The Circle of Life and the Undead

This is my second entry in an ongoing discussion of Disney animated films.

The Lion King is essentially the following kind of story: The Social Order Must Be Maintained No Matter What.  The Disney canon contains numerous instances in which out-of-bounds social relations must be terminated so that the proper social order is reestablished:  Mowgli the man-cub must leave the jungle and be with humans.  A fox and a hound must not be friends because they are destined to be in mortal combat with one another.

The Lion King is the apotheosis of such a conservative social vision.  Its dramatic structure unfolds like so: a king and his queen have given birth to a son who will be rightful heir to the kingdom; the kingdom is harmonious politically, and the natural world rewards this harmony by bestowing a bounty of fertile fields and forests and glorious sunshine; when the king is assassinated and the rightful heir flees in exile, the usurping ruler reigns with the help of outsiders to the kingdom, hired thugs who plunder the bounty of the land for their own enjoyment; nature rebels at this usurpation and the kingdom soon turns to ash and dust; finally, when the rightful heir returns to vanquish the despot and assume the throne, harmony between king and subjects reasserts itself, and as if by magic the natural environment transforms into a fecund place once more.  Balance to the social order, and thus the natural order, is restored.

Roland Barthes, the French literary critic, said that in studying cultural representations he resented seeing “Nature and History confused at every turn”.  By this he meant that the deeply contextualized and transient ideas and values of human beings are given to a propagandistic model of “transcendence”, as if they were somehow natural and therefore immutable processes not unlike gravity or other laws of the universe.  By this token, the very historical phenomenon of autocratic rule is parlayed into the “divine right of kings”, in which God himself had somehow reached down and touched the brow of latter-day Solomons and Davids.  Likewise, we Americans feel imbued with a spirit for liberty as if the land itself catalyzes our desire for self-governance, our entrepreneurial spirit, etc.  We call this American Exceptionalism, and everyone from Sarah Palin to Mitt Romney to even Barack Obama invokes the term or its central thesis again and again.

But critical to any “transcendent” idea about the social order is the hidden axiom that a social order speaks its opposite.  If you are for something, you must be against something else.  So what are we against in The Lion King?  It isn’t merely Scar, the evil brother of the slain Mustafa, whom we loathe.  While the surface narrative plays out a struggle for righteous retribution—Simba vanquishing Scar as Hamlet does Claudius to avenge the killing of the father—the underlying dramatic structure suggests that the social pariahs of the kingdom, the jackals, are the real objects of audience hatred. The jackals are personas non grata of the lion kingdom, on the margins of the “natural”; they exist somehow in a permanent state of imbalance.  We might call them tropes of dissonance embodied in physical form.  Or, to employ the critical cliché, they are the “Other”.  As “others”, the jackals can never be inscribed within the dominant social order. So when Scar assumes his reign, he gives the kingdom over to the jackals, and nature then begins its rebellion against these scavenger dogs by drying out, closing up, fossilizing itself.  In effect then, the lion kingdom Mustafa reigns over and Simba inherits is defined in exclusionary terms.  What must be kept out of it, for the good of all and the health of the natural world, is not Scar, but the jackals.

  If this idea of a social order being defined in xenophobic terms sounds familiar, that’s because real-world analogues abound (Nazi Germany, the British Empire, Manifest Destiny and Aboriginal Genocide, et al.). As far as fiction goes, perhaps the ultimate analogue is Bram Stoker’s Dracula.While no one considers Stoker a great writer, his genius lies in the character of Dracula itself, a creature that fuses together Nature and History into an unstable persona that gets to the core of Barthes’ critique.  Dracula speaks of the lasting paranoid fantasies society projects onto marginalized people, most typically immigrant populations.  Dracula is in essence a divided soul, a self in self-rebellion.  To put it another way, Dracula embodies in total not only Scar, but the jackals and even nature itself.  He is of royal blood (Scar), yet of an Eastern race (the jackals) unknown and distrusted by the West, and his physical presence is nature turned upside down, hence his aversion to sunlight and his appetite for human blood to avoid withering away.  He is immortal yet seemingly emaciated and bordering on death.  Dracula’s story begins in the East, but it is when he “invades” the West to suck the blood of the English innocent that the social order is potentially thrown into chaos; only when he is vanquished does the threat of the “other” recede.  But what has been vanquished is a cruel reflection of humanity itself, not some distinct “other”.  The gun barrel of xenophobia cannot help but be turned around to face those standing behind it.  Dracula thus deconstructs an image of racial/ethnic antipathy as a form of self-hatred.

The Nature-History confusion that Dracula represents is carried into The Lion King without the same sense of complication.  It is of an ilk closer to what Barthes would consider jingoistic propaganda.  Imagine the same storyline of The Lion King played out in human terms: an idealized country is taken over by an unclean, amoral group of people and the country and its rightful inhabitants lapse into anomie and entropy.  The machinery of industry comes to a standstill and the crops fail.  People are soon starving and in despair.  But with the immergence of a rightful, ennobled leader the country finds its way out of the darkness and prospers once more.

Doesn’t this sound like a script every dictator or totalitarian regime has employed at some point or another?  Round up all the undesirables, the infiltrators, the agents provocateur, dispense of them, and then swear eternal allegiance to the indomitable leader who speaks for all, because it is he who brings peace and honor.  Even those who might be philosophically opposed to the leader’s ideology swear allegiance because of his “natural” predestination to proffer the good for the country, the homeland, the Fatherland, Deutschland.  (So, in movie terms, this is why the zebras and other natural prey for the lions submit to the lion king’s rule and bow their heads in supplication.).

To boil it down, the political component of xenophobia is fascism.

I don’t mean to state that The Lion King is explicitly fascist; rather that it carries a covert message with fascist implications.  So too does the Lord of the Rings, the Dirty Harry movies, and many popular entertainments.  The literary critic in me swears its own allegiance, that to Barthes’ camp, and is reluctant to allow consideration of the “nature” side of the nature/history dichotomy.  But something about these cultural expressions does continue to enthrall us down through the generations.  Do we yearn to be led?  Does fealty to the powerful override the democratic desires we profess?  Do human beings possess a fascistic soul?  Am I a closeted Hobbesian?  Perhaps, as Curtis White has argued, we simply exist in a “culture of death” that is constantly reinforcing itself, a postmodern simulacra detached from the any notion of the real.  At least stating it that way gives me some sense of hope that democratic values aren’t somehow unnatural.

Let me close with a thought experiment: Would you be quite so apt to let your children watch The Lion King if the character of Mustafa wasn’t quite so honorable, the jackals and Scar instituted a different form of governance that allowed all of the subject species a voice and a share of power, and Simba was more like Napoleon or some exiled general, thirsty to re-impose his will upon the kingdom?

How come?