Does Disney Care About Diversity?
Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash
I have been a Disney fan for a long time. My favorite Disney movie growing up was Hercules, whose songs I would sing on repeat (and can still do so to this day). When the character Megara (Susan Egan) sings her song I Won't Say (I'm In Love), I swoon with delight every time, and you can often catch me humming the chorus over and over again while at work. I love Megara. I admired her bravery and independence growing up, and as a trans person, I'd be lying if I said she didn't have a seminal impact on how I view gender norms.
Disney has been putting out a lot of "diverse" movies recently (more on this term later): Encanto (2021), Coco (2017), Moana (2016). Many of these films are good, great even, and the company has done some important work in fostering stories that have piqued viewers' interest. Luisa’s song Surface Pressure from Encanto has become one of my personal favorites, which I sing now even more than I Won’t Say (I’m In Love).
However, this recent success exists against a backdrop of nearly a century of regressive storytelling. Before the mid-2010s, Disney's past films were overwhelmingly white, eurocentric, and straight. There has been a lot of press given to Disney's strides towards greater diversity, but given its history of conservative and arguably racist and sexist messaging, we have to question the benevolence of this new strategy.
Disney doesn't seem to be focused on diversity in a progressive sense as much as it is trying to capture an evolving market. While that is a good thing overall from a societal standpoint, it should give us pause about assigning accolades to an entertainment company that is ultimately very conservative.
First, let's define what we mean when we say "diversity." In our current context, we are speaking about a catchall term for any representation that falls outside white supremacist patriarchy (i.e., anyone who is not a white, cisgendered, straight, neurotypical man).
So you know, the majority of the planet.
There is a narrative that Disney hasn't been the most diverse in the past, but now they are "doing better." For example, the piece The Year Disney Started to Take Diversity Seriously in Vanity Fair talks about how starting in 2016, they seemed to be putting out more "diverse" work. The article referenced films such as Moana and Queen of Katwe, claiming they represented a radical departure from Disney's previous filmography. As Yohana Desta writes in the closing lines of that article: "Though [Queen of Katwe] was outside the norm even for Disney, the studio's devotion to making it the right way is a sign that Disney really is committed to telling stories the world should hear."
We see this sentiment also in Disney's latest marketing. I think a great recent example of catering to this definition of diversity is the 2021 film Eternals: the superhero movie about ten immortal aliens protecting humanity from evil monsters. The advertising for Eternals was focused pretty heavily on this concept of diversity from the getgo. The lead-up to the film was filled with headlines of its star-studded cast members like Salma Hayek and Gemma Chan, as well as its producers and directors, hailing this one feature.
This persistent claim could be made because Eternals did include many non-white leads. It also had a lead with a disability, and one main character that was openly queer, which is a rarity for the MCU. In particular, the appearance of gay Eternal Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) and his partner Ben (Haaz Sleiman) had not been done before in the MCU or Disney's larger canon in general. This depiction created quite the stir, even if the movie overall was not very good. "How 'Eternals' Establishes the MCU's First Gay Superhero and Same-Sex Couple in a Movie: 'It's Life-Saving'" read the headline from a Variety article shortly before the film's release.
There were many think pieces like this one. The film's advertising heavily leaned into this concept of diversity, and defenders were quick to frame negative press as bigoted. "Looks like we're upsetting the right people," Eternals star Kumail Nanjiani said in a now-deleted tweet in response to the film allegedly getting review bombed by users criticizing its queer representation.
So is this claim true? Was Disney, as a studio, terrible with making diverse stories before the mid-2010s, and are they better at making them now? Has Disney become a #woke defender against bigoted mobs?
On the one hand, the answer to this question is kind of obvious. Of course, Disney has gotten better with its content. When we look at its past titles, it's undeniable that they were overwhelmingly eurocentric and white. Many of them also had terribly racist tropes. From the painful depiction of Indigenous people in Peter Pan (1953) to the offensive black caricatures in Dumbo (1941), you can quickly point to dozens of examples. The most infamous probably being the 1946 film Songs of the South, which has a "happy" slave character best remembered for their song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah."
However, comparing the Disney of now to the Disney of the past almost seems disingenuous. It's unsurprising that Disney executives of the 30s through the 90s were putting out racist content: that was the dominant culture. What we need to do is compare the Mickey Mouse corporation to contemporary standards, and by that metric, they are extremely conservative.
Let's return to the example of Eternals. The reason the character Phasto was such a big deal only makes sense when looking at Dinsey's past conservatism. For over a decade now, Disney has put forth the narrative that they would have queer representation in their films, only for that representation not to be very good or present at all.
For example, there was a lot of buzz around Disney having a queer movie in Avengers: End Game (2019), only for that character to be a minor one with not much dialogue. Other examples include a blink-and-you-will-miss-it dance between LeFou (Josh Gad) and some side character in the 2017 Beauty and the Beast reboot; a brief kiss between two same-sex extras in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019); a screenwriter claiming on Twitter that two male characters in Zootopia (2016) were gay; and many more.
These scenes, assuming they exist on screen at all (looking at you Zootopia and Cruella), could all be edited out or redubbed for foreign releases so that they didn't impact sales abroad. For example, the grieving partner in Endgame was redubbed for Russian audiences partly to not run afoul of a homophobic censorship law in that country. We saw a similar situation unfold when Disney clipped that aforementioned brief kiss in The Rise of Skywalker to avoid getting a higher age rating for its Singapore release. This pattern of behavior is not the sort of thing a company would accept if they cared about queer representation as a concept.
Disney may have an undeniably queer character on the Silver Screen now — 21 years after Will & Grace had their big kiss on TV, and 16 years after Brokeback Mountain — but that doesn't mean they are suddenly bastions of queer progressivism. The framing they used with Eternals, of conflating all criticism as "bigotry" when the movie is indeed very bad, speaks to a level of manipulativeness that makes this whole situation feel very icky.
I have always found the narrative around introducing diversity in Disney properties to be odd because it’s marketed as this significant progressive action. Yet as we have already seen, it’s only a big deal because they choose not to be inclusive for decades. As yet another example, in the MCU (which was purchased by Disney in 2009), it took over a decade for us to get a black lead with Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in Black Panther (2018). This happened 20 years after Wesley Snipes’s Blade and 10 years after Will Smith’s Hancock. Disney wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with Black Panther anywhere outside the MCU. In the meantime, they made billions of dollars, mainly selling white, conservative narratives for over a decade.
This logic applies to most "groundbreaking" decisions within their repertoire. The "true love" narrative that Frozen (2013) subverted was revolutionary only because Disney marketed regressive narratives about Love for decades. It's not like narratives about putting yourself first over a man didn't exist. Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman was released in 1978. It was nominated for multiple Oscars. You could make similar arguments about having a woman protagonist in the MCU (see Captain Marvel), a Chinese protagonist (see Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), or any other "diverse" identity. These stories were progressive only in relation to the Mickey Mouse company's deeply ingrained conservatism.
Let’s be real here. Disney was the bad guy who decided that it would be more profitable to tell conservative narratives and ignore entire swaths of the world’s population than break new ground. And now, in the year of our Lord Gritty 2022, they are trying to act like this half-assed representation is the equivalent of making bold strides in diversity, when in the current environment, it’s just the bare minimum. Most of us don’t want to see the White Aryan Power Hour anymore, and Disney is responding to a long-overdue trend.
And even this attempt to meet the bare minimum is usually a struggle. When I look at some of the most progressive works the company has put out in recent years, it's clear that there are still significant internal struggles between the company's more conservative elements and their more progressive creators. For example, the TV show Owl House, which has been heralded for both its queer and Hispanic representation, seems to have had a lot of internal resistance from company executives. The creator Dana Terrace has been open in the past about how executives tried to forbade her from adding queer representation, and sadly the show will now be canceled after a significantly shortened third season for "reasons." As she wrote on Reddit in late 2021:
At the end of the day, there are a few business people who oversee what fits into the Disney brand and one day one of those guys decided TOH didn’t fit that “brand”. The story is serialized (BARELY compared to any average anime lmao), our audience skews older, and that just didn’t fit this one guy’s tastes. That’s it! Ain’t that wild? Really grinds my guts, boils my brain, kicks my shins, all the things. It sucks but it is what it is.
This happened in 2021, not in Disney's far-off history. Terrace insists this cancellation wasn't because of homophobia, and we will honestly never know for sure because it's not like she can be any more direct. It's noteworthy that Disney has a history of blocking queer representation. Similar comments were made by Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls, about the company forbidding him from adding explicit queer content in his show. And these are the comments that escape into the public. There's probably a whole unspoken history of homophobic, racist, and sexist conservatism behind the scenes that we will never know about because few would risk their career by being open about it.
Given this company's history, it seems weird to be lauding Disney for projects they barely want to put out and are only socially relevant because of their deeply rooted conservatism. We are rewarding a company's recalcitrance over the creators who actually break ground in this area, and then allowing Disney to pretend like this representation means anything more to them than dollar signs.
I think a scene that highlights this tension perfectly comes from the MCU movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The main character Xu Shang-Chi or "Shaun" (Simu Liu), is at a dinner with his fascist father, Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung). Wenwu monologues about how racist American audiences were for fearing The Mandarin villain in Iron Man 3, and by extension, the viewer for not criticizing that narrative earlier:
Xu Wenwu: “A funny story. Some years ago a terrorist from America needed a boogeyman to bring your country to its knees. So he appropriated The Ten Rings. My Ten Rings. But because he didn’t know my actual name, he invented a new one. Did you know the name he choose? The Mandarin. He gave his figurehead the name of a chicken dish. And it worked. America was terrified. Of an orange.”
This scene is an indictment of America's indifference to the racism of the previous phases of the MCU, and it's funny for multiple reasons. Within this film universe, it's sort of hypocritical of Wenwu to pretend like he is somehow apart from the racism of American Empire when, as the immortal leader of a secret organization that governs the levers of the world, he has 100% upheld American imperialism. The opening monologue shows the Ten Rings organization assassinating political leaders. If anyone has had a say in how biases have shaped up on Earth, it's this man.
The same logic applies on a metatextual level as well. This commentary is disingenuous because it ignores the power dynamic between the typical MCU viewer and the studios that make films and push culture. America did not make the Iron Man movies. That was Marvel Studios. They choose to make a racist narrative because they deemed it profitable, and like Wenwu, they haven't done much to change the circumstances that led to that bigoted example. The same people who created that racist narrative are still in charge of the MCU today. Kevin Feige was the head of Marvel Studios back in 2007, and he's still in charge now.
Rather than try to push for genuine accountability, films like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings are blaming "America" as a whole for this racism. It was merely the racist American markets, the studio seems to be arguing here, so don't hold us responsible for perpetuating that racism. That's how the market works. Whether racism goes up or down, you meet viewers where they are.
Does that sound like a company that cares about diversity?
Does it sound like a company that will combat white supremacist narratives if and when our country's opinions on "diversity" change?
Listen, I am still a huge Disney fan. I would not be penning a 2,000 word-plus article if I was not invested in this brand. I love Pixar. I love the MCU. I only constantly complain because I care.
Yet if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that Disney is a traditionalistic entity primarily concerned with making money by appealing to the conservative values of the time. It might employ individual creators who care deeply about progressive or even leftist values, but it's never going to adopt those as a matter of principle.
That's simply one wish that won't come true.