Social Utopia in Raya and the Last Dragon

        I think every filmmaker hopes that their film will change the world for the better, but how to measure that when the exact effects a film has on society are impossible to quantify? Did Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman instigate #MeToo, or were both just natural products of the shifting social dynamics that had been morphing for a long time? Maybe we're just kidding ourselves when we put our faith in movies to heal the wrongs of the world. After all, Kramer vs Kramer has been out for over forty years now, and some dads still struggle to prioritize love and attention for their kids. 

        I'm also thinking of Raya and the Last Dragon. Disney's 59th animated film takes place in a fictional world known as Kumandra, a land that was once home to the benevolent and majestic dragons. In the film’s prologue we learn that the dragons disappeared thousands of years ago to seal away an ancient evil known as the Druun. In their wake, the dragons only left behind a magical gemstone imbued with their magic. Over the centuries, the divided factions of Kumandra fight over the Dragon Gem until one day the gem is shattered, reawakening the Druun and plunging Kumandra back into darkness.

    The film’s heroine, Raya, reawakens the last living dragon, Sisu, and makes it her mission to undo the ravages wrought by the Druun. Together, Raya and Sisu journey around the ruins of Kumandra to collect the pieces of the gem, gaining allies along the way, in hopes of restoring peace to the land.

             In trying to sell how relevant this film was, two main narratives were played out. The first centered around the brokenness of Kumandra reflecting the brokenness of a world swallowed in a pandemic. The second was more focused on trying to find peace and community in a world that was constantly fighting with itself.

   Discussion around the woes of political and social divisiveness is perhaps not unique to the United States, but coming out of nonstop social turmoil, including two very bitter election cycles, a film like "Raya" can certainly feel tailor-made for here and now. In October 2018, Yale Law professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld wrote for The Atlantic:

“The causes of America’s resurgent tribalism are many. They include seismic demographic change, which has led to predictions that whites will lose their majority status within a few decades; declining social mobility and a growing class divide; and media that reward expressions of outrage. All of this has contributed to a climate in which every group in America—minorities and whites; conservatives and liberals; the working class and elites—feels under attack, pitted against the others not just for jobs and spoils, but for the right to define the nation’s identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into a zero-sum competition, one in which parties succeed by stoking voters’ fears and appealing to their ugliest us-versus-them instincts.”

    One of the directors, Carlos López Estrada, noted “We were joking yesterday, ‘Qui [Nguyen, the movie's co-writer], did you write Biden's inauguration speech?’ Because so many of the ideas that he's talking about and the general philosophy that he's using to approach his new presidency is so in line with many of the things that we're trying to talk about in the movie. It's nice to know that we're going to be part of a hopefully very optimistic conversation."

                 Measuring the merit of Raya and the Last Dragon solely on whether it silenced social discord once and for all is putting way too much pressure on a single film. But it’s a conversation I want to have anyways. I suppose an apology is warranted for my international readers: the inspiration for this essay stems mostly from political and social division within the United States. Just so, I hope that the basic principles have some transferability. 

    So I’m here, a year after the film’s entrance into the public discourse, to try to trace the psychology of this film. What does Raya and the Last Dragon say about the social division within America, and can it actually help heal the wounds of a fractured country?

            We’ll track the psychology of the film by first examining each of the main parties in the film. Then we’ll take a brief survey of how other films have depicted social division before taking a closer look at the scene in which the heroes finally heal their own world.

Raya and Sisu

             Raya supposes that the world really became broken “When I came into the story,” as she shares in the film’s prologue. This speaks to a sense of disorientation many Americans, especially Gens Y and Z, feel about the state of the world. Like the fabric of the universe erupted into chaos the moment they stepped into adulthood or even the moment they were born.

           When you tally all that has transpired in the last twenty years, or even the last five years, it’s easy to see where this attitude comes from. The 1990s was a relatively quiet chapter in the book of American history, one that seems unfamiliar from this side of 9/11 and unrecognizable from this side of … anything from the 2020s.

             In Raya’s case, this attitude is born out of a sense of guilt. She feels responsible for breaking the world because as a child she shared the location of the Dragon gem with “fellow dragon nerd” Namaari of Fang. Namaari took advantage of Raya’s act of goodwill and attempted to steal the gem, resulting in its splintering and the reawakening of the Druun which itself caused her father to be fossilized.

           This sets the stage for Raya's character arc: What does Raya want? She wants her father to come back to her, yes. She says as much to Sisu early on. But there’s more at work here. Raya wants things to go back to the way they were. She wants to continue living in a tribalistic country where none of the factions interact with one another. When Raya says that the world broke when she came into the story, Raya still thinks that the mistake was hers, and that the mistake was trusting in someone like Namaari.

It isn’t the possibility of healing the world that motivates Raya to go on this quest, it’s the hope of seeing her dad again. She’s not actively wishing ill upon her enemies, but she doesn’t really seem to care about what happens to society at large, at least not at first. (This makes her an unconventional leading lady for Disney compared to heroines like Snow White or Anna, and all the more fascinating for it.)

             We might describe Raya’s need, then, as one of opening her heart again. She needs to learn to trust again. But how can she be expected to do this when she’s seen how eager people are to take advantage of each other’s good intentions? It is, after all, Raya’s father who plants the idea in young Raya’s head of a united country. When Benja’s peace offering goes disastrously wrong, Raya takes it as a sign that her father was too optimistic for his own good and that Kumandra is unachievable. This is where Sisu comes into the picture.

    Sisu embodies the principles that Raya's father tried to teach her.  At the start of her quest, Raya views Sisu as this salvific figure who is going to cleanse the world of its impurities with some raw display of awesome dragon power. Then Sisu shows up and just wants to give everyone a birthday present. Raya initially writes off Sisu's optimism as naivete, but as the two of them interact, Raya starts to see what a world through Sisu's eyes could look like.

             The unconditional trust that Sisu advocates for is hard for Raya to embrace because it exposes her and hers to the ill-intended actions of others. Sisu finds herself a victim of such malice when the Talon chief tries to coerce the dragon gem out of her by leading her right into the maw of the Druun. This is the downside to giving others the benefit of the doubt. If the other party chooses not to reciprocate your goodwill, you’re liable to get hurt. Sisu comes out of the ordeal feeling betrayed and hurt, but no less assured of the need for harmony.

Treating others with suspicion keeps you guarded from the ill-intentioned acts of others, yes, but it also creates a culture that perpetuates these acts to begin with. A large part of Raya’s development comes from realizing that while trust can be easily abused, distrust is even more dangerous.

 

Kumandra

In 1951, Albert Tucker defined the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a thought experiment that demonstrates how members of a party self-sabotage when they each work only in their own best interest.

            The scenario imagines two criminals both charged with a relatively small crime (e.g. minor burglary) with a small but inconvenient punishment, but the police suspect that they are both also involved in a much more severe offense (e.g. stealing the Mona Lisa). In order to pin the crime on them, the police offer each of them a chance to walk free if they will sell out their accomplice for committing the larger crime. Both prisoners receive this offer separately and do not know what the other will do.

If only one confesses, that prisoner receives no punishment while their accomplice suffers a heavy consequence. It makes sense, then, that either prisoner would want to sell out their partner, but if both sell out the other then they are both sentenced. If neither of them take the deal and just accept the short time in jail, then they both experience a relatively short punishment. The model suggests that because both prisoners fear being sold, they throw each other under the bus and both go to jail where they will both get to have a very awkward conversation with the other.

             This principle has been used to understand everything from business practices, video games, to battle strategy. In Raya and the Last Dragon this model explains why peace is so hard to attain for Kumandra. All the individual nations want to possess the dragon gem for themselves, but this self-serving impulse ultimately ruins it for everyone. As with the two prisoners, the belief that the other guy is only going to stab you in the back compels everyone to act self-destructively. 

    The reconciliation that Benja and Sisu advocate for plays out in the micro through Raya’s ragtag team, each party member a sort of ambassador from one of the warring factions of Kumandra. Their coming together is a sort of microcosm for Kumandra as a country unifying.

             The thing that unifies all of the party members is the realization that they all have experienced loss in the wake of the Druun takeover. Each of them has lost a family member to the Druun. Grief becomes a unifier, and when Raya presents the possibility of them setting aside their factional allegiances and work for a common good, this opens the door for them to transcend the barriers that have kept their nations at each other's throats.

             This comes to a head when Raya's clan make an effort to rescue the citizens of Fang from the Druun takeover. This is especially significant because no one from this team is from Fang--they aren’t helping out “their own” clan. Remember that Fang is the land that inadvertently released the Druun to begin with, but their time working with Sisu and Raya has eroded their anger. It's witnessing her friends risk their lives that snaps Raya out of her rage spell during her deathmatch with Namaari.

    But let's backtrack a little and talk more in-depth about Namaari.

 

Namaari

             I’ll admit I long for the days of classical Disney villains in the vein of Maleficent and Jafar, but in this story, I think the film was wise to not make the villain a character but a concept, a faceless entity. While Namaari is positioned as Raya’s antagonist, she’s not the bad guy. The real enemy is distrust.

    The conflict fracturing Kumandra as a country is focalized through the rivalry between Raya and Namaari. The bitter irony of their feud is by the time Namaari betrays Raya, neither of them have actually done anything to the other. The tensions that started this division all transpired centuries ago, but the bitterness is renewed as the descendants of this divide continue to inflict harm on one another. That balance is wrecked when Namaari takes advantage of Raya’s kindness and attempts to steal the dragon gem. This indirectly results in the Druun being awakened and Raya's father becoming one of their first victims. Suddenly Namaari has actively hurt Raya, who then spends the rest of the film working against her.

             Fang is paying for that decision all those years later. As Chief Virana notes, “The other lands blame us for what happened.” It’s this guilt Namaari carries that makes inflicting more hurt onto her enemies feel like the only option. It’s not like Raya could ever forgive her for accidentally petrifying her dad, right? And that’s the real catch with Namaari, she’s just another victim of the hate she puts into the world.

             Lead screenwriter, Adele Lim, says about Namaari, "she is not like a random girl who wants to just tear things down for the hell of it. She is somebody that Raya has history with, there were times where they could have been friends. And now that they have this combative relationship but they are really different sides of the same coin, because Namaari too, like Raya, in the world could have been a future leader [and] cares deeply about the land, about her people.”

             One standout moment has Namaari on route to her home country when they encounter the graveyard of stone dragons. She treats the space like hallowed ground, ordering her travel companions to slow down as they pass. The scene has little narrative utility, but it says a lot about her character. It shows us that our “antagonist” actually wants the same thing as our protagonist. Raya and Namaari are on the same side.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

          Popular consciousness has been trained to view the fight for goodness as a fight against a singular bad guy. Film is abounding in supervillains, the living personification of all that is ill in the world. Having one person embody evil so wholly helps to clearly outline exactly what evil the hero is fighting against (pride, greed, general cruelty, etc.), but this model takes it as a given that certain people are just born bad, and that makes it okay to root for their defeat, misfortune, or even their demise. It serves a narrative purpose, but what if it has real-life consequences on how we interact with real people, people who are much more than their political views?

This worldview is part of what makes it okay, even fun, to take down someone from “the other side” with a tasteful bashing. It may feel good in the moment, especially if other like-minded patriots validate your righteous anger with a “like,” but we’ve been living this “all’s fair in love and war” routine for a while, and it has not solved the world’s wrongs. It has made a lot of people feel really hurt. Maybe it would be easy if our opponents were as the Orcs of Isengard just begging to be thwarted by the hearts of men, but this is ignoring the complex realities that informed this person’s viewpoints and actions. I’m not prepared to say that there are no bad apples in real life, but most of the people posting misinformed rants on Facebook aren’t bad apples. As Sisu tells Namaari late in the film, “You don’t want to hurt anyone. You just want a better world. Like we all do." This is something Raya will never acknowledge about the girl who turned her father to stone, at least not at the start of the film.

Is this good storytelling? Yes. Does it say a lot about how to stop social division within a country? Well …

 

             Film and Social Turmoil

           In order to meaningfully discuss how "Raya's" portrait of social healing is unique, I feel like we need to take a step back and look at how film has historically approached the subject. I don’t dare attempt cataloging the entire history of social turmoil in all its many genres and typings, but we can in broad strokes look at how popular media presents hate and social division. For this conversation, I want to focus on where films tend to localize the source of the conflict and how they advocate for unity, if they believe such a thing is even possible.

    Stories about hate as the ultimate enemy arguably go back as far as stories like Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In this story, two teenagers from warring families fall in love and try to find a way to exist in the other’s world, but the hate of their families is too strong, and the film ends with Romeo and Juliet taking their own lives. In the end, the lives of two bright young kids are destroyed because of the hate between two groups of people.

             There’s not a lot within the text itself that specifies why the Montagues and Capulets hate each other. As a result, hate itself becomes the enemy. Various retellings can plant the basic format in a new context to serve their own goals and storytelling ambitions (e.g. West Side Story uses the archetype to comment on race and class divisions in 1950s New York) but in the original text, the exact politics are somewhat vague. Romeo and Juliet don’t die because of capitalism or the ennui of influencer culture. They die because their families hated each other. Plain and simple. Both the Montagues and Capulets try to destroy their social enemies, but in the end, they both lose. And this sets up one of the central takeaways of stories that decry the spoils of hate. As The Prince cries agonizingly in the final scene, “All are punish’d!” In the game of hate, everyone loses.

    We need to upfront differentiate between a text like Romeo and Juliet where hate itself is presented as the source of the conflict and a film like Belfast where the division presented has a long history rooted in more complex political issues. Such issues aren’t always addressed in the text itself because, again, by the time the audience enters the narrative we’re on step 273.  (The period of violence depicted in the film, what the Irish refer to as “the troubles,” lasted a good thirty years, and is rooted in a conflict stretching as far back as the 1200s.) Most pointedly, these films generally know better than to ask the audience why they can’t all just get along because the problem is rooted in a clear flaw in either the social attitudes or laws of the land. Saying that people “just need to get along” ignores the need to reform a system whose flaws are having tangible effects on vulnerable communities.

          Good Morning, Vietnam is the rare movie to insert a sort of kumbaya mentality onto real-world social issues, but it does so carefully. The film is a fictionalized account of real-life radio Adrian Cronauer (portrayed by Robin Williams) who was stationed in the US military base in Saigon, Vietnam during the height of America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict. The movie mostly follows Cronauer as he upsets the hierarchy of the base with his edgy observations about U.S. policy and military practice, which overlaps with the rising conflict between the military and the locals, Cronauer himself nearly becoming a casualty more than once.

             Good Morning, Vietnam ends with Cronauer hosting an impromptu game of softball in the town square with the locals before he is transferred out. In doing so, the film ends by suggesting that no division is so deep that we can’t all set aside our hatred for a neighborhood barbecue.

           This approach is much less common because it’s really easy to screw up. You run the risk of trivializing complex and even traumatizing social issues. Such is the case with a movie like Crash, which has been criticized for reducing systemic racism to an attitude that one can simply choose to discard. As one example, the film features a racist white police officer who molests a black woman during a traffic stop only to be suddenly cleansed of his impurities after he later has to pull this same woman from the wreckage of a car accident. The film gives heavy narrative weight to individual actions like these while downplaying or completely ignoring realities such as hiring practices and laws that punish racial minorities, among many other structural issues.

             Both Good Morning, Vietnam and Crash make appeals to shared humanity undercutting any arbitrary divisions. A key difference is that the former doesn’t ignore the complex social reality it’s presenting with platitudes. Leading up to the softball game, “Vietnam” is consistently critical of the ego of the American military and the part they played in creating the Vietnam conflict to begin with. Moreover, the film confronts Cronauer with the perversion of America’s involvement in Vietnam in a very big way.

        Susan Kord and Elizabeth Krimmer note in their book, "Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities," that film can get away with dancing around divisive topics while still performing advocacy by carefully wording their critique: "We tend to overestimate the representational work of a film as much as we underestimate and misjudge the nature of their political impact. Although Hollywood films are demonstrably political, they tend to recast political preferences as emotional differences. Ideology is converted into psychology so that a critique of capitalism is rephrased as a denunciation of greed ... personal growth renders structural change unnecessary.”

        You see this in the "Civil War" chapter of the MCU where the schism between the two factions of The Avengers is originally localized in a disagreement over policy, one that even invokes real-world dialogue over globalism. But eventually the discussion over sovereignty is revealed to be something of a red herring. By the end of the film, Tony and Steve are fighting over not the function of the Avengers as a group, but because Tony is mad at Steve for not telling him his friend killed his parents. (Even T'Challa's motivations are eventually revealed to be those of personal vengeance, not policy.) Tony and Steve are even able to reconcile in "Endgame" without truly reckoning with the implications or repercussions of their fallout, or even so much as an "I'm sorry." 

            Meaningfully addressing contemporary problems asks that you take a definitive stance on a multi-faceted issue, already a near impossibility for a system that wants to court as many ticket-buyers as possible. Resolving real-world issues requires concrete action, but how to answer today’s issues in a two-hour piece of media? As a result, mainstream media seldom discusses social division except in very broad strokes. Hollywood, like the culture it is born from, valorizes harmony in the abstract, but it does little to champion the actual labor that goes into building bridges across people of different viewpoints.

             In short, films face an uphill climb in actively trying to create Utopia. Mass media isn’t naturally equipped to rally the social consciousness in such a way that it meaningfully directs the masses to meaningful change.

           A couple of things to note about Raya and the Last Dragon: it takes a strong "all are punish'd" approach to its view of societal division, and its solution is more or less for people to simply choose to put down their spears and hold hands. One thing that separates this movie from more awkward bids for peace like Crash, though, is that the film doesn't try applying this to real-world conflicts that have much deeper roots than the film acknowledges. Divorcing this film's conflict from real-world issues can help the audience view their own feelings of anger objectively, but there is a downside to keeping the conflict so removed from reality.

            Defeating the Druun

    Late in the film, Raya and Sisu arrange a peaceful meeting with Namaari to try persuading her to give them Fang’s piece of the dragon gem. It looks as though they might actually pull off a peaceful transaction, but Raya panics at the last minute which leads to Namaari inadvertently killing Sisu, leaving the Druun to overtake Fang. Raya and Namaari have a final face-off in the palace of Fang while Raya’s posse tries to use the power of the dragon gem pieces to safely evacuate the civilians. Raya almost defeats Namaari, but after realizing that her own hate played a part in Sisu’s death, she decides to not give into her anger and runs off to help her friends. Namaari follows shortly after with the final piece of the gem.

    As the Druun close in, Raya realizes that the only way forward is for all of them, including Namaari, to put their pieces together. Everyone’s still mad at Namaari for her part in killing Sisu, so they’re not thrilled about the prospect of trusting her. But when Raya entrusts her gem piece to Namaari, in doing so allowing herself to be turned to stone, the other members of the party are so moved that they follow her lead. In the wake of their sacrifice, Namaari chooses to reassemble the gem rather than run off. This in turn causes the Druun to be blasted away as their victims are restored to life. And now that humankind trusts one another again, the dragons return to life, including Sisu. 

             Narratively, it’s a really strong conclusion. It builds nicely off all the tensions and plotlines, and it’s a fitting climax for Raya’s character. A character’s arc is fueled by change, and entrusting the one thing that could restore the world to a person who had previously betrayed her is something Raya would never have done when first we see her zooming across the desert. Even the act of letting Namaari be the one to heal the world is a clever subversion that really shows the film's commitment to the message it espouses.

            The conclusion works really well narratively, but as a reflection of our times, it’s somewhat sanitized. The film places a lot of emphasis on characters “taking the first step,” so much so that it treats it like the only step: Raya and Namaari have a high-stakes trust exercise, and just like that the bad thing evaporates and the dragons come back to play. No need to get into the actual labor that goes into building a world that serves people of different viewpoints. 

             Yes, America is torn apart by needless hate, but much like a tsunami is a natural product of an earthquake, the intense divisiveness is born out of real social ills, imbalances perpetuated by selfishness or indifference. “Raya” deconstructs the experience of living in a divided world fairly well. But again, when division itself is the enemy, little attention is given to the root causes. Taking stock of the root causes listed in the article by Chua and Rubenfield, you’ll see that “Raya” doesn’t have a lot to say about any of them. Changing demographics? Nope. Declining social mobility? Nope. Social media rewarding anger and outrage? Nope. 

   I’m not saying we necessarily needed Raya and Namaari to be fighting over Kumandra’s healthcare system, but the film keeps itself from asking the really hard questions. "Everyone deserves trust" is the kind of moral that’s easy to agree with in the abstract, but it doesn’t really ask the audience to do anything they don’t want to. For all its focus the general goodness of humanity, the film never really asks nor expects the viewer to sympathize with someone who thinks differently than you. Surrendering to the deathly embrace of a primordial evil is easy. Compromise is hard.

            In short, Raya and the Last Dragon entertains the viewer with the possibility that their political opponent might actually be a complex individual with hopes and dreams, but it never really asks the viewer to attempt to build a world with them. 

 

Can we be Kumandra again?

    I think it's easy to cast this movie's limitations as a fault of the film. I remember on my first viewing of the film I thought lines like "It was foolish to trust someone from Fang" were blunt, unkind to the intricacies of human discourse and dialogue. Then I opened my Facebook feed and, well ... Maybe the movie has us pegged better than we care to admit.

    I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who in his youth would have never classified himself as an "us vs them" kind of person but couldn't help playing into a very "us vs them" game of politics. In time I was graced with the blessing of perspective, something that really came when I went to college and started regularly interacting in person with people whose perspectives were different from my own. 

    I became good friends with a lot people that years earlier I might have classified as "sheeple" or some other dumb internet shorthand for "person whose life experiences I haven't bothered to understand." I found my own worldviews greatly enhanced by their additional perspective. Even when they didn't convert me to a specific worldview, the ability I gained to empathize with their viewpoint is something I still value. It helps me to talk about important issues compassionately and, more importantly, accurately. 

    I'll acknowledge I'm still figuring out what being a peacemaker looks like in practice, but I don't think it entails shirking the values you advocate for. It might entail shirking from the dispersions and slander that the public discourse freely transactions in. Smith writes for NPR, “Indeed, experts said it's more conversation — not less — that's needed, if the nation is to heal its blistering divide. But it has to be healthy, productive conversation.”

There’s a scene about two-thirds of the way through the film where a world-weary Raya stands before the petrified form of her father and wonders, “Do you think he would even recognize me? So much has changed.” 

On the surface, Raya is referring to the fact that she is six years older, but there’s more at work here as well. She’s also lost her idealism. She’s not the bright-eyed little girl who believes in world peace. The film’s honest about what living in a political battlefield can do to a person. Living in a world where it’s just par for the course to hate someone who isn’t on your team, it hollows you out spiritually. Makes you feel like you’ve been turned to stone. Even if the genesis of the conflict is somewhat blunted, the film captures this experience very well.

             Maybe we’re still not sure what exactly we need to bring back the dragons, but if human decency is the thing we keep coming back to, perhaps that’s where we should start.

        --The Professor

Resources for Understanding and Combatting Political Divison:

   Forum Address: Overcoming Political Tribalism [from Amy Chua, who co-authored the Atlantic article referenced earlier]

    Forbes: Are You Angry? Facebook Loves You

    Time: How to Talk to Family Members About Politics

    American Interest: The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People