By Michael Marano

Vicky Osterweil examines how Unca Walt’s empire imposes a politically dangerous, patriarchal form of homogenization across all its intellectual properties—from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) to cartoons, to Star Wars films and shows, and to amusement park “experiences.”

The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World by Vicky Osterweil. Haymarket Books, 320 pages, $26.

The recently deceased, brilliant, Oscar-winning filmmaker and media critic Peter Watkins warned in his essay The Dark Side of the Moon: The Global Media Crisis about the dangerous rise of what he calls “the Monoform”: that is, the global homogenization of Mass Audio-Visual Media (MAVM). The structures of modern film and TV, streamlined to narrative, emotional, and editing beats, are so rigid and narrow that they allow for no active participation on the part of the audience, no chink through which viewers can insert their personal experiences. Given no means to participate, the worldwide audiences of MAVM have been encouraged to be passive, trained to be easily manipulated. They have been given no opportunity to connect with real empathy to fictional characters, or to apply critical thought to what they watch.

This hindering of critical thought, this reduction of experiencing MAVM in just the amygdala with no activation of the frontal lobes, cultivates an inertia that leads to non-participation in the democratic process. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the modern nation state can’t exist without media (consider the role of pamphlets and newspapers in the American Revolution). The members of a democracy— through their experience of MAVM—can be rendered so dangerously indolent that their ability to think critically may be so degraded that they wind up doing something suicidally stupid, like… I dunno… giving the nuclear codes to a Harkonnen-like, sadistic, obese, mentally ill, failed game-show host.

In her book The Extended Universe, Vicky Osterweil applies Watkins’ take on the Monoform to the House of Mouse. But, while Watkins focused on the Monoform as it infects individual films and shows, she examines how Unca Walt’s empire systematically imposes a politically dangerous, patriarchal form of homogenization across all its IPs, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU), to cartoons, to Star Wars films and shows to amusement park “experiences.”

Osterweil addresses different facets of the Disneyfication of our culture, examining specific Disney releases in each chapter: Avengers: Endgame; Cinderella; Song of the South, etc. She makes compelling arguments about how the story structures, shot choices, and climaxes of Disney products reinforce a consistently reactionary worldview. For example, in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, piracy in the service of the ruling authority is a-ok, but piracy for oneself is a crime. Osterweil also argues convincingly that the prey animals in The Lion King—literally and figuratively bowing down to “the Circle of Life” that demands they be eaten—neatly mirror the guiding paradigm of Disney’s corporate outlook.

At the same time, by “colonizing people’s childhoods,” Disney not only creates passive, Monoform products; it also outsources “the production of meaning to fan communities.” This is why the Fan-Boys were able to sabotage, through online outrage, the profoundly wretched The Rise of Skywalker, reducing it to utter pablum and insisting on the downplaying and diminishment of roles for characters played by people of color. Faced with new, daring, and challenging storytelling in The Last Jedi, outraged fan-boys demanded the reassurance of non-participation—resurrecting the Emperor Palpatine as an antagonist in one of the most absurd character returns since Victoria Principal found her dead husband Patrick Duffy risen like Lazarus in the shower, because the entire season following his death was just a kooky dream.

This all leads to a “closing window of creativity,” to quote a screenwriter interviewed by Osterweil. Nothing is a story, all is just “content,” to be Borg-assimilated into the Red-Pill-proof Matrix that is Disney’s body of IPs.

Osterweil charts—literally, with graphs—the homogenization of popular films, noting year-by-year the rate by which the top ten highest grossing movies have been taken over by franchise films. It’s depressing, to see cultural stagnation quantified in this way.

The Extended Universe provides a nice touchstone for understanding the psychology of fan-boys and the machinations of corporate cultural control. While writing for Syfy, I panned the weevil-crawling pile of walrus turds that is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and received a barrage of ad hominem hate from fan-boys who had yet to see the movie. Their belligerent passivity—nurtured through the consumption of the Monoform—led to their embrace of the “outsourcing of meaning” for the third film in a series based on an amusement park ride. As per Osterweil, “they feel the franchises are their property, their world,” so any view that challenges that “is a violation” that can’t be tolerated.

Think of Osterweil’s book as a vaccine against the cultural manipulations that Disney and other IP wranglers perpetuate (I’m looking at you, Star Trek!). It might serve as a political shield as well. In the first chapter, she discusses how Disney sent lobbyists to Washington, D.C., to block COVID vaccine patent waivers for global use—fearing it would undermine their stranglehold on various IPs.

Consider that little factoid the first jab of the needle.

Note: Vicky Osterweil will be in conversation with Micah Herskind about The Extended Universe at the Harvard Book Store on April 13.

Critic, author, and personal trainer Michael Marano was, for a time, blacklisted by Disney after noting in The Arts Fuse that the quality of releases featuring certain IPs had declined since Disney’s acquisition of them. As the great Harlan Ellison once said after being fired from Disney only four hours into working on the lot, “…nobody fucks with the Mouse.”