Orientalism Through the Lens of Disney’s “Aladdin”, Essay Example

Disney’s 1992 animated feature Aladdin was among the most popular films of the year, grossing hundreds of millions of dollars for the studio and garnering millions of fans. The film is set in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Agrabah, and is replete with exaggerated caricatures and stereotypes of the people and places of the region. The opening lines of the song “Arabian Nights” set the tone for the film; the singer is, in fact, describing his own home as a “faraway place” that is “barbaric.” Such commentary may not seem out of place to many of the young children –or their parents- in the West, for whom the film was primarily created, but it engendered significant controversy in some quarters for its portrayal of Middle Eastern stereotypes. The original lyric of “Arabian Nights” included the line “they’ll cut off your ear if they don’t like your face;” this line was changed to “it’sflat and immense and the heat is intense” after concerns were raised by groups such as the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC)[1]. Aladdin is ostensibly a story about the relationship between a young man and young woman in a Middle Eastern country, though it offers little genuine insight into any specific or general Middle Eastern society. Instead, Aladdin serves to perpetuate the myths, stereotypes, and prejudices that, taken as a whole, comprise what authors, researchers and historians such as Edward Said have defined as “Orientalism.”

While the term “Orientalism” has been used in a variety of ways, it has largely been contextualized in recent decades as a means of describing a set of phenomena related to the way Western societies and cultures have constructed an idealized vision of the Middle East and Asia. This contemporary understanding of Orientalism was primarily codified through the work of academic and author Edward Said in his book “Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient” and in subsequent works on the subject. This construction of Orientalism is rooted in Western colonialism, and has as its underlying purpose the function of creating an exotic, mysterious, and ultimately inferior “other” that both explains and justifies the acts and repercussions of colonialism. As Said explains, “the Orient –unlike the West- doesn’t develop; it stays the same…it’s a creation of an ‘ideal Other’ for Europe.”[2] As long as the nations of Europe (and later, the United States) could contextualize the Orient in such a manner, then the subjugation of its land and peoples could be rationalized and even justified.

As Said notes in his book, the term “the Orient” can be and has been used to describe a region of the world spanning the Middle East and Asia; the author narrows his scope by focusing primarily on the Middle East from a geographical standpoint, and the relationship between the ideological, political, social, and cultural underpinnings of the West and the Arab world. Said does not entirely (or even largely) discount the net that Orientalism casts across other parts of the world, such as India and (as it was then known) Persia; in the end, the scope of Orientalism as framed in Said’s book ranges from the Near East to the Middle East and beyond as needed for the purposes of his discussions. What arises from this framing of the Orient, then, is an understanding of the ways in which the real and significant differences between and among these different nations and regions are ignored by the West, to be replaced by the idealized and constructed versions. Even when attempting to offer a serious academic deconstruction of Orientalism, Said is faced with the challenge of writing about an incredibly diverse set of people and places; those for whom there is little benefit to humanizing the Other would have no impetus for accepting a similar challenge.

In Said’s discussion of Orientalism, he noted how the “internal consistency” of the messages being transmitted to the West about the Orient[3]. From written works that were presented as ostensibly scholarly examinations of Oriental nations to paintings and literary creations, many of the same devices were copied and repeated, presenting to the West this unified vision of the Orient as a region filled with sand, camels, sheiks, and harems.  Despite the cultural and social diversity between countries in different parts of the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, and other parts of the world loosely aggregated as the Orient, it was and still is common for the Western world to view these different areas as being more similar than they are different.

The underlying impetus for Orientalism was the imbalance of technological and military power between the West and the countries in the Orient. As University of Massachusetts professor Sut Jhally notes, the nations of Europe were able to exert a measure of control and dominance in the Orient that was not, and could not be reciprocated[4]. Jhally cites the example of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, and his subsequent commands that information about Egypt and its people be recorded, copied, and stored on as great a scale as possible; this effort was not undertaken for the Egyptians, but for the Europeans[5]. As Jhally points out, researchers and adventurers from Egypt could not similarly examine and catalog the nations of Europe for the edification or entertainment of the people of Egypt. The very process of undertaking such an effort was an expression of dominance on the part of Napoleon over the nation of Egypt. This underlying process of domination was echoed in all the ways that the West filtered images and ideas about the Orient through its own lens, and in so doing constructed a world that could be understood as not just inherently different, but inherently inferior, and therefore in need of saving from itself by the West.

The Disney film Aladdin, and its subsequent sequels The Return of Jafar and Aladdin and the King of Thieves, serve both as contemporary and historical examples of Orientalism. A brief overview of the history of the Aladdin story provides a window into the very essence of Orientalism. For modern audiences, the story of Aladdin is known for being part of a larger cycle of stories alternately titled “One Thousand and One Nights” or “Arabian Nights.” The precise lineage of these stories is murky; historians believe they may be compiled from folk tales from India, Persia, and the Arab world. For those with even a passing familiarity with the story cycle, they were a series of tales a bride told to her husband on successive nights to keep his interest and avoid being executed as he had done to his previous wives. Among the most famous of the stories to contemporary audiences is that of Aladdin, who wielded the wishes granted to him by a genie to win his bride.

The irony of this story’s popularity is that it was not originally a part of the larger collection of stories, but was instead added to them when Arabic manuscripts of the stories were translated and published by Antoine Galland. While there is some evidence that the tale of Aladdin was indeed a genuine Arabic folk tale, it does not appear in print prior to Galland’s translation and some historians believe he may have invented the tale himself[6]. Regardless of the tale’s true origin, there is no question that Galland was responsible for bringing it to the attention of Western audiences, and the popularity of the story –and Galland’s translation of the other stories in the cycle- helped shape public perceptions of the Orient and set the tone for centuries of subsequent Orientalism.

The Aladdin films serve to amplify and reinforce historical notions of Orientalism, and in so doing they continue to demonstrate how Orientalism reflects Western societies more than it does those societies it ostensibly reveals. On the surface, the first Aladdin film presumably offers insight into the nature of love and romantic desire in an Oriental society (in this case, the fictional world of Agrabah). The setting for Aladdin is a hodgepodge of stereotypes and caricatures that have been handed down over centuries of Orientalism. While the country of Agrabah is clearly presented as being set in the Arab world, the manner of dress, the architecture, and the physical appearances of the characters are culled from a broad and generalized set of Orientalist tropes. The first character audiences see on screen is a camel-riding merchant whose sole interest is in swindling a potential customer. Other characters are similarly exaggerated; most have large noses, dark skin, and thick –if nonspecific- accents. The world of Agrabah is an inherently exotic, dangerous, and different place.

It is in the midst of these tropes and stereotypes that the central character of Aladdin first appears, and the differences between him and the rest of the characters could not be starker. While the rest of the cast has skin that is a uniform shade of deep brown, Aladdin is, by contrast, very light-skinned. He does not share the exaggerated, protruding noses or chins of the antagonists; instead he has a smaller, angular nose and narrow chin. Where the other men in Agrabah all share steep, thick eyebrows set over slanted, narrow eyes, Aladdin has wide, clear, and ultimately unthreatening eyes. Finally, when Aladdin opens his mouth to speak or sing, he does so in a bright, clear, and very westernized voice. Were it not for his thick head of black hair, Aladdin would look (and sound) like a slightly-tanned American dropped into the center of this exotic and dangerous world.

The differences between Aladdin and the other residents of Agrabah are mirrored by the appearance of Princess Jasmine; like Aladdin, Jasmine has light skin, small, delicate features, and no discernible Middle Eastern accent. If anything, Jasmine sounds far more like a blonde, blue-eyed American girl than she does an Arabic girl –a fact that is hardly surprising considering that the character is voiced by a blonde, blue-eyed actress[7]. While it could be argued that the characterizations were shaped this way so that the film’s target audience of American children could relate to them, such an argument fails to explain why no one else in the film shares their appearance or their accents. Instead, by Westernizing the film’s positive characters, while “Orientalizing” the rest of them, simply reinforces the notion that the Other is, by its nature, a mysterious and dangerous.

The plot of Aladdin hews fairly closely to the plot points of the original folktale, though it places Jasmine in a more central role than might be common for the typically prince-meets-princess story. Jasmine is portrayed in the first of the Aladdin films as an independent young woman who wishes to break with the tradition that mandates her marrying a prince. According to the law in Agrabah, Jasmine has three days remaining before she must marry, and she expresses her desire to avoid this fate. It is this desire that compels her to leave the palace in disguise and sets her on the path to meeting Aladdin. For much of the film Jasmine’s actions are as important to the plot as are those of Aladdin’s, though she does end up as a typical damsel in distress when she is captured by Jafar, and must be rescued by Aladdin. Despite this moment of regressive storytelling, the character of Jasmine is, in the context of the intended audience, fairly notable for her independence and determination.

The arc of Jasmine’s character fares less well over the course of the subsequent films. While it must be acknowledged that she was hardly a feminist icon in the first film –she was, after all, motivated almost entirely by her desire to find the husband of her dreams and get married- Jasmine was at least involved in moving the plot forward in some scenes. Many renditions of fairy tales, from historical versions to more contemporary versions, feature female protagonists such as Cinderella or Snow White, who simply wait idly for the entire story until the prince rescues them. If nothing else, Jasmine and Aladdin engaged in their adventures together in the first film; in the sequels, however, Jasmine quickly reverted to being little more than the object of Aladdin’s affection.

In The Return of Jafar, the first follow-up to Aladdin, the primary action in the film involves Aladdin and a number of familiar and new antagonists. When Aladdin first appears on the screen, he is making his way to the palace with a gift for Jasmine, while she waits dutifully for him. In the first film Jasmine ventures out of the palace alone; in this film she spends most of her time in the palace waiting for Aladdin, or being threatened by Jafar and in need of rescue by Aladdin. Meanwhile, Aladdin himself is tasked with combating Jafar and his henchmen either by himself or with the aid of the genie. This trend towards a diminishing character arc for Jasmine continues into the third film, Aladdin and the King of Thieves, as nearly the entire plot is taken up with Aladdin’s involvement with an antagonist who turns out to be his father. For her part, Jasmine is reduced almost entirely to waiting for Aladdin’s return so that she can finally realize her dream of marrying him.

While Disney’s portrayal of Jasmine –or any other Oriental figure- cannot be used as a lens through which to understand the reality of life for women or men in the Middle East, it does offer a means by which audiences can understand the Western perspective of the Orient. It may be reading too much into it to assert that the character arc of Jasmine over the course of the three Aladdin films contains any intentional proscriptions or declarations about the nature of romantic relationships in the Middle East, yet it is impossible not to notice the subtext of this arc in the context of Orientalism. Jasmine is initially seen as a relatively independent female character who is ensnared by the circumstances of her world and who will be forced to marry against her will. Both she and Aladdin are inarguably portrayed as Western, at least in contrast to the rest of the characters in the films. At its core, Aladdin announces to viewers that the familiar characters are the “good” characters, and the characters that are the most different are the “bad” characters.

This message is carried over, and reinforced, in the subsequent films, as the character of Jasmine becomes less independent and more focused on her desire to marry Aladdin. It is perhaps unlikely that this character arc was planned; it is, however, no less notable for its lack of predetermination. The fact that it follows the standard story arc of the Other being rescued by the familiar is, simply put, a blaring siren announcing the functions of Orientalism at work. Moreover, Disney invents an entire world for these characters that is based not on reality, but on a shared consensus deeply rooted in Orientalism. Jasmine is in many ways a victim of patriarchy; such patriarchy is often a common theme in Orientalist constructions of Middle Eastern societies. Such Orientalist depictions of harems and concubines, for example, were common in the representations of the Middle East that helped shape the vies of Europeans about the Other. Although there may be some truth to such depictions, the act of classifying expressions of patriarchy as exemplary of the Other all but ignores the Western historical traditions of patriarchy.

The message of Aladdin is, like Orientalism itself, a complicated tangle of traditions, precedents, prejudices, and ideals. At its center, Aladdin is simply a story of two young people who fall in love, a plot device that is perhaps the most common in all of literature. Moving outward from that center, however, we can see how this seemingly simple tale is embedded in the rich historical tradition of the Western worldview that frames the unfamiliar as the Other, and constructs a homogenous identity for the Other that allows that identity to be filtered, dissected, and consumed, rather than known and understood. Jasmine and Aladdin are not real people from a real place; they are character tropes from an Orient that does not exist, nor has never existed. Jasmine is the exotic Oriental woman who will always need saving, and Aladdin is the enlightened, Westernized male who will always save her. At first glance, Aladdin seems to offer an independent young woman who will break free of tradition for herself and for viewers; in the end, however, she is simply the Other.

References

Adc.org,. 2014. ‘Arab Stereotypes And American Educators – American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee ????????????????????????????????????’. Accessed May 29 2014. http://www.adc.org/index.php?id=283.

Aladdin. 1992. Film. Hollywood, CA: Disney. Aladdin And The King Of Thieves. 1996. Film. Hollywood, CA: Disney.

Arabstereotypes.org,. 2011. ‘What Is Orientalism? | Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes’. Accessed May 29 2014. http://www.arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism.

Edward Said On Orientalism. 1998. Video. Sut Jhally.

Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. 1st ed. New York: Vintage Books.

Sardar, Ziauddin. 1999. Orientalism. 1st ed. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.

The Return OfJafar. 1994. Film. Hollywood, CA: Disney.

[1]Adc.org 2014

[2]Edward Said On Orientalism 1998

[3]Edward Said On Orientalism

[4]Ibid.

[5]Edward Said On Orientalism

[6]Sardar 1999

[7]Aladdin 1992