THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 73
the difficulty of translating Blair’s styl-
ized, decorative, collagelike art into the
more familiar, approachable Disney style,
with its detailed, rounded characters.
As much as Disney admired her work,
he also feared “losing the believability
that his mass audience expected,” Cane-
maker writes. As for It’s a Small World,
if the ride had “been built the way she
suggested,” Karal Ann Marling, an art
historian who has written on Disney’s
theme parks, told Canemaker, it “would
have looked more like Frank Lloyd
Wright married to Andy Warhol.”
Still, elements of Blair’s background
design did make their way into Disney
films—the surreal playing cards in “Alice
in Wonderland,” for example, and the
tropical train on a black background in
“The Three Caballeros”—and this, along
with her sense of color, Canemaker
points out, had an effect on Pop art,
from Peter Max to Keith Haring. The
concept art for the Pixar director Pete
Docter’s films “Monsters, Inc.” and “In-
side Out” was influenced by Blair. As
Docter told Canemaker, “In every pro-
duction, there’s a phase where we say,
‘Let’s look at the Mary Blair stuff !’” S o
it’s odd that she was scarcely mentioned
in the standard books on Walt Disney
and that, when she was, it was often
only in tandem with her husband. Neal
Gabler’s massive 2006 biography of Dis-
ney contains just three brief references
to her. Michael Barrier’s “The Animated
Man,” from 2007, mentions her once, in
connection with It’s a Small World.
For women in the film industry, there
is a cost to such forgetting. Without a
history, there seemed to be less of a fu-
ture. In Hollywood, script supervisors,
who have historically been women, were
once known as “continuity girls.” I’ve
always liked that term, because, although
it actually entails noting down all the
information about each take for the
benefit of the editor, who will put ev-
erything together, it sounds like a more
philosophical sort of task—insuring the
internal consistency and, therefore, the
integrity of the narratives we tell our-
selves. Reading about the history of
women in film, the way they dropped
out of the frame time and again, I’ve
started hearing that phrase in my head
less as a job description and more as a
rallying cry, a protest against selective
amnesia. Continuity, girls, continuity!
BRIEFLY NOTED
Artificial Intelligence, by Melanie Mitchell (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux). Without shying away from technical details, this
survey provides an accessible course in neural networks, com-
puter vision, and natural-language processing, and asks whether
the quest to produce an abstracted, general intelligence is
worrisome. Although recent advances are staggering, Mitch-
ell emphasizes the limitations of even advanced machines. A
program called AlphaGo has bested one of the world’s best
Go players, but its intelligence is nontransferable: it cannot
think about anything except Go, let alone steal someone’s
job. Mitchell’s view is a reassuring one: “We humans tend to
overestimate AI advances and underestimate the complexity
of our own intelligence.”The Accusation, by Edward Berenson (Norton). In 1928, after
a young girl went missing in the town of Massena, New York,
the town’s Jews were accused of killing her, a theory that be-
came the focus of the police investigation. This was the first
and only time that the so-called “blood libel,” which flour-
ished in medieval Europe, gained traction in the United
States. Berenson, a historian whose great-grandparents were
among the first Jews to live in Massena, explores the origins
of the blood libel and traces its circuitous route to upstate
New York. He shows how the particular contours of racism
at the time allowed this long-buried idea to surface, and de-
scribes the ensuing debate among American Jews over the
challenge of claiming a place in their new home.Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson (Grove). This novelistic
homage to “Frankenstein” weaves together the life of its au-
thor, Mary Shelley, and a merrily slapstick plot set in the pres-
ent. While Mary, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in 1816, imag-
ines a man whose desire to seize the divine power of creation
unleashes a monster, a transgender doctor named Ry (formerly
Mary) falls under the spell of a “Gospel Channel scientist” with
a secret laboratory, where they are joined by a sex-toy entre-
preneur, an evangelical Christian, and a scoop-hungry journal-
ist. Refracting the past through the present, Winterson links
automation, A.I., cryonics, and sexbots to the human yearning
to transcend the aging, mortal bodies that we are born into.Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson (Riverhead). Anato-
mizing the consequences of an accidental pregnancy, this mul-
tivocal novel uses the sweet-sixteen celebration of the result-
ing child, Melody, as its centerpiece. Gradually, Melody’s
perspective, and those of her parents and grandparents, map
the pressures surrounding her birth—her father’s upbringing
as the child of a single mother and the class tensions the preg-
nancy unleashes in her mother’s family, members of the black
élite. Melody’s mother leaves her behind to attend Oberlin
and conceals her motherhood from her new friends, strain-
ing the parental relationship. The novel subtly explores the
ways in which desire can reconfigure our best-laid plans, and
its expansive outlook suggests how easily, in African-Ameri-
can life, hard-won privileges can be dissolved.