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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) is just not “getting it”? A cultural studies theorist would answer that there are no right or wrong readings, but rather different interpretive strategies. There is no single definitive reading of any text. If a reader decodes a certain understanding of The Lion King, and can point to specific examples from the film to support his or her reading, then that reading is valid. And in order to make a persuasive defense of one’s reading of a film (instead of just saying “I liked it – I don’t know why”), one needs to work at finding supporting textual evidence – the specific ways the text uses film form to encode meaning. (Note how the oppositional reading just presented pointed out story elements, the actors involved, how the characters were drawn, the use of music, and even aspects of editing.) This process of analysis need not destroy one’s pleasure in the text. Learning to analyze film form and ideology can enrich and deepen one’s experience of any given text, and one can become a more literate, and aware, media consumer.

Pop music superstar Beyoncé starred as the voice of Nala in Disney’s CGI remake of The Lion King (2019), part of a deliberate effort to include more black talent in the cast. Photo: Tinseltown/Shutterstock.

The second Lion King film, released twenty‐five years later reveals interesting things about its era, just as the first film did; for example, its ecological message seems even stronger in the current era of climate change awareness. The new Lion King also demonstrates the active hegemonic negotiation of some of the first film’s ideological messages. It tries to address some of the criticisms of the first film vis‐à‐vis race by hiring far more African American actors and singers to voice the lead roles (including Donald Glover and Beyoncé). The familiar score is still by Elton John and Tim Rice, but Disney brought in Pharrell Williams to produce some of it. The female characters do more in this remake. Beyoncé’s Nala has a new song all to herself. Simba’s mother Sarabi (Alfre Woodard) chases away hyenas (off screen) near the start of the film, and she and the female members of the pride fight ferociously to drive off the hyenas at the end. The leader of the hyenas (Shenzi) in the new version is also a much stronger female character. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new film is the way its photo‐realistic CGI animation (what some people mistakenly refer to as “live action”) tones down the stereotypes present in the first version. Scar (Chiweitel Ejiofor) no longer has swishy gay connotations; in fact, he wants to marry Simba’s mother. There is no longer a suggestion of a Nazi rally in his big number, “Be Prepared.” Similarly, other characters who also had vaguely stereotypical behaviors in the first film, are herein treated with more reverence (Rafiki) and menace (the hyenas). Still, even with these “corrections” to characters some audiences and critics found stereotypical, the new film maintains the hegemony of patriarchal rule, by retelling the central story of a father passing his power down to his son. This is often what happens with remakes in Hollywood; instead of telling new stories (as Disney did in films like Frozen [2013] and Moana [2016]), remakes frequently make concessions to some aspects of diversity even as they also retain central ideological messages from the original film, an excellent example of hegemonic negotiation.

This book hopes to provide its readers with the tools and encouragement to become active decoders – to help students develop the skills needed to examine media texts for their social, cultural, and ideological assumptions. Throughout this book, specific films will be decoded from divergent spectator positions, pointing out how the context of social and cultural history can and does influence different reading protocols. Furthermore, one will see that judging textual images as merely “positive” or “negative” vastly oversimplifies the many complex ways that cultural texts can be and are understood in relation to the “real world.” This textbook itself is part of American culture, and thus meshes in its own way with the dominant and resistant ideologies within which it was forged. Its ultimate aim is not to raise its readers somehow out of ideology (an impossible task), but to make its readers aware of the ideological assumptions that constantly circulate through American culture, and especially through its films.