How To Read Donald Duck is one of those books that seems ridiculous at first, but then offers a couple of convincing passages of rhetoric that make you say, "Maybe these guys are right about something...about what I have no idea.."
The book, first published in 1971, is built around a false premise: they want to regard Disney comic books with contempt because the Disney brand itself is associated with heavy merchandising, so any entertainment offered to foreign countries by the company must be a propaganda tool, right? No, not when the "evidence" offered is from the peripheral corners of Disney company; essentially, they point out what they believe is a poor effort at convincing the audience they could achieving anything by following the comics as a model of a domesticated, American-flavored utopia, with a sexually marginalized consumer culture and capitalist economy; the main text is under 120 pages.
What makes the book interesting to read is when their observations are genuinely interesting - where it becomes clear that they have read the comics and observed recurring themes in the stories that hint that they're onto something, but it veers more toward profiles of the various Disney comic book protagonists and a tangent from their big picture thesis, so they don't develop it any further; it wouldn't draw attention like associations with Colonialism, Freudian stereotypes, cultural/ethnic caricatures or abnormalities with anthropological animals; the passages dwelling on those subjects are flooded with tangled jargon - they're the most boring parts of the book.
The most intriguing part of the book is Chapter 5: "The Ideas Machine". Dorfman & Mattelart are still trying to suggest this material is flawed propaganda, so they argue in this chapter that Donald, Mickey & Scrooge are terrible as aspirational characters because they each live a charmed existence with contradictory drawbacks: they argue Mickey doesn't suffer bad karma because he uses his intelligence to solve mysteries and outwit criminals; his altruism is rewarded with a nice life, though he has to live like a perfect Boy Scout and his life is very bland; Scrooge is wealthy and poor at the same time: he's wealthy, but he is stuck - he enjoys his fortune the way a hoarder enjoys their collections of junk, but it just lays there in his money bin, yet because his hoard has value, it is vulnerable to theft, with the hint that the loss of his fortune is the death of him; his money is his life, but he lives by keeping as much of it as possible. They conclude he's a tragic figure, which ironically makes him sympathetic, because he forever remains a rich tycoon.
Donald Duck - or, to be specific, the comic book Donald, who is a more deeper character than the cartoon Donald, yet was so sharply modified by cartoonist Carl Barks in his stories, he became complex enough to have subsumed the animated cartoon version of Donald and is essentially considered the same character appearing in all media - from their socioeconomic perspective, is the strangest character of all. At one point in this chapter, they conclude that Donald pretends to work. In all of his stories, Donald is never in danger of losing parental guardianship of his nephews, Huey, Dewey & Louie; he is never in danger of losing his home or car; he is almost always unemployed, in a sitcom fantasy world where jobs are always available and never scarce. He is totally incompetent, often fired for his bungling, but finds another job anyway. His usual motivation for working is he wants to earn money to buy gifts for his girlfriend, Daisy, or toys for the nephews, or complete down payments on luxury items for himself, like a TV set. Many of the jobs he works in are at factories, which have become a scarce source of employment in the United States with each decade, as manufacturers found outsourcing from other countries a cheaper option. When Donald is depicted as being particularly good at a job, or accomplishing tasks all too easily without going through a daily grind, it's argued that he's trying not to be bored; his efforts at entertaining himself lead to making greater mistakes resulting in his termination. If he's successful at a job, like, for example, a janitor or museum guard, this is usually established at the beginning of a longer adventure tale that begins with him quitting this job so that he can take off on some far-flung quest. This behavior is defined in the book as freedom from labor; Donald only works when he's bored, is useless at a job that requires focus and attention because of his incompetence, but quits any job he's successful at because he's bored by the daily grind - he hates it when he succeeds at a job, because it will be dull, but would be awful at a job that demands him to be more active and lacks initiative to break from this. It's possible that this might be why the Disney comics from Europe had long established that Donald is subletting his home from Scrooge, who is presented as the true owner of the property, and, most-likely, the one who pays Donald's Bill's and makes sure his nephews are not living in poverty. So, in Italian comics in particular, there exists dialogue where Scrooge gets away with regarding Donald as an irresponsible parasite. In American comic book reprints of those original stories, this behavior always seems out of character for Scrooge, but is understandable when this overseas perspective of Donald & Scrooge's personalities is explained.
Donald's cousin, Gladstone Gander, is considered a more aspirational figure than Donald, because his good luck allows instant success with no effort or gratification necessary, but there is no discernible career path for the reader to follow if they want to have a life like Gladstone, so he exists to make Donald look more sympathetic, because it's more possible to aspire to be like Donald and follow a path, even though it's been concluded that Donald is terrible at the follow-through.
They postulate the only time Donald appears to truly be working are when he goes on adventures with his nephews and Uncle Scrooge, or when his sitcom life depicts him going to outrageous lengths to achieve mundane goals, like obtain a signature from an authority figure, feuding with his neighbor or nephews, or the act of falling in and out of a job itself. This is the first time I've heard of the term suffrenture - suffering coated with adventure. He goes through conflicts that are not exciting at heart, but have the capacity to be entertaining - the realm of freedom vs. the realm of necessity. When Hercules was tasked of cleaning the Augean stables of massive piles of horsepoop, this was not depicted as an ordinary farm chore, but one of The Twelve Labors, as important as chopping the heads off the giant Hydra or capturing Hades' dog, Cerberus.
So, that's the only thing I enjoyed about the book - one chapter, in which the authors were paying attention to what they read, but in support of their contempt. The rest of this book was a slog - a suffrenture that argues the Disney Company is doing a terrible job at manufacturing subliminal capitalist propaganda; you can read Donald, Mickey and Scrooge stories, but they're not helping you learn to live like them...we don't learn how to live right from them...and in that sense, those guys are right...?
It's not as though this book is the definitive guide to Disney Comics, anyway..there's still plenty of unanswered questions..
