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In all of his adventures, Mr. Magoo has been in a desperate situation. He is virtually blind, pitifully weak, and very small. He is handicapped also by a majestic inability to understand the dynamics of the world through which he stumbles. Yet every time we encounter him, he is facetoface with malignant and inimical forces of both the animate and inanimate orders. Shysters, confidence men, and bandits try to do him in or to bleed him dry. His near-blindness inevitably carries him to a point just short of irredeemable destruction. He has teetered on girders, fallen down elevator shafts, had a wild leopard for a pet, played golf with a bear and tennis with a bull walrus. No man so ill-equipped and so endangered can possibly survive—except in the dream world of the animated cartoon.By now we have seen enough Magoo cartoons to know the basic plot line; but we have not yet tired of his incredible good luck, and I do not think we will. The joke of Magoo's improbable survival will continue to amuse us because, behind the joke, there lies a reassurance that we all need. As we watch him we all become Magoo. He is a personification of a part, though only a part, of every man's inner image of himself. Our own feebleness, our own ineptitude, our own confusion are drawn out of unconsciousness and externalized for us in the dream image of Mr. Magoo. The dangers he faces symbolize the less dramatic dangers to which we all are sensitive in our own lives. Perhaps all ages have been ages of anxiety, but certainly ours is as full of fright as any other. The fear of war, the fear of loss of identity, the fear of boredom, the fear of isolation, the fear of our own impulses—all these are rearoused in us as Magoo faces his more concrete horrors.But dreams, whether private or public, are wish-fulfilling; and it is Magoo's function to still our fears. This he does splendidly. If this monument to bumbling ineptitude and incapacity always comes through—not only having saved his skin, but with some gain to show for the experience— why then, we too may rest easy. The dangers we face are surmountable; nothing can touch us any more than it does Magoo. With him, we are inviolate.This comic device for the arousal and reduction of anxiety through the evasion of physical threat is, of course, as old as slapstick comedy itself. Disney has used it effectively, as did such great comic heroes as Chaplin, Charlie Chase, Harold Lloyd, and W. C. Fields. But all of these heroes were at least partially responsible for their own escape from physical threat. To some degree, they earned their salvation. Fields had a certain low, illegitimate cunning. Harold Lloyd had inexhaustible reserves of energy. And even Chaplin the tramp had his wonderful physical grace, which was really a kind of athletic prowess.On the other hand, Mr. Magoo's survival in the face of danger is inexplicable. It seems to us a sheer gratuity, totally unrelated to any source of power in the man himself. But is this true? Is Magoo just plain lucky? Or is there perhaps some secret power that he does possess, some obscure but trustworthy magic of his own devising? Is his survival a gift of inscrutable fate, or does he earn it?Running through all the Magoo cartoons there is, I believe, a secret intimation that it is not fate that has saved Magoo but rather, that he has saved himself. How has he done this? Here the artists of UPA unconsciously voice a hope that lies deep and not fully known within each of us. Magoo has saved himself—and we may save ourselves—by complete allegiance to a set of social values and moral conceptions.The values Magoo lives by are those of yesterday's self-made man. In comic guise, he is a personification of the verities of a social era contiguous with our own. He is American individualism in its purest moral form. With a directness that verges on quixotism, he wants what he wants when he wants it—but only because he is convinced that the rules of society justify his wants and have put him clearly "in the right." He speaks his mind always and expects as much from other men. He plays fair and expects to be treated fairly. His personality is compounded in equal parts of eccentric individuality, square shooting, get-up-and-go vigor, and classic persistence. Furthermore, he never questions the tenets of his existence; the honest word, strongly spoken, will always do the trick. A respect for tradition, exemplified in the Victorian clutter of his home or in the firm bond of the old school tie, supports him in his unquestioning belief in himself. And, ultimately, this belief in himself, rooted in his internal loyalty to a moral view of existence, keeps him whole and secure in the face of dangers that, because of his faith rather than his myopia, are not visibly real.So the underlying serious and unconscious message of these cartoons is, as I see it, simply this: to stand securely in an insecure world, a man must stand for something. I do not believe that the artists behind Mr. Magoo are suggesting that we should stand, as he does, for primitive rugged individualism. For Magoo is, after all, treated by them with ridicule as well as love. What they are saying to us, and with us, is that individual man finds his fulfillment in commitment to purposes and truths that encompass more than himself.For those who may be numbered among Mr. Magoo's loyal following (it would be interesting to know precisely who and how many they are), the appeal of these cartoons must be based in large part on the fact that they give expression to the hunger for a moral meaning in existence. Their unconscious recognition of the connection between Magoo's moral dedication and the near-miracle of his survival must certainly serve the members of his audience by reassuring them that the hunger for moral meaning is neither futile nor aberrant. Indeed, I am tempted to borrow some terms from David Riesman's lexicon and to suggest that Magoo may have his greatest appeal in the eyes of lonely "inner-directed" persons caught up in an increasingly "other-directed" round of existence.
