From Mice to Men: Miracle, Mythology & the Magic Kingdom

Within this essay we address sport film as particularly lustrous, affective and sensuous mediums onto which various socio-political trajectories become mapped and within which popular forms of culture are appropriated. Focusing on the 2004 Disney release of Miracle, we propose that the film is an emplotment of the past - a sanitized reconfiguration of history - that can best be understood through reference to the geo-political realities of the present: one in which the spectres of the Cold War are being rolled out in multiple popular cultural forms as part of the United States response to the events of September 11 2001. We argue the events of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games US ice hockey semi-final victory by the US over the USSR were detached from their historical moorings in the soft/ideological battles of the Cold War. Instead, as part of the commercially bastardized, insipid, yet seductively effervescent filmic popular, this 'great moment in sport history' re-emerged in our present, or more accurately, was narrated or retold, as a 'sanctioned' sporting discourse that mobilizes the affective orientation of popular-commodity-signs in the substantiation and appropriation of US corporo-political needs through a myopic expression of American jingoism, militarism and geo-political domination.