The Comic World of Flip the Frog

 

    Long recognized as one of the greatest animators of American film during a time when movie theaters typically showed a program including cartoon, newsreel, and perhaps other short subjects as well as one or two feature films, Ub Iwerks created a marvelous comic world within the conventions of his form.  Doubtless best-known for his work with Disney – they had worked together since both were teenagers -- he was the first artist to draw Mickey Mouse and went on to make significant contributions to many Disney cartoons, as well as drawing for Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes and Columbia’s Screen Gems. [1]  Yet he resented Disney’s dominance and for a time headed his own studio making Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper features among others in which he was able to develop his own vision during an era when animated shorts were made to appeal not to children alone, but to audiences of all ages.

     Flip the Frog first appeared in Fiddlesticks (1930), the first color animation with sound.  The sound is significant as many cartoons of the period foregrounded music while neglecting plot.  The Disney studio had produced a number of Silly Symphonies shorts providing fanciful visual accompaniment to pieces of music and for this series, Iwerks produced Autumn and Springtime. [1]

     Flip appears on the initial title holding a single-stringed instrument, a buoyant troubadour with a huge smile.  On the soundtrack one hears Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, to become familiar to many several decades later as the theme music for the Alfred Hitchcock television show.   The sinister tone of this melody may seem discordant, its solemnity and melancholy the opposite pole of the vivacious frog.  In fact, the macabre occupies a significant space in the cartoons of the era, those by Ub Iwerks among them, yet it is always a comic, fundamentally joyous fear like that evoked in celebrations for Hallowe’en and the Day of the Dead as well as in the devils and death figures that often feature in Carnival celebrations. 

     More froglike than he will become in later cartoons in spite of four-fingered cartoon white gloves, a smart bowtie, and a few buttons on his ventral side, Flip leaps from one sylvan lily pad to another and then begins dancing like a trouper with theatrical high spirits.  He grins and faces the audience; his ebullience becomes the viewer’s.  He punctuates his movements with an odd squawk, more like a duck than a frog, eventually dancing atop the shell of an annoyed turtle who ejects him into the water.   

     Temporarily shaken, he soon resumes his merry dance until he comes upon a scene to rival Breughel’s peasant festivals: a group of small animals, mostly insects, but including mice and other creatures, several of whom are drinking while many play musical instruments.  There is, in fact, a sort of symphony orchestra in these woods which Flip enthusiastically joins.  They play the local version, one can only assume, of the music of the spheres, the dance of earthly life.   Upon his arrival, Flip seizes center stage on a stump and bows with every ego’s vainglory, then dancing with abandon until a second hint of the sinister aspect of life appears.    Ready for anything, Flip climbs a line that suddenly appears next to him only to discover that it descends from the web of a threatening spider from whom he retreats in fear and, a moment later, resumes his vaudeville-style dance.  The music varies, but the frog is always euphoric, sometimes closing his eyes in bliss.  When he takes a bow, all the animals, including the once malevolent-looking spider, unite in appreciative applause. 

     A piano has now appeared on the stump-stage and Flip begins to play along with a mouse violinist (who resembles the earliest Mickeys).  They play for a time in harmony but before long Flip has taken a direction of his own, picking out “Ach du Lieber Augustine” until the mouse bops him with his violin.  Though briefly interrupted by a tobacco spitting bird above, they resume playing to such effect that not only they but the piano and itself bench as well are soon capering in a chorus line.  The music takes a sad turn and before long all are weeping at the tragic spectacle of life which had earlier seemed so worthy of exuberant affirmation.  

     Flip loses himself in delicious melancholy, miming violin movements until the annoyed piano kicks him.  This drives the frog into a Jerry Lee Lewis-style performance aggressively banging the piano keys with fists and feet until the instrument explodes into the air and a rain of ivories descends on the bemused frog. 

     The film then depicts a harmonious world in which all sentient beings are united in celebration to the rhythms of time.  This melodious affirmation is punctuated by reminders of aggression and suffering.  The turtle’s hostility, the spider’s predatory threat, the mouse’s rivalry, even the piano’s frustration provide the counterweight to the choral singing, producing a tense energetic dialectic of disorder and order.  The collapsed piano of the conclusion represents the dissolution of familiar reality into chaos.  This bipolar opposition structures the life of Flip the Frog and the lives of his viewers as well.

     While all of Iwerks cartoons are meant to be funny, the malevolent aspect of life is foregrounded in many as well as in those from other studios. [2]  The embrace of life and flight from death are both reflected as clearly as in the pairs of benevolent and malevolent aspects of deity in Hinduism.  Indeed, in  the fifth Flip the Frog cartoon, The Cuckoo Murder Case, the cat is out of the bag and mortality itself is Flip’s antagonist. 

     For the opening credits sequence Flip has acquired a pair of shorts as well as white gloves and plays a kind of ragtime piano behind the title card.  Though his tune is sprightly, this story highlights the mixture of comedy and horror that characterizes so many cartoons of the period.  A sleepy cuckoo occupies a clock in a shabby home.  The bird is humanized; it is so sleepy it must be repeatedly poked by the clock to call out the hour.  Death itself enters as a robed skeleton and shoots the cuckoo bird whereupon Flip as a private detective is summoned by the clock itself to investigate. [3]

     Once more, the entire world is animated, acting as a great orchestral company cooperating in producing the grand pageant of phenomenal events.  Flip’s car pauses to tiptoe through a puddle.  Storm clouds and lightning flashes are playing portentous games in the sky.  The very house grimaces menacingly as the frog approaches, but, when he tries to retreat, an irresistible karmic wind drives him back toward it.  A crew of police arrives as well while Flip is sneaking about the house.  Eventually Flip comes upon the robed skeleton representing mortality studying the book of life on a table with an hourglass.  He stamps “out” on a page bearing the cuckoo’s name, then turns the page to reveal that Flip is next on his list.  Flip makes a mad dash to escape, overturning furniture and finally dives through a set of double doors into what looks like a great abyss.  Surely he has made his appointment in Samarra, though he is resurrected for a good many later features. 

      In Spooks (1932) Iwerks avoided that sort of conclusive denouement.  During a storm a less frog-like Flip approaches a remote house occupied by sinister skeletal characters similar to the one in The Cuckoo Murder Case.  A band of such figures then plays a danse macabre like those depicted in art as well as enacted in village rituals and court masques from the fifteenth century on. [4]  Oblivious to his danger, Flip happily dances in the arms of a female skeleton until she falls to pieces, signifying the transience of love.  At this point his host assumes a wicked expression and clearly plots to add a frog skeleton  to his collection.  The cuckoo even reappears in skeletal form.  When it is time to go to bed, Flip asks for the bathroom and is directed to a dark space where he is ambushed.  He next appears tied to a table as his host sharpens a knife.  Flip manages to take off, smashing his antagonists’ bones on every side until he lands out of doors on the back of his trusty horse.  He apparently makes his escape but, just when he feels he is in the clear, his mount suddenly turns to bones at which point he leaps off and dashes into the distance.  For the moment, he has successfully dodged death, but the viewer knows that his victory is only temporary.

     Flip lives in a world that pulses with life.  All creatures enthusiastically participate in the rhythmic celebration of their own existence, so brimming with the elemental joy of life that they sing and sway.  Flip’s irrepressible optimism is temporarily jolted by conflicts arising from appetite and ego, but he rapidly recovers.  Like his viewers, he is pursued by death, but he reacts as though engaged in a playful game until either a sudden descent when he is swallowed by darkness or a narrow escape.  Just as the makers of medieval cathedrals designed them to emphasize the supernal promise of salvation yet included frightening representations of death and of demons, sometimes including actual bones in the crypt, the movie audience, basically there for a good time, is not allowed to forget conflict, aggression, and the ultimate dissolution of the flesh.  In fact, by playing with the fearful recognition of frailty and in the end of mortality, though it may amount to whistling in the dark, the doughty frog may be a role model for his viewers, whose specters are formed not by the cartoonist’s pen, but by pain, suffering, illness, and violence. 

 

 

 1.      The film was simultaneously released with King of Jazz, a musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman, which included a Walter Lantz cartoon depicting how Paul Whiteman, the music director of the film, "became the King of Jazz."

2.      Notable examples include Iwerks’ film for Disney The Skeleton Dance (1929) and the Fleischer Studio’s I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You 1932 in which Betty Boop appears with Louis Armstrong.

3.      An indication of the adult audience for such cartoons is the telephone’s frustrated "damn!" in the detective office says when it fails to wake up Flip.  In later films he tries to peep on a showering young woman and then to run out on a hotel bill (in Room Runners 1932), while in A Chinaman's Chance (1933), Flip smokes opium. 

4.      Similarly jocular presentations of death not only influence practices for Mardi Gras and All Souls Day, but also countless comedy horror movies.  Many critics think Whale’s sequel Bride of Frankenstein superior to the original film primarily because added considerable humor.

Parmenides and the Perennial Philosophy

Numbers in parentheses refer to the standard listing of Parmenides’ fragments.  Those in brackets are endnotes.

    Parmenides was my favorite when as a student I first read the pre-Socratic philosophers.  I was, I imagine, attracted by his dramatically startling claims.  The paradoxes of his disciple Zeno delight everyone with a taste for tossing concepts about.  A generation or two later Socrates’ dialectics, Aristotle’s ratiocination, and the theatrical gestures of Diogenes would open up philosophy in other directions, but the fundamental challenge of Parmenides’ thought remained unchanged, as immovable as the plenum he imagined.

     Paradoxically, though Parmenides’ conclusions seem outlandish from the perspective of everyday reality, they are peculiarly reasonable to a skeptical modern sensibility.  To me he represents the most profound ancient Greek statement of a perennial philosophy in the classic modern form represented by Transcendentalism and, in the twentieth century, Neo-Vedanta.  Parmenides has in common with Huxley (and mystics in different parts of the globe throughout the centuries) the apprehension of an ultimate reality underlying sense experience which is, to use Parmenides’ language “unitary, unmoving and without end” (μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον). (347)

     After millennia in which our species had used the poetic devices of analogy and metaphor in religion, magic, ritual, and mythological thought, Parmenides proposed using only the mind.  From the simple proposition that one can say nothing about the nonexistent or “what is not,” Parmenides developed provocative and astonishing conclusions.  The phenomenal world is in some sense “unreal;” motion and change are impossible as the cosmos is monistic, the only thing that exists. 

     He arrives at such a strikingly counterintuitive position by significant rhetorical and dialectical routes.  The title of his principal work Περὶ Φύσεως is sometimes translated On Nature but its concerns are so fundamental that it might have been called On What Exists.  A dramatic proem sets the angle of Parmenides’ approach.  The philosopher’s insight is attributed to his having been taken on a journey by the maiden daughters of the sun, arriving at a gate in the borderland between Night and Day at which point he encounters a goddess [1] who delivers to him the knowledge he conveys to the reader.  Though the location signifies the duality that constitutes the ordinary experience of reality, [2] she offers a route to a unified vision.  

     The divinity would seem to be Night herself: Parmenides goes to “the halls of Night,” and the goddess who greets him welcomes him to “our home” (1).  The goddess Night serves as counselor to Zeus in some of the major Orphic texts, including the Derveni cosmology. In the closely related Orphic Rhapsodies, Night instructs Zeus on how to preserve the unity produced by his absorption of all things into himself as he sets about initiating a new cosmogonic phase. It is thus appropriate that Night should be the source of Parmenides’ revelation, for Parmenidean metaphysics is very much concerned with the principle of unity in the cosmos.

     This deity’s specific identity, though, is less important than the fact that the mythological language implies that Parmenides’ ideas are not as attributable to rigorous ratiocination as to revelation or intuitive insight.  The goddess promises to reveal to him “well-rounded truth” (aληθείης εὐκυκλέος) [3] in contrast to the “opinions of people, in which there is nothing true at all” (βροτῶν δόξας͵ ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). (fr. 342, stressed again in 346)

     In the voice of this goddess, Parmenides proceeds, arguing that, as no one can meaningfully conceive of what does not exist, human thoughts must concern only “what is.”  (2)  His language here outpaces his reasoning which has been criticized as specious by modern scholars who note his conflation of the existential and predicative uses of the verb “to be.” [4]  The criticism will carry little weight for readers who have accepted the introduction with its mystic quasi-shamanic flight, suggesting that the philosopher’s vision rests on experience and intuition, on meditation perhaps, rather than on logic. 

     He argues that most people conveniently ignore logic when they treat what is and what is not sometimes as the same and sometimes as differing.  They are “two-headed,” helpless in their ignorance. (6)  Yet this error is the basis for the conventional way of seeing the world, what Parmenides calls the “way of appearances” [5](or seeming or opinion).  (See 1 and 8)

     “What is” is a kind of universal substance that must be “unitary, unmoving and without end.”  There is no void or emptiness since a plenum fills all of existence.  Contrary to appearances, there is no growth, there is no change, there is no beginning or end.  Reality cannot be divided, for it is alike everywhere (οὐδέ τι τῇ μᾶλλον, τό κεν εἴργοι μιν συνέχεσθαι).  Like Einstein’s universe, it is finite, though without beginning or end.  It may best be imagined as a sphere. (8)

     I am not concerned with tracing sources, among which others have noted Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and others, nor do I wish to detail influences, through neo-Platonism, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonisn Skepticism, pseudo-Dionysius, certain medieval mystics and Spinoza.  My point is quite simply the fundamental similarity of Parmenides’ monism and the tradition some have called the perennial philosophy.  Perhaps the most significant and concise statement of this view is the Advaita Vedanta teaching grounded in the Chāndogya Upanişad.  In the seminal sixth book Uddalaka explains to his son Śvetaketu that a single substance underlies all phenomena including themselves.  “Tat tvam asi.” (“That art thou!”) he declares.  There is no other -- the fabric of reality is continuous.  According to Advaita Vedanta, the individual and the deity or cosmos are identical: atman = Atman. 

     Parmenides goes on to relate what he calls the “way of opinion” providing an elaborate cosmology that once occupied the greater part of his book, but which is largely lost.  Though this portion of his work more closely parallels the speculation of earlier philosophers, it was less distinctive as well as being undercut by the author’s repeated assurances that his assertions in this section refer to appearances only, the way things seem, and not their real nature, rather like the Hindu concept of maya.  

     Parmenides is associated by Strabo with the cult of Apollo Oulios, an epithet usually rendered as the Healer, though the primary meaning of the word in Liddell and Scott is “pestilential” suggesting the hand of the Far-darter in plague and disease. [6]  Apollo is then defined, in sum at least, as indifferent to human desire just as the Hindu deities often have beneficent and malign manifestations.  Apollo and the cosmos as a whole are not so much ambivalent or unpredictable as utterly beyond good and evil.  For Parmenides would deny the final validity of disease and health, pain and joy, indeed of all dualities.  For him such contraries are the illusion from which arises the “way of appearances” as opposed to the “way of truth.” 

     Such insights have rarely attracted many disciples.  Whatever heights Hindu philosophers achieved, the average Indian is satisfied with customary sacrifices and other forms of formulaic worship.  In ancient Greece Pythagoreans and other mystery religions (including eventually Christianity) gained many followers with the promise that the individual soul was immortal and only the cult could provide supposed means to improve well-being after death.  Conventional religion has often displayed little patience with the monistic assertions: Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Spinoza were all indicted by their communities for expressing European versions of the Upanishad’s “tat tvam asi.”

     Specifically because their conclusions are experiential, attempts to rationalize the revelations of mystical flights like that Parmenides relates at the outset of his work, such thinkers are as immune to logical refutation as to proof.  They can only record their own insights (or seeming insights) and point a way for others seeking the “way of truth.”  Side-stepping the slipperiness of language and the dubious claims of syllogisms, they present a spirituality independent of supernaturalism, authority, and tradition.

    

 

1.      1.  Identified variously as night, Nature, Wisdom, Necessity or Themis.

 

2.      2.  Thus the account in Genesis describes creation of material reality through a series of oppositions: light and dark, earth and sky, water and land.

 

3.      3.  Compare this usage to the description of the cosmos as spherical in Plato, Timaeus 32c-34b.

 

4.      4.  See, for instance, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 269-70.

 

5.      5.  Parmenides’ word δόξα might also be translated as “seeming” or “opinion.”

 

6.      6.  The pattern is the same with φάρμακον, meaning both medicine and poison, a circumstance of which Derrida made a great deal in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.

John Brown Speaks to Us

 John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois

      W. E. B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown, though it relies on first-hand and documentary sources, is less a work of historical scholarship than a passionate polemic first published at a critical moment in American history.  Even as the mythic Lost Cause ideology was developing and the United Daughters of the Confederacy was erecting monuments in courthouse squares and city parks throughout the South, the NAACP was formed and Du Bois published this biography. [1]

      The book contains a detailed and sympathetic account of Brown’s career and includes lengthy quotation from writings by his family members and associates.  The reader can see not only the vicious motives and tactics of the slave-owners, but also the fragmented rivalry of those on the side of freedom.  In Du Bois’ account it is clear that Brown’s moral clarity, couched throughout his life in the rhetoric of the Separate Baptist Church in which he had been raised, was shared by very few Americans before the Civil War.  The greater part of those who opposed the expansion of slavery did so because they wished to avoid the competition of slave labor with free or because they supported the political sway of the North over the South.  Even among those who argued against slavery itself, a good many benevolent souls such as those in the American Colonization Society supported not integration but the return of slaves to Africa or their settlement in a new country in Central America. 

     One reason that few shared the “clear, white light” of Brown’s moral certainty is that, for all their charitable feeling, most white Americans kept their Black brethren at arm’s length.  Brown recalled from his childhood an incident in which he received hospitality in a householder’s home as he drove his father’s cattle to market.  There he met a Black slave of his own age who impressed him as “fully if not more than his equal,” yet who was treated harshly by his owner.  This personal acceptance was apparent in Brown’s adult life as he consistently practiced social equality, inviting Blacks into his home and visiting in theirs, informally adopting a Black son, and seeking to include Black collaborators in his work. 

     Brown is an excellent example of a man who sought progressive change, not out of pity but because he considered their freedom a necessary precondition for his own.  His education had been primarily from the Bible, and Biblical values and language were woven throughout his own thinking.  This orientation was not only in tune with broadly shared American standards at the time, but religion’s claim to universal authority is appropriate since slavery, like murder and the oppression of women, is condemned by virtually all modern moral standards.  Brown’s prophetic voice, while thoroughly Christian, can still appeal to all.

    For those who contemplate a life like Brown’s, historical fact and partisan view may be considerably entangled.  Du Bois clearly has an interest in maintaining not only that Brown was sane (if fiercely single-minded) but also that his plan to attack the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry had a reasonable prospect of success. [2]  Whether this point of the plot’s practicality is so or not must remain controversial and speculative, but for the modern reader the point is that Brown’s opposition to slavery was exemplary and his zeal cannot be faulted. 

     John Brown tells us that the price of repression is greater than the price of freedom, that violence is far more pernicious when it is institutional and habitual than when it is a matter of an evil-tempered individual.  Every day that the slave system persisted people became inured to its crimes against humanity, more accepting of its outrages, and thus more brutalized.  A more or less benevolent master remains a master.  In Brown’s opinion the solution must lie, not in the reformation of individuals as John Woolman had attempted in the eighteenth century, but in the alteration of society.  To allow an exploitative system like slavery, or, one might add, colonialism or capitalism, to continue is to sanction violence whether or not one is personally wielding the whip.  Lincoln eloquently argued in his Second Inaugural that the moral debt of slavery was always increasing and, painful though it be, must in the end be paid.  “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’"  Now, long after the Civil War, after the attempts by racists to perpetuate injustice have produced a hundred and fifty years of violence, lynchings, Jim Crow, and daily exploitation and repression, the cost is evident to all, and still rising. 

     Brown tells us, then, that the time to act is now.  Hesitation is complicity.  No shrewd calculation of odds can alter the facts that racism is wrong, that its ill effects consistently harden and deepen, and that it entails consequences that spare no one. [4]  Others may be depended upon to criticize, to temporize, to offer only financial support, but some feel called to take action.  Further, Brown speaks for the harder truth of his own day, that slavery’s foes must use “any means necessary,” and the price it seemed could be payable only in blood. [5]  He had abandoned the faith in political pressure and moral suasion to which his friend and associate Frederick Douglass still clung.  He sought to have a wider effect than Harriet Tubman had managed with her daring raids. (Tubman, in fact, supported Brown, joined with him in planning the assault on Harpers Ferry, and during the war served in the Union army.)   

     Du Bois seems to be straining just a bit when he enumerates the positive effects of the raid in spite of its military defeat.  He quotes Douglass: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he at least began the war that ended slavery.”  Du Bois argues that his raid aroused the slave population leading to incidents of rebellion and presaging the hundreds of thousands of Black recruits that served in the United States Army.  The fear of insurrection from within and the conviction that Brown had brought a mere taste of the potential for armed Northern intervention created a sense of crisis that, Du Bois argues, hastened the conflict.  Finally, he says, Brown presented a moral dilemma to Americans in the most fundamental terms.  People heard of a good, indeed a Christian man, who sacrificed himself out of love for others, killed by the advocates of a system built on the sins of greed, cruelty, and lust. [6]       Few would question that Brown’s actions shifted the political parameters in his day.  Whereas anti-slavery propagandists had seemed the South’s chief antagonists, they now had to deal with the fact of armed opposition.  Just as the rise of Black power advocates like Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and H. Rap Brown (later Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) made the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King seem suddenly more acceptable, even those who did not approve of Brown’s actions became more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, so his actions had a clear effect of hastening the end of slavery.

     Though many moderns may lack the fire and the courage of “the old man,” as he was often called in the days of his greatest action, he clearly advanced the cause of freedom.  Brown’s passion for justice is inspiring, and much of his analysis remains viable today.   Today, no less than in his era, racism remains a great evil, the pursuit of racial justice continues, and the movement’s most vigorous partisans feel as he did that action is imperative regardless of short-term consequences, whether for the nation or for the activist.  One need not share the rhetoric of Brown’s Calvinist theology to applaud his militance.  Right is right.

 

1.      1.  The book was published in 1909.  My copy is an International Press edition from 1962 including comments by Du Bois indicating his view of the book’s relevance after almost half a century.  It remains no less useful now when the work is more than twice as old. 

 

2.      2.  He claims that the primary reason for the defeat of Brown’s party, small though it was, was the failure of the timely arrival of supplies from the farm a few miles distant.

 

3.      3.  Lincoln had long been a supporter of such plans.  One hears little these days about his plan to establish Lincolnia, an African-American colony in the Chiriquí Province of Panama which foundered in the face of opposition by Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

 

4.      4.  The murder rate among both white and Black remains highest in the states of the Deep South, for instance, where slavery was most brutal.

 

 5.     5.  I am reminded of the turn from its fifty years of pacifism taken by the African National Congress in 1960.

 

6.      6.  I find a parallel in the effect of photographs of early civil rights demonstrations in journals like Life and Look.