Lady and the Tramp is an ideal date movie: a bit scruffy, adventurous, romantic, and fun. Walt and company continued to churn out classics through the 1950’s in a silver age unmatched until Pixar started making films. Energy and story telling at Walt’s company nearly died in the 1940’s along with humanity in World War II.
Walt liked civilization, but the end of the War started another more deadly conflict between liberty and tyranny. Stalin’s Russia was more seductive than Hitler’s Germany, knowing how to sell tyranny as personal peace and security, but no less deadly. Against that nightmare, the Gulag future, Walt argued for reason, science, family, and republican values. Somehow that made the old darling of the Ivy League old fashioned though Walt did not care.
What did Walt teach me in Lady and the Tramp?
Marriage can civilize a person and provide a great adventure. Lady lives an overly sedate life, but Tramp lacks domestic bliss. Lady is able to raise Tramp to a higher level of culture while Trump shows Lady that mere convention is not the same as virtue. Lady is afraid to live not just be a lady while Tramp does not know how to live. Where Tramp is bad, he must change. Where Lady is merely afraid, she must change. By the end of the film, both are better than they were.
Marriage is also hard and entails giving up freedom so wedlock is death to selfishness. Is it natural to be monogamous? Monogamy is natural to our better selves and unnatural to uncivilized humankind. Tramp is not so much miserable as he is unfulfilled. There is more to him than he knows, but the world in which he is merely a tramp will never give it to him. “He is tramp and we love him” is satisfying, but not a recipe for moral progress!
A mistake one might make is thinking that marriage only civilizes men. Walt sometimes sounded as if he believed women were uniquely Angels and men Tramps by nature, but this movie is more subtle than this trope. There are bad dogs and good dogs and both can be found in both sexes. Lady is a lady, but there are other options from fallen dog to regular house pet. What the film is missing is a younger dog to be the Gentle-dog to the Lady. Sadly, the older dogs are civilized without the vitality that Lady needs.
Some dogs are not civilized as much as too old to hound dog around.
A great book Anne of Green Gables gets the balance just right. Anne does not want a man who is bad, but one who could be bad if he wished. Tramp is no better than he should be, but he has the potential to become excellent. Love of lady draws this out of him. Those of us who have been civilized for the sake of the beloved understand. To love her req1uires becoming better than you are. This kind of love can save a tramp and gentle his condition.
And yet Lady also needs something . . . a spirit of adventure and of risk. She gains this from Tramp and so becomes lively. Many men and women are “gentle” without being bold and adventurous. Society can confuse timidity with virtue, cowardice with a lack of vice. If a man or woman is good only because he or she lacks the nerve to be bad, then virtue is missing. Lady stands in for all of us made tame and housebroken by convention, rules, and policies. A gentleman or a lady would never break the laws of Nature or of Nature’s God, but they would ignore social convention (if it was stultifying) in a flash.
Oddly, all of us stand before our Bridegroom like either Tramp or Lady. Some of us need to be reminded that boredom is unholy and others that vice is not rendered virtuous because it is enjoyable. The Lady needs the adventure to be a true Lady and the Tramp needs the Lady to become the father of many nations.
To be married is to know pain, adventure, sacrifice, and duty. It is civilizing and courageous because it is always the blending of two different voices; the male and the female. Neither can be the other or be replaced because both compliment the other. Staggering fecundity (puppies!) are the natural result whether in the flesh or in spirit when the Lady meets the Tramp.
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