bloodyrosemccoy | Simba Is The 1%

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Simba Is The 1%

Mom got the Blu-Ray for The Lion King. She says it’s her favorite Disney movie, mostly because of the “Circle of Life” song. I can’t argue. That’s a damn fine song.

Only thing is, the characters in the movie don’t seem to actually believe it. For all the lip service they pay to the Great Circle of Life, you start to think that some animals, to paraphrase Orwell, seem more connected in the circle than others. And then the movie starts to look a lot like a failed Equal Hyena Rights campaign.

Think about it. In the beginning the hyenas are inexplicably relegated to some foodless wasteland. When they’re in the wasteland the king’s all “Not my problem,” but if they get hungry and come to the place where all the other animals are allowed to hunt and eat each other, the lions call it poaching and FUCK THEM UP until they go back to their barren world of exile. Why the distinction? Are we all connected by the Great Circle of Life unless we’re hyenas? What’d the hyenas do to deserve that?

So they get desperate and try to ally themselves with Scar, because he says he’s going to let them be part of the Pridelands again and more to the point god dammit they’re HUNGRY.* So they have themselves a revolution, which has a rocky start because Scar is not really about Hyena Rights so much as It’s Good To Be The King,** and then Simba comes back and is all WHAT IS THIS SHIT and sets fire to everything and presumably after he takes his place as king he dumps them back in their wasteland, and everything’s all status quo again. Which is great, unless you’re a hyena.

Poor suckers. I’d suggest they try more civil disobedience next time, but that’s a bit tricky when the people in power will just eat you. Sorry, hyenas.

*If you listen to the countermelody they sing in “Be Prepared” after they did their little goose-step, it’s kind of heartbreaking. He gets them on their side by saying they’ll never go hungry again, and then while he's carrying on about how he deserves to be recognized as the most awesome king and he'll show everyone, you hear them singing “We’ll have food / lots of food / we repeat / endless meat!”

**Yeah, the drought. If this world has no god, that means it’s a really unfortunate coincidence and all the lions’ll say that just goes to show hyenas bring drought. If it’s theistic, then apparently God’s top priority is starving hyenas, and all his other concerns—such as feeding ALL THE OTHER ANIMALS—comes a distant second.

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Yeah, hyenas get the short end of the stick in that movie. Even if you allow that there's some sort of Fisher King thing going on with drought/rain thing that cares really earnestly about standard human-style monarchical succession in the local lion pride, the lions are still dicks for keeping the hyenas out of all the good gazelle lands. (And let's not get into the concept of a king who eats his own subjects.)

That said, "Be Prepared" is an awesome song. Back when the movie came out, I bought my little sister the Official Cassette Tape for Christmas (...my god, that was a long time ago), and we'd sing that song together, with her doing all the hyena parts and me doing Scar. It was fun!

It certainly says something about humans that we equate "king" with "impressive predator who eats everybody under him." No wonder we're so darn bad

Yeah, the Fisher King/Divine Right business is unsettling all on its own, but the hyenas had the misfortune to be tangled in with Scar--you just KNOW that even if the lions don't figure they brought the drought, they're in the same category of Plague--either they're the plague, or they brought one.

I do love the music--my sister and I sing the two parts, too! ("No king, no king, lalalalalala!") I love most Disney music regardless of what I think of the movie--I honestly love the hell out of the Hunchback of Notre Dame's music (especially "Hellfire," because it's SO DAMN FUCKED UP for a Disney movie holy SHIT) and hated the movie, and Pocahontas was pretty dumb but I get a kick out of David Ogden Stiers's little duet with himself in "Mine, Mine, Mine."

Yeah, it would've weirded me out a lot less, in retrospect, if the Lion King was just...you know...king of the lions. In which case defending their territory against other predators makes a lot more sense all around, and bringing in outside predators for a succession battle does seem like playing unfair. But if you want to be king of all the animals? That doesn't just mean the pretty ones, kids!

I feel you on the music side of things, though. There are at least two songs I love in Hunchback, even though I am full of D: at what they did to the book. (Happy ending? I expected. Singing gargoyles? Fine. Making the most selfish, corrupt douchebag of the whole book into the love interest? D: D: D: D: )

I actually do feel pretty bad for the hyenas. And it's not like the lions are doing it to every predator -- there are leopards and cheetah running around the Pridelands.

(You know, I assumed the ecological catastrophe was Scar's fault in that he's a shitty conservationist and bought a bunch of new predators into an ecosystem with no thought of actually feeding them in the long term. But that wouldn't affect the grass directly -- in fact, having a drastic drop of herbivores would cause a massive growth of undergrowth and things antelopes eat.

(And, yet, once the Rightful King is on the throne, no one cares that Sarabi pretty much said 'we're all boned, time to go let the land recover and eat things elsewhere'. Somehow having Simba being King of Pride Rock makes the grass grow and the antelopes breed like bunnies.)

Although Zazu does categoricaly declare that "Cheetahs never prosper!" ;)

I think they were trying to imply that Scar does mishandle things by lying around in his cave all day, but I keep trying to figure out how that would cause the rain to stop or the grass to just die. Maybe he decided to cleanse the land with fire and we just missed that scene?

Oh, wow. I always wondered what the chorus of the "Be Prepared" song was. I did recognize that the hyenas were being treated badly and terribly manipulated by Scar, but that song just makes it worse. :( Poor hyensas!

I have a hard time relating to The Lion King since I found out that hyenas are apex predators and lions are more likely to scavenge from them. The movie got their entire ecological pecking order backwards.

That said, the implication the filmmakers seemed to be going for was that the hyenas hunted indiscriminately, killing far more than was necessary and upsetting the delicate prey/predator balance, which in turn, according to the Circle of Life theory, cause the entire system to go out of whack. The drought was a way to easily visualise this for the viewing audience.

In any case, there's definitely a Fisher King thing going on, though. The giant-Mufasa-in-the-sky heavily points toward this.

Agreed; I think that's what they were going for, that the Pridelands got thrown out of balance. Although it's mostly meant to illustrate that Scar is a terrible king, meaning the hyenas aren't really the ones "causing" the drought, they're still inextricably tangled in his schemes, and that'll put them in the Bad category for the rest of the animals regardless of their actual deeds and intents.

As for why they're treated so badly before shit went down, it's always possible that the hyenas did something BEFORE the film that meant they had to be banished for the good of everyone else, but that's not well-established, so it could just as easily be that the lions thought the hyenas smelled funny.

Clearly, God cares deeply about which lion gets to hang out at that big old rock. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

I much prefer the hyenas in Digger, myself. Lots more entertaining.

Who is also named Ed, incidentally!

"NAME IS ED!" gets me every time.

For all the lip service they pay to the Great Circle of Life, you start to think that some animals, to paraphrase Orwell, seem more connected in the circle than others.

Well... yeah. There's a hierarchy in the food chain just like there's a hierarchy in a pride of lions.

I’d suggest they try more civil disobedience next time, but that’s a bit tricky when the people in power will just eat you. Sorry, hyenas.

Well, it worked for Timon and Pumbaa. The problem the hyenas had was that they were disloyal, disorganized, uncontrollable, whiny, unstable, impulsive, shallow assholes who were collectively stupid enough to be led like sheep by the highest bidder. Or only bidder, in this case.

Screw the hyenas, not one of them can think for themselves or is willing to do a damn thing to improve their lot unless they're told to by their evil dictator whose motives or methods not one of them ever questions even though there's no evidence that hyenas have ever had any reason to trust lions. I'm rooting for the interspecies gay couple who offered a rude gesture to the society that was keeping them down and buggered off to live somewhere they could define their lives on their own terms, raise an adopted child, and ultimately show that when people have the ability to be TRULY free, to prosper by finding the place in the world that suits them and using their own effort to have food and shelter, and by respecting the bounty that they have access to and using it responsibly, they thrive.

Lesson? Think for yourself. Be yourself. Respect, and harm no one, and just be. You're better off if you get out of the pride, or flock, or herd, or pack, realize the true potential of YOU, and use that to find a place in the world that is symbiotically beneficial based on your ethical and personal instincts and needs, not on hierarchical expectations or mob mentality peer pressure bullshit.

I can't feel sorry for a bunch of creatures who are given a bad rep that they then proceed to live up to every chance they get. I never saw that movie give us any reason to think the hyenas deserved to be treated any way other than how they always apparently had been. All they did was engage in territory scuffles with the lions, give themselves over without question to the first person with charisma who showed up, watch that system fail catastrophically, and then destroy it, presumably leaving them right back where they started.

What a waste.

Hakuna Matata.

Timon and Pumbaa had a fair enough answer, but if someone wants the support of society, that answer won't work. Changing that gives everyone a better chance.

Also, nobody deserves to be treated like shit no matter how unlikable they are.

I'd rather not mar your journal, which is lovely by the way, by introducing an argumentative component into it that doesn't belong in it. Suffice it to say that I've already expounded on the reasons for which I agree with the gist of this entry elsewhere, that I've made no secret of my hyena sympathies before, and would like to encourage you to write other entries in the same vein in the future.

*grin* Thanks! I think you might have mentioned something about the hyenas before, though I may not be remembering correctly.

And you're welcome to open up a debate if you'd like. I like to hear discussions!

One thing that makes people uncomfortable about hyenas is how much their females look like males and how much their males look like females.
It seems to me like it would be the same mental mechanisms that would react when people are uncomfortable about other human beings like transfolk/the intersexed/bisexuals/asexuals who in some way exist outside of traditional gender assumptions.
People don't like to have those boundaries blurred, because they want to be able to rely on them for stability and security, but they don't always think about at whose expense.
I know not everyone who disliked hyenas is a heterosexist bastard, but at the same time, if people can get comfortable with hermaphroditic traits of hyenas, maybe they won't seem to "unnatural" to people when they run into them in other humans.

Hyenas were often reviled by religious authorities, and presented as having demonic associations, because said authorities loved scapegoats that couldn't realistically fight back.
That the same religious authorities also presented other human beings as having demonic associations, again, doesn't prove that someone who dislikes hyenas is even religious.
But if someone is willing to go to the trouble to understand that hyenas play an important role in their ecosystem and that a lot of myths about them based on superficial criteria don't check out from up close, they've developed the same mechanisms that are required to understand that some of the human beings those authorities also demonized may have also played a relevant role in human society, in their own way.

Now for the goosestepping, there's the common misconception that the events leading up to WW2 happened because of something specific to the German character.
After all, they had to have all been sadists or fools unlike any of the rest of us here and now could ever be, even as our society continues to march right back toward fascism today.
It's been demonstrated that human beings can have the same failings in other countries and many decades later.
More than ever, I think it's important for people to understand how far the downtrodden can't be pushed, and how easy it is for the powerful to take advantage of people's unconscious and desperation to manipulate their motivations, no matter when or where they were born.

Which brings us all the way back to the 99% protesters of OWS.
One of the reasons for which RL hyenas are reviled is that they're supposed to be "scavengers", which people find "disgusting" because they eat meat that someone else has already killed before, even though that's what everyone who eats meat and doesn't hunt does.
Not only did the lion already commit the most violent act in those cases by killing the prey in question, and not only do they (unlike hyenas) throw their own children off cliffs so they only have to raise the strongest (now *that's* some Randian pragmatism right there for you!).
But by eating part of an animal that's already been killed, the hyena doesn't have to kill another animal that day, so that animal gets to live, and isn't that one of the 3 Rs, waste not want not, as Quark so well in The Ascent?
Then, there's the fact that in actuality lions do their share of scavenging and hyenas do their share of hunting, and the ways in which human morality can't be applied to animals in the first place.
Naturally the movie demands a certain level of suspension of disbelief, as many movies do.

But when you get into how many of the kind of people who showed up at OWS were, and that a lot more of the people they were representing by being there, were *also* reviled for their "filthy" low class occupations or lack thereof - in a word, for *scavenging*.
In that context I feel like the devaluation of the hyenas's plight risks coming at the cost of dehumanizing the 99%, already out there protesting because it's been dehumanized enough in the first place, and whose lives I believe are also more noble they receive credit for, in the context of how brave the people who live them have to be to get up and continue to face obstacles for their "pack". As for the greater cruelty of the "lions"...

I think people also just find hyenas to be less aesthetically compatible--in short, they don't look or sound quite as impressive or glorious to most humans. But I am always amazed at how often people ascribe cultural mores to animals--scavenging, sexual characteristics, etc, get filtered through the morality.

The trouble with OWS is it's a one-way analogy: we may tell fables that are based on our economy, but if you to start with an ecological model and use it to justify social constructs, you're definitely rationalizing on some level--the justification of the 1% is another iteration of Social Darwinism, which is a corruption of a solid biological model. So animal stories and actual animals--two different things, and people are unclear on that. (Like I said further up the page, it says a lot about humans that we equate an interspecies ecosystem with a social structure--and put the one animal that eats all the others in the same position as "king.")

As for the Nazis, I'd say it's a defense mechanism--we have to distance ourselves from people who might commit atrocities. Of course, we're all human, so statistically with the right factors the same sort of thing could happen anywhere. But nobody wants to believe that about themselves. People have to tell themselves the others are defective so they don't have to worry that the same thing could happen again. It's shortsighted, but understandable.

I can't think of much to add to that, other than that I appreciate the thought you put into your response.

Um, I realize that the comment above does go into a lot of the wider reasons why hyenas were selected as villains at all, as opposed to their portrayal in the movie itself, which has been the crux of the discussion up until this point. It's true that irrespective of how hyenas are portrayed and viewed in general, they could have been portrayed in the movie in particular with a greater level of nuance to better effect.

But it's interesting if you consider that the lions, by contrast, are literally the symbol of Christ - and have that reassuring mane that let you know you're dealing with an adult male.

I'm lookin' right at you, Aslan. >.>

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Simba Is The 1%

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