and Bagheera’s very controversial “Fight him like a man” (Favreau, Taylor, Favreau, 2016: 1:23:38). In all of these, “man” is used in opposition to “animal” and, therefore, “human” would sound more apt to today’s viewers2. In this very masculine atmosphere that the film recreates there are only two female characters: Raksha and Kaa.
In neither the book nor the film does Raksha have her own storyline. In both, she only appears in relation to male characters. In the book, for example, she is presented as the protagonist’s mother and all the references to her, her actions and interventions are mediated by this maternal role. At the same time, she is portrayed as a strong secondary character: she is a creator with the power to give names to other creatures (Kipling, 2013: 6, 10); she is enlightened and has deep knowledge of the jungle (Kipling, 2013: 7); she is intuitive and can feel when something is wrong (Kipling, 2013: 8, 17); she confronts Shere Khan (Kipling, 2013: 9) and is ready to confront the wolf pack (Kipling, 2013: 11); she makes decisions – keeping Mowgli – that are key for the development of the story (Kipling, 2013: 9); she prophesises that Mowgli will kill Shere Khan (Kipling, 2013: 10, 14); and she shows some woman-to-woman solidarity (Kipling, 2013: 178).
In the film, however, she is downgraded, presented as far less charismatic and less central: she is made the partner of the wolf pack leader, Akela (also Mowgli’s wolf father in the film), which further accentuates her subaltern role in the patriarchal system. At the same time, she is never on her own, but always followed by her cubs, and quite removed from everything else that happens in the wolf pack: for example, she remains silent while the pack (including Mowgli) recite the Law of the Jungle at the beginning of the film. Although she does confront Shere Khan at the Peace Rock (“What do you know about law”) (Favreau, Taylor, Favreau, 2016: 11:12) and the wolf pack at the Council (“We raised him as one of our own!”) (Favreau, Taylor, Favreau, 2016: 14:50), she does so less fiercely than in the book, where Kipling dwells on Raksha’s awe-inspiring demeanour: “she ran in the Pack and was not called The Demon for compliment’s sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death” (Kipling, 2013: 9).
Towards the end of the film, Raksha is shown to be the new wolf pack leader, an addition with great potential for female empowerment and role modelling. However, this happens only after Akela has been killed (an indication that her leadership might be the result of her status as Akela’s partner, rather than her own merit) and is shown only indirectly (when she orders the pack to attack Shere Khan) and in the aftermath of the story (when the wolf pack gathers around her to recite the Law of the Jungle). Thus, Raksha taking over the leadership of the pack seems more an example of cosmetic upgrading than an earnest appraisal of the story’s gender politics.
Regarding Kaa, the character undergoes a series of changes in the passage from book to film. In the book, Kaa is a male helper who saves Mowgli (and also Bagheera and Baloo) from the Bandar-log, the leaderless Monkey-People. The 1967 version turns Kaa into an antagonist that unsuccessfully attempts to kill Mowgli. The 2016 production adds a further spin by making the character female, sexy (Sink, 2016) and evil. In a recent study, Lauren Rosewarne explores the purposes of gender swaps in adaptations and remakes: “Undertaking a sex-swap can position a studio as abreast of the zeitgeist, and as responsive to viewer expectations – notably as related to gender equality- all while potentially expanding the box office” (Rosewarne, 2019: 34). In this regard, director Jon Favreau stated that it would be “odd” to have an all-male cast nowadays, and that giving more relevance to Raksha while making Kaa female “helped balance [the story] out and feel more of our time” (The Telegraph, 2016). Favreau’s words, together with his consideration of Raksha and Kaa as “prominent” female characters (The Telegraph, 2016), quickly brushing off the issue of their inconsequential role in plot development, further underscore the token nature of these transformations.
Moreover, female Kaa, with her sensuous voice, seductive movements and alluring performance, and described by Scarlett Johansson, who voiced her, as “coquettish” (Gupta, 2016), fits comfortably in with a long-standing Western tradition that associates enticing women, evil/danger and snakes, from Medusa and the Bible to Freud and popular culture (Rosewarne, 2011: 58). It is also quite revealing that, while in the book Mowgli is unaffected by Kaa’s hypnotising powers (Kipling, 2013: 47), in the film he is ensnared by the female python. Indeed, it has been noted that both Raksha and Kaa perform hackneyed and complementary roles as the film plays along with stereotypical representations of women as either maternal figures or femme fatales (Gupta, 2016). In this way, the director’s purported egalitarian aspirations are thwarted by these disingenuous choices that contribute to validating and perpetuating old masculine narratives by either suppressing the presence and voice of female characters or presenting them as cliched tropes.
6 Conclusions
Whether the process of meaning construction is led by audiences or industries (Altman, 1984: 9) or by a negotiation between the two (Gledhill, 2006: 118), it is clear that family films and blockbusters tend to obfuscate political struggle, difference and inequality. In the context of world confinement, these “sanitary” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 6), “wholesome” (Booker, 2010: 31) and “apolitical” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 4) products elevate this sort of “sanitization to pedagogy” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 8). However, intermedial analysis lays bare the mechanisms behind this cleansing process.
In the works analysed here, secondary female characters undergo a series of changes in their passage from book to blockbuster. Many are subject to purge, made to disappear from plots overcrowded with men in a man’s world that serves as the backdrop of the protagonist’s adventures. Another mechanism involves downgrading secondary female characters, reducing their relevance for plot development, ridiculing them or giving them relational roles as romantic partners. Furthermore, the inclusion of a heterosexual romantic relationship, often absent in the book, is a common strategy that perpetuates traditional heteronormative notions of love and underscores, from a typically male-gaze perspective, women’s main reason to exist. Also, because women do not hold any substantial relationship with one another (another common deviation in the passage from book to film), viewers are left without models of female bonding.
There are also films that make use of cosmetic upgrading by introducing female characters that either are male or do not appear in the book. Whereas this can and has been used to showcase a more forward attitude by raising female representation, intermedial analysis reveals a return to dominant models and plots that do not contest or problematize traditional gender representation, perpetuating long-standing visions of women as caring mothers, romantic partners or evil enticers. Indeed, earnest upgradings, that is, true attempts at feminist reimaginings of secondary female characters in book-based family films, are rare. In these, women are given, in spite of not being completely rid of patriarchal constraints, more active and independent roles as they transfer from book to film.
In spite of the recent upsurge of films with strong leading female characters and all-women casts, the use of purging and downgrading strategies is still common when it comes to secondary characters: many new adaptations and sequels such as the whole Jurassic Park franchise (1997, 2001, 2015 and 2018) and the very recent live-action adaptations of Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018) fall back again on the old tropes of femininity in spite of the feminist push behind them (Koushik, Reed, 2019: 132).
This is the backdrop of the informal gender education of whole generations of viewers over the decades to which young audiences under lockdown are now being exposed at home. Some of the solutions to the problems raised in this chapter include situating critical “pedagogy far beyond the boundaries of schools” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 9), offering “representations that work with a degree of fluidity and contradiction” (Gledhill, 2006: 118), abandoning a capitalist logic when accessing media texts (Koushik, Reed, 2019: 125), and more women directors and screenwriters (Lauzen, 2019: 6). It is still difficult to find
