https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZT6Qo146Ncs
In the past few years there’s been an increasing range of cultural manifestation with the seeming purpose of replacing the masculine. Whether it’s the new Ghostbusters, Doctor Who, the slew of Marvel heroes being replaced by feminine versions of themselves, for certain this list is getting longer. Of course those who are doing this think they’re doing women a service by leveling the field, but there are strange ironies running through these political chess moves, as instead of creating powerful cultural images of the feminine, you put female bodies on masculine ideals and the question begs to be answered, are we actually dismissing the masculine or are we dismissing the feminine by doing this? Or maybe it’s both. But when it comes to replacing the masculine while preserving the feminine, the Disney movie Moana appears as one of the most successful, giving this cultural movement an almost mythical expression. We’re going to look at Moana and see how that plays out in the movie and what the consequences are. This is Jonathan Pechot, welcome to the Symbolic World. In all my movie interpretations I tell people to pay attention to the opening sequence, as usually the entire movie reveals itself there. This is no exception. The beginning of the movie is the beginning of this new feminine world. It’s a creation myth. The story of how the world began and we’re told in the beginning there was only ocean. Immediately we should be suspicious, because in the traditional Maori myth, like in so many other cultures, the world is made by the union of opposites, heaven and earth, the great father and the great mother. This traditional myth will actually continue to be there in the movie as a kind of ghost, a kind of invisible strangeness, a feeling that something isn’t quite right in how things develop. But in this story, in this creation myth, here in this movie there is only the feminine part, the earthly part, the ocean. And out of this primordial chaos emerges the mother island Te Fiti, which is an image of the, let’s call her the new agey mother earth, who by her heart has the power to create life. We’re told that soon some began to covet the heart. We’re shown a sea serpent, and then all the characters who want to steal the heart in the actual movie, the crab, the pirates, and then finally Maui. Notice first of all that all these characters are masculine. But notice mostly that Maui lifts off into the sky as an eagle to steal the heart. We’re finally shown the masculine counterpart to the mother earth character. We are shown the heavens. And this image of the masculine is not there to act as a compliment to unite with earth and create life, but is there to steal the heart of the earth and unleash a progressive destruction of all things. One of the things that Maui is known for especially is that he is the one who pulled out the islands from the sea with his mighty hook. The hook is an image of technology in its most basic sense. It is the tool by which humans can act upon, modify, and reign in the chaotic world. The fish hook is particularly this because it goes down into chaos, into the water, and catches that which is useful, that which can be eaten or integrated by human society. The hook is a tool of logos. Just think of the fishing imagery used by Christ. The idea of pulling dry land out of the sea is this ultimate capacity to pull something out of chaos and make it useful. But in the specifics of these islands it also makes them a kind of vertical height on the horizontal backdrop of the waters. Pulling an island out of the water is pulling it towards heaven. We find ourselves in a village and one of the strange ghostly feelings I mentioned appears immediately at the beginning because for some reason Moana will be the next chief. All the chiefs before her were men, but without explanation were meant to simply accept that this young girl will replace her father as the chief. He takes her to the highest place on the hill and shows her a column made by a series of stones, each placed by the preceding chiefs, and he tells her that as the next chief she will one day place her stone on the pillar. But the malaise continues because this rather masculine vertical column is actually a continuation of what Maui did in the beginning. That is by adding a stone on the pillar stone one is pulling the island even higher up towards heavens making the island higher. Of course Moana in this movie is the chosen one, chosen to take the heart of Te Fiti, so that Maui can replace the heart. On this journey Moana has a series of allies, her mother, her grandmother, the ocean itself, all these feminine type characters. And then she has a series of all male obstacles, her father who doesn’t want her to go, the pirates and the crab who want to steal the heart. And then finally there is Maui who is supposed to help her, though he is actually the cause of this whole apocalyptic situation in the first place. There is of course one major feminine obstacle, Te Kaa, the fire demon. And as we discover in the final reveal of the movie Te Kaa is actually only a victim of Maui. So let’s look at Maui for a second. Maui is supposed to help her, but he doesn’t in fact help her at all. Maui actually doesn’t do anything. Moana is the one who takes the heart back from the pirates. She is the one who gets Maui’s hook from the crab. And then she is the one who ends up putting the heart back into Te Fiti. Maui does not really help her. At best when Moana is figuring out the heart dilemma, at the end Maui acts as a distraction. But even there we finally discover that all the damage he is doing to the fire demon Te Kaa is actually just continuing the violence and abuse that he operated on Te Fiti by stealing her heart. Like I said Te Kaa appears as Maui’s victim. There is a concise image of the dynamic between Moana and Maui in the movie. An image of how the whole point of Maui in this movie is that he is supplanted by Moana. And it appears immediately when they meet. First off Maui goes into a song, which mocks the quote unquote patriarchy, because Maui insists on saying, you’re welcome, for all the civilizing he’s done. What can I say except you’re welcome? For the tides, the sun, the sky. Oblivious to the fact that no one is saying thank you. Thank you? That he is in fact the cause of the ecological disaster upon them. But then when Maui shuts Moana in a cave, she escapes by climbing up a statue of Maui and then toppling the statue in order to escape through a too obviously feminine looking opening. The toppling of Maui and the civilizing spirit he represents is the actual leitmotif of the entire movie. The most aggressive version of the male bashing in this movie is in Moana’s animal sidekick, the brainless cock. The rooster is an age old image of the masculine. He is traditionally placed on the summit of houses in the guise of a weathervane. But the rooster has also been seen as the delusional masculine. The prideful and boastful one who thinks that he is the one whose call summons the sun. And so by making a rooster the most brainless thing imaginable opens up all kinds of possibilities of jabbing below the belt. Don’t believe me? Boatsnack! Maui, did you just choke that chicken? Now as I said, there are some strange ghosts in the movies. Strange reminders of what the story should have been. For example, there is a very powerful object in the movie when Moana’s grandmother is dying. She gives Moana a locket into which to keep the heart of Te Fiti. The locket is composed of two waves, a dark and a white one against each other, and is an obvious reference to the yin yang symbol. By putting the heart, which is also the seed, the point at the center of the spiral, into the locket, this is an image of how the seed of life, the root of life, appears as the joining of heaven and earth, masculine and feminine. And so it would only have been fitting that Maui return the heart of Te Fiti as it was prophesied at the beginning. You see, the idea of placing the seed in the center of the mother so that she can bring forth life is, well, just basic birds and bees. But this is not what this movie is about. It is about the civilizing masculine who destroys life and brings about ecological disaster. And so when Moana returns home and becomes the chief of her tribe, instead of taking a stone and increasing the pillar, pulling the island further up into heaven, she takes the shell which the ocean gave her, which comes from the bottom of the world, the shell which is shown overtly pink and stylized to look rather, well, let’s say, to look feminine, and places it on top of the pillar. By so doing, stopping the pillar from getting any higher, stopping the masculine line of chiefs for good, and because it is impossible to add anything on the pillar now, it is at the same time announcing a kind of end, a kind of transition where her people will once again take to the ocean. By changing the traditional terms of a fairy tale or myth, Moana contributes to the growing confusion between the very primordial masculine and feminine categories, categories which have not only regulated societies from time immemorial, but also ensure the very existence of the human race. Moana proposes a world in which the mother, the hero, the wise one, the chief are all roles played by women, and the masculine, once toppled, will receive whatever power he has only by the gracious acquiescing of the great mother. So I hope you enjoyed my analysis of Moana. You probably noticed that there’s a lot more complexity in the video, more video layering, more timing between the text and the video of the movie, and that’s really to celebrate that I’m almost, I reached 500 I promised that I would ramp up the level of the videos that I’m doing. So it’s very exciting to seeing all of you who were supporting me, who were following me, writing comments, and so if you like what I’m doing, please consider giving a little bit a month so that we can make these even better, and so that I can be more involved in these talks. The more I’m seeing the results, the more I’m excited to do this even more than carving. And so next week I’m going to be in Vancouver with Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein for a Students for Liberty event, and so that’s really a whole exciting new door that’s opening up. And so let’s keep going.