Western cinema’s core prioritisation of profitability in mainstream, commercial cinema takes precedence over any moral commitment. It works hard to create a false-consciousness of reality that prevents us from grasping the reality of our existence and fighting back, as under monopoly all mass culture is identical (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1). In Western cinema, the widespread and dangerous dominant ideology of white supremacy is still prevalent because culture monopolies are weak and dependent, and, as Adorno and Horkheimer state, they ‘can’t afford to neglect the appeasement of the real holders of power’ (2). This essay will explore how cinema encodes dominant ideologies, particularly large conglomerate businesses like Disney in The Princess and the Frog and how it mystifies the racial prejudices people of colour face through cartoon animation.
IdeoloIdeology, mostly derived from Marxist theory, supports the powerful at the cost of the weak, or the working class. There’s a notion that in cinema, the screen is blocking viewers from recognising the real conditions of existence, misleading and providing false-consciousness rather than anything that is real. As Comolli and Narboni claim, cinema reproduces reality but ‘reality’ is nothing but an expression of the prevailing ideology (689). There is very little subversion of asserting people of colour into established roles usually contracted to white actors, as large media companies stick to their ‘safe bet’ of done-before films that curate positive responses from audiences and return on the capital invested in the process (Ash, 86)
This often leads to the White Saviour format prevailing because it allows audiences to continue to believe the warped idea that white supremacy is a true ideal. There is a blissful ignorance to this depicted concept as the popular theme of ‘colour blindness’ creates a universalisation of cultures rather than recognising the systemic discrimination of privilege.
In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana is reliant on her white friend Charlotte to break the curse of her anthropomorphic form. Ringle claims the white saviour trope is an attempt to ‘assuage guilt’ from the original sin of slavery and ‘repay’ the characters ancestral debts (272), yet it remains a trope that innately shows cultural arrogance and racially offensive undertones, while presenting itself as non-racist as a way to take race off of the table, to ignore the negligence people of colour consistently face.
The interpellation of dominant, white-washed, Westernised ideologies isn’t simply imposed on ourselves, it is our spontaneous relationship to our social world. In Vernā Myers TedTalk, it was proven that 80% of white people chose a white face as ‘more trustworthy’ over a black face, and 50% of Black people also chose the white face, because white characters in cinema are nearly always triumphant heroes, therefore the ideology that they are dependable is further embedded into our beliefs.
The objective social tendency is to recognise film as a system that unifies ideology as a whole and grants the public their wishes to view a ‘real’ depiction of life that is a form of escapism. Yet the ostensibly pretense belief that cinema is a business that produces art, with a failure to recognise that it serves as an ideological function, only allows the dominant ideologies’ power to grow (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1) because the more time a person spends in front of a screen, the more influential the medium becomes, cultivating perspectives that are universally capitalist.
The cultural industries represent an imaginary version of real conditions and we are interpellated as subjects by them. Politics and religion formed an inseparable whole where God served as a master concept, uniting the cognitive, aesthetic and ethical dimensions of society (Steger, 21-2), but these beliefs have been twisted to fit the beliefs of those in power. There is an intimate relationship between ideology, socio-economic practice and Disney. Disney attempts to represent Tiana as an empowered, grounded and ‘down-to-earth’ African-American woman, but still relies heavily on reproductions of racial ideologies. The princess spends an inordinate amount of time in her anthropomorphic form maintaining the stereotypical image of Black women as invisible. Siegel claims mainstream culture often deems women of colour, particularly African-American women, as ‘nasty animals in heat’ (34), failing miserably to achieve racial parity and continues to prolong the issue of intersectionality that Black women face.
Black women are subordinated, not just in cinema. Yet films like The Princess and the Frog, continue to dismiss the prejudices Black women face and ultimately adds to the issue. Furthermore, Disney was willing to endow a Black woman with power, yet her aspirations of owning a restaurant are supposed to be accepted by viewers as “sufficiently impressive for a black character” within the existing framework of white male hegemony (Dundes and Streiff, 8). Tiana displays a willingness to settle for modest aspirations, only being driven to please her deceased father, reviving the dominant ideology that fathers have a ruling over what the family does. There’s a clear electral undercurrent of the capitalist ideology that ‘dreams only come true if you work hard’. This teaches children that they have to become a hard-working member of society for them to succeed, reflecting Marx’s view that society is reliant on its economic base surviving. Tiana’s divergent narrative further promotes the idea that Black women are inferior to white women, as it suggests that protagonists of colour are not entitled to a life of leisure and privilege that white Disney princesses enjoy. Neither Tiana or Mulan finish their narratives living in a castle for their ‘happy ever after’, yet it’s given a palatable front due to its lip-service to feminist ideology as they reject relying on a man to provide for them.
Meaning and understanding develops out of interactions between individuals and those around them. Behaviour modifies and changes due to reactions from others, causing us to learn and train to fit into the bigger picture. Comolli and Narboni affirm that every film is part of the economic system and therefore “cinema and art are branches of ideology” (688).
Disney’s idealized worlds rest largely on the artifice of animation, with ‘good’ characters illustrated with European features (Artz,3), yet the droll, ‘cutesy’ innocence connected with cartoon characters shadows the damaging Westernisation of particular characters.
In The Princess and the Frog, each main character of colour has a detrimental portrayal and one example of harmful representation would be Mama Odie’s character, a Voodoo witch who doesn’t conform to the heteronormative lifestyle encouraged by dominant ideologies. She is represented as a crazy, old lady, who is isolated from society, reflecting how those who don’t conform to heternormative ideologies are often shunned from those within mainstream culture. Because it’s jarring against dominant beliefs already ingrained within us, audiences continue to be mystified by her way of thinking.
When facts or beliefs that don’t fit in with the already-available frames of thinking are presented, people have difficulty accepting them as we are repeatedly, from birth, called upon to become subjects into the laws of our given social reality. Disney follows the bourgeois realist box of cinema ‘tricks’, as it produces the idea of having ‘blind faith in life’ (Comolli and Narboni, 690), but only when the faith is aligned with dominant ideology.
Disney animation entertains and instructs because it offers a cinematic escape from reality, yet the appropriation of cultural codes reflects Disney’s racist past and the truth that this still haunts their current movies (Alnic).
As aforementioned, Tiana spends two-thirds of the film in an anthropomorphic form, but this is not the only Disney film where the black protagonist transforms into an animal. In the 2020 film, Soul, which came out after the racially motivated Black Lives Matter protests, the black protagonist transforms into a soul only to then turn into a cat.
This non-human representation allows for the majority of the character’s development to be brushed over, suggesting it’s unimportant and that people of colour do not develop to fit in within the hierarchical structure that white society has developed.
Additionally, these two films are not the only Disney films to anthropomorphise their non-white characters curating a gap in their audience market, as many children will not see themselves represented. This lack of representation is not a new issue, and has remained a prevalent controversy throughout cinema.
Netflix’s show Bridgerton, a show that challenged taboo issues, such as female masturbation, initially drew rave reviews for their handling of ‘colour-blind’ casting, but it quickly became controversial due to their clumsy handling of race. The majority of the speaking roles belong to the white actors (Romano), and consciously or not, almost all of the black characters have negative attributes and beliefs which places them at odds with the white characters.
Furthermore, the show reinscribed the white saviour narrative by the kings ‘enlightenment’ to marry a Black woman to reduce national racism and failed to touch upon material issues of racial injustice. It could be suggested that this is a form of tokenism, as tokenism is one way by which commercial cinema profits from the cosmetics of inclusion, whilst doing very little to address racial injustice in a meaningful or substantive way.
Those in charge have asymmetrical power – a power imbalance – and due to the loss of support of ‘objectively established religion’ and the dissolution of pre-capitalism, a cultural chaos has ensued, with racism becoming mechanised and robotised (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1), despite Western art being indebted to and transformed by minority countries. This is shown in the portrayal of the Mardi Gras parade, ‘Big Daddy’ LaBouff represents the social elite, a white man, standing proxy for those who rode in exclusive parades dating back to antebellum days, with the subtle glamorization of being a slave owner being present (Gregory). As Howard Winant clarifies, “whiteness is an over-determined political and cultural identity to do with socioeconomic status”. It is embedded into a highly articulated social structure and a system of significations.
The hierarchical system relying on binaries that essentialises and allows for discrimination to continue existing, remains in power because it claims to be an empirical notion of truth. However, meaning always seems ‘fixed’ and ‘evident’, but what is said doesn’t exist until further interpretations are placed upon it (9). Ideology is something that calls upon you to behave a certain way, to be a subject made by ideology.
Individuality is never something that is self-present to us, we are not self-sufficient, free, autonomous individuals. This is reflected in the manifold reminders of Tiana’s differentiality to the other white princesses as she is portrayed as only able to get ahead through hard work that is physical labour, advice most applicably given to viewers with less access to education (Dundes and Streiff, 8-9). The acquiescent attitude Tiana has to ‘slaving-away’ at work to gain enough money for her restaurant highlights the dominant ideology that black people are expected to live by the credo expressed repeatedly: “The only way to get what you want in this world is through hard work”.
This symbolises how the way in which we see the world is conditioned by the differences in cultures and depicts the idea that myths curated into dominant ideologies abolish the complexity of human acts, giving them the simplicity of essences.
Sources:
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Bridgerton. Directed by Julie Anne Robinson, Netflix, 2020.
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Soul. Directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers, Disney, 2020.
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The Princess and the Frog. Directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, Disney, 2009.