Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 31

Radsm in Disney's

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melons, and other unidentifiable juicy fruits. Later, the monkeys
deliver their crowning insult: they lead Baloo, who is looking
upward and left and following the off-screen Mowgli, to the edge of a
cliff, trip him, and howl as the camera pans downward depicting
Baloo’s fall to yet an even lower, more powerless position in the
frame.
Thus Disney repeatedly places the monkeys in a
cinematically superior position as antagonists and encourages the
audience to consider them a dangerous, lawless, and undesirable
group-just as African-Americans are often stereotyped.
Notwithstanding their violent portrayal, one wonders
throughout Disney's version just what makes King Louie and the
monkeys seem so repugnant to Baloo and Bagheera and, by extension,
to viewers. It cannot merely be their apparent threat to Mowgli’s
safety, for, despite their manhandling of Mowgli, King Louie and the
monkeys never actually threaten to kill him. In contrast, both Kaa
(who refers to Mowgli as a "delicious man-cub") and Shere Khan
(who physically assaults him) do threaten to kill him, yet neither
thereby merits the same pariah-status as the monkeys—on the
contrary, the physical powers of Shere Khan and Kaa serve mainly
to inspire respect in Baloo and Bagheera. In addition, the threat of
violence associated with King Louie and the monkeys eventually
dissipates; they only appear ominous at the outset, when Bagheera
darkly insinuates, "Oh, 1 hate to think of what will happen to
[Mowgli] when he meets that king of theirs." However, in the
ensuing scene that threat is ironically deflated by the actual comedic
depiction of King Louie and the monkeys, who, in bumbling slapstick
style, manage to receive far worse than they give. Finally, although
King Louie's attempt to obtain the secret of fire from Mowgli possibly
suggests broader sinister intentions, there is never really any danger
of his fulfilling them, since Mowgli does not know the secret, as he
himself informs King Louie. The threat of violence alone, then,
simply cannot account for the repugnance that King Louie and the
monkeys inspire in the others. It is as if there were rather some deep
irrational taint associated with "monkeyness." But it is a taint that
remains largely unexplained, a premise that to a certain extent the
film simply begs.
Such a taint is especially puzzling, for of all the denizens of the
jungle. King Louie and the monkeys seem closest to Baloo in spirit.
Certainly, they do not share the existential boredom of the vultures.