The Hidden Mickey Mouse

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. — Walt Disney


The Diaries of Mickey Mouse
by Mickey Mouse
Gudgeon and Crankshaft (2007), 452 pp.

Students of the cinema, and devotees of contemporary culture in general, will greet with enthusiasm and, no doubt, surprise the publication of The Diaries of Mickey Mouse. The diaries, which fill a long-neglected void in film and cultural-studies scholarship, encompass virtually all of Mouse’s career and reveal to the reader not the comically confident sprite of the films, but an individual riven by inner contradictions, consumed by petty resentments, and tormented by an almost Gothic sense of psychic imprisonment and despair.

Mouse appeared in his first two films, Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho, in 1928. It was not, however, until the critical and financial success of Steamboat Willie later that year that he began to record his thoughts and impressions in diary form. Even at this early stage of his career, one can discern something of the complex emotional fabric of his personality. In the entry for January 12, 1929, he expresses his skepticism toward the critical acceptance of his breakthrough film by quoting Swift:

Was it not the great Dean himself who likened the critic to a fly, which, “driven from a honey-pot will immediately, with very good appetite, alight and finish his meal on an excrement”?

The quotation from Swift is noteworthy, for the satirist remained a seminal influence on Mouse throughout his life. It was an artistic and intellectual kinship that would result in an intensely personal homage to Swift, the 1934 classic Gulliver Mickey. Moreover, Mouse’s later years would be characterized by a saeva indignatio and misanthropic rancour that recall Swift’s reaction upon finding his chops undercooked.

The diaries provide as well a fascinating, if often unsettling, view of Mouse’s difficult relationships with his contemporaries. Goofy, for instance, is dismissed as being “incapable of an original idea,” while Mouse’s frequent onscreen antagonist Pegleg Pete is described as having “the table manners of a geek.” His most scathing invective, however, is reserved for his major rivals at this time: Felix the Cat and Donald Duck. Duck, whose appearance in Mouse’s 1935 film The Band Concert had heralded the arrival of a distinctive if stylistically wayward talent, is singled out for abuse with inordinate frequency. In an entry for November 16, 1936, Mouse writes that “[Duck] is a philistine. He will create nothing of lasting value.” Later, in an entry otherwise devoted to an excoriation of Felix the Cat’s autobiography, I Owe Cuba $27.50, we are told that “it is really Daisy — cocotte vulgaire! — who makes [Duck’s] films work.”

Such emotional volatility suggests a profound psychological disquiet, a state of mind glimpsed even more vividly in Mouse’s deteriorating relationship with Minnie. Since the release of Steamboat Willie, Mouse and Minnie had been as close offscreen as on. During a holiday on Capri, where they stayed with Norman Douglas (“a nice enough man but a bit on the louche side”), they had scandalized the locals with their unabashed displays of affection on the nearby lido.

Nevertheless, as the diaries show, with an often painful immediacy, Mouse soon became tormented by fits of romantic jealousy and suspicion. Such fits seem to have had no real justification, for by all accounts Minnie was completely faithful to Mouse, despite a lengthy, albeit platonic, correspondence she conducted with none other than Donald Duck. The situation seems to have come to a head on June 19, 1937: