Below is my analysis of 2012's Wreck-It Ralph from the chapter on Disney's "Great Awokening" (a term I first encountered at Spotted Toad's blog):
Though unheralded for much more than its charm and cleverness, Wreck-It Ralph represents something much deeper and more significant in Disney’s ideological evolution. It also serves as a vivid illustration of burgeoning quasi-religious progressive movement that was breaking out in America’s cultural power centers, beginning in academia and percolating outward to Hollywood, New York and Silicon Valley. A number of conservative commentators have dubbed this ideological ferment the “Great Awokening.”
Building on the established and widely shared loathing of racism, the Awokening gathered -isms and -phobias old and new into its widening funnel. The suck zone of this outrage tornado - a single circle of common ground encircled by the chaotic swirl of competing grievances - centered on straight white males. In this mythology, white men furnish the main supply of villains. As this mythology is post-spiritual and materialistic but intensely moralistic, whiteness, with its implicit power, becomes a synonym for vice*, and victim status for virtue. *The temptation of the reactionary of the present, just as it was for the colonizers of the past, is to make whiteness a synonym for virtue. To do so is to break as fully from Christian ideology as the Woke movement does today. For the moment, however, the anti-white ideologues enjoy the high ground, while the white supremacists enjoy nearly universal cultural condemnation. As such, the much greater ideological threat to present-day Christians and conservatives comes from the former
This mythology had its early prophets in the Disney Renaissance. Villains like McLeach, Gaston, Ratcliffe, Frollo and Clayton embodied the stereotype of predatory exploiters and victimizers (of animals, native cultures, and women of color). But each of these had their virtuous white male antithesis - Cody, the Beast, John Smith, Phoebus and Tarzan. The Awokening’s evolutionary next step was to bring down even the benevolent patriarchs and institute a new victim-driven power structure.
It would fall to Wreck-It Ralph to bring the Awokening to Disney. It would not do so with ideological guns out and blazing, as the emerging class of internet-oriented “Social Justice Warriors” would do, but with humor, charm and a skillful knack for postmodern storytelling. Beneath the smiling, winking coating, however, lay a similarly revolutionary set of values and beliefs.
Ralph’s setting is straight out of Pixar’s postmodern kitchen - a world of sentient video game characters in an arcade, dependent on oblivious consumers for life and purpose. Under Pixar’s brain trust, it’s easy to imagine this project following the usual Pixar route of longing for a connection with the player and finding spiritual fulfillment in bringing joy to a child or a nostalgic adult gamer. At Disney, however, Ralph’s creative team of Moore, Johnston and Lee would show far more interest in the social power dynamics within the video game world, treating the setting as a fun staging ground for a culture war.
The story follows two characters with a case for overthrowing the existing power structure. The title character Ralph is an unwilling bad guy forced to live in a garbage pile when he wants to live in the penthouse with the “good” characters. With each game, the program celebrates the player’s win with the little character ritually tossing Ralph off the roof. In another game world, he meets a partner in grievance in princess race car driver Vanellope. Vanellope has been kept from pursuing her passion - racing - by King Candy because of a disability, a glitch in her programming. To make matters worse, the abled racers, a band of tweeny bopper popular girls, bully her cruelly.
Both seeking to right these social injustices, Ralph and Vanellope join forces. Ralph hopes to win a hero’s medal, shed his bad buy label and gain access to the penthouse, while Vanellope wants to force her way back onto the race stage. Disney’s newly awokened values begin to show in which of these grievances the story ultimately validates as legitimate and which it dismisses.
Ralph, a big, ill-mannered working-class schlub disdained by the penthouse residents, might have had better luck with an older, union-oriented progressivism. But in the new progressive mythos, no one is comfortable with a big powerful white guy taking charge. Indeed, the arcade characters’ foundational myth tells the story of Turbo, an old-school racer (an old white guy, naturally) who couldn’t handle losing power and popularity and began invading other character’s games and taking them over. “Going Turbo” was the ultimate social crime - refusing to accept one’s place in a new social hierarchy. Thus, when Ralph breaks out of his game and attempts to prove his heroism in another game, he is justly accused of going Turbo, and eventually all hell breaks loose as a result.
Condemnation of any attempt to overthrow a social hierarchy might seem to be a deeply conservative notion, but Ralph is careful to flip that rule when the social dynamic in question is different. In Vanellope’s game, the ruler is an old white male, King Candy. As it turns out, he is the original Turbo in disguise, and he only gained his power by sabotaging Vanellope’s code and kicking her out of a game that was hers to begin with. Thus, fighting to overthrow Turbo’s patriarchal reign is not Ralph forgetting his rightful place but Vanellope regaining hers. Having embraced his lowly status as video game bad guy and destroyed Turbo to restore Vanellope to her kingdom (which she promptly declares a democracy and unilaterally declares herself president), Ralph returns to his duties as his game’s designated scapegoat. Grateful that he’s no longer trying to bust his way into the penthouse, the penthouse dwellers let him eat cake in the dump.
Lest there be any mistaking these story choices, Ralph reinforces them emphatically with its subplot. The hero to Ralph’s villain in the game world is Fix-It Felix, a pint-sized, high-voiced repairman who magically repairs Ralph’s societal damage. Bashful, apologetic, slightly effeminate and utterly non-threatening, Felix is the story’s preferred alternative to embarrassingly manly and dominant heroes of Disney’s past. As the Ralph/Vanellope relationship is strictly platonic, Felix does the romantic heavy-lifting. His romantic foil is a Sergeant Calhoun, a hard-bitten, gravel-voiced female platoon commander (voiced by 6’ lesbian comedienne Jane Lynch) hunting down the alien bugs Ralph accidentally lets loose.
Their relationship is a painfully illustrative of the alternative, woke social order. An effeminate, self-effacing man shyly courting a butch, militant woman represents a joyful overthrow of social norms and a pointed contrast to Ralph’s hard-learned lesson not to mess with a parallel norm that has him at the bottom. Though tempered with both silliness and sweetness, the Felix-Calhoun relationship is punctuated with a scene that gives literal form to the violent subversion the story preaches. The writers contrive a scene that requires Calhoun to slug a cheerful Felix in the face over and over again (each time he fixes his busted face with his magic hammer) to get them out of a jam. Played for laughs, it nevertheless illustrates how willing the new orthodoxy is to embrace even the cruelest excesses of the old it seeks to replace. That Felix is so happy to be abused in service of the woke social order (just as Ralph ultimately learns to accept his own villainous part) makes him the ideal white male.
Wrapped in Pixar-style trappings, loaded with cleverness, fun and sweetness, Ralph’s woke messaging goes down easy. Well-received by critics and the mainstream, Ralph’s success was enough to entrench Lasseter’s new recruits at Disney and, with them, the woke ideology. Lasseter rewarded each of the leaders of the Ralph with places high up in the Disney brain trust, where they would exert a powerful influence on the rest of Disney’s slate.
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