As I was listening to Dr. Bezio’s tenth podcast, I kept thinking about how she discussed the idea of “storytelling” as determining “high” versus “low” culture. It made me think about all the stories I heard that later turned out to be false or misleading. For example, the Disney movie Pocahontas: marketed as a kids movie, this film was about the unlikely bond between a Native American woman and a colonizer with a heart of gold. It showed that everyone can be good and love always wins, right? Wrong. Absolutely, totally, completely wrong. Although they used the same historical names (big no-no, Disney) there was no such thing as a happy bond of love between the colonizer John Smith and the Indigenous woman Pocahontas. This movie gives such a misleading image about colonizers and the first English people that arrived in America; it tries to “repaint” the image of white people to make it seem like they were much better than they actually were, and it tried to “other” Native Americans.
The point of all this is to say that, depending on who is making the stories and telling the stories, things start to get a bit tangled up, and this leads to a lot of problems later in life that include the “isms” (racism, sexism, classism, etc). In Disney’s Pocahontas’ case, it misleads children at an impressionable age that colonizers weren’t all so bad and the aggression against them on behalf of the Native Americans wasn’t entirely founded. It certainly misled me. I think Disney in particular has a bad track record of creating these romanticized versions of historical events, Pocahontas being one of the worst offenders. Davey Crocket is another one of Disney’s romanticized “wild western” cowboys out on the trail to defeat the native “savages.” In my high school history class, we did a whole unit on how these popular Davey Crocket episodes lead to extreme prejudice and dislike for the Native population because of the portrayal of Native tribes in the episodes as ruthless murderers. Again, this is no case reality or truth, but the fact that it became formatted in this “storytelling” narrative built a stereotype in itself.
Using the Disney movie Pocahontas as your example to put into perspective the podcast from this week is a really interesting and smart take on the topic of storytelling and a story being manipulated and creating a misleading image. It seems that in a lot of disney movies (especially those in the past), they have included many stereotypes, even when trying to be more racially diverse. For example, when introducing one of their first colored princesses Jasmine in the movie Aladdin, there was a lot of discussion about how they steryotyped the looks and villianized the characters that were meant to look arab. This is just one example of the many disney movies that have been criticized due to steryotyping characters.
Movies and media, in general, tend to romanticize things because the narrative will be easier to sell to audiences. Disney has a history of using old stories and twisting them either by displaying the story in a eurocentric view or romanticizing the story. For example, Cinderella was originally about a woman who was forcibly married to a king.
I think that Disney movies and other media marketed to children are some of the most interesting and disturbing to look at through this lens because children absorb what is put in front of them so easily. When they are given a movie like Pocahontas or other racially motivated film, they will adopt those viewpoints and take them into adulthood leading to potentially racist beliefs.