The Battle To Preserve Our Folklore

Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony is not without merits. His analysis strived to explain how the traditional bourgeoisie, anthropologically from the right, maintains its power in capitalist societies by propagating its values and norms via cultural institutions.

However, following the late ’60s civil rights movements and the political shift from the social (class struggle) to the societal (race, gender, sexuality, etc), the intellectual bourgeoisie, anthropologically from the left, gained control of the arts, cinema, literature, schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, radio, television.

The sub-cultural media: films, series, music, etc., turned out to be the perfect vessels for the new left to propagate its values and norms. The progressive dogma was not imposed on the masses with force and brutality but by means of individual gratification (narcissism of social media), lust (sexual revolution), and specifically entertainment.

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The media promulgated a certain standard of happiness and a model of freedom, mocking traditional values and morals deemed antiquated and reactionary. As such, the historic imaginary experiences needed to be altered to correspond with the cultural elite orthodoxy.

And so, for instance, in order to dismantle the so-called white supremacy in Western Societies and celebrate diversity, multinational entertainment companies such as Disney took on the habit to cast non-white actors to portray characters describes in the original oeuvres as Caucasian.

As an illustration, in the 2023 live-action movie The Little Mermaid, the black actress Halle Bailey was chosen to play Ariel the mermaid and in 2024, Rachel Zegler, an actress and singer of Colombian descent, will interpret Snow White in the eponymous motion picture.

While for some, those examples of race-swapped were celebrated as Disney’s pledge to represent diversity through the characters in its films, others took them as an insult to the original stories from Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm as well as European culture.

However, critics forgot that, already, under the guise of democratization of the culture and the abandonment of the legitimate culture (perceived as oppressive), the progressive left had paved the way for the implementation of mass culture as a substitution. 

In short, even before rewriting the Little Mermaid or Snow White through the lens of the woke ideology, Disney had rewritten those tales through the lens of mass culture i.e. uniformed and standardized products formatted by private companies. 

Nowadays, most of us know The Little Mermaid and Snow White by Disney rather than the original oeuvres by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Disney has successfully enforced its vision of the stories to the world by annihilating the initial intent of the authors. Similarly, only a few people are truly familiar with the original tales of Hercules, Cinderella, Mulan, or Aladdin and their cultural anchorages.

Our representations have been compromised by capitalist multinational companies. Our imagination has been merchandised and our mental conceptualization shattered by this standardization and homogenization imposed by the “Disneyfication of the world”.

In addition, entertainment businesses abandoned their historic audience – an old generation, mostly white middle class, nostalgic of their childhood and irritated not to recognize their beloved characters.  They strived to appeal to the emotions of their new “customers”, an extra-European population who celebrate the inclusion of diverse actors like a triumph, an emancipation from the reactionary past, almost a revenge against the perceived white supremacy in western societies.

Ironically, on one side, the historic audience wants Disney to produce cultural merchandise that conforms to their vision of the world (which was carved by Disney). On the other side, the new customers, claiming to come from people oppressed by the Western colonial empire heritage, allow a private business to impose on them a conception of the world, to accelerate their integration into a commercial empire, an omnipresent cultural empire.

Multinational entertainment companies swallow all particularisms only to regurgitate them into uniform products exportable everywhere around the world, ready to be consumed, along with their batch of branded merchandising. 

Corporations such as Disney colonize our imagination. Their alleged promise of diversity is an illusion of variety, a mere pillage of wide-ranging societal patrimonies – the Pacific with Maona, China with Mulan, France with the hunchback of Notre Dame, America with Pocahontas- turned into standardized products with as per the examples of the movies, the same stories, the same narrative structure, the same direction. The homogenization of the production means uniformity rather than cultural variety. It is the universal normalization of the experience, in other words, the opposite of diversity.

Furthermore, Disney, specifically, was accused in several instances of attempting to profit from the folklore and customs of human communities around the world. In 2003, the company's request to trademark the Swahili expression “Hakuna Matata” (no worries) was approved for registration. In 2013, the enterprise sought to copyright the “Day of the Dead”, a traditional Mexican holiday. In addition, the movie The Lion King is allegedly a plagiarism of “Kimba the White Lion” a Japanese anime series.

Corporations such as Disney embody the abandonment of our folk culture, the popular culture, understood as originating from the base, the people, in benefit of a pop culture originating from above e.g. the capitalist multinational companies.

The pledge of alliance to a new generation of consumers, the “diverse” target market, is only a gimmick permitting such businesses to remain relevant, attempting to profit, and above all to hide the mediocrity inherent to their cultural products. 

Indeed, the contentious casting of non-white actors to play Caucasian characters allows deflection of constructive criticisms of the movies and defamed detractors with the accusation of racism (or sexism, homophobia, etc). While historically those who raised concerns against the industrialization of the culture were dubbed elitists, this demonization enables Disney to produce forgettable films under the guise of multiculturalism, inclusion, and democratization.

By defending Disney’s idea of diversity, the progressive left is confirming the death of true cultural diversity on the altar of mass culture, divertissement, and spectacle. Instead of promoting tales and stories from other cultures, oeuvres written, played, and directed with peculiar societal references such as Bollywood or the Hong Kong cinema industry, the unconditional adhesion to the Disneyfication of the world has substantiated our submission to uniform productions and the merchandising of our traditions.

Mass culture prefabricated by multinationals has supplanted historic cultures born from regional and national particularisms, and that is why we should not demand that Disney cast white or black actors but battle to preserve our folklore endangered by the neo-capitalism standardization.