Bambi: Bleaker Than You Thought

excerpt from the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/bambi-is-even-bleaker-than-you-thought by Kathryn Schulz, Jan. 24, 2022.

My dear friend, Cynthia, sounded surprised when I said, “This would make an interesting blog.” See what you think:

It is one of the most famous murders in the history of cinema. On the first warm day after a bitter winter, a mother and her child are out for a walk, a man with the gun is offscreen. We see the mother’s sudden alarm, her panicked attempt to get her child to safety, their separation in the chaos of the moment, and then the child, outside in the cold as snow once again begins to fall, alone and crying for his mother. The film in question is the 1942 Walt Disney classic Bambi. Perhaps more than any other movie made for children, it is remembered chiefly for its moments of terror: not only the killing of the hero’s mother but the forest fire that threatens all the main characters with annihilation. Stephen King called Bambi the first horror movie he ever saw. Some years ago, when the American Film Institute compiled a list of the fifty greatest movie villains of all time, it chose for slot No. 20—between Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty and Mrs. John Iselin of The Manchurian Candidate—the antagonist of Bambi: Man

The movie was adapted from Bambi: A Life in the Woods, a 1922 novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten. The book made Salten famous. The movie, which altered and overshadowed its source material, rendered him virtually unknown. Bambi was not particularly successful when it was first released, hampered partly by audience turnout, down because of World War II, and partly by audience expectations, since it featured no magic and no Mickey. In time, though, Walt’s favorite among his films, Bambi, became one of the most popular movies in the history of film. In the four decades following its release, it earned 47 million dollars—more than ten times the haul of Casablanca, which came out the same year. Perhaps more notably, it also earned a dominant position in the canon of American nature tales. 

Salten wrote Bambi to educate naïve readers about nature as it really is: A place where life is always contingent on death, where starvation, competition, and predation are the norm. But authors do not necessarily get the last word on the meaning of their work, and plenty of people believe that Bambi is no more about animals than Animal Farm. Instead, they see it as a reflection of the anti-Semitism that was on the rise all across Europe when Salten wrote it.

Salten was just 3 weeks old when his family moved to Vienna—a newly desirable destination for Jews, because Austria had lately granted them full citizenship. His father was a descendant of generations of rabbis. Salten only began to identify as Jewish in his late twenties, when he grew close to Theodor Herzl, a fellow Austro-Hungarian writer and the father of the Zionist movement. Salten claimed that it was Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish State that made him “willing to love my Jewishness.” In later years, his increasing willingness to embrace his Judaism corresponded with the increasing anti-Semitism in Vienna, which made it impossible for Jews to forget or deny their religious background.

“I wanted to free my readers from the faulty perception that nature is a sunny paradise.”

Whatever else Bambi may be, it is, at heart, a coming-of-age story. “Of all his teachings,” Salten writes, “this had been the most important: You must live alone. If you wanted to preserve yourself, if you understood existence, if you wanted to attain wisdom, you had to live alone.” 

In the forest—that is, in a state of nature—we are in constant danger; in society, tended and cared for but fundamentally compromised, we are still not out of the woods.