Discipline, Incorporated

Claire Birkenshaw

“By means of strange incantations, they conjured up a new incarnation of evil, another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly renewed magic of purification and exclusion” (Foucault, [1972] 2009, p.3). 

Film, as Sian Barber (2015, p.4) reminds us, is a “crafted artefact”, which is “never produced in a cultural and social vacuum”. Furthermore, film “will always suggest something about the period in which it was made” (ibid.). As such, society’s social issues and concerns, morals and manners, and competing ‘ideologies’, will, in one way or another, walk right into film production. Thus, film offers a rich seam for academic study. However, not all films are deemed worthy of scholarly attention and theoretical analysis. One overlooked genre, contends children’s film scholar Noel Brown (2012), is the ‘family film’ due to its perceived lack of seriousness. This is surprising, given that “cinema lays claim to the child – both on and off screen” (Labeau, 2008, p.7). My intention, then, is to offer a brief analysis to a family film as demonstration of its potential for theoretical seriousness. The film in question: Monsters, Inc. (dir. Pete Docter, [2001] 2009).

Described by The Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw, as “a higher order of existence than any other Hollywood family entertainment on offer” (Bradshaw, 2002, n.p.), it is fair to say that Monsters, Inc. wowed family audiences with its boundary pushing animation coupled with a smart storyline that “reanimates the myths of childhood and adulthood” (ibid.). While the film has been discussed from different perspectives by a range of scholars (see Freeman, 2005; Tranter and Sharpe, 2008; Booker, 2010; Halberstam, 2011; Meinel, 2016), missing is a close Foucauldian reading. This I find rather peculiar, particularly as Monstropolis (a city in the ‘Monster World’) presents itself, on the surface at least, analogous to the “utopia of the perfectly governed city” (Foucault, [1977] 1991, p.198), populated with a diverse cast of happy, well-ordered, and industrious monster citizens who reside in neat monster homes, powered by clean dependable energy, overlooking tree-lined avenues where monster children play safely. This description should not surprise, Monstropolis was designed with serious intent. As the production team reveal in their explanation of ‘Designing Monstropolis’, the monster world was created “to have some relatable connection to our [human] world, […] there had to be a real reason for it, […] we had to really think it out”, David Silverman, co-director, discloses enthusiastically (Monsters, Inc., [2001] 2009). In so doing, not only does the monster world look familiar to us in a general sense, it also appears recognisable in a Foucauldian sense as well, particularly in terms of some of the key concepts presented in Foucault’s seminal book, Discipline and Punish ([1977] 1991): the monsters of Monstropolis are every bit as entangled in an intricate web of “disciplinary projects” (ibid., p.199) as their human counterparts in the human world are.

Under the guise of ‘human children are dangerous and deadly’, the governance of Monstropolis bears an uncanny resemblance to Foucault’s description and analysis of the “plague-stricken town” (ibid., p.198), which “constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism” (ibid., p.197). Instead of plague, it is the image of the human child, both “real and imaginary” (ibid.), that “stands for all forms of confusion and disorder” (ibid., p.199) in the monster world. Thus, the human child is conceived by monsters to be akin to a lethal pathogen. “A single touch could kill you!”, warns Waternoose, C.E.O. of Monsters, Incorporated (Monstropolis’ energy production behemoth), to a group of scarer recruits to maintain Monstropolis’ powerful permutation, production, and permeation of peril into monster consciousness, simultaneously aided and abetted by monster media like the broadsheet, Monstropolis Horn, and tabloid red top, The Daily Glob. “I won’t go in a kid’s room! You can’t make me!” wails one recruit hysterically to Waternoose when confronted with the apparent dangers of scream extraction from human children.  

This message of ‘child as threat’ serves a useful political purpose for the governance of Monstropolis: it both secures the acquiescence of monsters to security systems of “surveillance, observation, writing” (ibid.) for individual protection and collective way of life; and it strengthens the paired projects of discipline and exclusion to further extend capillaries of control. Examples of Monstropolis’ projects of discipline can be discerned as follows: first, scare recruits accept being disciplined by state-of-the-art learning machinery, such as the ‘scare simulator’, because it is seen to improve their scream proficiency through its meticulous attention to the process of scaring; second, scarers submit themselves to the discipline of the scare floor’s unremitting observation, monitoring, and ranking system, which displays the real time metrics of their individual scaring performance on a giant ‘scare totals’ leader board for all to see because they seek the status of achieving scaring records, and importantly, power’s approval; third, they feel safer knowing the disciplinary “gaze is alert everywhere” (ibid., p.195), as bespectacled Roz, secret head of the Child Detection Agency, gratingly reminds Wazowski: “I’m watching you Wazowski. Always watching. Watching. Always.”

Projects of exclusion, on the other hand, appear to materialise when monster behaviour troubles monster docility and threatens the established order of Monstropolis, demonstrated by the banishment of the ‘abominable snowman’ to the human world. “Why can’t they call me the ‘adorable snowman’? Or the ‘agreeable’ snowman for crying out loud? I’m a nice guy”, laments the inaptly named ‘abominable snowman’ to Sulley and Wazowski, who themselves have just been exiled for questioning the actuality of children’s lethality to Waternoose. This suggests that monsters who question, and challenge, the assignment of their “’true’ name, [their] ‘true’ place, [their] ‘true’ body, [their] ‘true’ disease” (ibid., p.198, author’s emphasis), or reject scaring because they are able to imagine an alternative to the – ‘We scare because we care’ – hegemony currently dictating activity in Monstropolis, end up rebuked, stigmatised, and cast out.  Furthermore, the film alludes that Monstropolis’ projects of exclusion are undergirded by the exercise of a “binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous; harmless; normal/abnormal)” (ibid., p.199) system to control and label monsters, something that monsters are indeed aware of. This is revealed when Wazowski is repulsed by the abominable snowman’s seemingly insane invitation for him to try a yellow-coloured snow cone: “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t worry. It’s lemon!” exclaims the abominable snowman, attempting to ameliorate Wazowski’s worry and demonstrate his sanity; or when the abominable snowman relays the ‘mad’ behaviour of another excluded monster, his buddy Bigfoot, to Wazowski: “When he was banished, he fashioned an enormous diaper out of poison ivy and wore it on his head like a tiara. Called himself ‘King Itchy,’” bemoans the abominable snowman, perplexed that his friend is no longer able to follow the rules of class and gender. However, there appears to be another ‘unspeakable’ reason for exclusion from the monster world: queer desire. This is subtly hinted at when the abominable snowman is seen trying to fathom out the ‘true’ nature of Sulley and Wazowski’s relationship through his dialogue with Wazowski, which he uses as a method to discover the ‘truth’. “I just assumed you were buddies, when I saw you out there in the snow, hugging and all…,” he says awkwardly to Wazowski, unsure of what to make of Wazowski’s connection with Sulley after Wazowski’s revelation that he is not ‘best friends’ with Sulley after all.

What I find intriguing about Monsters, Inc. is its mirroring of the education system. Instead of scream productivity, read exam results. Instead of scarers, read teachers. Rather than the utopia of the perfectly governed city, read the ‘political dream’ of the ‘utopia of the perfectly governed school’, configured as a compact model of disciplinary mechanisms. Instead of plague, read any child that, in some way or other, is conceived to be a ‘contaminant’ to the purity of the education project, or represents ‘confusion’ or ‘disorder’ to the imagined order. As Foucault (ibid., p.198, my emphasis) insightfully points out, “behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’”. We are reminded of this when those with power use terms such as ‘contagion’ or ‘epidemic’ in their rhetoric to necessitate more control, and less agency, for both children and educators.  However, as the monsters of Monstropolis came to realise, scaring children, to an extent, is productive, but removing fear, and not scaring, is more productive. It is perhaps with this realisation that led Booker (2010, p.84) to offer the view that Monsters, Inc. delivers a “potentially powerful (and even radical) political message.” Added to this, I would include a Foucauldian message too. Instead of Monsters, Inc., read discipline, incorporated.

This blog is dedicated to all my students (and colleagues) that have endured my theorisations of Monsters, Inc. Thank you for thinking.

References

Barber, S. (2015) Using Film as Source. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Booker, M.K. (2010) Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films. Santa Barbara, CA.: ABC-CLIO.

Bradshaw, P. (2002) Monsters, Inc. The Guardian [Online]. 8 February. Available from:< https://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/feb/08/1#:~:text=Faster%20than%20light%2C%20lighter%20than,overtaking%20the%20dullard%20%22fantasy%22%20genre> [Accessed 5 December 2023].

Brown, N. (2012) The Hollywood Family Film: A History, From Shirley Temple to Harry Potter. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Freeman, E. (2005) “Monsters, Inc.”: Notes on the Neoliberal Arts Education. New Literary History, 36 (1), pp.83-95.

Foucault, M. ([1972] 2009) History of Madness. Translated from the French by J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. Abingdon: Routledge.

Foucault, M. ([1977] 1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated from the French by A. Sheridan. London: Penguin.

Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lebeau, V. (2008) Childhood and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books.

Meinel, D. (2016) Pixar’s America: The Re-Animation of American Myths and Symbols. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Monsters Inc. ([2001] 2009) Directed by Pete Docter. Burbank: Disney Pixar [video: Blu-ray].

Tranter, P.J. and Sharpe, S. (2008) Escaping Monstropolis: child-friendly cities, peak oil and Monsters, Inc. Children’s Geographies, 6 (3), pp.295-308.

Suggested citation:

Birkenshaw, C. (2023) Discipline, Incorporated. Altered States of Academia, 17 December [Online blog]. Available from:<https://alteredstatesofacademia.blog/2023/12/17/discipline-incorporated/> [Accessed ? ].