Note: this post contains spoilers for Disney’s Moana, which I highly recommend that you watch right away if you’ve never seen it. There will also be very mild references to sexual violence and the #MeToo movement.
As far as I know—relying on that most unreliable of things, narrative memory—Moana is one of the three films I’ve seen the most at the cinema (the other two being Brokeback Mountain and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, so it’s something of an outlier). That, of course, was when it was released in 2016 (and probably into early 2017)—roughly six years ago. It’s hard to believe how much has changed since then, both culturally and in my life. I can’t have seen this film in more than four years, since I’ve never logged it on Letterboxd (which I joined at the beginning of 2019), yet it’s so etched into my memory and my heart that I feel like I last watched it a matter of months ago.
The film was released, crucially I think, before the #MeToo movement. Watching it again now, I was struck by how much it seems to be about female trauma and rage—and yet how easily it imagines that those things can be healed.
I definitely think that Te Fiti’s transformation into Te Kah is multivalent. In fact, I think the most obvious interpretation, at least on this watch, is as a symbol of colonial violence (despite the fact that Maui himself is Polynesian—the metaphor isn’t as direct as that). Interpreting it as sexual violence is a lot dicier, but we can certainly go as far as to say that it’s an act of male violence against a woman (or rather, a goddess). He violates her bodily autonomy; literally steals a part of her.
In either case, the solution presented is simple: restore the heart of Te Fiti to nullify her rage, which has transformed her into something demonic.
On my first several watches of this film, I admired the fact that it really had no villain (apart from Tamatoa, who is only a secondary antagonist). Maui is rehabilitated; Te Kah is revealed not to be a villain at all, but a wronged Te Fiti. On this viewing, though, I felt a bit differently. I spent many years thinking of my anger as something pathological—a character flaw. I thought it was at the root of my depression, and that it was something that it was my duty to overcome. In the last few years, though, I’ve begun to reassess that. Of course, it’s important for me not to let my rage drive me to do harmful things to other people (or to myself), but is it really something to be conquered? Rage, like pain, is an alarm system. Just as a person who can’t feel pain is in danger (shout out to that House episode where the patient had CIPA), anger is there to keep you safe—to let you know when something is wrong. Anger is what tells you that you deserve better. No wonder people who hurt me were so keen to convince me that I was wrong to feel it so deeply.
For Te Fiti, having her heart restored heals her immediately. It is also followed by a genuine apology from Maui: “Look, what I did was… wrong,” he tells her. “I have no excuse. I’m sorry.” There’s no doubt that a genuine, heartfelt apology goes a long way towards helping someone to heal, but healing is never—in my experience—instantaneous. Moreover, an apology that is given on the expectation, even the condition, of immediate forgiveness, as so many seem to be, is not a real apology at all—it’s a bargaining chip. I’ve had people turn on me when I wasn’t ready to forgive them on their terms, at their preferred time; when I wasn’t ready to shed my anger, or rather pretend to shed my anger, since anger doesn’t fall away like a coating of ash and bloom immediately into flowers. Anger, or my anger anyway, is a heat that can bleed away in time, if it’s given the right conditions. A volcanic island can support life in time, but you don’t try to settle it while the lava is still cooling.
To broaden out, then, from my personal rage to female rage (or the rage of the colonised) in general, I am troubled by the idea that healing from rage is as easy as a single act of restoration. Healing, forgiveness, and regaining trust are all processes and not events. An apology, given unconditionally, is a wonderful start, but it’s only a start. It has to be backed up by a genuine change in behaviour. If an apology were enough by itself, people could just keep on hurting you and apologising in an endless cycle.
Another thing I’ve been revisiting and reassessing in the years since I last saw this film is my unprocessed grief at the death of my grandmother when I was a teenager. It happened at a difficult age and at a time when I wasn’t very mentally stable, which I think is part of the reason why it was never fully resolved, but another reason is that my father’s grief was so overpowering that there wasn’t really any room for mine. I felt as if I had to be his support system, and nobody was there to be mine—maybe because I did too good a job at masking the fact that I needed one, but maybe also because I’ve often lacked a support system when I’ve needed one (something I’ve also been grappling with lately).
As on previous watches, I was moved to tears more than once by the portrayal of Moana’s relationship with her grandmother, especially after the grandmother’s death, when she appears as a reincarnated stingray, and then as a spectral presence. But I have to admit that it didn’t exactly resonate with my personal experience of grief, coming to it again. There’s no lingering illness—and, of course, there isn’t always one. But it’s also an easier story. One moment the grandmother is well, the next moment she is fading away—another moment, and she’s back again in a new form. A palatable version of death to serve up for children, but not a very honest one. Nor is Moana’s grief especially present in the rest of the film—we might be forgiven for forgetting about it until grandma shows up again to give her some more guidance. That, I suppose, does resonate more strongly with me. I never dealt with my grief at my grandmother’s death, and instead I dreamed for years that she was still alive, over and over again. It took perhaps ten or more years for the dreams to stop.
I think that part of me felt that grief for a grandparent would be somehow indulgent: grandparents are old. They die. One of my grandfathers died before I was born; the other I only met once and had no relationship with. My mother’s mother is still alive to this day, at over a hundred years old. I don’t know if I really had a model for mourning a grandparent until the grandmother of a friend of mine died a couple of years ago, and I witnessed her profound grief. It made me realise how incomplete I had allowed my own to be.
However much I may still love this film, I do think it’s worth interrogating its portrayals of anger and grief, especially in a narrative primarily written and directed by members of the dominant culture, and made by Disney, which might as well be the avatar of cultural dominance. Is there room for a story where anger and grief persist beyond the neat resolution? That’s the story I’m living.
Panicky in the UK 