Longer Reflection

One assumption I brought to this class that has been challenged to some extent is that the Disney movie Aladdin is problematic, but I didn’t know as to why this is true. In class we talked about the characters in the movie carrying white features. The reading assigned, by Staninger, highlights Disney’s problematic description of Middle Eastern representation and culture in the film. 

First, Princess Jasmine is portrayed as likable by American audiences because her story represents “a pseudo-feminist, pseudo-cross-cultural model”(Staninger 65). The major part of her internal conflict story is that she doesn’t want to be put into an arranged marriage. Jasmine decides to run away to escape her problems and eventually falls in love with someone from a different social class. This plot development of Jasmine clearly follows that of any other American teen film. It shows how far away Jasmine is from a typical Middle Eastern teenage girl. Her speech resembles that of an American teenager and, compared to the rest of the character, she speaks without a Middle Eastern accent. In the movie Jasmine is voiced by a white actress Linda Larkin. A pattern that keeps coming up is that Jasmine doesn’t embody a generic Middle Eastern woman. The features of Jasmine are white/European and Staninger describes her as “dark-haired Barbie”(Staninger 68). Through more research outside of Staningers work, I found out that Jasmine was inspired by Jennifer Connally’s looks. While, her counterpart, Aladdin, contains the same facial features as Tom Cruise. Finally, the clothing that Jasmine is drawn in follows a Western approach to fashion rather than Middle Eastern. Jasmine’s style represents the “Southern California dress code”(Staninger 67), baggy pants and crop tops. 

Second, the Middle East is shown as violent in the movie. The lyrics in the opening song, written by Americans, “Where they cut off your ear / If they don’t like your face. / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home,” describes Islamic law as violent and uncivilized. In the movie Disney is creating a false perception that the Middle East is a violent and an unreal place that is inferior to Western civilization. Also, if you look at the other stereotypical Middle Eastern looking characters, they have “violence on the mind”(Staninger 68). We see these characters as the villains in the movie, such as Jafar and his soldiers. The soldiers are meant to seem dimwitted by the audience whose ideas of forms of punishment is chopping someone’s hand off for just simply stealing an apple. These narratives create negative stereotypes of the Middle Eastern world and present people as violent and primitive. This statement can even tie into Said and Ernst’s writing relating to how the world perceives the Islamic culture. Movies like Aladdin abide in helping Western audiences further believe that the negative stereotypes in Aladdin are undoubtedly true. 

Overall, Disney is not as great as it preaches and needs to fix the problematic movies from its past. Most importantly, Aladdin should embody the truth about the Middle East and have its negative stereotypes debunked. In current times, people use these false stereotypes and turn them into deep forms of hatred.