11-21-2018, 01:28 PM
(11-21-2018, 09:55 AM)gabrielle Wrote:(11-21-2018, 01:11 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: But those were late in the era.
I was just about the right age for those films, and I was born right in the middle of Gen X.
Quote:Did The Jungle Book show the sort of life anyone would want a child to lead?
Well, it was about an orphan raised in the jungle by wild animals, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say no. But the film is a Disney fantasy, and it becomes a playful frolic. Mowgli wanders off alone sometimes and gets into scrapes along the way, and learns he cannot always trust the adults. Eventually the frolic is over and he must "grow up" and return to the human village.
It's also Kipling. Mowgli is an orphan because the man-eating tiger Shere Khan has killed the boy's parents. He's the inverse of the domestication of the wolf, being taken in by wolves who eventually find him useful. Maybe the wolves are safer by day from Shere Khan because Mowgli can see the striped death that would kill wolves as prey.
See also Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of Rome, taken in by wolves.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.