David Cormack
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You won't get a sniff without me
🕑 Added 2021-07-25 21:49:13 +0000 UTCWe had a family holiday last week. We drove from Wellington to Auckland with a two-night stopover in Rotorua.
It was cool. A lot of people were like "why don't you fly?!", but we wanted to drive. Gave us a chance to stop in other places (we also stopped in Taupō on the way home), and it also meant we had a car when we were in Auckland.
But that's not the point of this post, to tell you about my holiday.
While we were in Auckland, and the main reason we went, we went and saw the stage production of the Lion King.
Now the Lion King is one of my favourite movies of all time. It's also one of the most traumatic. It came out in 1994. I was 10. Seeing [spoilers]'s death scene fucked me up some. In fact to this day, if we put the Lion King on for Greta, I try to leave the room during that scene. Don't like it.
It's much easier to cope with in the stage form.
Anyway, that is also not the point of this post.
Rather, what I noticed as I sat there watching the Lion King was the politics of the show.
It's a monarchic society with an aristocracy, and an upper class. Mufasa talks to Simba about the "circle of life" and how they eat the antelope, but then the Lions die, and their bodies become the grass that the Antelopes eat. So there's a tier of society who look after one another, with a King up top.
Except then there are the hyenas. And the hyenas have been excluded from society for ... reasons? They are forced to be self-sustaining, with no benefits from the kingdom, and are viewed with disdain by everyone in the aristocracy and the upper class. They are definitely the lower-working class of this story.
And then you have Scar who wants the throne himself. And so he hatches a plan that involves bringing the hyenas into the fold. This in of itself is a good thing, right? Bringing people together. Letting the lower-working class join the upper classes. Except Scar doesn't introduce democracy or anything like that, he just becomes the monarch, and lets the hyenas run amok.
And the consequences of all this is that Pride Rock becomes a barren wasteland. We're supposed to sit there and believe that because a "bad" king took over from a "good" king and invited the "bad" animals into society that everything goes to shit. And sure, the bad king may have made some shit decisions, but we associate the poor state of Pride Rock with the hyenas also being introduced.
And I thought what sort of pro-feudalist/monarchist anti-working-class bullshit is this?
Because the resolution is not democracy. It's the resumption of the "good" king. Scar is thrown out of the pride and because he tried to blame the hyenas for all the problems, they turned on him and ripped him apart. Again I sat there thinking that the message was that not only do the lower classes ruin a society when let in, but that they'll turn against the ruling class and kill them at the drop of a hat.
When the "good" king is back on the throne, suddenly everything is ok again. The upper classes are happy, Pride Rock becomes bountiful, and the hyenas are turfed out of society. What a load of shit. I couldn't believe I had been indoctrinated with this classist rubbish as a child, and that now I was exposing my family to it.
And then as I walked out of the show, I thought to myself "get a life David, stop projecting your politics onto everything."
But it's hard, eh? Because the personal is the political.
Comments
m3me_fr0g
Interesting perspective! I'd say the hyenas represent the gangs/organised crime while the antelopes represent the working class (from the lower working class to the upper middle class - they're still all workers, while lions are the aristocracy). No great surprise that when you let organised crime dominate society it destroys it. Look for example at much of southern Italy (or South America) where you had Mafia/Cartel bosses that were insanely rich literally living in caves unable to spend their money while the areas they controlled experienced immense poverty.
David Cormack
DETHRONE THE MONARCHY
Hilary Stace
And here was I thinking it was another grieving for a lost father story like Hamlet and Harry Potter.
