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Page 190 comes his feelings of guilt and inadequacy to accept the responsibilities of adulthood” (1998:8). Substitute one name for another, and Kakutani could be describing Hamlet. Disney gains enormous currency from this appropriation: it generates product placement, including a half-page color picture and front-page article connecting Shakespeare and Disney in The New York Times, Arts and Leisure section. But the corporation also enlists Shakespeare to lend credibility to its simplistically Oedipal model of development, recognizable as a popularized version of Ernest Jones’s (1954; first published 1949) dated analysis of Prince Hamlet, which identifies Claudius as a displaced version of Hamlet’s father and diagnoses the Prince’s failure to act as deriving from unresolved, conflicted feelings about his parents. Although Bourdieu’s model of cultural distinction implies that appropriation transfers value unidirectionally, from a source to a new receptacle for cultural capital, Disney’s use of Shakespeare shows that worth flows in two directions. Revaluing one currency in turn alters the standard currency by which it is measured. While Shakespeare lends credibility to the Oedipal schemes of Mermaid and The Lion King, the Disney films also perpetuate popular notions about Shakespeare’s plays, especially with regard to Hamlet’s “Oedipal complex.” Unlike the elder Hamlet, Simba’s father, King Mufasa, is alive when the action begins. In one of his father-son advice sessions, he shows Simba a shadowy, menacing place beyond the borders of his kingdom, where we see threatening animals lurk. (We later discover them among Scar’s henchmen.) Simba imagines that being King means thinking, as Scar himself later says, “I’m the King and I can do whatever I want.” This youthful grandiosity gets Simba in trouble with his powerful father. When Mufasa observes Simba visiting the shadowy dangerous regions, he punishes his son strictly. These father-son dynamics leave Simba unable to resolve an implied set of internal conflicts. Simba feels stirred in an unsanctioned manner; he feels aggressive and ready to replace his father; yet he also feels small next to the grand, powerful father he loves. When Simba avoids all effective action by living with Timon in the forest, he seems immobilized, like Jones’s Hamlet, by psychological conflicts originating in guilt over his father’s death. Intimidated by his father’s greatness and physical strength, Simba in many ways wears an Oedipal “scar,” even before it is deepened by his Uncle Scar’s accusations. Disney’s Oedipal plot for Simba therefore defines not just masculine development, but also the order of culture to which concepts |
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