Ninety years ago, Columbia Pictures released a film that transformed the trajectory of American screen comedy.

Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night tells the story of spoiled Park Avenue heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert), who meets newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) on a Greyhound bus in Miami. Ellie has just run away from her overbearing father, who disapproves of her recent elopement. Peter recognizes Ellie from the headlines and makes her an offer: He’ll help her return to New York to reunite with her husband if she gives him an exclusive scoop he can sell to his editor. Ellie accepts, and along the way home, they fall madly in love.

The movie, a tale of romantic yearning within a battle of the sexes dynamic, became one of the first screwball comedies, a genre born out of evolving socioeconomic and industrial strife that shaped Hollywood filmmaking in the 1930s and early 1940s. Screwball comedy depicted a world full of fast-talking dames, madcap antics, and romance, all set against the backdrop of economic upheaval. During its heyday, it drew in audiences who loved the genre’s unique blend of escapist romance and pointed social commentary. Today, it functions as a kind of time capsule, holding up a mirror to its era’s socioeconomic woes, capturing the bubbling cynicism that pervaded the American psyche in the mid-1930s. It also, paradoxically, continues to demonstrate a timeless appeal, having influenced generations of romantic comedies from 1972’s What’s Up, Doc? to 1999’s Notting Hill all the way up to recent releases like Anyone But You and Rye Lane. That’s because though the characters and settings may have evolved, the relationships featured in these screwy stories still have much to teach us about the universality of the human experience.

Screwball comedy emerged as the United States grappled with the Great Depression. In 1934, when It Happened One Night premiered, unemployment was still hovering at over 20%, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program could not help the populace fast enough. Hollywood wasn’t spared. America’s film industry had enjoyed some 20 years of unencumbered prosperity, capped by a late-1920s attendance boom fueled by the novelty of sound film technology. But during the Depression, dwindling audiences and falling ticket prices forced some major studios into receivership and others to sell valuable assets, like their theaters, to stay afloat. With the industry reporting a collective loss of nearly $250 million between 1930 and 1933, it’s no surprise that uneasiness took hold in the cultural zeitgeist.

The Depression rears its ugly head throughout the screwball genre, thematically puncturing some of its most jubilant moments. In a scene from It Happened One Night, Peter, Ellie, and the other bus passengers break out into a chorus of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Capra captures class solidarity with immense warmth and grace, but that joyful camaraderie falls back down to Earth with the fearful scream of a young boy whose mother has fainted from hunger. In Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living (1937), protagonist Mary Smith grudgingly breaks her piggy bank to scrimp together enough money to cover her $7 per week rent. And in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936)—perhaps the most socially engaged film of the classical screwball era—forgotten men become collectible objects in a scavenger hunt for Manhattan’s upper class.

In spite of the genre’s political grounding, screwball comedy didn’t aim to offer practical solutions to socioeconomic precarity. Philosopher Stanley Cavell once mused that screwball comedies were “fairytales for the Depression”—where else but screwball could a $58,000 sable fur coat fall on a working-class woman’s head and turn her life upside down? In the screwball fairyland, the Depression’s omnipresence is counterbalanced with kookiness and absurdity.

Screwball’s proclivity for the fantastic is also reflected in the genre’s approach to romance, which it navigated amid the constraints of the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code, informally known as the Hays Code. To stave off the looming threat of federal censorship laws, in July 1934, Hollywood studios uniformly implemented this series of guidelines. The Hays Code regulated everything from how scripts could approach topics such as crime, adultery, and sex. And it dictated that all movies must communicate redeeming social mores.

Cavell later dubbed screwball comedy the “re-marriage” genre because it included so many storylines about couples that reconcile after a period of separation. This recurring narrative arc was a direct response to the Code’s moral mandate; the head of its enforcement body, Joseph Breen, a staunch Catholic, believed that marriage was the foundation of a healthy society, and that American films should uphold traditional family values.

One of the genre’s most popular movies—Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937)—begins with duplicitous shenanigans that lead Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) to divorce. The couple realize their undeniable compatibility only after they date other people, and, as in a fairytale, reunite—just before the stroke of midnight, on the eve before their divorce is finalized. In the screwball world, divorce inspires metamorphosis and growth: Characters learn about themselves and their capacity for love. “For better or for worse” is the ultimate awful truth, and Jerry and Lucy’s separation reminds them why they fell in love with each other in the first place.

The classical screwball era lasted until the onset of World War II, when the spread of fascism and the horrors of war made the genre’s domestic politics quaint. Despite its brief window of production, the genre made an outsized impact on the film industry. Nearly a century has passed now since the birth of the genre, and it continues to prove timeless in what it can say about life and love, especially amid hard times. Screwball comedy celebrates silliness, even as it magnifies the razor-sharp line between luck and misfortune. It indulges our childlike impulses and celebrates the joy and whimsy of fun, particularly in moments of grief and uncertainty. In defiance of reality, it imagines up worlds of charming romantic entanglements, pratfalls, and play, where leopards roam free, bears ride motorcycles, and an anti-aging elixir opens up the wealth spring of youth. Most importantly, it speaks to camaraderie and the resilience of the human spirit.

Near the end of My Man Godfrey, the titular Godfrey Parke—a former upper-class playboy who’s disguised himself for much of the film as a forgotten man—returns to the garbage dump he had called home with a friend from his socialite days. After Godfrey introduces him to the people living there, he says triumphantly, “the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job.” Godfrey’s observation is fundamentally that we are stronger when we come together. And regardless of our circumstances, we all strive for love, compassion, and community.

This sentiment is why the screwball comedy and their rom-com successors are often considered comforting “feel-good” movies. Whether they’re screened at a Depression-era movie theater or viewed at home alone with a pint of ice cream, we love to watch them because, at their best, they tap into the universal ideas that bind us.

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That the Hollywood titans were wrong about all this is a historical fact as fundamental as World War II. But Hollywood’s 1920s triumphalism shouldn’t be discarded. Indeed, it can’t be, because it has endured to this day—as a script for talking about technology, communication, and social relations.

From television to social media, the partisans of each wave of new, or emergent media have been able to adopt wholesale the essentially gnostic idea systematized by people like Hays and Fairbanks: that difference of location, language, and culture is a corruption of an original, or intended state of unity, which can be broken down or overcome by more powerful technologies. That this dream of perfected communication has proven to be imperialistic, indifferent to ethics, and hostile toward less powerful individuals and groups hasn’t made it any less seductive.

Back in the 1920s, it was the silent character—or perhaps more accurately, mute character—of Hollywood films that made plausible the premise of cinema as a universally accessible power. Hollywood didn’t immediately advance this idea. Originally, the American film industry had presented itself as a purveyor of mere entertainment, shying away from controversy after producing a series of films about sexual slavery in 1913 and 1914. Although producers advertised these films as exposés of social problems and as pleas for moral reform, they were widely condemned as indecent and met with calls for censorship. From this experience, the industry drew the lesson that it should steer clear of social and political debates and devote itself to the benign mission of entertaining the public through diverting fictions.

When in the 1920s the studios began to talk about their products as “more than an entertainment feature,” they did so on a much grander scale, openly embracing the idea that movies could be educational and morally uplifting. Proponents of visual education had long been touting films as substitutes for textbooks in biology, history, and other classrooms. But this was a different proposition: that the standard fictional, feature-length, narrative film (regardless of its particular subject matter), innately promoted a higher state of consciousness. This argument drew on screen education advocates’ belief that visual images have a special power to act directly on the mind, in support of a larger idea: that the medium itself—technologically reproduced moving images exhibited and consumed on a mass scale—was a “world force” for good, as public relations pioneer George Creel put it.

Utopian prophecies about new communications technologies were not new, even then. As early as the 1840s, proponents of telegraphy hailed its ability to eliminate the physical and metaphorical distances separating human beings. And pronouncements like those by Fairbanks and Hays tapped into a number of intellectual currents in early 20th-century America: from the New Thought, with its treatment of spiritual “energy” as a measurable, scientific phenomenon akin to electricity; to the new liberalism, which championed mass media as a means of forging collective consciousness; to the first literary and philosophical meditations on cinema, which treated screen images as the “hieroglyphics” of a new civic religion.

The triumphalist language of 1920s Hollywood reflected the industry’s increasing confidence in its cultural authority. With the emergence during the mid-to-late 1910s of the so-called “classical” style of film narrative and the construction of bigger, more opulent film theaters—the movie “palaces”—cinema seemed to have come into its own, not only as the dominant form of popular entertainment in the United States, but also as a legitimate art form. And the Hollywood studios broadened their international reach, especially in lucrative markets like Germany and France, where World War I had disrupted domestic production. By 1927, the industry could boast that 85 percent of the world’s motion pictures were made in the United States.

The Great War, in addition to presenting the opportunity for more film exports, revealed that the globe was the ultimate social and political horizon. Hollywood utopian discourses about film are filled with Wilsonian hopes that World War I would end all wars and that some kind of supranational political body would emerge in its wake. Indeed, one recurring and esoteric idea in the rhetoric of movies-as-world-force was that the mission of the League of Nations would best be taken up by some kind of global film production enterprise, “developed through a union of motion picture screens,” as Sydney Cohen, president of the Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America, characterized it.

These utopian visions also had a practical purpose: defense of the industry itself. After a series of high-profile scandals involving film stars in the early 1920s, Hollywood was being vilified as a morally corrupting influence and faced calls for greater censorship and regulation. In 1922, Hays was hired to head the newly created Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America where he mounted a public relations campaign intended to restore public trust in the studios. To portray the very medium of film as a juggernaut turning the hearts and minds of human beings toward peace was to make any particular instances of morally questionable content seem insignificant—and any effort to restrain the work of film producers seem misguided.

Movies, Hays was fond of saying, spoke an “Esperanto of the Eye.” He borrowed the phrase from That Marvel—The Movie, a curious 1923 book by Edward Van Zile, part history and part prophecy. With terrific understatement, Hays praised Van Zile in the introduction he supplied for the book for treating “the motion picture as more than an entertainment feature.” More than entertainment, indeed: Van Zile went so far as to declare that the movies were humanity’s sole hope for salvation from the looming catastrophe of global warfare.

Under Hays’s leadership, the industry did not just seek to rehabilitate its public image. It also embraced the nascent field of public relations’ theories about the propaganda potential of mass communication media. The industry increasingly sought to portray entertainment itself as a basic necessity—a form of spiritual sustenance made even more essential by the rigors of modern, industrialized life—and geared its operations toward serving this public good.

Of course, the actual films turned out by Hollywood in the early 20th century taught ugly social lessons too, equating full “humanity” with racial whiteness. The major exemplars of the period’s most prestigious genre, the historical epic—from The Birth of a Nation, to The Covered Wagon, to The Iron Horse—show white groups formerly at odds with one another establishing new forms of social “understanding” through the violent subjugation of African-Americans and Native Americans. Known for spectacular crowd scenes, these films offer a sinister mirror image of the notion of human progress through collective bonding.

If silent movies did have any true unifying influence, it was in the arena of consumer culture. Hays styled himself as a true believer in the “Esperanto of the Eye,” but he was candid about the screen’s power to shape tastes in consumer goods like clothing and home furnishings. “Trade follows the film” was his mantra. More than fostering social harmony or peace, the movies helped to create national and international communities unified by the universal language of desirable commodities.

After the silent movies transitioned to recorded sound in the late 1920s, it became much more difficult to claim that films were a universal language. And when, in the early 1930s, the censorship debate erupted anew—this time around a spate of “talkies” dealing with risqué subjects—the studio system was forced to engage more directly with the critique of movies as an immoral influence, especially on children. The “Motion Picture Production Code,” a self-regulating document drafted by Hays in 1930, cited movies’ universal reach not to tout their capacity to knit together the social fabric, but to acknowledge their “larger moral responsibility,” relative to other forms of art and entertainment.

Still, the idea that cinema speaks a universal language and brings “us” all together persists today. It reflects a certain nostalgia about the special power of the movies in an age of media convergence, and typically makes at least one appearance during each year’s Oscars ceremony, often to introduce a montage of classic film clips.

But it’s an idea that never really was true and it reflects a dubious fantasy. Technologies, including film, can be put to any number of uses, and it’s disingenuous to suggest that they can “automatically” curb violent human impulses. And even if movies could unite the world, a shared taste for sentimental romance or adventure should not be mistaken for peace.

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After the success of the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt, which was set in San Francisco, dozens of feature films, TV movies, and television series were shot on location there. Mayor Joseph Alioto, a former attorney to movie moguls Samuel Goldwyn and Walt Disney, wooed Hollywood producers and trumpeted over $10 million in annual revenue from location shooting.

But he soon faced staunch opposition from famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the loudest voice among residents who bristled at the invasion of movie crews from rival Los Angeles. At stake were not only traffic and parking problems, but also San Francisco’s cherished image.

In Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films and the popular TV series The Streets of San Francisco, Hollywood frequently depicted the city as a dangerous cesspool. Alioto sold Hollywood production as a form of tourist promotion for the city, but San Franciscans soon rallied against producers who took advantage of their hospitality only to slander the city on-screen.

As the Downtown Association of San Francisco put it, “If moviemakers persist in giving the impression that San Francisco is a crime-ridden city where police chases are an everyday occurrence, let them make their movies somewhere else.”

Despite its proximity to Los Angeles, San Francisco had only sporadically served as a location for Hollywood filmmakers in the 1950s and early 1960s. This changed late in the decade when location shooting became the dominant production method, as films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider took off while massive back lot productions like Camelot and Hello, Dolly! flopped.

Hollywood’s shift to youth-oriented films shot on location also corresponded with San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Which produced its own wave of media attention for producers to chase. Bullitt and another film, Petulia, both released in 1968, were the first commercial features shot entirely in San Francisco since the silent era, and their productions became the talk of the town as prominent socialites scored roles as extras. Bullitt soared at the box office, while reinventing the police genre and the car chase.

The first sign of disenchantment with Hollywood filmmaking stemmed from one of the most innocuous films of the era, What’s Up, Doc?, a throwback to screwball comedies of the 1930s. While shooting a car-chase finale in November 1971, filmmakers took few precautions and chipped the steps at Alta Plaza Park. This was no laughing matter for residents of the tony Pacific Heights neighborhood, as conveyed by the local headline, “Outrage at Alta Plaza.” The incident prompted the board of supervisors to consider greater scrutiny of the growing number of film productions in town.

Caen railed against “the chutzpah of these Hollywood invaders,” framing location shooting not as a local practice but as an encroachment of Los Angeles industry on San Francisco. Then he went a step further, directly tying the carelessness of filmmakers on location to their disregard in representing the city, particularly with the police genre. Figures like McMillan, Rock Hudson’s police commissioner in the television series, McMillan and Wife, were largely incompetent, but Dirty Harry was “a brute of a cop,” and other detective films like The Organization didn’t help the city’s image either.

Alioto worked to contain this early bout of negative publicity, which extended to the pages of Variety. He took the stage at the San Francisco premiere of Dirty Harry in December to assure filmmakers that, “We’ll continue to make pictures in San Francisco, and we’re not going to worry about a couple of chipped steps in Alta Plaza.” He soon put together a film committee, led by a local casting director, which conferred with local Screen Actors Guild and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees groups working to better organize and streamline production in the city.

But Alioto stood firmly on the side of Hollywood and remained personally invested in filmmaking. He courted producers in Los Angeles, and often met with visiting filmmakers in person. Deputy Mayor John DeLuca helped secure locations for major productions. This embrace of Hollywood made him vulnerable to more direct attacks by Caen.

The San Francisco shooting boom intensified in 1972 when The Streets of San Francisco became the first weekly network series filmed extensively in the city since The Lineup in the 1950s. In 1973, three of the six features shooting in town were police films, and a fourth was a mafia picture. Violence dominated the city’s screen presence, ranging from a machine-gun massacre on a bus in The Laughing Policeman to “a sniper spraying bullets around campus” for an episode of Streets.

Publicity photo picturing David Wayne and Karl Malden from The Streets of San Francisco. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But, once again, it was a comedy, albeit a police comedy, that drew public outcry. Freebie and the Bean featured a pair of cops, who “were hopelessly inept or corrupt,” according to Police Sergeant Bill McCarthy, who oversaw filmmaking in the city. The police department, which was responsible for safety and security during location shoots, refused to endorse the San Francisco setting. They withheld official badges and decals for the movie detectives, and all references to the city had to be struck from the script. (Of course, any viewer with a basic knowledge of San Francisco could identify the city in the background.)

Fatefully, the script also called for a spectacular car chase (a staple of police films following Bullitt and The French Connection) in which a car would fall from the lower deck of the Embarcadero Freeway. Working on a tight schedule and further delayed by November rains, filmmakers convinced the Department of Public Works to make an ill-advised decision, closing off the Stockton Street Tunnel during morning rush hour.

Caen pulled no punches, opening his column by noting the “honest taxpayers” who were forced to be late for work. He mentioned another incident where ten wrecked cars parked at one location blocked residents from pulling out of their parking spaces. He added the following exchange:

   Fumed one irate woman, “who needs these people, anyway?”

   Cop: “Alioto”

In a short, pithy column, Caen bluntly suggested that the regular citizens of San Francisco were the ones paying for Alioto’s movie aspirations. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, the future mayor and U.S. senator, joined the fray, suggesting new legislation to set rules on location filmmaking. Supervisor Dorothy von Beroldingen threatened to hold public hearings on location shooting. The film committee and labor leaders managed to convince the board not to proceed any further, but the days of easy cooperation were over.

San Francisco’s appeal for filmmakers had largely rested on that cooperation, in combination with its unique, scenic cityscape. By 1975, a glut of police films had all but exhausted its novelty as a location. Meanwhile, public enthusiasm waned and logistical problems multiplied as a small, densely populated city struggled to accommodate so many production crews. Following the blockbuster The Towering Inferno and Francis Ford Coppola’s critically acclaimed The Conversation, filmmaking in the city declined through the second half of the 1970s. As generous incentives flooded in from other regions eager to attract filmmakers, San Francisco no longer had to worry about Hollywood invaders.

In the end, the most powerful handgun in the world failed to put a dent in San Francisco’s reputation. The postcard image survived the harrowing depictions of Dirty Harry, its sequels, and its many imitators. The city moved on, and so did the movies.

San Francisco’s production boom preceded the aggressive, international competition for location production that has defined Hollywood filmmaking ever since. Places that succeed, like Canada or Louisiana, still weigh the cost versus the benefit, although largely in financial terms.

San Francisco raised a rather different question about Hollywood production: What is at stake in the way that movies portray a given place, and are filmmakers accountable for that depiction?

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The opening is a perfect example of the “bursting into song” for which the musical genre is known (and occasionally maligned). Without cause or provocation, characters break out of their ordinary lives and into a heightened state wherein they express feelings of love and longing, happiness and despair. Except for the anti-sentimentalists among us, the musical lifts us out of our humdrum reality, if only for a moment.

Surprisingly, this tendency in musicals stems not from a desire to escape but rather the need to address what is lacking in our lives. This was a central concern of musical films made by Jews, Mexicans, and African Americans in the early days of sound cinema. Ministering to audiences who were dealing with the pains and anxieties of migration, ethnic musicals offered stories about people who burst into song as a way of establishing connections to one another and to their homeland.

In the late 1920s, Hollywood filmmakers routinely built an explanation of the use of song and dance into their films. Stories typically revolved around show business and took place in performance contexts, including the rare Hollywood film that acknowledged the experience of migration, The Jazz Singer (1927). The only time people burst into song without justification was in films about people of color, who were portrayed as naturally prone to singing and dancing (see Hallelujah!, 1929). Ethnic musicals operated within a different logic, one that assumed a cultural affinity with its audience. In these films, made outside of the Hollywood mainstream, ordinary people sing and dance as a matter of course, no special context required. Their characters perform with their audience, rather than for it.

As many already have noted, La La Land does indeed nod to the Hollywood musicals of old, such as An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and the French quotations of those films, such as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). But the film’s emphasis on migrant characters in search of love, community, and belonging places La La Land squarely within the ethnic traditions that are foundational to the genre.

Characters sing together in Allá en el Rancho Grande (Over on the Big Ranch, 1936).

Take, for example, Allá en el Rancho Grande (Over on the Big Ranch, 1936), the most popular Mexican film of its time. While Hollywood offered a cycle of films about chorus girls and stage door Johnnies (see 42nd Street, 1933; Gold Diggers of 1935; Stage Struck, 1936), director Fernando de Fuentes presented a simple story about Mexican ranch life with folk songs and dances. He quickly found that the film’s biggest audience was among Mexican immigrants living in the United States—they constituted a critical mass that hundreds of movie theatres, large and small, served in cities across the country.

In Los Angeles, the film attracted English-speaking audiences, too, yet elicited back-handed compliments from reviewers in the mainstream press. Variety applauded its efforts, but ultimately declared that it was “not a musical in any sense of the word,” objecting to the “casual way” in which songs and dances entered and exited the story without explanation. So unfamiliar was the reviewer with this approach that he dismissed the film as a rudimentary attempt at the musical. He ended his review by condescending to de Fuentes, advising him to look to Hollywood for “a more thorough lesson.”

Other ethnic musicals similarly departed from the status quo. Clarence Brooks and Harry Gant’s black-cast film, Georgia Rose (1930), surprised audiences and critics by rejecting the stereotypical imagery of “the Negro singing spirituals, eating watermelon and shooting craps,” as one reviewer noted. Instead, Brooks and Gant told a story about a modern black family who leave the South in search of opportunity up North. And as an answer to the assimilationist message of Hollywood’s The Jazz Singer (1927), Joseph Seiden released Mayne Yiddishe Mame (My Jewish Mother, 1930), the first Yiddish sound film. Made for an audience of Jewish immigrants, Mayne Yiddishe Mame demonstrated that while American success was alluring, nothing replaces the sanctity of the family.

In these films, as with Rancho Grande, ethnic filmmakers revealed a new purpose of the genre: to serve the needs and desires of a people for whom migration is a reality. With the coming of the U.S. entry into World War II and the ensuing separation of families, the Hollywood studios realized that changing times necessitated a shift in the musical as well. As MGM producer Arthur Freed recounted in an interview, “Gone were the gigantic production numbers, the trick camera angles, the dances and songs that stopped the plot cold until the last chorine waved her last ostrich feather in the camera’s focus.”

Instead, stories about small-town communities and the endurance of home dominated the genre, epitomized by Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). In Vincente Minnelli’s musical, the lives of the Smith family of St. Louis are disrupted by the prospect of migrating to New York City at the turn of the century. This film resonated deeply with World War II-era audiences and its theme of social unity in the face of change shaped later classics, including The Music Man (1962) and The Sound of Music (1965).

La La Land begins by introducing characters who have already ruptured their lives by leaving home and are striving to make it in a new place. As the opening number shows, these young hopefuls are as diverse as the city in which they live and they are seeking careers in L.A.’s many creative industries. Mia, the main character played by Emma Stone, embodies their journey. She left Boulder City, Nevada in order to become an actress. But making it is an uphill battle, she soon realizes. At her lowest point, she tells her boyfriend Seb (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist, “I’m going home.” When he insists that she is home, she responds, “Not anymore.” As these moments suggest, L.A. is full of migrants who enter and exit the city. But these migrations come at a significant cost to the maintenance of relationships, which Mia and Seb soon understand.

As “Another Day of Sun” reveals, the musical allows characters to shift from a state of isolation to one of inclusion. It creates a sense of belonging for both its characters and its audience in the process. Ethnic musicals did this as a matter of course. Often, audiences sang along to songs they already knew—these early musicals typically included a mix of familiar songs and original numbers—effectively transforming the movie theatre into a musical community of its own.

This tradition extended to the Hollywood musical in films like Meet Me in St. Louis, in which the use of folk songs, “Skip to My Lou” and “Meet Me in St. Louis,” fostered a connection between the Smith family and its 1940s audience. Even today, the annual The Sound of Music sing-along at the Hollywood Bowl brings together audiences from all walks of life. They happily sing “Do Re Mi” and “My Favorite Things,” songs that have over the years become part of an American folk heritage. La La Land, like the musicals that precede it, brings people together again and again, from the opening song, to Mia and her roommates in “Someone in the Crowd,” to the impromptu reprise of “City of Stars,” casually sung by Mia and Seb at the piano.

To understand La La Land’s appeal, we might well look to the genre’s long history of speaking to people on the move. The struggle between pursuing dreams and sustaining relationships, leaving home and staying put, is a recurring theme. Delving into the musical’s origins, we find that this was of particular concern to migrant communities. Just like Mia, musical film audiences are searching for a better life.

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These contradictory responses suggest the lingering strength of the Bambi myth, the lasting legacy of Walt Disney’s 1942 cartoon about that big-eyed fawn. Seventy-four years later, Bambi’s worldview still animates debates over animal rights and environmentalism: Should we save Bambi or save the earth?

Bambi didn’t start as an American environmental fable. Written by an Austrian author with the pen name Felix Salten for adults in 1928, Bambi: A Forest Life, recounts the story of a fawn who grows up to be the prince of the forest alongside his royal father. But his rise to power comes only after the death of his mother and near loss of his mate Faline. While hunters are a problem for these deer, so are animals: In the forest, owls eat mice, crows eat a friendly rabbit, and a fox eats a duck. Early reviewers considered the book an anti-fascist fable and more recent writers have speculated that the story was an allegory about the plight of Jews in Europe. All of Salter’s work was eventually banned in Nazi Germany.

By 1942, when Disney released the film, Americans were processing their shock at the attack on Pearl Harbor and our entrance into a world war, which is reflected in the film’s simplified portrayal of deer living in an idealized forest where predators and prey play together and fear only a shadowy character called “Man,” who is equipped with guns and fire.

The emotional punch of Disney’s Bambi is heightened by its artistry, which combines gorgeous natural realism with cartoonish animals, their exceptionally large heads, small noses, and wide eyes resembling human children. Disney gave Bambi playful friends like the rabbit Thumper and the skunk Flower, in contrast to the more melancholy, quarrelsome animals of the book. Even though these cartoon animals frolic to the tune of “Little April Shower,” Disney paid special attention to the details of the forest, sending artists to sketch foliage in Maine’s Baxter State Park and shipping two fawns to the studio as artist’s models. This uncanny mix of cuteness and terror and fantasy and realism has led some to call it a horror film.

When it was released in 1942, Bambi the movie was surprisingly controversial, but not for the same reasons as the book. Hunters in particular saw it as an ideological threat. Outdoor Life editor Raymond J. Brown called the film “the worst insult ever offered in any form to American sportsmen,” and even asked Disney to correct slurs against hunters, according to anthropologist Matthew Cartmill’s A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History. Disney claimed sportsmen were not the targets because Salten’s story was about German hunters. In 1988, Field and Stream urged “hunters to start protesting against the “Bambi-killer jokes” they sometimes encountered.

Bambi had fans too. In a July 1942 issue of Audubon Magazine, naturalist Donald Culross Peattie “hotly denies” that Bambi “misrepresented anything.” That same year the National Audubon Society compared the cartoon’s consciousness-raising power for the environment to what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the abolition of slavery. New York Times reviewer Theodore Strauss claimed Disney films “teach us variously about having a fundamental respect for nature. Some of them, such as Bambi, inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism.”

When it was first released, Bambi lost money, but subsequent re-releases in theatres and video rentals brought in close to $300 million by 1988 as the film became a rite of childhood. And over the years that “emotional groundwork,” took hold in the form of “The Bambi Factor,” a sentimental anthropomorphized view of wildlife, especially deer.

One of the first people bitten by the Bambi Factor was, ironically, early environmentalist Aldo Leopold. In 1943, Leopold encouraged Wisconsin to institute an antlerless deer season that would have allowed hunters to shoot does and young bucks to thin the overpopulated herd. Leopold was interested in the good of all life as part of an ecosystem, not just special animals. In his Sand County Almanac, Leopold extends ethics to include nonhuman animals, as well as the plant life that sustains them. For Leopold, “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts,” and those parts include all elements of the natural environment, from soil and plants to “Bambi.” A graduate of the Yale forestry school, Leopold promoted game management, evolutionary biology, and ecology, rather than sentimental anthropomorphism. To maintain a diverse ecology, Leopold supported regulated sport hunting, including shooting a limited number of Wisconsin’s does with the aim of keeping the herd size smaller. But his Wisconsin proposal was shot down—the public, according to scholar Ralph H. Lutts, was outraged at the idea of culling any of Bambi’s child-like creatures.

But there’s another environmental ideology hidden in Bambi that’s at odds with reality. Bambi’s underlying message is that “Man” and deer can’t co-exist. Only Man disrupts the pristine view of nature in the Bambi cartoons. “Why did we all run?” Bambi asks after a gun shot sounds. “Man was in the forest,” his mother replies. A later gunshot is the last we know of Bambi’s mother, hiding the violence that is heightened by her absence. Other hunters go on a chilling rampage, wounding Bambi and causing a final eco-disaster when their campfire explodes into the woods and destroys the animals’ home. The fire effects light the scene in oranges and reds, in the spirit of the “Burning of Atlanta” scene in Gone with the Wind. In the context of Disney’s film version of Bambi, humans and their vicious dogs are shadowy harbingers of death destroying an idealized paradise.

Disney focuses almost entirely on a human-free world of the forest. Unless a spectral man appears, animals of all species live without fear in a “paradise” untouched by human hands. Even owls act like vegetarians! In Disney’s natural world, interaction with humans ends only in death or suffering, so the only real choice is a complete separation between the two worlds.

As academics, Bambi’s worldview interested us: Did the “paradise” view of the forest precede the more modern idea of the ecosystem in popular culture? We were surprised to find that it didn’t. Just a few months before Bambi came out, audiences went to see the Fleischer Brothers’ animated feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941). Instead of contrasting conflicts between humans and idyllic nature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town demonstrates how lowland bugs and humans can live interdependently in a human couple’s urban garden in the center of Manhattan. Despite the anthropomorphism on display, Mr. Bug’s focus on interdependence connects with more realistic views about wildlife management and interconnected communities of plants, bugs, animals, and human animals. While Mr. Bug was modeled on sophisticated Hollywood comedies of the time, Bambi reflects Disney’s focus on emotionally convincing yet traditional folktales meant to appeal to broad audiences.

Contrary to the Disney story, of course, deer are all too comfortable with “Man,” “Woman,” and “Cars,” not to mention our delicious gardens, lawns, and infant trees. By 2015, predictably, protests against the Bambi Factor started to come from drivers and organic gardeners as the deer population grew dramatically. The National Traffic Safety Administration estimates that deer cause 1.5 million roadway accidents per year with 150 human fatalities and 10,000 personal injuries, as well as $1 billion in property damage. On Internet gardening forums, gardeners grouse about deer invasions.

Bambi lovers want to protect the deer even when the deer are sick. As recently as 2012, naturalist Valerie Blaine blamed the Bambi Factor for the North Rutland Deer Alliance’s opposition to killing deer even to test for chronic wasting disease. According to Blaine, the group felt any herd reduction would spoil their “deer watching experience” in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs.

The Bambi Factor encourages sentimentalized views of wildlife that romanticize nature without accepting its messier aspects. With its vast and varied ecologies, America’s myth is that it is both a frontier to be conquered and an Eden to be preserved, but there’s more to living on this planet than choosing between paradise and a parking lot. Bambi presents us with a powerful vision that is in a sense a false choice. Instead of looking for a paradise that separates us from wild nature, we need to find a new vision that stresses how to live together, balancing habitat preservation with wildlife management. Bambi is, after all, just a movie.

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