'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?' and the Death of the Aura
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Transcript of 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?' and the Death of the Aura
Daniel Welch
Postmodernism and Film
Lee Edelman
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 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 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 vaudevillian 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 such
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 taking on Roger’s toonhood, Valiant destroys the original aura that toonhood
itself is a replication of – himself, as a human being – 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 line of questioning 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 human 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 static corporeality and flattened,
poetically, 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, which 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.