Thread by @meakoopa

Timon's concerns in "Can U Feel the Love Tonight" - that Simba's pursuit of heteronormativity will leave their radical queer collective diminished - are not addressed and remain, like Scar, part of the queer grit which text's insistent narrative of cyclical fecundity must ignore

The "great circle of life" as elaborated in THE LION KING has no place for Timon & Puma's socialist gleaning, nor Scar's queer but sterile decadence, which are pushed aside in favour of duplicating the familiar patriarchal heterosexual structures and fertility cycle.

Simba's queer, rakish adolescence is - like Prince Hal and Hamlet's before him - necessarily obliterated, and Timon and Pumbaa become like Falstaff and Rosencrantz & Guildentstern, a strange and uncomfortable index to a person who must no longer exist.

"Hakuna Matata" is really the ethos the text feels Simba must reject - much moreso than Scar's; Simba is never tempted by power - but instead of confronted it is domesticated and made to serve patriarchy: Timon, bristling, coaxed into dressing in drag and doing the hula.

When the optics of film's opening are replicated exactly at film's close, we might wonder what becomes of the queer seams it opened up only to foreclose.

Was Zazu, too, once a radical queer figure, until he was remade by Mufasa's regime into the fussy queen who serves the state?

inability for queerness to participate in the "great circle of life" is clear, too, in return of the hyenas to the social margins (hyenas are a very old symbol for gender nonconformity; Wollstonecraft was, for example, a "hyena in petticoats"). Simba has no solutions for them.

There is a way that THE LION KING is the first real response to Howard Ashman's death, and i have always liked how its attempt to use Elton John - queer camp par excellence - to service its conservative, cyclical narrative is frustrated by Elton's version's rewritten lyrics.

In the film "Can You Feel" is abt sudden eruption of irresistible heterosexuality into a queer idyll.

In Elton John/Tim Rice's version, tho, the heat CAN be turned away, restless warrior finds peace, and king and vagabond alike "believe the very best."

Cycle disrupted by idyll.

Elton John's version of the song - importantly non-gendered, but picking up only traditionally masculinized images of warrior, king, vagabond, wanderer - is about the cruel circle of life finding remit and relief.

It is, in fact, just 'Hapuna Matata" in another key.

Anyway, to say that THE LION KING is just furry Hamlet is not that innovative, but it is interesting how its shift from tragedy to comedy still found no way to save its prince; the "redeemed" Simba, with child and crown, has no speech and no solutions. He can only roar.

a LION KING that found a home for the hyenas would be more ethically honourable but less artistically coherent.

(I used to make students watch THE LION KING and explain what it picked up and what it abandoned from Hamlet and Henry V and it was always one of my favourite days.)

i do not much like the heterosexual "circle of life" but i quite like the queer "twisting kaleidoscope", which I guess is why I am very into PARADISE LOST

I think I summoned this SOFONDA COX number today at Starry Night.