(no subject)
so this has been a long time coming. it isn't for a class or anything, just me trying my hand at a nonfiction piece on my own. comments appreciated, especially about the order of the three sections.
Around thirteen, I began to suspect that my hatred of the Disney character Goofy was not something the rest of humanity felt. In fact, I was noticing that most people seemed indifferent toward him, or liked him. So, I tried to embrace him. I watched episodes of Goof Troop, and I stole my brother’s Goofy figurine and put it in my room, on my nightstand. Every day when I woke and every night when I went to sleep, there was Goofy, with his gap-toothed grin and his too-large feet. I would try to think of things to like about Goofy, try to be more like him. Try to worry less and embrace more, try to swallow my pride and apologize even when I wasn’t sorry. After a few weeks, the experiment was failing. I hated Goofy more than ever, hated the sight of his stupid long face in the morning, hated the way trying to be like him meant foregoing arguments in favor of a shrug. I decided extreme tactics were in order.
I borrowed A Goofy Movie from my paternal grandmother and sat down one Saturday morning to watch it before anyone else in my family had risen. The VHS tape was darkly sinister in my hand as I pushed it into the tape player. As the opening credits of the movie began, I felt the way I imagine someone would feel if they decided to push pins under their own fingernails willingly. I had made a very foolish decision in starting this movie.
However, as the film got going, I found myself relating to Max, Goofy’s son. He too hated Goofy. I felt Max’s pain when Goofy decided to drag him on a ridiculous road trip when Max had his own things to do. I admired Max for thinking of a way to foil Goofy’s plans. In the film’s climactic scene, in which Max and Goofy are floating down river rapids on top of their destroyed car, I even felt validation at Max’s rejection of Goofy. Finally, I thought, someone was telling Goofy off properly! As Max yelled at Goofy for being clumsy, for ruining everything with his senseless optimism, I rejoiced. Maybe I didn’t have to accept my inner Goof after all.
However, as anyone who has seen the movie knows, this is not how the film ends. It is a children’s film, after all. Goofy manages to pull his act together at the last minute and not ruin his son’s life. His son is able to accept his father despite his shortcomings, and even introduces him to his girlfriend. It would have been perfect if this storyline had inspired me to make a similar change in my outlook, to embrace the Goofs I encountered. But it didn’t. I rewound the movie, half hoping that the tape player would destroy the film, and gave my brother back his Goofy figurine. Call it puberty, call it stubbornness or pride or arrogance, but at that point I was unwilling to accept that Goofy was redeemable in any sense. I still hated him, only now I knew that hatred was absolutely irrational, unable to be combated with exposure or arguments. I simply loathed him for reasons I could barely list, let alone understand.
Let me begin with the basics. First of all, he looks nothing like a dog. Dogs do not have teeth that look like piano keys. They do not have gangly limbs, or hands the size of t-bones. They don’t wear green top hats or suspenders, and they certainly don’t wear shoes, at least not in their natural state, though I’m sure everyone has seen one or two of those ridiculous photos. Dogs in wedding dresses, dogs playing poker, dogs driving cars. They make about as much sense to me as Goofy does, but at least they still look and act like dogs.
I thought he was a fool, and that he was exempt from the way the world worked. He made horrible messes of his life and the lives of others, and was allowed to get away with it. An exclamation of “gawrsh!” and an apology, and he was off the hook. But this was not the way the world worked, and I knew it. Never mind that I was-and still am-willing to suspend my disbelief for magic carpets, singing mermaids, and talking candelabras. Unicorns, dancing hippos, and mouse detectives all made it through the relatively strenuous gauntlet of my rationality into my heart. I loved them all, but I did not love Goofy.
Now, this isn’t to say I’m against anthropomorphic cartoons. I really don’t have any problem with other Disney characters. Sure, Minnie is a little vacant, and Mickey is arguably more naive than Goofy, but they don’t bother me. I don’t hate them. I even have a little bit of a crush on the foxy Robin Hood, and I would like for Bagheera to be my friend. It’s Goofy’s personality that bothers me, the manner in which he has been made quasi-human. Art Babbit, the man who created Goofy in the 1930’s, once gave a detailed description of the character that captures perfectly some of the things that I cannot stand about him:
“Think of the Goof as a composite of an everlasting optimist, a gullible Good Samaritan, a halfwit and a shiftless, good-natured hick. He is loose-jointed and gangly, but not rubbery.
He can move fast if he has to, but would rather avoid any overexertion, so he takes what seems to be the easiest way. He is a philosopher of the barber shop variety. No matter what happens, he accepts it finally as being for the best or at least amusing. He very seldom, if ever, reaches an objective or completes what he has started. His brain being rather vapory, it is difficult for him to concentrate on any one subject. Any little distraction can throw him off his train of thought and it is extremely difficult for the Goof to keep to his purpose.”
Looking at my hatred today, I think it stems from the fact that Goofy is simply too real. I know people like him, people who think they can bungle their way through life and get away with anything if they only feel remorseful. The Goofy personality types are the people who convert to Christianity on death row. We all have a friend who never stops asking for favors, yet never seems to do any in return. They’re the ones who think that they can decide which things in life affect them and which don’t, who tuck away the bills and forget them for months. They are not responsible, and to me, their apologies are always empty, a series of three magic words that should make everything alright. Goofy doesn’t think enough about the world.
I am not these things. If I were suddenly transformed before your eyes into a Disney character, it would be Donald. I am loud. I crash and burn a lot. I speak too soon and too fast and I have to force myself to be forgiving. I am a loyal friend, but not an easy one-if I were friends with Mickey, I would try to subvert him all the time too. I don’t believe in letting others get comfortable with their opinions, and I don’t believe in getting comfortable with mine. There’s a reason Donald and Goofy are always quarreling in cartoons; it’s because their world views are almost irreconcilable. Goofy flows with the current of the world, content to bob along like a piece of flotsam, while Donald fights against it, questions the lot he has been given and the direction life is leading him. The one personality trait they share is that each, in their own way, is a good friend to Mickey, Mickey with his noble notions and his good heart.
So my hatred of Goofy isn’t really about Goofy at all. It’s everything he represents, the kind of outlook his existence seems to condone. Simplicity is beyond me in almost all its forms. By hating Goofy, who stands as an archetype of a kind of person, I am able to interact with people like him. My subconscious frustration at the naturally content is vented on him. It’s easier that way. He doesn’t have the richness and the complexity of an individual which makes them almost impossible to hate. He’s everything I dislike about humanity-apathy, acceptance of fate, irrational optimism-wrapped up in a neat little package. And in the end, the reason I hate him the most is because I can’t help but be like him sometimes, just like Goofy-types are like Donald on occasion, and maybe we’re all trying to be Mickey but failing. Maybe Mickey isn’t even an option on the spectrum of humanity; maybe he’s what we’ll never be, but we like him because he challenges us. At least, that’s why Donald seems to like him, and why I like him too. Goofy, if I’m being brutally objective and honest, is equal but different. Not better or worse than Donald, just alien. Mickey is above them both, the uberminsch, the head of the cartoon pantheon. I hate Goofy because he’s everything that’s holding me back from that perfect state, something so alien to me as to be beyond my reach forever.
My hatred of Goofy is more of a cause of social awkwardness than you might expect. People often react at first with amusement, and later with anger. They attempt to reason with me. They call me uptight, narrow minded, and judgmental for hating Goofy so fully and seemingly arbitrarily. It’s hard to explain to them why I hate Goofy, and harder to show them that hating me for hating Goofy is just as foolish. We’re too attached to icons, to representations of ourselves.
Once, I was shopping for a gift with my then-boyfriend. It was for his mother, for some occasion like a birthday or mother’s day. His mother was the type who liked knick knacks and trinkets, useless dust collectors she could point to and quote a price about. Charlie had decided he wanted to get her a Swarovski crystal statue of something, which in my estimation is about the pinnacle of useless. My mother would throttle me if I dropped 75 bucks on a crystal carving of a tropical fish, even if I gave it to her afterwards. But, she was his mother, not mine, and so we were standing on the second floor of a Macy’s, looking at the statues in the display case and discussing their various merits. The second shelf of the display case held all Disney statues. Winnie the Pooh clutched a balloon, Mickey waved a sorcerer’s wand, and Eeyore sat forlornly in the case, each of them cast in clear crystal with jet eyes and detail work.
There was, of course, a Goofy, tucked neatly between a playful Pluto and a flirtatious Minnie. For just around $250, you could own the stupid thing, Goofy with his mouth agape and his hands raised in a typical Goofy fashion, as if to say “well shucks, I can’t do anything about this goshdarned price, but I hope we can still be friends.” To this day, if I see that statue in a private home where I can touch it, the only thing that will keep me from bashing it to bits is the exorbitant price.
“Well, as long as you don’t buy her that Goofy, I don’t really care,” I said finally. The Goofy comment was made half jokingly. Of course Charlie would never even consider the Goofy.
At least, that’s what I thought until I saw him glance at me measuringly.
“You don’t like the Goofy? It’s expensive, but I think she’d like it. She likes Goofy.”
My heart stuttered in its rhythm. “Your mom likes Goofy?” I tried to keep the horror out of my voice, but it didn’t work. Charlie’s attention now moved away from the statues for good to rest on me.
“Yeah, why? What’s wrong with Goofy? You don’t like him?”
I scoffed. “No, I don’t! He’s an idiot. He’s a total retard, and he’s not funny.”
“I bet you like Donald.”
“Yeah, I do, actually.”
“Donald is an asshole. He’s always messing with people. At least Goofy is nice.”
“Goofy is nice because he’s too stupid to be anything else.”
An awkward silence fell. The statues in the case glittered. The shards of light reflected by the Donald and Goofy statues seemed particularly sharp. They stood far apart in the case, as if even the person putting them out for display knew they couldn’t be near each other.
“I think I’ll get the kitten with the ball of yarn,” Charlie said, referring to a cheaper statue of a crystal kitten lying on its back. It was wearing a blue bow and patting a ball of clear yarn.
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s cute.”
The subject of Goofy didn’t come up between us again until I went with him to his home in Kentucky to meet his Goofy-loving mother and the rest of his family. In his closet in his old bedroom was a tee shirt from one of his many childhood trips to Disneyworld. It was nothing but a huge picture of Goofy, his hands flailing around in a claim for your attention, his grin wide and unassuming.
“Did you ever wear this?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I like Goofy, I told you.”
“Why?” I demanded. I was starting to suspect that Charlie was a Goofy type. Since meeting his family, I could see that he put up with being ordered around, did what was easy simply because it was easier than struggling for what you wanted. Charlie was afraid of his inner Donald in much the same way I was of my inner Goofy. And in that moment, I knew we couldn’t be together forever, not the way we were. I needed someone with a little Donald in them, a little roguish and a little too serious for their own good, a little jaded and sarcastic. He needed someone less uptight, more naturally kind, who could accept things more readily than me. I asked too much of the world in his opinion, and he didn’t ask enough in mine.
The car ride back to Indiana a few days later was silent and strained. We both knew his family hadn’t liked me. His mother saw the same things I had realized on the trip, that he and I were not compatible on deep levels that weren’t visible during every day life except to a mother’s critical eye.
“It’ll be okay, though,” he said eventually, shooting me a reassuring smile. A typical Goofy comment. I opened my mouth to give argument, and shut it again, considering. I leaned back in my seat to let the spring sunshine touch my face, the breeze comb fingers through my hair. I surrendered myself to fate, or chance, or whatever governs this world. I stopped trying to predict the future, stopped fighting to shape the world to be the way I wanted it. I gave him a broad grin in response, one that could probably only be described by a name I hate, a word I can't embrace, an aspect of myself I cannot escape.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it will be.”
Around thirteen, I began to suspect that my hatred of the Disney character Goofy was not something the rest of humanity felt. In fact, I was noticing that most people seemed indifferent toward him, or liked him. So, I tried to embrace him. I watched episodes of Goof Troop, and I stole my brother’s Goofy figurine and put it in my room, on my nightstand. Every day when I woke and every night when I went to sleep, there was Goofy, with his gap-toothed grin and his too-large feet. I would try to think of things to like about Goofy, try to be more like him. Try to worry less and embrace more, try to swallow my pride and apologize even when I wasn’t sorry. After a few weeks, the experiment was failing. I hated Goofy more than ever, hated the sight of his stupid long face in the morning, hated the way trying to be like him meant foregoing arguments in favor of a shrug. I decided extreme tactics were in order.
I borrowed A Goofy Movie from my paternal grandmother and sat down one Saturday morning to watch it before anyone else in my family had risen. The VHS tape was darkly sinister in my hand as I pushed it into the tape player. As the opening credits of the movie began, I felt the way I imagine someone would feel if they decided to push pins under their own fingernails willingly. I had made a very foolish decision in starting this movie.
However, as the film got going, I found myself relating to Max, Goofy’s son. He too hated Goofy. I felt Max’s pain when Goofy decided to drag him on a ridiculous road trip when Max had his own things to do. I admired Max for thinking of a way to foil Goofy’s plans. In the film’s climactic scene, in which Max and Goofy are floating down river rapids on top of their destroyed car, I even felt validation at Max’s rejection of Goofy. Finally, I thought, someone was telling Goofy off properly! As Max yelled at Goofy for being clumsy, for ruining everything with his senseless optimism, I rejoiced. Maybe I didn’t have to accept my inner Goof after all.
However, as anyone who has seen the movie knows, this is not how the film ends. It is a children’s film, after all. Goofy manages to pull his act together at the last minute and not ruin his son’s life. His son is able to accept his father despite his shortcomings, and even introduces him to his girlfriend. It would have been perfect if this storyline had inspired me to make a similar change in my outlook, to embrace the Goofs I encountered. But it didn’t. I rewound the movie, half hoping that the tape player would destroy the film, and gave my brother back his Goofy figurine. Call it puberty, call it stubbornness or pride or arrogance, but at that point I was unwilling to accept that Goofy was redeemable in any sense. I still hated him, only now I knew that hatred was absolutely irrational, unable to be combated with exposure or arguments. I simply loathed him for reasons I could barely list, let alone understand.
Let me begin with the basics. First of all, he looks nothing like a dog. Dogs do not have teeth that look like piano keys. They do not have gangly limbs, or hands the size of t-bones. They don’t wear green top hats or suspenders, and they certainly don’t wear shoes, at least not in their natural state, though I’m sure everyone has seen one or two of those ridiculous photos. Dogs in wedding dresses, dogs playing poker, dogs driving cars. They make about as much sense to me as Goofy does, but at least they still look and act like dogs.
I thought he was a fool, and that he was exempt from the way the world worked. He made horrible messes of his life and the lives of others, and was allowed to get away with it. An exclamation of “gawrsh!” and an apology, and he was off the hook. But this was not the way the world worked, and I knew it. Never mind that I was-and still am-willing to suspend my disbelief for magic carpets, singing mermaids, and talking candelabras. Unicorns, dancing hippos, and mouse detectives all made it through the relatively strenuous gauntlet of my rationality into my heart. I loved them all, but I did not love Goofy.
Now, this isn’t to say I’m against anthropomorphic cartoons. I really don’t have any problem with other Disney characters. Sure, Minnie is a little vacant, and Mickey is arguably more naive than Goofy, but they don’t bother me. I don’t hate them. I even have a little bit of a crush on the foxy Robin Hood, and I would like for Bagheera to be my friend. It’s Goofy’s personality that bothers me, the manner in which he has been made quasi-human. Art Babbit, the man who created Goofy in the 1930’s, once gave a detailed description of the character that captures perfectly some of the things that I cannot stand about him:
“Think of the Goof as a composite of an everlasting optimist, a gullible Good Samaritan, a halfwit and a shiftless, good-natured hick. He is loose-jointed and gangly, but not rubbery.
He can move fast if he has to, but would rather avoid any overexertion, so he takes what seems to be the easiest way. He is a philosopher of the barber shop variety. No matter what happens, he accepts it finally as being for the best or at least amusing. He very seldom, if ever, reaches an objective or completes what he has started. His brain being rather vapory, it is difficult for him to concentrate on any one subject. Any little distraction can throw him off his train of thought and it is extremely difficult for the Goof to keep to his purpose.”
Looking at my hatred today, I think it stems from the fact that Goofy is simply too real. I know people like him, people who think they can bungle their way through life and get away with anything if they only feel remorseful. The Goofy personality types are the people who convert to Christianity on death row. We all have a friend who never stops asking for favors, yet never seems to do any in return. They’re the ones who think that they can decide which things in life affect them and which don’t, who tuck away the bills and forget them for months. They are not responsible, and to me, their apologies are always empty, a series of three magic words that should make everything alright. Goofy doesn’t think enough about the world.
I am not these things. If I were suddenly transformed before your eyes into a Disney character, it would be Donald. I am loud. I crash and burn a lot. I speak too soon and too fast and I have to force myself to be forgiving. I am a loyal friend, but not an easy one-if I were friends with Mickey, I would try to subvert him all the time too. I don’t believe in letting others get comfortable with their opinions, and I don’t believe in getting comfortable with mine. There’s a reason Donald and Goofy are always quarreling in cartoons; it’s because their world views are almost irreconcilable. Goofy flows with the current of the world, content to bob along like a piece of flotsam, while Donald fights against it, questions the lot he has been given and the direction life is leading him. The one personality trait they share is that each, in their own way, is a good friend to Mickey, Mickey with his noble notions and his good heart.
So my hatred of Goofy isn’t really about Goofy at all. It’s everything he represents, the kind of outlook his existence seems to condone. Simplicity is beyond me in almost all its forms. By hating Goofy, who stands as an archetype of a kind of person, I am able to interact with people like him. My subconscious frustration at the naturally content is vented on him. It’s easier that way. He doesn’t have the richness and the complexity of an individual which makes them almost impossible to hate. He’s everything I dislike about humanity-apathy, acceptance of fate, irrational optimism-wrapped up in a neat little package. And in the end, the reason I hate him the most is because I can’t help but be like him sometimes, just like Goofy-types are like Donald on occasion, and maybe we’re all trying to be Mickey but failing. Maybe Mickey isn’t even an option on the spectrum of humanity; maybe he’s what we’ll never be, but we like him because he challenges us. At least, that’s why Donald seems to like him, and why I like him too. Goofy, if I’m being brutally objective and honest, is equal but different. Not better or worse than Donald, just alien. Mickey is above them both, the uberminsch, the head of the cartoon pantheon. I hate Goofy because he’s everything that’s holding me back from that perfect state, something so alien to me as to be beyond my reach forever.
My hatred of Goofy is more of a cause of social awkwardness than you might expect. People often react at first with amusement, and later with anger. They attempt to reason with me. They call me uptight, narrow minded, and judgmental for hating Goofy so fully and seemingly arbitrarily. It’s hard to explain to them why I hate Goofy, and harder to show them that hating me for hating Goofy is just as foolish. We’re too attached to icons, to representations of ourselves.
Once, I was shopping for a gift with my then-boyfriend. It was for his mother, for some occasion like a birthday or mother’s day. His mother was the type who liked knick knacks and trinkets, useless dust collectors she could point to and quote a price about. Charlie had decided he wanted to get her a Swarovski crystal statue of something, which in my estimation is about the pinnacle of useless. My mother would throttle me if I dropped 75 bucks on a crystal carving of a tropical fish, even if I gave it to her afterwards. But, she was his mother, not mine, and so we were standing on the second floor of a Macy’s, looking at the statues in the display case and discussing their various merits. The second shelf of the display case held all Disney statues. Winnie the Pooh clutched a balloon, Mickey waved a sorcerer’s wand, and Eeyore sat forlornly in the case, each of them cast in clear crystal with jet eyes and detail work.
There was, of course, a Goofy, tucked neatly between a playful Pluto and a flirtatious Minnie. For just around $250, you could own the stupid thing, Goofy with his mouth agape and his hands raised in a typical Goofy fashion, as if to say “well shucks, I can’t do anything about this goshdarned price, but I hope we can still be friends.” To this day, if I see that statue in a private home where I can touch it, the only thing that will keep me from bashing it to bits is the exorbitant price.
“Well, as long as you don’t buy her that Goofy, I don’t really care,” I said finally. The Goofy comment was made half jokingly. Of course Charlie would never even consider the Goofy.
At least, that’s what I thought until I saw him glance at me measuringly.
“You don’t like the Goofy? It’s expensive, but I think she’d like it. She likes Goofy.”
My heart stuttered in its rhythm. “Your mom likes Goofy?” I tried to keep the horror out of my voice, but it didn’t work. Charlie’s attention now moved away from the statues for good to rest on me.
“Yeah, why? What’s wrong with Goofy? You don’t like him?”
I scoffed. “No, I don’t! He’s an idiot. He’s a total retard, and he’s not funny.”
“I bet you like Donald.”
“Yeah, I do, actually.”
“Donald is an asshole. He’s always messing with people. At least Goofy is nice.”
“Goofy is nice because he’s too stupid to be anything else.”
An awkward silence fell. The statues in the case glittered. The shards of light reflected by the Donald and Goofy statues seemed particularly sharp. They stood far apart in the case, as if even the person putting them out for display knew they couldn’t be near each other.
“I think I’ll get the kitten with the ball of yarn,” Charlie said, referring to a cheaper statue of a crystal kitten lying on its back. It was wearing a blue bow and patting a ball of clear yarn.
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s cute.”
The subject of Goofy didn’t come up between us again until I went with him to his home in Kentucky to meet his Goofy-loving mother and the rest of his family. In his closet in his old bedroom was a tee shirt from one of his many childhood trips to Disneyworld. It was nothing but a huge picture of Goofy, his hands flailing around in a claim for your attention, his grin wide and unassuming.
“Did you ever wear this?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I like Goofy, I told you.”
“Why?” I demanded. I was starting to suspect that Charlie was a Goofy type. Since meeting his family, I could see that he put up with being ordered around, did what was easy simply because it was easier than struggling for what you wanted. Charlie was afraid of his inner Donald in much the same way I was of my inner Goofy. And in that moment, I knew we couldn’t be together forever, not the way we were. I needed someone with a little Donald in them, a little roguish and a little too serious for their own good, a little jaded and sarcastic. He needed someone less uptight, more naturally kind, who could accept things more readily than me. I asked too much of the world in his opinion, and he didn’t ask enough in mine.
The car ride back to Indiana a few days later was silent and strained. We both knew his family hadn’t liked me. His mother saw the same things I had realized on the trip, that he and I were not compatible on deep levels that weren’t visible during every day life except to a mother’s critical eye.
“It’ll be okay, though,” he said eventually, shooting me a reassuring smile. A typical Goofy comment. I opened my mouth to give argument, and shut it again, considering. I leaned back in my seat to let the spring sunshine touch my face, the breeze comb fingers through my hair. I surrendered myself to fate, or chance, or whatever governs this world. I stopped trying to predict the future, stopped fighting to shape the world to be the way I wanted it. I gave him a broad grin in response, one that could probably only be described by a name I hate, a word I can't embrace, an aspect of myself I cannot escape.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it will be.”