I know we’re nitpicking a twenty year old kid’s film, but recently saw it again and want your thoughts.
Here’s my argument - if Scar hadn’t been self-obsessed and had actually cared about his ‘evil’ hyena minions, he wouldn’t be an expy of Adolf Hitler but George Washington; the hyenas aren’t the wehrmacht but minutemen. They’ve have been exiled to a wasteland for no reason we’re made aware of in the film and Mufasa doesn’t give two shits about them, beyond warning Simba to stay away.
What did they do to deserve a slow death by starvation? Scar recruits them simply by promising food. At first I thought it’s because they’re outside Mufasa’s ‘Circle of Life’ philosophy, by when hyenas die their bodies become grass as sure as the lions. They’re so disaffected that the prospect of abolishing the entire system of government ‘who needs a king? No king, no king’ is greeted with joy, they’d prefer absolute anarchy to Mufasa’s rule.
From 9 Famous Movie Villians Who Were Right All Along:
[QUOTE=Cracked.com]
*
Mufasa: Everything you see exists together, in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance, and respect all the creatures-- from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.*
*
Simba: But Dad, don’t we eat the antelope?*
Mufasa: Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become grass. And the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life.
*
Simba: Wow… Say, Dad, where do the hyenas fit into the great Circle of Life?*
*
Mufasa: Ugh, the hyenas. No, f#@k those guys.*
*
Simba: Yeah, that’s fair.*
Mainly because they’re mean, act villainous and are lackeys for the main villain. They are scavengers who don’t accept their own place in the circle. They weren’t starving, they just wanted more food than they were getting and Scar promises it to them.
And stories need a villain, don’t think too much about it.
Serious answer, it’s a story that needs villains. In guessing that regardless of what animal they picked for the role, the question would be “why them?”
They weren’t starving until Scar’s mismanagement of natural resources (never really explained) caused the herds to move on. They started out simply greedy.
I never saw the movie, but have a nitpick with your post. Washington commanded the Continental Army, not the Minutemen. The Minutemen were a civilian militia.
The hyenas weren’t exiled to the wasteland. They created the wasteland.
All of the other creatures accept limits and live in a self-sustaining balance. But the hyenas didn’t - they just kept consuming and using up resources until the environment collapsed.
Left free in the regular world, they would have ruined everyone’s life. So they were confined to one area, so that they alone would have to face the consequences of their actions.
They weren’t confined to a wasteland. It was a normal place when they were sent there. If they had changed their ways, it could have sustained them and when the other animals saw the hyenas had changed, they would have been accepted back into the society of other animals.
But they didn’t change. They destroyed their home just as they would have destroyed the larger world if they had been out in it. And they learned nothing from this. When Scar brought them back out into the larger world, they abused its resources and this was the reason for the environmental collapse we saw in the movie.
The hyena is an animal which has, for a long time, generally got among humans, a “bad rap”. My brother is a big fan of hyenas (has seen them at work in the wild in Africa); and feels for them, re people’s “knee-jerk” loathing of them. In his view, they are just part of nature, and very efficient at what they do: scavengers, and opportunist killers when the chance comes their way – their supposed “laughing” cry, a fantasising-imagining thing on the part of biased humans: really, just the noise they happen to make.
He and I have a theory that hyena-loathing has been stoked-up to quite some extent by extreme-left-wing rhetoric in the earlier part of the twentieth century, which developed a “meme” of talking about “Fascist hyenas” – making use of European already-there, distaste for the animal concerned. That became an often-repeated cliche, which took on – even right-wing-minded people latched on to the figure of speech; with their hyena-dislike, already there, being intensified thereby.
Or maybe because hyenas are a matriarchal society, it’s latent misogyny. Yeah that’s the ticket. It can’t have anything to do with the creepy noises they make while trying to rip you apart. Lol.
Because they’re the least-attractive carnivores on the continent.
Any image search of ‘hyena’ will reveal that though they aren’t as misshapen as their *Lion King *cartoon versions, they really are less pleasing to the human eye than are other predatory mammals. There’s something bat-like about their heads and ears, at least as compared with lions, leopards, cheetahs, wolves, jackals, etc.
Their symmetry is less-close to human symmetry than is true for the other animals, so we call them “ugly.” And in human story-making, pretty = virtuous and ugly = villainous and contemptible.
Yep, it is all about patriarchal domination. You just have to remember that the Lion King is told from the POV of the entrenched ruling class. Everything is part of the ‘Circle of Life’, but notice who conveniently sits at the apex of the ‘Circle of Life’ - why, the lions of course. In particular the ruling male dynasts of Mustafa’s line. Why is Mustafa’s son more entitled to succeed his father? Merit? Don’t make me laugh - he’s a frickin’ cub! Meanwhile the Spotted Hyenas ( which by the way are a more consistently successful predator in terms of hunting success rate, with a lower rate of carrion consumption than lions ) are deliberately excluded from society because they refuse to bow down to paradigm of monarchical patriarchy. Their matrilineal society makes them anathema to the staid conservatives of the lion pride, where females are exploited for their labor, allowing the favored males to spend their days lying in the sun, fucking their huge harem of subservient wives and stealing the food the females work to acquire as they please.
Scar, disenfranchised from birth by the illogical and backwards primogeniture system even male lions must labor under, is a true progressive and revolutionary. He is willing to embrace the potential of the downtrodden and socially ostracized hyena lumpen proletariat. Sure, he must occasionally take harsh methods to achieve his ends. But “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And of course much of what you see is filtered through the lens of the reactionary victors. Ask the Ricardians about Richard III sometime.
No Scar and the hyenas are the true heroes of the story. But alas in real life, heroes usually fail.
Like the fanwanking but I must depart from your theory; in that the place they were exiled to is the Elephant Graveyard. Full of geysers and elephant bones. How could the hyenas have caused that? They have no chance of taking down elephants. When Scar becomes king the Pridelands become a craphole, granted, although as absolute monarch Scar is responsible for environmental mismanagement.
If the hyenas are seen as some sort of walking environmental disaster in the universe, is Mufasa’s best plan to simply segregate them. Get out of my kingdom and die. Condemned simply because of their nature, while Mufasa bends over backwards to justify the rule of the lions; coming down basically to might makes right. Just like that guy with the moustache…you know, Stalin.
Oh yeah, oops. Still, you get my point, that they were revolutionaries in the morale right, rebelling from tyranny.
Wasn’t that after Mufasa’s death? Scar recruits them by simply promising them food; paying them with a zebra leg after the failed trapping of Simba.
Yes, exactly. They weren’t starving at that point, they were simply hungry. Or “starving” like my kid is starving between lunch and dinner. Later on they were literally starving, when Sarabi tells Scar, “Scar, there is no food. The herds have moved on.”
Recall, Mufasa chased the hyenas off the Pridelands early in the movie, and Zasu and Simba have that conversation about “slobbering mangy stupid poachers”. I think we’re supposed to assume that the hyenas are indeed an ecological disaster waiting to happen if they get into the Pridelands, and that Scar knew that, and courted their help in killing Mufasa and Simba anyhow.
So I guess maybe* that* is Scar’s mismanagement of resources - allowing the hyenas in the Pridelands threw the Circle out of Balance because their presence overwhelmed the ability of the lionesses to provide for so many carnivores, and Scar’s pride won’t allow him to move the, er, pride to another location with better hunting.
