Amph The Disney/Pixar Movies Thread (for anything non-Marvel/SW)

This is the main problem I'm having with this conversation. A non-British person telling a British person they can't differentiate British mannerisms from gay mannerisms. A non-gay man telling a bunch of (presumably) gay men they can't differentiate gay subtext from cultural subtext.

If you didn't see Scar's sexuality before, that's fine! But it was there the whole time.

 

But you said Timon wasn't gay and Chewgumma said he definitely was. You can't even agree on that, and yet somehow there is a definitive answer on Scar? Okay then.

I think telling people that something YOU saw yourself in is definitive just because YOU like it that way is a bit ridiculous.

 

I'm saying Timon isn't queer-coded. That doesn't mean there isn't queer subtext there.

Come on.

 

But if it's so definitive, then it's coded. Timon and Pumbaa are a gay couple who raised Simba. That's queer-coding. If it isn't, what is? If it's not so definitive, then not even two of you with these theories can agree on something.

I just don't see how this is any different than, say, shipping slash. You can read whatever you want onto fictional characters, especially when it makes you connect with them better. That's fine. But saying this definitively makes them ACTUALLY that thing for every viewer is wrong.

 

Timon and Pumbaa don't really act like domestic partners, no. They act like jobless slacker best friends. There's subtext to be made, but no coding as far as I can see, outside of Timon's really gay hula dance (so yes, Timon is queer-coded!).

Like I said, though. Scar is gay. It's ok that you didn't see it before, but it was deliberately imprinted onto the film, just as much as Ursula was designed to be Divine. Like Ramza said, it's not just a Disney thing. Gay villains are a staple of Western media for the whole twentieth century. Check out the Celluloid Closet if you ever want to read / watch more about it.

 

Ok then, I guess opinions and viewpoints no longer matter. Thanks.

 

And this is where I disagree with bacon, and @Bacon164 can argue with me too. How many children were adopted by same sex couples in the early 90's? And how many best friends adopt children? And raise them into healthy adults? There is a same sex parenting message there.

 

1994 is the year Disney as a company started giving benefits to same sex partners of its employees. So yes, gay families and adoptions were definitely a thing and a thing Disney was familiar with.

 

I do actually agree that there isn't a definitive answer, but the arguments against the gay interpretation seem to be

1. This was not intended (Reasonable, but I personally find it hard to believe it was anything other than deliberate), and
2. Scar has slept with women (He hasn't, he's a cartoon lion. Even if he had this is a bad counterargument! This is bad! Please don't do this.)

As internet arguments tend to do, there's also been loss of the space between queer coding and outright queerness. I think "Scar is gay" is acceptable shorthand, but it's silly to speculate about the off-page sex lives of fictional characters (with the exception of Sherlock Holmes, solely because the Great Game is fun). I wouldn't seriously contend "Scar is gay" in much the same way I wouldn't seriously contend "Dumbledore is gay." But the irony is there's a hell of a lot more evidence for the former, meanwhile the latter is intended. Allegedly.

 

I respect opinions that come from a place of curiosity. I’ve felt throughout this whole conversation that you are trying to shut my point of view down. That’s why I’ve responded in kind. That’s probably wrong of me, so I apologize if I’ve made you feel that way.

You’re right that Scar was adapted from a character in Hamlet (who I’m not sure that we know to be straight, actually). You are also correct that he presided over a herd of lionesses. Neither pieces are evidence that he fits in with heteronormative society. In fact, the film repeatedly demonstrates that he in fact does not.

 

I think where you're misinterpreting me is that I tend to be more of the "author's intent" school of thought when it comes to the interpretation of art than a "what the viewer perceives." I get that several of you are arguing that it was coded in by the film's authors. I tend to want to actually hear that from the author's mouth, though. Yes, sometimes the authors suck and their works can exceed what they intended. But usually, I just personally like to respect the author's intentions as much as possible. And since I've never heard them say Scar is supposed to be gay, I just don't see it that way. Sorry.

 

Hypothetically, if the author lies does the essential meaning and valid interpretation of a piece change to conform to the lie? That seems to be a necessary consequence of that line of thought. Hence I have some reservations.

Edit: Authorial intent is going to be factored into an assessment regardless of whether or not we think it should be (We're never going to go back to a pre-"Dumbledore is gay" world, for example, even if the textual evidence isn't there to back it up), but I don't think there's anything fundamental enough "at the bottom" of a work to make the stated intent of the author the only thing we take away from it. Not to mention the author is going to bring along some cultural baggage they aren't even aware of, the audience imparts its own baggage, history brings along a heaping helping of baggage, oh the baggage. Just mountains of it. Like an airport on Christmas Eve. "We live in a society" as the meme goes.

 

Why the hell would the author lie? If the author is a jackass, the art probably isn't worth watching or reading anyway

 

StarWars.jpg.

 

Not disagreeing with any bodies personal reading of Disney characters but to me personally so did I never read Scar, nor Timon and Pumba as queer.

EDIT: if anybody who was queer did see something positive in Timon and Pumba good for them. They are good characters (even if Timon has his problem )

Surprisingly many good creators are awful humans.

 

Well that's true. I just mean, if they deliberately lie about their work, they have a particularly weird condition

 

Death threats? Political inconveniences of the times? They didn't actually lie but there are inaccurate historical records? They feel like it? Trolling IRL? J. K. Rowling trying to score brownie points?

 

Well all those things are what you take into account when you study a work. Just as you are an expert at Math, I'm an expert at studying works of literature and film. So I always try to do those things. And of course you try to take all those things into account.

But I mean, Allers and Minkoff are both still alive, in a time where it would be politically fine to talk about this. And I'm not going to assume they're just liars keeping a secret for no reason.

I've sat with Ron and Jon and heard them tell me that Ursula was based on Divine. That's how I know she was. Easy enough. Allers and Minkoff could tell me the same about Scar being gay and I would believe it, but they haven't said such a thing. Maybe someone should ask them?

 

I'm not sure I'd say Scar is gay, but he's definitely another in a long line of fictional villains who are queer-coded. I wouldn't be surprised if it never even crossed the minds of those involved, honestly. I may not be giving some people enough credit, but I feel it's likely they just wanted to make him off-putting, creepy and uncomfortable to viewers, and wound up on the proud Hayes Code tradition of villains that don't fit a certain gender role as shorthand. Not to say it's good shorthand.

 

well (and i'm not saying this is definitely the case) one reason allers and minkoff might have to lie is that they have since realized that the tradition of queer-coding villains perpetuates harmful stereotypes, and doing so with scar isn't helpful or positive representation, but in fact the opposite.

 

So why does bacon look up to him?

 

Because for nearly the entirety of the modern history of mainstream media that was the queer representation we got? Any water in a desert.

 

There was a deleted scene in the movie, but made it to the play, where Scar tries to seduce Nala into being his Queen.

 

I don’t look up to him, but I do see identifiable traits that I relate to. Traits that were, again, deliberately inserted into the film, primarily to create an alien, antagonistic “other” that mainstream audiences could rally against. I think @Joystick Chevron said it most succinctly. It’s not that he is literally gay, but is given gay traits, I.e. queer-coded. Which results in a valid interpretation that he’s literally a homosexual.

@solojones This is one nugget that the Celluloid Closet covers. I really think you’d find the movie interesting, given your interest in general cinematic history.

@Ramza, you can take this one.

 

So I think there are a few problems with trying to argue from canon on this whole situation, which I think is what you're trying to do here, though not out of any malicious intent on your part.

1. Because this sequence was removed from the film (apparently because it was "too creepy" going off some quotes on Wikipedia and, yeah, probably) most viewers aren't engaging with it so it's not going to affect their interpretation. This sounds trite, but we're on a Star Wars message board and we're all aware of just how canon those RotS deleted scenes wound up being. So even from the point of view where we take the executive decisions on the text as law this does nothing for us.
2. Assuming we take the sequence into consideration anyway, it's debatable that this has any effect on Scar's queer coding. As a couple of us have already argued, there's actually something of a precedent of queer coded characters having gestures towards heterosexuality within a text to take some of the "edge" off. It's also perfectly conceivable that a queer individual within a heteronormative monarchical society would perform heterosexuality for the purposes of securing their claim to throne (something Scar is definitely into). As I've said, at some point we're arguing about the fiddly details of the non-existent sex lives of fictional characters, so this is all kind of goofy, but queer coding isn't dependent on sex lives.
3. Even if we allow Scar to have an impossible off-the-page life, and even if he slept with women in this fantasy scenario, we still could not rule out the possibility of his queerness, because plenty of queer men, some gay, some bisexual, some identifying in other ways, have slept with women. I put this third but frankly it gets my goat the most in these discussions. Like, does my sexuality magically change depending on the gender of my partner and have nothing to do with me? Because that is wild, and quite the development, frankly. Obviously Scar doesn't have an interior life so that's not 1-1 in the slightest. But the implications here suck, folks, and it sucks all the more because I know y'all are better than that.