The Perfect American by Philip Glass

By Charlie Fox

‘If only the phantom would stop reappearing!’

So begins, in a soprano’s frightened yelp, John Ashbery’s poem on opera-going, ‘Faust’ (1962). The phantom is an incarnation of failure. Poor ghoul, he doesn’t know ‘the hungers that must be stirred before disappointment can begin’. There is much hunger in the London Coliseum before the premiere of Philip Glass’s The Perfect American (libretto by Rudy Wurlitzer). The hunger makes a glittery noise, the sort that only occurs when an audience is excited or a little scared and has taken to champagne whilst waiting for a grand work by a great artist to be unveiled. Einstein on the beach, playing violin, Kafka singing ‘In The Penal Colony’ and now Walt Disney in hospital, dreaming and dying across two acts. After 20 minutes, a similar phantom appears and he keeps reappearing throughout: a symbol of disappointment, a vague sense that this production is not what our hunger hoped for – ‘the crowds strolled sadly away’.

Hallucinations come and go. There’s much talk of corporate greed and we touch on Disney’s troubled interior. Just as Mussolini was frightened of the moon, Disney harboured all sorts of weird superstitions. Throughout there are signs we should think of him as a dictator in the classic Hollywood mode, full of fury but secretly pathetic. Sometimes it wanders into the shadowlands of the uncanny but more often retreats from proper examination of this haunted life. Disney was plagued by phantoms, too, but they remain obscure. ‘Monstro’, like the whale from Pinocchio (1940), would be a more suitable name for him than Walt.

The Perfect American works best as a sinister carnival of images; meaning is hazy or too obvious, elsewhere darkly suggestive, reminiscent of a Grimm fairytale: Snow White moonlights as a nurse, Abraham Lincoln doubles as an undertaker. In Wurlitzer’s finest writing, his novel Nog (1969) and the script to the chilly road-movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), silence works like a peculiar narcotic. His characters are mutes – stunned, damaged, detached – who find speech too strange and difficult to employ. Their speechlessness lets a disconcerting mood seep into the work, but Disney is a ferocious talker, always slipping into a soliloquy or reciting statistics so that the opera’s desired atmosphere comes in the vacant spaces between words, then the feel is spooky, feverish, like Fellini in despair.

Everything begins in silhouette or, more precisely, with something uncannily between a silhouette, smoke and the amorphous shape unique to nightmare. A grey owl is projected onto a silken sheet like a monster in a magic-lantern show. (The image comes from Joseph Pierce whose animation has a wonderful dark elegance. Later, tumours in the shape of Mickey Mouse heads will metastasize in Uncle Walt’s lungs until he’s riddled with cancer.) The bird doesn’t swoop but billows across the sheet, as if it’s made out of some toxic fog, all set to unusually deep, desolate Glass. Suddenly we’re inside those dark, enchanted forests that surround the fairytale home, as close to Twin Peaks (1990–91) as the woods from Snow White (1937). And the owl is about to catch… a mouse, maybe? Mickey, so far as I know, in all his adventures never met an owl. Disney is the prone creature here; owls terrified him from childhood on, somehow made in his mind into a premonition of death. It’s an eerie, arresting prologue, set at the threshold of nightmare and real- life terror. The production never locates a symbol so stark and strange again.

Out of the owl’s shadow steps Walt Disney (sung by Christopher Purves), in glorious health, smoking like the devil. It’s 1965. By the end of the next year, he’ll be dead. Together with a happy chorus, he exalts the small-town idyll of Marceline where his fantasy world took shape. It’s all Midwestern warmth, cheerful families, blue skies, white folk and bright-eyed animals frolicking, a place where, in a haunting little phrase, ‘USA’ is intoned like ‘Amen’ at the end of a hymn.

Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Nightmare and dream, red-blooded American life, wealth and empire – this is territory rich with myth and symbol. Perhaps Wurlitzer and Glass, who were born the same year that Snow White– the very first full-length Disney film – was released, want to figure out precisely what they’ve inherited from Disneyland, other than its gilded songbook. His films are often where we find out what it means to be frightened (the whining of donkeys will always sound, to me, like the screams of the boys in Pinocchio) and The Perfect American is sometimes a great monologue on fear. But the libretto just wants us to know he was a bad man, which is meant to be a toxic irony because, obviously, his films are full of warmth and angelic kindness. There’s a feel of supreme disenchantment with the cartoons themselves as mere symptoms of Disney’s various fears and fits of treacly sentiment. (Though they are also catalogues of sadism, which goes unmentioned but suits this deformed Disney. ‘Pluto’s Judgment Day’, from 1935, for instance, becomes nastier as I grow older.) Its forays into the real life of the man, with all his greed and despair, feel like vague distractions from those dreams. He’s nothing but a cartoon and his sins are barked at us through a megaphone: he hates ‘negroes’, he adores Reagan (‘I made Ronnie governor’, he brags), he’s a fascist without a thought in his head who prospers from the tireless work of his animators.

A still from ‘Pluto’s Judgment Day’ (1935) in which poor Pluto has a nightmare about a hell ruled by the cats he has wronged. He wakes just he is about to be burned alive. This is the cartoon that best exhibits the especial darkness and cruelty running through the Disney oeuvre.

The baritone’s body means the role has a furious, bearlike grandeur. Purves’s voice is rich with doom and haunted depth; stray notes of longing open up like old wounds. The aged Charles Foster Kane would sing like this. And thoughts of Citizen Kane (1941) are inescapable. Purves is all roar and stomp and lonely walk, a careful assumption of Kane’s later tics and tragic moves. Just like Orson Welles, much of the power in his performance isn’t bound up in the flash and rumble of his voice but an errant sort of grace, a thud here, a fearful pace there.

Contemplate that title, too, which is a sly homage, a little half-echo. When Kane was still an enormous script shrouded in rumour and the possibility of scandal, it was called simply American, a name too grand and empty to mean anything. That addition, that ‘perfect’ is much easier to parse: it’s meant with the most caustic sarcasm. Feeling fanciful, you can join them together according to the dreamy logic of fairytales, turning Disney into Kane’s long-lost, ill-educated brother; not as smart but just as sly, equally dissatisfied with everything. Like Kane, he constructs a kingdom, Disneyland in place of Xanadu, but he lets everybody in rather than keep them out, and he betrays the same immense loneliness.

There’s even a vaguely Kane-like shape to the narrative: a lone animator is seen piecing together his dead master’s life, just like Thompson the journalist sent in search of the meaning behind Kane’s last words. (This element slips in and out of focus, sometimes it disappears completely.) But there are echoes of Kane everywhere if you know how to catch them – even, with some distortion, in the thought of the beast alone in his decaying palace. Such weird tension, a double life of innermost horror and outward warmth, gives Disney a peculiar vulnerability. The opera’s peak comes at the end of the first act when we glimpse some of this torment. Disney is in dialogue with a faux-animatronic Lincoln on the ‘Negro problem’. This president is a supremely uncanny figure who moves according to an agonized choreography, all clockwork shudder and jittery step. His precise meaning, like most hallucinations, is inscrutable. He is a horrific circus attraction straight out of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) – a giant in the middle of a seizure, a clumsy metaphor for all the disorder in the 1960s, or a premonition of bodily decay. By the curtain’s fall, Disney sits sobbing in his lap, the two of them united in their decline.

As he lays dying, cue the comic guest appearance: Andy Warhol arrives from the Factory. Jon Easterlin plays him as if he was the kind of gay jester that haunted sitcoms in the ’70s, prancing around the animation room whilst declaring his likeness to Disney (‘I never criticize America!’) and noting the similarity of their production methods. A comic touch to lessen the darkness around the second act, and maybe a half-serious nod to the effects of mass-production on art, but a perverse decision all the same.

Disney and Warhol are different incarnations of the same monster, alike in their greed, mock-innocence and wily charms. Warhol could draw and Disney, we are told repeatedly, could not – he had to learn his trademark signature, which he could never reproduce it satisfactorily. Warhol never paraded his ‘lack’ of talent in such a camp fashion. To draw him as a little clown, a lisping pussycat (there is something owlish, too, in his movement and the jags of his silver hair) removes their likeness, which runs deeper than any closeness to Kane, and misses how icy he was even in moments of play. Incidentally, if anybody‘s life called for operatic treatment…

Glass’s score is seductive, more discreet. There’s a sinister gleam to certain passages, as if he was thinking about film noir and the nocturnal world that came alive when Disney’s audience were in bed. The orchestra plays it like the score of a lush, dark dream from classic Hollywood, all romantic surface and menacing undertow- most of the time I thought of the sea. In sweep those familiar undulations of textbook Glass, followed as ever by claustrophobic passages, always underpinned by that eerie pulse, everything in that unique timbre. Glass’s work always seems immune to error; it’s the sound of things falling into place. ‘The call of the owl broke my heart…’ Disney laments to us, and another composer might dwell on the strange, lingering effect of certain sounds, make some sorrowful echo, but this isn’t Glass’s domain. There’s always an air of withdrawal to his work, as if sustained by its own intricacy. A sleek and luminous music without risk, it wishes it was perfect, too.

Then is this an oddly hollow work? Familiar Glass, a little darker than usual, and little unexpected in the libretto, except the knowledge that the deceased Disney wasn’t frozen (as the urban legend has it) but cremated. But there were moments of genuine strangeness that even recalled in daylight cause a shiver. Maybe the excellence of the cast was a distraction, but certain scenes still haunt: the mischievous alignment of a phrase with the movements of some deformed rabbits, Lincoln, staggering, Disney’s deathbed, empty, as the curtain fell. Strangest of all, I felt sympathy for this monster then, notes of the same rare, lukewarm ache I feel for the Devil at the end of Fantasia (1940) when he flinches, spooked all-of-a-sudden by the toll of a bell and the dawn light creeping towards him.