Daniel Welch

Postmodernism and Film

October 18, 2014

“This is it…! This isn’t it…”

: Death of the Aura

Who Framed Roger Rabbit presents a world in which corporeal, “original” beings live

alongside malleable, produced ones. The existential quality of the latter – “Toons” – is what

Benjamin would call “reproduction”: millions of anthropomorphized images of life cut together

in a process of animation that “substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” (4) Their

presence introduces a crisis of “aura” in the world that they are literally being drawn from, which

is revealed in the climactic fight sequence to be just as absent from human life as it is from

reproduced Toon life. The conflicting ideologies find their champions in Judge Doom, a

reproduction that strives for a return to aura, and Eddie Valiant, a human who reproduces

toonhood and exposes his own plurality.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin provides what

can be appropriated as a creation story for the Toons of Who Framed Roger Rabbit: “Since the

eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was

accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.” (2) Toons are ontologically

ambiguous creatures – implicitly authored and produced beings who still appear to retain

autonomy and lack an observable creator. The “acceleration” Benjamin describes can fill in the

gaps: one can imagine the original Animator stretching themselves so thin trying to keep pace

with the eye’s perception that they disappear completely, and through their sacrifice allow the

Toons entrance into reality. Yet it is by virtue of this process that a distance is enforced between

the Toons and humans… Humans are understood as singular figures with a constant physical

presence they impel into motion by their own will, whereas the live-giving “animation” of a

cartoon is created through a sequencing of images that give the illusion of movement. In this way

they have the same lot in life as the actor, whose “creation is by no means all of a piece; it is

composed of many separate performances.” (9) Benjamin describes a sense of isolation the actor

experiences as a result of their image’s fragmentation into frames of a film that parallels a

Toon’s existence as a collection of animation cells: the audience only interfaces with the actor

through the manipulation of their image by a camera, which results in them “tak[ing] the position

of the camera; its approach of testing.” (8) This scrutiny of the medium’s connectivity removes

the audience from the actor and eliminates the “aura” that is produced in a more intimate “cult”

interaction with an original, authentic image. The difference between the actor and a Toon,

however, is that eventually the shoot can wrap, freeing the actor to reformulate themselves and at

least pursue an authentic life. Toons suffer the same phenomenon but the absence of their

recording instrument, the Animator, means that they are forever trapped in the discriminatory

“approach of testing” taken by the life-forms with which they have to share a city. So of course

they are ghettoized.

This can partly be attributed to a paranoia on the part of “authentic” humans that grows

out of the potential freedom Toons possess from the original images they are ostensibly modeled

after. As Benjamin explains, “process reproduction can bring out aspects of the original that are

unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle

at will.” (3) Toons as reproductions without the separation of a lens then can illuminate

uncomfortable realities of the people they live alongside. Jessica Rabbit is the most salient

example of this: the nearly amorphous body produced by the warping of the “lens” creates the

image of woman manipulated to its most sexualized conclusion. Her existence brings suppressed

patriarchal mechanisms like male gaze and standards of physical beauty imposed on women to

the fore, where they are revealed as so literally cartoonish that they become impossible (one way

or another) for the human characters to ignore. This discomfort is described perfectly in

Benjamin’s quotation of Duhamel on his detestation of film: “’I can no longer think what I want

to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’” (14)

The climax of Who Framed Roger Rabbit takes Duhamel’s distrust one step further,

where actions become replaced by moving images. Just as Roger has reproduced aspects of

human existence, Eddie Valiant discovers that the only way to rescue Roger from being

dissolved in Judge Doom’s toxic “Dip” is to reproduce him in turn. He launches into a song set

to a tune that Roger was singing to in a previous scene, which in the closing credits is subtitled

“Roger’s Song”. The first verse goes: “Roger is his name! / Laughter is his game! / C’mon you

dope, / Untie his rope / And watch him go insane!” However, Valiant’s demand goes unheeded

and the rope binding Roger remains tied through the duration of the song. Yet Roger is also

unbound by the vaudeville act with which Valiant accompanies the song and dance, which

exhibits an effect of reproduction “which can put the copy of the original into situations which

would be out of reach for the original itself.” (3) Valiant allows himself to be possessed by the

manic “toonness” of Roger and acquires the plasticity and resistance to physical harm we see in

Roger’s feature Somethin’s Cookin’ – the resistance to decay characteristic of any reproduction.

The essence of Valiant that we’ve encountered so far in the movie – the masculine, “sourpuss”

detective – has vanished: he performs, but his lyrics are, “this singin’ ain’t my line”; the whole

time he is “takin’ falls” and “bouncing off the walls” he is concurrently denying both as a part of

his identity. As Benjamin puts it, “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction

emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual,” (5) and through becoming

such a reproduction Valiant abandons the rituals that converge to construct his aura, allowing

him to become the duplication of Roger that the situation demands of him.

“The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” Benjamin

proclaims (3), and this is the principle that undoes the Toon henchmen holding Roger and Jessica

Rabbit captive. By on Roger’s toonhood, Valiant destroys the original aura that toonhood itself is

a replication of, rendering the weasels reproductions of nothing. This is communicated visually

by spectral versions of themselves exiting the weasels’ bodies, leaving them empty of

representational meaning. But what does it mean that Valiant can destroy his own aura and

survive?

This question is posited twice over in the film’s denouement, first as Mickey Mouse

stands over the remains of Judge Doom and says to the rest of the Toons, “I wonder who he

really was…” The climactic twist regarding Doom is at first presented as a revelation that this

whole time he’s been a Toon using fake eyeballs and a rubber mask to pretend to be human.

However, after being posed the question of origin by Mickey the rest of the Toons respond by

going around and denying any association with him… “’He weren’t no rabbit…’ ‘Or a duck!’

‘Or a dog...’ ‘Or a wooden boy!’’ So it becomes hard to place Doom, but given the Toons’

comments it seems just as admissible to say that ontologically he does not represent Toons at all,

but a humans who represses an innate Toonhood. Throughout the first phase of his fight scene

with Valiant, Doom consistently turns to man-made instruments such as his sword or a steam-

roller while Valiant, who has embraced Toonhood, takes hold of animated magnets and black

holes. Doom picks up the jar of ACME “Extra-Sticky” Glue and tries to use it as a bludgeon

instead of for its contents, and so becomes stuck in his corporeality and flattened into his true

dimensions. Even when he is forced to acknowledge his reproduced nature, though, his

immediate response is to re-inflate himself. He begins to embrace the weapon he can turn his

body into as a Toon, but even then there is a part of him that still believes he’s human that tells

him to dodge a punch from Valiant’s boxing-glove hammer – a punch that might have warped

his face inward momentarily but would cause no real physical harm to him. It’s because he can’t

leave his “authenticity” behind that the boxing glove instead strikes the valve that releases the

one thing that could actually kill Doom – his own “Dip”.

So Doom clings to the idea of an aura in an effort to become human, while Eddie

abandons it to take on the plasticity of reproduction. They’re each respectively placing their bets

on the power of authenticity versus plurality, and by virtue of Eddie’s victory, the original “aura”

that Doom strives for is shown to be an illusion. This is because Eddie Valiant has been a

reproduction the entire time: he is a revival of the pulp and noir heroes of the 30’s and 40’s, his

actions and personality prescribed by theirs. And these heroes are revivals of codes of

masculinity that have been reproduced endlessly over the centuries. Eddie himself is also a

character, which means that the people who watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit? might also be

influenced by the illusion of his “aura”, meaning really that they are reproductions of a

reproduction of infinite reproductions. Truly they “substitute a plurality of copies for a unique

existence”; their “creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate

performances.” It is the Doomed desperation for a self-affirming aura that causes the humans to

delineate themselves from the Toons, and to forget their own malleability.

The second question in the closing minutes of the film is posed by Roger to Valiant, “Do

you think your days of being a sourpuss are over?” Both this and Mickey’s question are queries

of existence without an aura, and where Doom only found emptiness in his attachment to his

own, Eddie has seen a chaotic, formless side of himself. The heretofore stringently heterosexual

Valiant answers Roger’s question with a kiss, dispatching with all rituals of ego that came before

this experience.

Works Cited

Walter Benjamin (1968). Hannah Arendt, ed. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction", Illuminations. London: Fontana. pp. 214–218. ISBN 9781407085500.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Prod. Robert Watts and Frank Marshall. By

Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman, Charles Fleischer, and Kathleen Turner. Perf. Bob

Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, and Stubby Kaye. Buena Vista Pictures,

1988.