In Praise of Cartoons: Lantz Does Conceptual Integration

This is the sixth in a series of posts on the Walter Lantz cartoon, The Greatest Man in Siam. I've listed the other posts at the end of this one. YouTube has the cartoon.

Over the past two months or se, even as I’ve been viewing, reviewing, and writing about the The Greatest Man in Siam and Porky in Wackyland, I’ve been thinking about the more general question: Why cartoons? Why do we watch them? Why do they give us so much pleasure? There are, I suppose, many factors to consider in approaching those questions. I’ve got one particular factor in mind: conceptual integration.

The notion of conceptual integration, or conceptual blending, has been pioneered by Mark Turner and Giles Fauconnier and a host of others in the cognitive sciences over the past two decades or so. The basic idea is simple: one of our principle ways of grasping the world is to combine concepts from different domains into a new concept. We do it so often and effortlessly that we rarely notice it. Yet it is ubiquitous and fundamental.

In this post I’m going to take an informal look at conceptual integration in The Greatest Man in Siam, and then conclude with some more general remarks on conceptual integration in cartoons. Those who’ve been following my series on that cartoon will be familiar with that material; those who haven’t may wish to look over some of the earlier posts.

Orientalist Fantasy & America

In the large, we can think of The Greatest Man in Siam as being staged in a blend of two conceptual spaces: 1) a generic pop-cultural Orientalist fantasy of the Arab Middle East (though Siam, of course, is not in the Middle East), and 2) mid-20th Century America. The Orientalist fantasy provides the physical setting and costumes and is the ‘cover’ for the central conceit of the cartoon: a king declaring a competition for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Mid-20th century America then obtrudes in this setting in various ways; in particular, we have references to the ongoing state of war (the cartoon appeared in 1943).

Here’s the opening shot of the film:

This is pure Orientalist fantasy. A bit later we see this car pull up:

This could, of course, be the car of a rich Arab and so be a proper part of the Orientalist fantasy. But it could also be a mid-20th century American car. It’s thus ambiguous between the two spaces. When the car door opens, a rotund man in Arab dress emerges and nails a proclamation to the wall. Here’s the last part of that proclamation:

That wording is out of mid-20th Century America and is standard for various promotions and contests. Still later, we see this marquee on in front of the palace:

The marquee itself, of course, is from America (notice the supports on either side), as is the bowling contest.

Once the bridal contest starts, the contests succeed one another on screen. The second contestant declares himself to be the richest man in Siam. He offers various evidence of his wealth, including ration books (the cartoon came out in 1943, when all sorts of things were rationed because of the war). He also holds up a can of gasoline, one of the rationed items:

This is not the only reference to the war. The first contestant turns out to have been a draft dodger while the third shows up to the sounds of air raid sirens and airplane engines.

Here’s the king’s daughter in her first appearance:

Her costume and the general setting – notice the colors – seem out of the fantasy. But the rotating platform she stands on appears to be from, e.g. a department store window display.

These are only a few examples of this blending of Orientalist fantasy and 20th Century America. But they give you a feel for how it works.

Blues Fuse

Now let’s look at a specific sequence that appears about five minutes into the cartoon (which is roughly seven minutes long, the standard length of theatrical shorts). This sequence involves the fourth claimant to the title of the Greatest Man in Siam. This contestant is a jazz trumpet player. And he enters playing his trumpet.

This is not, of course, the first music we hear. Like all cartoons there’s been music from the beginning. Once the contest begins, however, some of the music ‘moves’ from the soundtrack and into the cartoon itself – in film-theory terms, from extradiegetic to diegetic. The king initiates the contest by singing a song about it. Each contestant, in turn, sings their own praises, using the same melody initiated by the king. The trumpeter makes his entrance by playing an unaccompanied four-bar riff.

In fact we, along with the king and his daughter, hear the riff before we see the trumpeter. They look up, and there he is, playing out of a high window:

The trumpet itself, in that form, is a Western instrument, and the music is mid-century swing. The setting and costumes, as before, come from the Orientalist fantasy. Notice the shape of that window and the long decorative elements below it. They have a distinctly phallic cast, which is certainly appropriate to the subject matter (courtship). As I’ve argued in The Phallus in the Palace, this is not the first time we see a phallic symbol in the cartoon. They’re part of the visual fabric of this Orientalist fantasy world – another element of the blending going on.

The trumpeter descends by parachute – 20th Century America, with military overtones. As he descends he sings his song, which ends: “With my trumpet I blow blues, I play so hot I blow a fuse, I’m the hottest man in Siam, yes I am.” Those words signal, and are part of, a virtuoso bit of blending. While he sings, we get a close-up of the daughter, and then we get a close-up of his eyes. [See my previous post for more discussion eyes]:

Even as he sings about blowing a fuse, his eyes morph into 30amp fuses:

So, we get a blend between his face and the domain of electrical equipment. But, I suggest, not only his face. For his face was preceded immediately by hers. In a few frames his face will disappear entirely, as will the fuses. All we see is sparking arcing between two points:

Those two points are his eyes, but her eyes as well, but also one point is he and one is she. The electricity is not merely the electron flow in circuitry but the emotional flow between a man and a woman in courtship – and more.

What has happened is that everything that’s appeared in this cartoon, from domains of Orientalist fantasy and America, has been blended and compressed into that one image of bi-polar sparking. The trumpeter will emerge from that image floating in ecstasy:

Then he’ll start blowing his blues in earnest. First as an outline – just a fusion of form and music:

Then he’ll solidify:

And then he’ll start dancing with the daughter:

All Together Now

That couple dance will morph into a grand carnival in which the couple will appear with signs of being bride and groom and everyone will be dancing.

At this point the distinction between the Orientalist fantasy and 20th Century America has been all but obliterated. The music and the dancing are American, as are party balloons and streamers. The costumes are that remains of Orientalist fantasy, though an elephant will appear at the end – though elephants aren’t indigenous to the Middle East. If one were to further argue that the Orientalist domain is, in this cartoon, female, and the American domain is male (think of the war), then the collapse of the distinction between those domains mirrors and is a consequence of the marriage between the king’s daughter and the hottest man in Siam.

It all happens gracefully, beneath our cognitive radar. The blending is us.

In Praise of Cartoons

If you read much about cartoons you’ll encounter the notion of a gag, which is a word of art. The classic American cartoon – of which The Greatest Man in Siam – is one example, is a tissue of gags. Many of those gags – perhaps almost all, maybe even all (I’ve made no attempt at extensive examination) – are intrusions of one conceptual domain into another, or collisions between domains. That slightly odd language in the king’s proclamation, the contestant holding up a can of gasoline, the eyes become fuses, those and many others are gags. It follows thus that the classic American cartoon is a vehicle for (often virtuoso) conceptual integration.

Between the visuals, the soundtrack music, the relationship between the two, cartoons are about conceptual integration. When cartoon folk talk about gags, they’re talking about conceptual integration. The question that has posed itself for me over the past few months is whether or not cartoons are the richest locus of multimodal conceptual integration of any art form in the past century.

If cartoons ARE that – maybe they are, maybe not – I’d like to know why. Is it a matter of media ecology, that cartoons got that job because of how they’ve emerged in the marketplace? Or is it inherent in the nature of the medium? Every frame is drawn by hand. The movements of the characters must be synched to the music, frame by frame, bar by bar. Is it that that minute attention to each moment somehow prompts one to the possibilities of mingling conceptual domains?

I have no answers to these questions. But I think they’re important ones. And they’re made even more important by the emergence of anime both in Japan and internationally. Anime is not so dense with gags as classic American cartoons, but it is rife with a scramble of motifs and themes from various cultures and eras. Has anime become one of the chief means through which the world's youth are conceptualizing and reconceptualizing life and their lives, and transnationally at that?

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Earlier posts in this series:

1. The Hottest Man in Siam.
2. The Greatest Social Contract in Siam.
3. Why Siam?
4. The Phallus in the Palace.
5. Siamese Eyes, Electricity, and a Contest.