Moana's Mixed Messages

“I had a professor once who liked to tell his students that there were only ten different plots in all of fiction. Well, I’m here to tell you he was wrong. There is only one: who am I?”

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Here be spoilers. Lots of spoilers. All the spoilers. Also, the below may not make all that much sense if you haven’t seen Moana. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

The word Polynesia, which is the place where Moana is set, comes from the Greek for ‘many islands’. Original.

So I’ve seen Moana in the cinema twice now, and I’d just like to make it clear before I start bombarding its worldview with criticism that I think it’s a very enjoyable film, with entertaining dialogue, gorgeous animation, and the best overall soundtrack of any Disney animated classic released this century. Still, I’m afraid that I am, nonetheless, about to start bombarding its worldview with criticism, now that I’ve had ample time to ponder it. Said ample time was more necessary than one might, perhaps, have expected, much as I’ve never been one to disdain family-friendly animated films as necessarily lacking intelligence, nuance, or depth. The trouble with Moana was that I just couldn’t work out what it was the film wanted me to buy into, as it were. It seemed to be affirming mixed messages. If I was supposed to be invested in the idea of Moana as the Chosen One (standard),¹ then where did Maui’s constant sarcastic undermining of that idea, poking metacinematic fun at the trope, fit in? If I was supposed to agree with Moana that the loss of Maui’s fishhook didn’t alter his identity, then why did the situation seem to be so different in the case of the loss of Te Fiti’s heart? Well, I had a closer look and a harder think, and the closer I looked and the harder I thought, the less, I’m sorry to say, I liked what I discerned.

The big question of the film, I think, is this: how do I know who I am? Granted, that’s not exactly a massively surprising thing for the creators of the film to have chosen as the driver of the storyline, particularly if one agrees with Peter Parker’s English teacher that no other plot exists in the entire realm of fiction.² Still, I think it’ll be worth taking a look at some of the options the film presents, and the one on which it ultimately ends up settling.

Option One: My society tells me who I am.

Moana is the daughter of the village chief. Consequently, her parents and their subjects – the sum total of everybody she knows, in fact – expect her to one day fill her father’s shoes (does he wear shoes?) as the leader of her people, and until that day comes, to dedicate herself to preparing to take on that role. The society of which Moana is a member will happily tell her who she is – their next leader, the next slab of stone on top of the mountain, duty-bound to devote herself to maintaining her people’s health and happiness. Sounds straightforward enough.

However, much as Moana recognises the value of the role of chief, she harbours a longing for a different kind of life. Specifically, she doesn’t want to stay on her island; she wants to voyage.

I know everybody on this island seems so happy on this island; everything is by design.

I know everybody on this island has a role on this island, so maybe I can roll with mine.

I can lead with pride;

I can make us strong;

I’ll be satisfied

If I play along,

But the voice inside

Sings a different song.

What is wrong with me? …

See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me.³

The film quickly discards the option that Moana’s society will tell her who she is. The Voice Inside has contrary ideas, and will not be silenced.

Option Two: My history tells me who I am.

After a single disastrous attempt to pilot her canoe beyond the safety of the reef, Moana declares herself ready to lay her stone on the mountain and accept her society-given identity. However, she’s clearly looking for an excuse not to do so, and her grandmother, the self-proclaimed Village Crazy Lady, is happy to provide one. She directs Moana to a hidden cave where a number of huge old boats have been left abandoned, and Moana realises that the ancestors of her people were expert navigators who used to cross the seas discovering new islands as a matter of course. Moana dashes out of the cave exclaiming, “We were voyagers!” with an enthusiasm that tips over into ludicrousness.

The apparent weight given to this option intrigued me. Whereas the expectations of Moana’s current society had been entirely dismissed from being allowed to define her identity, the film seemed to afford a greater authority to these more antiquated traditions. Moana saw the precedent set by her forebears as a justification for her own ambition. Might her heritage be the source of her identity?

I think not. Moana was looking for an excuse to follow her own desires and that was exactly what she got. The fact that her ancestors were voyagers might add weight to her argument, but it wasn’t that that fostered the Voice Inside; it only happened to chime with it at an opportune moment.

Option Three: An external higher power tells me who I am.

So the Voice Inside is proved the supreme factor over both concordant and discordant external voices – but where does the Voice Inside come from? For the better part of the film, Moana seems to understand it as the call of the ocean. The ocean chose her to restore the heart of Te Fiti, thereby saving her island from ruin, and she must obey its call, whatever anyone else says.

 

Excuse for a pretty ocean picture! This is Hawaii, apparently, so pretty close to Polynesia.

The ocean is cast in a fairly godlike role here. It’s clearly pulling the strings so that Moana might succeed in her quest – by relentlessly depositing her back on the boat when Maui attempts to throw her off it, for instance – and that’s true even when things aren’t going the way she expected: she’s none too impressed when she initially ends up shipwrecked, but as it turns out, that’s the means by which she encounters Maui, whose help she is going to need to restore Te Fiti’s heart. The ocean has a plan and has decided to use Moana as a key cog in the machine. Or so it would seem.

The point at which this option gets blown out of the water – so to speak – is the dramatic “I Am Moana” scene towards the end of the film, where Moana, having failed in her first attempt to get past the lava-monster Te Kā and been abandoned by Maui as a result, engages in the traditional Chosen-One pursuit of Rejection of the Call by giving the heart of Te Fiti back to the ocean with a demand that it choose someone else. She’s all ready to set sail for home, even when the stingray-reincarnated ghost of her grandmother (yeah, I’m not totally sure how that’s supposed to work either) shows up – but she hesitates. Her grandmother responds with a reprise of the film’s exposition song, finishing as follows:

Nothing on earth can silence the quiet voice still inside you.

And if that voice starts to whisper, “Moana, you’ve come so far,”

Moana, listen: do you know who you are?

So this is it. We’re about to get Moana’s very own answer to the big question of the story whose protagonist she is. She riffs on the previous options we’ve encountered for a bit, before concluding, as the music swells climactically:

And the call isn’t out there at all; it’s inside me.⁴

Option Four: I tell myself who I am.

The Voice Inside, Moana declares, doesn’t come from the ocean at all. Its source is her own self. She dives to retrieve the heart of Te Fiti and sets off with her determined face on to make another attempt to restore it. She doesn’t need the ocean to call her. She does what she wants.

And, on top of that, she actually starts bossing the ocean about. When she realises that Te Kā is really just what Te Fiti becomes without her heart, she orders the ocean to let the lava-monster come to her, and it duly parts. Far from being a cog in the ocean’s plan, she turns it into a cog in hers. She’s not the Chosen One because the ocean chose her, it emerges: the ocean isn’t actually the one with the agency here. Rather, she’s the Chosen One because she took hold of the role for herself. And thus, Moana doesn’t rely on her society, or her history, or an external higher power to tell her who she is. She defines herself.

But what about when we bring other characters into the equation? Before she had her I-define-myself revelation, Moana told Maui that his magic fishhook isn’t what makes him who he is, which turns out to slot quite nicely into her worldview as subsequently revealed: one’s identity should not be placed in any external factor. But then, post-revelation, she tells Te Kā,

I know your name.

They have stolen the heart from inside you,

But this does not define you.

I know who you are – who you truly are.

Who is Moana, fearless advocate of self-definition, to tell anybody else what defines him or who he truly is?⁵ And isn’t a bit jarring to claim that the fact that Te Kā’s heart has been stolen ‘does not define’ her, when it literally turned her from a benevolent, life-giving, green island into a terrifying, destructive lava-monster with a different personality and even a different name? It isn’t as if all it takes is Moana’s reminder for Te Kā to recall who she truly is and revert to that form; her heart has to be put back in its place before that happens. In other words, Te Kā doesn’t get the privilege Moana enjoys of deciding on her own identity; she requires certain external factors to align in order to be the version of herself she wants to be, namely Te Fiti. So the hero is allowed to be whoever she wants, but the villain has to be who the hero says she is. Moana, as it turns out, doesn’t really buy its own conclusion to enough of an extent to apply it to all the characters equally.

The thing is, the I-define-myself option does not, cannot really work. If Moana defines Moana, if subject and object are one and the same, who is it that’s defining whom? By the time she’s finished defining herself, she is no longer the same self who did the defining, and so she hasn’t really defined herself at all. She’s doomed to chase herself round in circles forever, never actually able to settle into an identity. How do I know who I am? Well, if I define myself, the ‘I’ who does the knowing part can never be the same one who does the being part. I can never really know who I am.

This is not a new argument, by the way. It has all been said before, by lots of people much wiser and more worthy of your attention than I am.⁶ But I thought it would be useful to discuss it with Moana as a case-study. The ‘I define myself’ conclusion is a big favourite in current fiction, so much so that I think we’ve become quite numb to it, but in Moana – lovely, harmless, family-friendly Moana that surely couldn’t contain anything unwholesome – it’s especially overt. Just listen to the soundtrack again and attend to every mention of ‘who you are’ or similar ideas. ‘I define myself’ is kind of the theme tune of our culture and we need to be able to pick it out from the noise and name it for what it is – a big fat lie.

So, much as I reckon I’ve managed to sift through Moana’s mixed messages to reveal the ideas that it in fact wants me to buy into, I certainly don’t mean to respond by blithely buying into those ideas. If we’re talking in terms of the four identity-defining possibilities the film presents, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’d consider Option Three the one to go for, although with the external higher power in question not as a peculiarly sentient body of water, but as the living God who created us, sustains us, and has every right to define who we are. How blessed we are that, if we trust in Jesus as our saviour, he defines us as righteous, as beloved, as heirs to his kingdom, indeed!⁷ The way God defines us is infinitely superior to any identity we could attempt to build for ourselves.

And, to leave you with one last thought, isn’t it rather ironic that, by embracing the ‘I define myself’ mentality that our society so enthusiastically endorses, we’re really just drifting back into the uninspiring throes of Option One; that as it turns out, to determinedly define oneself is really just to let an external influence define one after all? To follow the Voice Inside isn’t to stand out from the crowd, but to play right along to society’s tune. To follow Jesus – unashamedly, unreservedly, unswervingly – that, on the other hand, is something really distinctive.

Footnotes

¹ One can happily add Moana to the list of characters fulfilling the Chosen-One type as laid out in the Honest Trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n9358zVHwM.

² My thanks go to a friend who is currently staying with me for mentioning the scene in question when I told her the gist of what this post was going to be about. It makes, I think, a very appropriate opening quotation indeed.

³ And here we have a happy opportunity for me to provide a link to Jonathan Young’s rather lovely cover of this particular song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ixCu-Vcu4o, with a view to recommending his work in general: I draw particular attention to his covers of ‘The Plagues’ from The Prince of Egypt, ‘In the Dark of the Night’ from Anastasia, ‘Hellfire’ from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and ‘Mine, Mine, Mine’ from Pocahontas, but I only discovered him recently (my thanks go to the friend who recommended his channel) and so am entirely prepared to believe that there’s some amazing stuff there that I haven’t yet got round to listening to.

⁴ A clip of the scene that some thoughtful human has uploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEiSF8HpyDg.

⁵ I use the masculine pronouns here to make it clear that I’m not referring to Moana. Te Fiti/Te Kā is actually also female, as I hope is made clear elsewhere in this post.

⁶ Check out this talk by Tim Keller, for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehw87PqTwKw, at which point I must yet again offer my gratitude to the friend who recommended it to me.

⁷ I’m going to give you Romans 8 for this jazz, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=ESVUK, because I’m a bit obsessed with Romans 8, to the point where I’m kind of suspicious of anyone who isn’t also a bit obsessed with Romans 8.