Of Male Friendship and Spirals in The Lion King, Vertigo and the American Pie Saga

Abstract

In this article, I will argue that the real originality of The Lion King is not to reproduce an umpteenth version of a somewhat dubious Freudian reading of the oedipal complex, but the fact that the threat depicted in the movie is not a Freudian regression or a Lacanian forclusion of the Name-of-the-Father, but the threat of male homosocial bonds. In the first part, it will be established that, if in the Lion King and as we will see also in American Pie, male friendships can sometimes become a threat to the patriarchal organization, it is due to their particular temporality, defined here as the timeless jouissance of friendship, which jeopardizes the temporality of the Circle of Life. In a second part, I will carry on with the construction of a graphic model of the straight time (patriarchal and familialist) with the figure of the spiral. It will suggest that this model of the spiral of time allows regrouping under a single model, different (patriarchal) temporalities and their relations to particular narratives. Finally, in a last part I will apply this figure of the spiral to Hitchcock’s Vertigo in order to illustrate its work.