What's Up Doc?

Here are some of Don’s very own brilliant words on a subject close to his heart: Bugs Bunny. He wrote the following memorial for his mentor, Franklin Rosemont, who died in April, 2009. Don passed it on to me after we chatted once about the virtues of Looney Tunes.

In an email introducing it, Don says:

"…as his memorial at the newberry library in chicago last july, we were asked to write something about one of his [Rosemont’s] passions, and i did a rant about the revolutionary unconscious of bugs bunny cartoons)...it had been a pet project of his for the better part of ten years, so it pleases me to think that he's working his gris-gris from beyond the grave."

Here's Don's lovely rant:

Franklin Rosemont Commemoration
Newberry Library, Chicago, 11 July 09

The last time I spoke with Franklin was on the telephone a few days before he died. It was a typical conversation for us that ranged widely over a broad spectrum of topics: new ideas, new projects, new discoveries, old favorites… I was especially anxious to tell him about a half-hour documentary film I had just seen about the artist and filmmaker Chuck Jones called Memories of Childhood—you may not know the name “Chuck Jones,” but I’m sure that you’ve all seen his artwork. From 1935 to 1959, Jones was the animation film director at Warner Brothers’ studios and the creative force behind the Golden Age “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies” animated short films featuring Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester and Tweety, the Roadrunner and the Coyote, and, of course, Bugs Bunny.

I was one of those kids whose mind was forever shaped, twisted, and warped by the art and craft of Chuck Jones, and I admit I was a little embarrassed by how fascinated I was by these films. It was only long after the damage was done that I read some of Franklin’s essays in radical defense of Bugs Bunny. Franklin saw revolutionary poetry in Bugs Bunny’s anarchic humor and disdain for the conventions of reality, even though the Grey Hare was a commodity produced by the entertainment-industrial complex. But, as Franklin argued over the years, Bugs Bunny’s guerrilla war on the miseries of daily life is so subversive and so poetic that it spills over the corporate cage that keeps him a prisoner of capitalism.

Franklin insisted that Bugs Bunny’s genealogical heritage stretched back to Cherokee legends of the trickster rabbit, to African-American folklore about Br’er Rabbit, and to both the White Rabbit and the March Hare of the Alice in Wonderland myths. With such a powerful history, Bugs Bunny is well outside of the confines of intellectual property laws—Bugs can be sampled, pirated, and hijacked out of his “authorized” texts and liberated by popular culture. Both hip and hopping, Bugs Bunny has been activated and energized by the imaginations of children for decades—Bugs is a laughing rebel whose thought and actions are infinitely more instructive, interesting, and relevant than his corporate overlords had ever intended. With an insight keener than a roomful of psychologists, Chuck Jones once explained the appeal simply when he said “Bugs is who we want to be. Daffy is who we are.”

Franklin said that Bugs Bunny—like Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx, Pigmeat Markham, and Eve Arden—was a lightning rod for creative rambunctiousness and celebrations of wildly expressive play. Bugs Bunny was important to Franklin because he conceived of humor as both a tool and a weapon against tyranny of all kinds. Franklin wrote: “Against all forms of oppression and horror, humor wreaks havoc—humor deflects horrors full force by means of a powerful shield of poetic intuition. When oppression and horror become total, nothing less than total humor can do the trick. Humor alone can effect a revolution of consciousness.”
Reading Franklin’s writings on the subject taught me to think about Bugs Bunny dialectically: “It is impossible to appreciate the genius of the world’s greatest rabbit without understanding Elmer Fudd,” Franklin wrote in the catalog of the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition. Fudd is the anti-Bugs, the vivid example of petty authoritarian mediocrity whose existence is dominated by his consuming obsession to destroy wild animals and wilderness and to viciously protect his private property. The Hegelian tango between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd is an intriguing cathartic parable of class warfare for our time, but it is also funny as hell.

In our last telephone conversation, Franklin listened with interest to my report on what insights I had gleaned from the documentary on Chuck Jones about our old pal Bugs Bunny. He occasionally asked some clarifying questions about my observations, but mostly he just chuckled (in that way he that did) as I mentioned some of the new things I had learned about Bugs since starting to watch those old cartoons with my five year-old son. The boy was viewing these Chuck Jones classics for the first time with a fresh set of eyes, howling with laughter and wonder at this “screwy rabbit”—my son’s observations seem to have confirmed Franklin’s theories.

In 1935, the poet André Breton wrote this simple dialectical formula about surrealism: “Marx said, ‘Transform the world’; Rimbaud said, 'Change life'; these two mottoes are for us one and the same.” Fifty-five years later, Franklin told a story about a surrealist publication he had received from abroad that carried the bold-face declaration: “‘Bugs Bunny world! Bugs Bunny life! These two commands are for us but one!’” Inspired by this Franklin concluded that 1989 essay with some words that I want to leave you all with this afternoon: “Until further notice, the watchword of the next revolution remains: ‘What’s up, Doc?’”
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Matt C.