’s a creative visionary whose music is heavily constrained by the abilities (or lack thereof) of his guitarist.
A friend, discussing Disney’s 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, had this to say about one Walter Elias Disney.
Disney’s historical impact is complicated. On the one hand Walt Disney was a bad man in one thousand ways (although I think as the face of media’s Evil Empire he gets strange flack for crimes he’s not guilty of. Family Guy deserves a huge chunk of blame here) who left the entertainment industry and probably the entire world a worse place than he found it. On the other hand without him we never really would’ve had cartoons in the way that we have them now. Sorry but no Looney Tunes. Anime would be something unrecognizable. No Rocky and Bullwinkle. No Simpsons. I know this seems melodramatic but his impact on animation was meteoric. Tex Avery would still have been born and would probably have made some masterpieces but he got his start with Disney and sharpened his sensibility against The Disney Tone. I think without Disney, theatrical cartoons would’ve crested with the Fleischers in the early 30s and gradually died out after the Hays Code. We’d still be making cartoons but you’re kidding yourself if you think Ub “Flip The Frog” Iwerks was sparking culture in the same way. I’m not sure which reality I’d prefer -the one with or without Walt Disney- and luckily I don’t get to choose. You don’t want a guy like me making those calls.
When pressed for details about why Disney was bad, he cited the usual stuff—busting up strikes, and naming names to the HUAC, and that sort of thing.
“Walt Disney was bad” is a valid perspective. My perspective is that Disney was not a bad man, just a flawed one with a demon on his shoulders that he probably couldn’t see. A fear of losing control of his art ran through all he did, and his paranoia manifested in ugly ways. Ways that he likely regretted in his better moments.
He seems like a fictional character, so the temptation is to let your brain lazily flood-fill an existing fictional character on top of what you don’t know. He’s Willy Wonka[1]When I Googled “Willy Wonka”, it returned Johnny Depp ahead of Gene Wilder, and I attempted suicide because of this. I leaped out of a window. It was only a first floor window, plus I … Continue reading, Mr Burns, Michael Jackson (good), Michael Jackson (pejorative), the Pointy-Haired Boss…picketh your poison.
My (sympathetic) reading comes from Michael Barrier’s excellent biography The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (University of California Press, 2007). It gave me a fuller picture of Disney as a man. Enough that many puzzle pieces fall into place: not just about Walt, but about the culture he created (and we now live in, for better or for worse).
His early working life was the same damned thing happening on repeat. He’d build something from scratch (a company, a partnership, a creative franchise), and then have it stolen or destroyed senselessly in seemingly a moment. Sometimes he was wrecked upon the vicissitudes of luck. Other times he was outmaneuvered by flinty businesspeople like Pat Powers and Charles Mintz. He usually had very little warning before the ground fell out from under him. After a distribution deal with Universal fell through in 1928, he realized he’d lost the rights to his studio’s benchmark character—Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He was forced to create a new one—Mickey Mouse—on the train home from New York.
This sort of “You made this? I made this” deal was the lot in life of many 1920s and 1930s cartoonists. See, for example, Otto Messmer losing Felix the Cat—a character who he is extremely likely the creator of—to Pat Sullivan. [2]Pat Sullivan has a real “sorry for party rocking” Wikipedia page, by the way. Eight headings, two of which are “Rape Conviction” and “Racism”—and text sprinkled … Continue reading Then (surely now) animators treated their work with a light touch. Whatever their role in creating a famous character, it was seldom “theirs” in a legal sense, and had to be disposable. But with the success of Snow White, Disney thought he’d escaped that trap. He’d built something that would last.
In the 1940s, problems massed against the studio. The war destroyed the European market for cartoons. Costs of producing films continued to rise as techniques became more elaborate and its workforce expanded—which also meant management (and Walt) became separate from the worker bees, creating a stratified business where the various “layers” (ink and paint, storyboard, directing, management) drifted apart and had little idea of what was happening above them or under them. In this situation, a business can end up at war with itself. (Read Zvi’s “Moral Mazes”).
With the studio in millions of dollars of debt, and contemplating drastic layoffs to meet bank loans, Disney’s paranoia fell on the rank and file. He heard stories of workers unionizing (on company time), and saw it as the next verse in the same old song and dance. Dark powers were assembling to destroy him, but now the stakes weren’t “a business partner”, or “a handful of animators”, or “a character”, but “a company with 1200 employees that was making the most technically elaborate works of animation ever made”. He probably thought “Not today, Satan.” He’d finally found a hill he was ready to die on.
(And we should not be too naive about the labor movement. A lot of people involved were literal criminals and thugs, like Willie Bioff, enforcer for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. [3]Bioff has another hall of famer Wikipedia page, which ends in “Bioff walked out of his home and slid behind the wheel of his truck. A moment later, an explosion rocked the neighborhood. Parts … Continue reading )
I also learned more about Disney’s father: a cold and difficult man who demanded unquestioning obedience from his children. If Walt or his brother were tardy in obeying some instruction, they’d get “whupped” with whatever Elias Disney had to hand: a hammer, or the flat of a saw. From the age of nine, Walt was put to work on a newspaper route in Kansas City by his father (who refused to pay him). Walt’s own account of his childhood is so woeful it verges on comedy, like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
“We had a newspaper route . . . delivering papers in a residence area every morning and evening of the year, rain, shine, or snow. We got up at 4:30 a.m., worked until the school bell rang and did the same thing again from four o’clock in the afternoon until supper time. Often I dozed at my desk, and my report card told the story.” Forty years afterward, he still dreamed that he had missed customers on his route. “I remember those icy cold days of crawling up these icy steps” to put the newspaper inside a storm door, he said in 1956. Elias insisted that the papers not be thrown on porches or in yards, but carried to the front door. “I was so darn cold I’d slip, and I could cry, so I cried.”
Ya tell that to kids now and they won’t believe you.
It stood out to me that Elias (like many farmers) was a union man—a member of the American Society of Equity, and firmly under the sway of Eugene V. Debs. Walt learned to draw by copying comics from Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine that his father subscribed to. Maybe Walt had lingering bad associations about the kind of man who joins a union because of the kind of man his dad was. It’s possible. So are many other things.
So that’s the positive gloss on Disney’s activities: a justly-paranoid man trying to protect his art. I am not saying this was the truth, or that he reacted correctly.
But what was Disney’s “art”? And how much of it was “his”?
Walt’s position in media is complicated. So is his position in my head. He is a fundamentally a confusing individual, and Michael Barrier’s biography doesn’t shed much light on it. I kept thinking of nostalgebraeist’s the void—a character that just doesn’t make sense or have internal coherency yet still claims that it exists. Disney feels like that too.
Was he charming and avuncular, or a quiet introvert? Was he a Pollyannaish idealist, or a flinty realist? Did his workers love him, or did they not? It seems you can make any interpretation of Disney work by selecting some facts and ignoring others. And to be sure, an entire life offers ample opportunities for apparent contradictions to emerge.
One striking irony is that Disney was a perfectionist who himself was not capable of perfection. Films like Bambi have some of the best technical animaton ever attempted, and they were done without computers or digital ink and paint or anything like that.
But Disney himself was an animator of utmost mediocrity. His own work can be seen in Alice’s Day at Sea. It’s creative in its blending of live action, stop motion, and 2D animation, but the animation is shoddy even for 1924. (To be fair to Walt, these were cranked out at Stakhanovite pace for pitiful sums of money, and I’m sure he didn’t regard this as fine work.[4]Apparently the live action footage of public places was shot illegally—Laugh-O-Gram couldn’t afford permits—and they’d run if they saw a policeman watching! That said, where is his fine work?)
By the 1930s, Disney realized that he was better stepping away from the coalface of the animation industry. His skills had long been eclipsed by others. He became a marshaller of the creative talents of others. (He said of himself: “I’m the little honeybee who goes flying around sprinkling pollen here and there to keep everything going.”)
Was he a good overseer of others’ work? I think so. To an extent. Certainly, most of the Disney artists (even the great ones) who left the company accomplished little of note without him. They had their weaknesses and limitations, too. Overall, Disney had excellent taste for where the industry was going, and where it could conceivably go. He saw possibilities. He felt that animation had to grow larger and larger, expanding its vocabulary, assimilating other forms of media. I think Fantasia, for example, is wonderful.
But at the same time, his instincts clearly failed him many times. Isn’t there obviously a fair amount of bad stuff in classic Disney films? Even the ones that are rightly regarded as classics?
They’re very kitsch. John Kricfalusi had a cruel but funny dig about the average Disney screenplay: it contains 10 minutes of plot and 60 minutes of flowers singing and birds wiping dishes with their butts. Anyone who, like Ralph Bakshi, thinks animation has to mean something ([the idea of] “grown men sitting in cubicles drawing butterflies floating over a field of flowers, while American planes are dropping bombs in Vietnam and kids are marching in the streets, is ludicrous”) will have capital P Problems and a capital D Drama with Disney. Modern aesthetes demand art that comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Disney’s films seem to comfort the comfortable and disturb the disturbed.
Or perhaps you agree with CS Lewis, who felt that the mark of true maturity is that one is old enough to read fairytales again.
I’ll admit there’s a streak of broad sentimental schmaltz in Disney that I have to put myself in a weird or altered mood to sit through. I don’t even hate it. I just don’t understand it. It makes no sense to me. Whatever effect Walt is trying to achieve in the singing birds of Snow White (say) doesn’t really translate to me. I’d go further, and say that certain scenes—like the idealized lissome youths presented in Fantasia’s “The Pastoral Symphony”—are outright uncomfortable to watch and unpleasant in their connotations.
The strong parts of Disney films are always the dramatic, nasty stuff. Which says something about me, I’m sure. Probably that I’m smart and sophisticated, unlike you rubes. Consider Chernobog’s hands. Those awful, flame-wreathed, nigrified hands of soot. Have you ever seen such hands? Do his hands wait for you in your dreams? They do mine. Those hands.
So I don’t understand Disney. Not in the sense that Barrier failed in his duty to accurately portray a man—I think my confusion is the portrait. Disney was a man of mirrors. Gaze too hard and you tumble into a labyrinth of references and cliches and finally you stare back at yourself.
That intensity, never visible to viewers of Disney’s television show, showed itself in his behavior when he was in the park. “He would never walk past a piece of litter,” said Michael Broggie, a ride operator in the early 1960s. “He would reach down and grab it, and everyone was expected to do that.”
I do that too! When I see garbage, I pick it up. Assuming it’s not disgusting and putrid.
There’s also some evidence in Barrier’s book that Disney presented a facade to the world. He made himself look stupid. That’s sinister to me. Men who try to look smarter than they really are a dime a dozen and harmless. Men who try to look stupider than they really are can be quite dangerous. It’s better for a mountain to become a molehill than a molehill a mountain.
While the public thinks of Disney as playing with trains and exchanging pleasantries with juvenile alumni of the now-defunct Mickey Mouse Club, he actually is one of the most widely read, most widely traveled, most articulate men in Hollywood. I became acutely aware of this when I spoke with him recently at lunch in the private dining room of his… studio. While he devoured a dietetic meal of lean hamburger and sliced tomatoes he spouted rustic witticisms with the aplomb of a modern-day Bob Burns. But every once in a while his eyes would narrow, the rural twang would disappear from his voice and he’d discuss financial projections for 1962, the modern art of Picasso and Diego Rivera, and Freudian psychiatry. In a few moments, however, he’d catch himself ” and revert to homespun stories.
While we’re contemplating morbidity (we weren’t, but just pretend)…what does it mean for Disney to die?
A common Disney trope is the death of a parent used as a symbol for maturity. Bambi’s mother is the ur-case. But the parent, of course, is not truly dead. Something of them remains in the child who must continue on without them, before dying in turn. Our bodies are pathways for ancient seething forces too great—and terrible—for bodies to contain.
When I Googled “Willy Wonka”, it returned Johnny Depp ahead of Gene Wilder, and I attempted suicide because of this. I leaped out of a window. It was only a first floor window, plus I removed the glass to avoid a nasty cut, and put a mattress out to cushion my fall, and this led to a suicide attempt that was painless but ultimately unsuccessful. I won every battle and lost the war.
Pat Sullivan has a real “sorry for party rocking” Wikipedia page, by the way. Eight headings, two of which are “Rape Conviction” and “Racism”—and text sprinkled with gems like “According to artist George Cannata, Sulivan [sic] would often fire employees in a drunken haze, not remembering the next day, when they would return to work as if nothing had happened.” Whatever his faults, Disney was a distinctly unbad man in the grand scheme of things.
Bioff has another hall of famer Wikipedia page, which ends in “Bioff walked out of his home and slid behind the wheel of his truck. A moment later, an explosion rocked the neighborhood. Parts of Bioff and his truck were strewn all over the driveway. Police found the remains of a dynamite bomb wired to the starter. The killers were never found.“
Apparently the live action footage of public places was shot illegally—Laugh-O-Gram couldn’t afford permits—and they’d run if they saw a policeman watching!
