No matter how you look at it, this is a film that introduces us to a society where the weak have learned to worship at the feet of the strong


Donald Glover and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter voice Simba and Nala in this 2019 remake of "The Lion King." (Walt Disney Pictures)
By Dan Hassler-Forest
Dan Hassler-Forest is an author and public speaker on media franchises, cultural theory, and political economy. He lives in the Netherlands and works as assistant professor in the Media Studies department of Utrecht University.
July 10

Last November, Disney broke the Internet with its teaser trailer for “The Lion King.” This 93-second video gave millions of people chills by faithfully re-creating key moments from the original film’s beloved opening number. But as nostalgic as “Circle of Life” may make us feel, this bombastic scene is also a painful reminder of the film’s ideological agenda: It introduces us to a society where the weak have learned to worship at the feet of the strong.

As we watch the herbivores congregate to bow down before their newborn ruler, “The Lion King” offers us a seductive worldview in which absolute power goes unquestioned, and where the weak and the vulnerable are fundamentally inferior. In other words: “The Lion King” offers us fascist ideology writ large, and there seems to be no way out for the forthcoming remake.

The first thing to understand about “The Lion King” is that it isn’t in any way about lions, or any other animal species. As in every fable, a variety of cute and cuddly figures stand in for human societal organizations. Mapping our internalized social hierarchies onto the pristine and “neutral” world of the animal kingdom renders these power dynamics natural, common-sense and desirable. But by using predator-prey relationships to allegorize human power, the film almost inevitably incorporates the white supremacist’s worldview, one in which some groups of people are inherently superior to others.

Obviously, such fables can serve politically diverse ends: George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” employed a similar allegory to make class distinctions more blatantly visible, and to criticize authoritarian systems of power. Disney’s own “Robin Hood” adaptation similarly associated power systems with animal food chains, but used its allegory to poke fun at the obvious greed and corruption that defined the predatory ruling class.

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But the sympathies of “The Lion King” lie elsewhere. Doubling down on Disney’s historical obsession with patriarchal monarchies, it places the audience’s point of view squarely with the autocratic lions, whose Pride Rock literally looks down upon all of society’s weaker groups — a kind of Trump Tower of the African savanna. When grand patriarch Mufasa explains patiently to his son how this division of power works, he emphasizes that the king must maintain balance in their kingdom. This seems fine when we think about the environment, where “balance” sounds great. But when we consider that he’s really explaining to his own heir why it’s perfectly fine to behave dictatorially, the lions’ perspective feels a lot more unsettling.

Bad as it is that the powerful are presented as inherently superior to all other species, things get substantially worse once the hyenas are introduced. With the lions standing in for the ruling class and the “good” herbivores embodying society’s decent, law-abiding citizens, the hyenas transparently represent the black, brown and disabled bodies that are forcefully excluded from this fascist society. Noticeably marked by their ethnically coded “street” accents, the hyenas blatantly symbolize racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes of “verminous” groups that form an inherent threat to society.

Just as fascist leaders constantly pinpoint specific groups they seek to villainize and cast out from “natural” society, the film’s heroes are preoccupied with keeping their kingdom free of contamination by undesirable elements, who are consigned to the shadowy ghettolike areas “beyond our borders” — on the wrong side of the tracks. With these elements in place, the film’s plot centers on what happens when the “natural” supremacy of traditional patriarchal rule is interrupted. This foul betrayal of tradition is predictably orchestrated by Scar, the misfit lion whose opportunistic desire to advance the status of minorities echoes the way conservatives speak of liberal politicians, when they act as if compassion is merely opportunism. Simultaneously, his effeminate gestures and lack of interest in heterosexual reproduction mark him as queer, like the vast majority of other villains in Disney’s exclusively heterosexual world. Adding insult to injury, the social outcasts’ rebellion against Mufasa’s autocratic regime is explicitly associated with the imagery of goose-stepping Nazis.

But as so often in Hollywood films, the explicit Nazi iconography serves primarily to distract us from the heroes’ own fascism. Simba’s final ascent to the throne, his masculine roar returning Scar’s dystopia to its Edenic natural state, is nothing less than the Führer Principle at work: the idea that those we entrust with positions of leadership are blessed with a natural, even divine superiority. Groups who question this system or rebel against it are presented as genetically inferior and malicious beings who must learn to acknowledge their proper place in the social order. As Matt Roth has written, the movie thereby idolizes bullies by mythologizing the most brutal social principles: “only the strong and the beautiful triumph, and the powerless survive only by serving the strong.”

Now that Disney has become by far the most powerful entertainment company in the world, we have seen several attempts to update and correct its ideological payload: “Maleficent” and its forthcoming sequel changed a deeply sexist fairy tale into a feminist parable about sexual abuse, “Aladdin” made at least some attempt to mitigate the original film’s Islamophobia, “Beauty and the Beast” included one (very minor) openly gay character, the new Ariel will be a mermaid of color, and “Mulan” has been overhauled to become less offensive to Chinese audiences.

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By the same token, the promotional campaign for “The Lion King” has constantly emphasized its majority-black cast, swapping out the original’s white voice actors Matthew Broderick and Moira Kelly for Donald Glover and “Queen Bey” Beyoncé Knowles-Carter — a “woke” casting coup if ever there was one. In obvious efforts to resonate with the company’s thematically similar “Black Panther,” Disney publicists have doubled down on pitching this remake as diverse and inclusive.

It’s tempting therefore to jump on the Disney bandwagon and celebrate the admirable work the company has been doing on this front. And yes, even the most brazenly opportunistic and superficial attempts to improve the way women, people of color, LGBT people and the disabled are made visible in our popular culture make a real difference. Representation still matters, and having female Jedi knights, black mermaids and Chinese action heroines are undeniable marks of progress.

But it’s also not enough. In our increasingly nostalgic culture, we need to recognize that the real problem with “The Lion King” isn’t the ethnicity of its voice actors, just as the inherent misogyny of “The Little Mermaid” can’t be salvaged by casting a black actress in a role that’s notorious for sexualizing and objectifying teenage girls’ bodies. These films consistently champion authoritarian and anti-democratic values by reproducing a worldview in which power, strength and privilege are genetically determined, and where the weak and vulnerable only exist to serve, support and flatter their masters.

At a moment in our history when the far right is on the rise, when we debate whether to call the horrific shelters on our border concentration camps or not, and when anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes continue to increase, we should ask ourselves what it means for our culture to obsessively revisit narratives that celebrate the strong, the beautiful and the powerful, while looking down upon the rebels, the outcasts and the powerless. “The Lion King” is exactly that kind of story, and it will take more than Queen Bey’s regal vocal cords to redeem it for the next generation.