political tracts but as mindless escapism, and an audience member who accepts that tenet will rarely be alert to the cultural and ideological assumptions that the films encode and promote. (One should remember that ideology is often most effective when it goes unnoticed.) The fact that Hollywood films are generally understood as mere entertainment (without political significance) is itself an ideological assumption, one that denies the importance of image studies and therefore represents white patriarchal capitalist film practice as neutral, natural, and inevitable.
Yet the act of performing a negotiated or oppositional reading is not in and of itself a radical denunciation of dominant cinema, or dominant ideology. (After all, even the oppositional spectator has signaled his or her “approval” of the text by purchasing a ticket to the film.) While such readings may criticize and critique certain ideological notions, they are nonetheless created within the same basic hegemonic framework as are dominant readings. They cannot completely negate the ideological messages found in the text, only resist them. Still, oppositional and negotiated readings can have an effect on the hegemonic negotiation of dominant ideologies throughout time. When a certain oppositional reading strategy grows within a culture to the point that future similar texts are no longer accepted by consumers, then certain ideological assumptions must be altered, and future texts may exhibit those changes. As we shall see throughout this book, the overtly racist and sexist images that were found in many films from previous decades are – in many cases – no longer considered acceptable in the twenty‐first century. Nonetheless, white patriarchal capitalism maintains its hegemonic dominance, in both American film and culture‐at‐large.
Case Study: Two Lion Kings (1994 and 2019)
Issues of culture and ideology can be illustrated by examining texts that many people would probably consider totally apolitical and meaningless except as mere entertainment – the Walt Disney Company’s animated feature The Lion King (1994) and its CGI (computer generated imagery) remake (2019). Let our discussion begin with the first film. One of the biggest box office successes in motion picture history, The Lion King embodies what most people refer to as escapist family entertainment. Since the film was about animals – and cartoon animals at that – the film might seem to have little to say about human relations or ideologies. Yet, since cultural artifacts always reflect in some way the conditions of their production and reception, it is not surprising that The Lion King has interesting things to convey about late twentieth‐century American culture and its dominant ideology – white patriarchal capitalism. These messages reflect the place and time in which the film was made: the songs are typical 1990s soft rock music, some of the jokes refer to current events, and the storyline evokes concepts popularized in the 1990s by New Age spirituality. Using ideas and concepts that were familiar and reassuring to many Americans probably helped strengthen the film’s popularity.
According to our cultural studies model, the cultural artifact The Lion King is the text under consideration, its producer is the Walt Disney Company (the animators, performers, and other employees involved in making the film), and the readers are all the people who have seen the film since its release in 1994. The Disney filmmakers encoded meaning into the cartoon, and every viewer, whether preschooler or senior citizen, works to understand the text by decoding it. The film was arguably as popular as it was because it playfully and joyfully encoded dominant hegemonic ideas about white patriarchal capitalism into its form and content: the film’s story is a coming‐of‐age tale in which Simba, a young male lion, learns that his proper place in the world is to be the leader of those around him. Readers who enjoyed the film were probably performing dominant readings of the text, as they cheered on the young lion’s rise to the throne, defeating his adversaries amid song and dance and colorful spectacle.
Scar’s moronic and evil sidekicks are voiced by actors of color, Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin.The Lion King, copyright © 1993, The Walt Disney Co. Top left, photo: Umberto Adaggi; top right, photo: Michael Ansell.
Yet, while the film was a huge box office hit, there emerged a small but vocal opposition to The Lion King, criticizing it on a number of levels. These critics of the film performed oppositional and/or negotiated readings. For example, some readers were annoyed that the film focused on patriarchal privilege by dramatizing how a son inherits the right to rule over the land from his father. The film literally “nature”‐alizes this ideology by making it seem as if this is how real‐life animals behave, when in fact female lions play dominant roles in the social structure of actual prides, a detail the film minimizes (and which, by extension, minimizes the importance of females in human society). The female lions in the film are minor “love interest” characters, and females of other species are almost non‐existent. One might also note that the film’s very title is suggestive of male authority and supremacy – lions and kings are longstanding symbols of patriarchy.
Other oppositional or negotiated readings noted that the first Disney animated feature to be set in Africa had erased all evidence of human African culture, and employed white musicians to write supposedly “African” music. (This is a good example of the dominant culture industry commodifying and incorporating African style while ignoring the politics of race and nation.) Furthermore, Simba and his love interest are both voiced by white actors. Disney did hire a few African American actors as character voices (including the assassinated patriarch), but some viewers felt that these characters came close to replicating derogatory racial stereotypes. For example, although the baboon character Rafiki (voiced by African American actor Robert Guillaume) holds a place of respect in the film as the community’s mystic/religious leader, he frequently acts foolish and half‐crazed, a variation on old stereotypes used to depict African Americans. Furthermore, two of the villain’s dim‐witted henchmen were also voiced by people of color (Whoopi Goldberg and Richard “Cheech” Marin), linking their minority status to both stupidity and anti‐social actions.
Uncle Scar preens with an arched eyebrow (a stereotypical signifier of male homosexuality) as he plots against Simba, the “true” and “rightful” ruler of the jungle, in Walt Disney’s The Lion King (1994).The Lion King, copyright © 1993, The Walt Disney Co.
Villainy in the film is also linked to stereotypical traits of male homosexuality. The villainous lion Scar is voiced by Jeremy Irons with a British lisp and an arch cynicism; the Disney animators drew him as weak, limp‐wristed, and with a feminine swish in his walk. Other characters refer to him as “weird,” and, in his attempt to usurp the throne for himself, he disdains the concept of the heterosexual family. Scar’s murder of Simba’s father and his attempt to depose the “rightful” heir to the throne posit him as a threat to the “natural order” itself (a fact made literal when Scar’s rule results in the environmental devastation of the savanna). It is only with the restoration of Simba to the throne that the land comes back to life, in a dissolve that makes the change seem miraculously immediate. Perhaps most disturbingly, the film connects Scar’s implied homosexuality with one of the twentieth century’s most heinous evils: his musical solo, complete with goose‐stepping minions, is suggestive of a Nazi rally.
Immediately, the question of which reading is “correct” gets raised. Are all these people who were bothered by The Lion King, those who performed oppositional readings, getting antagonistic over nothing? Or do they know what is really going on in the film, while everybody else (performing dominant readings)
