He conceded the obvious escapism in Disney films; if Disney sang “a marvelous lullaby,” who among Americans, “whose lives are graphed by the cent and dollar,” wouldn’t want to forget being “shackled by hours of work … by a mathematical precision of time”? Precisely because it afforded release, escapism was a form, however temporary, of emancipation from Fordist drudgery. Liberating audiences for a few enchanting hours from “the timeclock mechanism of American life,”
