Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America
Leila Philip, (2024, 2022)
The childhood home my brother and I grew up in had a slanted perception of American monoculture, one where a majority of social life radiated from the church, and that most mainstream media—MTV, Dungeons & Dragons, anything rated north of PG—were perpetually, intentionally attempting to undermine. Most of the new popular culture we encountered was simply new to us and deemed safe by our parents: music on the oldies stations, Nick at Nite, the first couple waves of Walt Disney films. Yet we were also drawn to our own secular myths, and for a kid in the cradle of New England, there were few greater than the American West. For me, anything associated with the Cascadia bioregion was then, and for the most part has been since, a fascination.
An origin point was Disney's True-Life Adventures, a series of nature shorts directed by James Algar and narrated by Winston Hibler, the latter's voice at the median of James Cagney and Bing Crosby (for example, "decoy" pronounced "d'koy"). In Beaver Valley (1950) was my favorite.
The TLA films were, are, beautiful to look at and listen to. Moose trampling through a swampy river. Eagles negotiating against an Alice blue sky. Alger's affinity for sustained views replicates with a handheld camera what it might be like to observe its subjects in the wild. But many of the scenes are notoriously staged, animals coaxed to flee and manipulated into unnatural positions to show action and move along the plot, often to their detriment, ike in the myth-creating slaughter of lemmings in White Wilderness (1958).
Currently streaming on Disney+ and categorized under "documentaries," a loose genre that has come to include traditional Ken Burns-style projects, stitched together found footage, student films, exposé television newsmagazines like 20/20, and profiles of quasi-celebrities. TLA was never about documenting accurate science. The films themselves are fictions, noted today for notorious directorial choices that favor dramatic affect over scientific accuracy. They're an all a too-literal example of wild, nature, and "true-life" as what William Cronon (1995) observed in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature: what we often call the wilderness is actually "a human creation... a product of [human] civilization."
What is actually being documented in TLA is the version of America, of industry, of heteronormative nuclear family, and so that you know it's a Disney production, union-busting. According to the narration, "The beaver is a solid citizen, and he builds a solid house. He has no use for frivolity, nor will he even pause to pass the day with a fellow worker." Segments of these films were later repurposed as educational videos shown in public schools across the US through at least the 1990s.
Everything is soundtracked by sweeping strings and punctuated horns to signify the heroes and villains of the story, letting the audience know when to laugh and when to accuse. One prolonged scene involves frogs ribbiting in concert with the music, like an inverse of the "dramatic instrumental music" gag in High Anxiety. It's a silly but charming pomo break from a project that is otherwise an appeal for modernity.
Both the visual and audio style are common across the Disney films of that era, likewise on d'splay in The Gnome-Mobile and others we watched and rewatched. The Gnome-Mobile was directed by Robert Stevenson, with a ridiculous plot I won't get into here but that has, at it's heart, a rather sincere, if entirely whitewashed, pro-environmental moral. It's based on the novel by Upton Sinclair (1936), best known for muckraking novels like the Jungle (1906) and King Coal (1917). Stevenson more notable films, also heavy in our family's rotation, include Mary Poppins (1964) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), which invoked the Suffragette movement and World War II, respectively, as vehicles for British audiences to safely reconceptualize concurrent social upheavals of 1960s youth subculture and the Troubles.
The cover colors and typeface of Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America invoke a similarly imagined mid-twentieth century U.S. pastiche as In Beaver Valley. Philip focuses on the same protagonist to tell a different narrative of American industrialism and the constructions of human/nature interaction. (And like me, the story starts in New England, with visits to the Pacific Northwest.) The non-humans are not anthropomorphized in some heavy handed allegory about individual rights, hard work, or the nuclear family—tough to avoid with beavers!
Rare in the "biography of non-human" genre, the human characters can be as interesting. Philips gives us glimpses into their political leanings, sometimes illustrated through the go-nowhere conversations she has with them. Most of these characters like beavers because they like to kill them, and from that first premise you can accurately predict their views on other issues—licensure, trapping regulations, taxes, etc. Philips is clearly frustrated at times, and she does offer post hoc analyses of the contradictory and unsubstantiated clichés the guys tell her. But she's always gracious for their time. Unlike those old nature films, you can't force your participants to tell the story you want.
*Philip is a Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts
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