Mufasa and Mimesis

When Mufasa: The Lion King was released in theaters, I was unable to join our family in seeing it. But, almost immediately after, my wife and kids began drawing me into the world of its infectious soundtrack. Disney’s go-to maestro Lin-Manuel Miranda talked about intentionally writing “joy bombs” in light of the intensity of the plot—which echoes, the cradle Catholic adds, “Shakespearean tragedy” and “Bible stories—and of these, “I Always Wanted a Brother” is certainly the most explosive. The song positively overflows with positivity, with light and exuberance. It would take a stone-cold temperament not to sing along.

Now that the prequel is available for streaming, I was brought up to speed with the film itself, and—as I anticipated from my wife’s summary—what I saw was a surprisingly complex and dark story. And while the visuals are undeniably impressive, they also paradoxically feel somehow emptier and flatter than hand-drawn animation. Neither its substance nor its style conduces to a classic; Mufasa will, like Scar, forever live in the shadow of the beloved Lion King.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting and even morally instructive film. There are, happily, discernible “bad guys” with evil intent, the elimination of which has been a growing trend with the Disney studio. And while this “origin story” of Mufasa and Scar does obscure the latter’s culpability—showing him, at the very least, as deeply devoted and altruistic toward his brother, and, at least initially, torn over his mounting hostility toward him—it’s a striking portrayal of what the anthropologist René Girard termed mimesis.

According to Girard, the origin of all culture is religion (“the sacred”), and the origin of all religion is what he termed “the scapegoat mechanism.” An archaic community, rocked by instability, collectively sets its sights on a single victim—a scapegoat—who protrudes on either extreme of the social spectrum (e.g., a king on the throne or an outsider in the shadows). The community truly believes in the guilt of this scapegoat and, in a paroxysm of fury, destroys him. When this process “works,” the community subsequently experiences a cathartic release and social restoration so sublime that it sees the victim as divine.

But underneath all of this, for Girard, is an even more fundamental social reality: imitative or “mimetic” desire. As human beings, we know what we want by watching what others want—and then wanting it too. In a word, we find “models” for our desires. And when the desires of two people converge on the same finite object, rivalry and conflict inevitably arise. Two mimetic “doubles” can’t both have the same thing in the same way at the same time. Who will take it first? When the conflict spirals out of control, the surrounding community reaches a crisis point—and this is what triggers the scapegoat mechanism. For Girard, a faithful Catholic, these dynamics are discernible in the great literature and myths of the world, and only fully come to light in the revelation of Christ on the cross—the innocent Victim to end all victimization.

Mimetic rivalry is so often told as a tug-of-war between brothers and twins—Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus—and what we see unfold between Mufasa and Taka follows much the same pattern. The first object onto which the two converge is kingship. The latter is the true king of the tribe by blood, while the latter, adopted into the royal family, is the true king by nature. But they can’t both be the true king: Who will lead them? Their mimetic rivalry emerges almost instantaneously in a race between the two to determine whether Mufasa will join the family or be killed. And the two go on racing. (“I’ll race you to the other side!” they sing together at the end of Miranda’s “joy bomb.”)

The second object onto which the two converge is the lioness Sarabi—a hint of the classic “love triangle,” which is a classic mimetic structure (desiring subject, model of desire, and the mutually desired object). This second triangle is only a deepening of the first: Is Sarabi the true love of Taka, the royal claimant, or of Mufasa, the noble protector? Though both brothers are stalked by an “Outsider” lion called Kiros, this “accuser” out to destroy them can be read as a kind of reflection of and source for the very dynamics that threaten to destroy the brothers from within. Kiros—like Satan, for Girard—is real, but also unthinkable apart from the fear, jealousy, deceit, betrayal, hatred, fury, and, finally, murderous violence that mark a mimetic crisis.

Mufasa is, of course, a Disney movie, so nothing as dark as Girard’s scapegoating mechanism occurs. Still, one can see a certain pivot point where it might have: when their rivalry spills over into and threatens to destroy “Milele”—a paradisal land of milk and honey without predation—the animals there fly into a panic. Suddenly, Mufasa is effectively alone: Kiros is out to get him, Taka has betrayed him, and all the animals of Milele are circling around him, wishing he had never shown up and caused all this trouble.

One can easily imagine a Girardian conclusion to the story: All of the animals, perhaps Sarabi included, decide that Mufasa—simultaneously a kingly figure and a “stray,” an outsider—is guilty, and promptly tear him to pieces. In this alternative ending, he would again live on in the stars as a mythic god of the past, though not for the same reason we’re used to.

For those interested in going deeper on Girard, a great place to start is Father Elias Carr’s I Came to Cast Fire: An Introduction to René Girard, and his recent conversations with Larry Chapp (here and here). Mufasa may not be an instant classic, but if this leonine fable gets viewers thinking more deeply, from a Girardian vantage, about mimetic desire, social conflict, and the structuring of human institutions and stories, it’s well worth the time.