Part of Your Reich: A White Nationalist Review of The Little Mermaid (1989)

As I was helpfully reminded the other day, if you work hard enough you can pick apart a movie in such a way to develop nearly any narrative that you wish. With that in mind, I attempt to parse out a hidden White Nationalist message in the 1989 animated feature film, The Little Mermaid. I will not be touching the more recent live-action adaptation for obvious reasons.

Before beginning, I want to acknowledge other more mainstream interpretations of The Little Mermaid. It has been alternatively described by some reviewers as a feminist movie what with its heroine, Ariel, rejecting her father’s authority and disobeying him in order to pursue a life of her own choosing, and as a sexist movie due to Ariel giving up her voice as a prerequisite for the chance to meet a man whom she has fallen in love with from afar. Such views are, in my opinion, equally valid and equally infantile. As this review will attempt to show, such interpretations neglect the wealth of storytelling elements – however unconscious – which point to a message rich in struggle, applicability, and hope for our people.

Our first introduction to the world of The Little Mermaid does not take place underwater, where our heroine begins her journey, but aboard a great old-fashioned ship, that great crosser of boundaries. The intersection of man and sea is where we are heading, and the opening song of the film, the oft-overlooked “Fathoms Below” evokes the challenges and triumphs of the brave explorers of the age of sail. Before we meet Ariel, the titular little mermaid of the film’s title, we are first introduced to Prince Eric. Dialogue reveals that Eric is the heir to a great legacy. Yet, while his seasick majordomo, Grimsby, attempts to push him towards a traditional model of kingship, Phillip yearns for something more. He is drawn to the myths and stories of the sailors under his command and the hard work that they enjoy.

Despite his pedigree and his good looks when compared to his crew, Eric is eager to throw himself into the hard work of operating the ship. His hunger for adventure includes not only his desire to learn from the legends of the past but also the desire, the need, to be working towards following their example. This prince is no mere starry-eyed dreamer or dilettantish playboy, but a man who understands a leader must be willing to get his hands dirty to earn the respect of his men, and to earn self-respect as well. Much more than his physical appearance as a dark-haired man with soulful blue eyes, it is Phillip’s hunger for discovery and adventure point to his status as an avatar for his people, his race, as does his noble birth combined with his refusal to be coddled by it. Furthermore, much like a familiar figure we could name, Eric clearly loves dogs from the way that he dotes on his lovable sheepdog, Max.

After we get this glimpse of Prince Eric’s character, we finally meet Ariel. Despite Grimsby’s protestations, mermaids are quite real and one is observing the ship from afar. At this point in the film, Ariel is wholly unaware of Eric. It is the excitement of the human experience that has awakened her youthful curiosity, not puppy love. Her desire to understand humans has run long enough for Ariel to have collected a sizable trove of artifacts from the surface world. She has collected these treasures from the skeletal remains of sunken ships. During one such excursion, Ariel is happy to scrounge some small souvenirs from her trip, a fork and a pipe. We will return to the subject of these human artifacts shortly, but for the sake of the plot it suffices to say that it is only when she is having the item appraised by a ditzy seagull that Ariel belatedly realizes that she has forgotten about a concert, in which she was to play a starring role.

The laborious approach that the viewer experiences en route to the underwater concert hall, devoid of any surrounding structures, evokes the emptiness of Ariel’s underwater life. The concert itself, featuring the sea king Triton’s daughters in an overblown production composed by a famous Jamaican-presenting conductor and crab, Sebastian, is flashy but it lacks heart and lacks Ariel, the youngest of Triton’s seven daughters. Even after a reprimand from her father, who is furious upon learning that she went to the surface, Ariel refuses to abandon her fascination for the gilded pleasure dome that appears to be Triton’s kingdom.

Triton’s bluster is as ineffective as any other form of naked coercion for blunting the genuine desire of Ariel to know of the rich history and struggle that offers a meaning beyond her “normal” world. Whereas Ariel pours her heart out in the song “Part of Your World”, the sea king is unable to do much more than bluster about the danger that humans pose and send his token crab to spy on Ariel. It is important to note that at the time Ariel is singing the song which encapsulates her character and her desires, she has still not yet met Prince Eric. His role in this story will expand later. Ariel’s hunger to experience the surface world is not because of a mere teenaged crush, but a deep spiritual longing for something more meaningful than the life she has been told to live.

Sebastian’s protestations are as ineffective as those of King Triton and he is reduced to tagging along with Ariel as she travels to the surface in order to watch the fireworks and other celebrations marking Prince Eric’s birthday. In watching the ship upon which the party is taking place, Ariel is enraptured with the whole of the human experience, and her eyes naturally alight upon the young man with dark hair and blue eyes who is at the center of the festivities.

Ariel is content to observe him, and the rest of the revelers, from afar until Prince Eric tumbles over the side of the ship and falls into the sea during a violent storm. In an instant, her passive observation, her consumption of his experience transforms into action and Ariel surges through the churning waves to pull Eric up from the murky depths and save him from drowning. This willingness, this instinct, to act sets Ariel apart from the rest of her sea-dwelling family. Eric is rescued, and awakens on a beach to a vision of the young woman who saved him, and with the song she sang to him burned into his brain.

Meanwhile, Ariel is both infatuated with the handsome young prince, and also unsure how to proceed. On one hand, her rescue of Eric was invigorating, not only because of the act of saving a young man whom she desires, but also because it represents an act of willful rebellion against her father’s authority. By King Triton’s orders, merpeople are forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the human world, even to the extent of letting them die, but this dramatic rescue is the culmination of a long obsession that Ariel has with the human world. As we see her examine her collection of artifacts, some appear wonderous and some appear mundane to us, but to Ariel all are fascinating relics whose esoteric meaning she has to puzzle out for herself. This collection provides us with one half of puzzle which forms the base of this White Nationalist reading of The Little Mermaid.

The other half comes from the lifestyle that Ariel is ensconced in, the one she is struggling against and trying to reject. A seemingly ideal world where the merpeople spend their days pursuing art and other forms of recreation while under the watchful eye of their authoritarian patriarch, and Ariel’s father, King Triton. But as the fin-tapping tune, “Under the Sea” shows, this underwater world is no Hyperborean utopia but rather an empty bacchanal pursuing mindless pleasure. What do they have on land, Sebastian the crab asks Ariel, besides sun, sand, and struggle? This is a fine example of the African mindset, and is well placed in the big-lipped mouth of Sebastian, but we understand that this is a hollow dream. Describing the human world as “a mess”, as Sebastian does at the beginning of the song, should be an invitation, a challenge to change it for the better, but the shiftless Sebastian sees this as a reason for neglecting it altogether. An endless childhood free of responsibility might sound fun, but it has no deeper meaning, and no purpose. This lesson occurs more explicitly in The Little Mermaid’s fellow Disney film The Lion King, which came out a few years later, but it is present here as well.

Once one understands the (ironically) shallow nature of Ariel’s life underwater, her yearning for the human world becomes not a rejection of her nature and her people, but an expression of a deeper understanding that this is not the way things should be. How many of us in our sphere can empathize with this sentiment? We look around us at our people, at our land, and at our world and feel an overwhelming sense of disquiet. Something is rotten, something is sick. Somewhere we have gotten off the proper path, and are now wallowing in consumption, isolation, and death. The “end of history” that our supposed betters celebrated looks instead to be the end of meaning.

Like many of us, Ariel, whose name evokes the word “Aryan”, is hungry for a better world, one where concepts like nobility and struggle are not dismissed out of hand, one where loyalty and romance are not mere marketing terms. Like us, she believes she has found such a world and wants to be part of it. For her it is the human world, the surface world, and for us, it is the world that Adolf Hitler and Nationalist Socialist Germany tried to create.

Ariel possesses a great deal of artifacts from this dream world, in the same way that we today have access to speeches, photographs, and more from the Third Reich. But like so many of us, she has to undergo a laborious process of sorting out the lies and the half-truths in order to discover the real value of her trove of treasures. The seagull, Scuttle, whom Ariel relies on for information on the human world is enthusiastic to share what he knows, but he is also woefully ignorant of the topics which he professes to possess a great deal of knowledge in, just as so many self-described experts on National Socialism and World War II provide fraudulent narratives.

The discovery of Ariel’s collection of artifacts by her father leads to a brutal scene of destruction as King Triton blasts apart this painstakingly assembled portrait of another world into pieces. His face softens after his tantrum as he witnesses his daughter weeping, but he offers no apology to her, content in his belief that the destruction he wrought was enough to snuff out the flames of Ariel’s youthful curiosity. Most striking about the scene of violence and terror Triton inflicts on these mementos is his lack of any underlying rationale for this devastation, besides the fact of Ariel’s disobedience. While as her parent he certainly possesses more rights over his daughter if he believes she is going down the wrong path, Triton is unwilling, or unable, to articulate any higher reasoning for why Ariel’s curiosity is bad.

In a similar way, taking an interest in World War II outside of the strictly circumscribed mainstream narratives invites a similar reprisal from polite society. Like Triton, most of those quick to condemn others as “Nazis”, especially among the general public, are unable to articulate their hostility towards truth-seeking in anything but the most ham-handed terms.

As our own iconoclasts have discovered, clumsy and forceful censorship of ideas ignites, rather than suppresses, curiosity. Accordingly, a confused and dejected Ariel falls easy prey to the schemes of a sea witch, Ursula, whose jewish nature is evident from her unpleasant blending of male and female attributes and the fact that her lower body is a grasping, suffocating octopus.

Inside of her volcanic lair, Ursula offers to sate Ariel’s curiosity about the human world, but, like with all jewish deals, there is a catch. Ariel will be transformed into a human and be able to live among the world that she has dreamed about, but she will be mute, giving up her beautiful singing voice, the manifestation of her artistic and creative capabilities, to the sea witch.

This is not dissimilar to the offer given to the men of our race: you can possess whatever arcane knowledge you desire on racial differences in behavior and IQ, you can even disbelieve the official narratives of the Second World War, but you will be unable to speak about them. You have won your knowledge, but fear keeps you silent, much as Ursula’s magic contract has silenced Ariel.

Nominally, Ursula has provided Ariel with a way out of this predicament. Should she be able to woo Prince Eric, she will remain human. If she cannot, she will forever be Ursula’s slave. When the virginal Ariel wonders aloud how she is supposed to accomplish this task bereft of communication, Ursula is quick to suggest forgoing a deep spiritual connection with the one she loves in favor of a shallow physical one. Behind her compliments on Ariel’s beauty, one can see the real agenda of the sea witch, to soil what is pure. No doubt that if she had been allowed to continue, Ursula would have suggested that Ariel create an OnlyFins account.

This entire scheme is Ursula’s attempt at revenge. Her musings aloud let the viewer know that Ursula once lived in the royal palace before being banished and exiled. The sea witch will always tell you what was done to her, but never why. This history of rubbing shoulders with the powerful, being exiled, and seeking revenge is archetypical in jewish history dating back to the Old Testament. Perhaps it is not the ocean water, but an ingrained sense of aggrievement that has left the former court mollusk so salty?

Although Ariel nearly drowns after the transformation, the spell is a success. Ariel’s tail has been replaced with a pair of human legs and she is free to roam around the world that she has, until now, only been able to view from afar. Her wonderment and enthusiasm are contagious for Eric and his servants who take her in, as Ariel learns how to drive a horse, sleep in a bed, and eat a fine meal. Ariel finds challenge in the routine and magic in the everyday. The restriction placed upon her by the sea witch is a frustrating one, however, and Ariel struggles to make herself understood to Eric. What’s worse, without her voice he cannot make the connection between the besotted maiden before him and the siren who saved his life. None the less, Ariel is persistent and starts to win Eric’s heart. When the young couple are enjoying one another’s company on a scenic rowboat excursion, Sebastian the crab tells Eric Ariel’s name and then unleashes his racial proclivity for music and mating rituals to lead the local aquatic animals in the number “Kiss the Girl”.

Ursula watches this development with ill-contained fury. By disguising her schemes as assistance for those “with no one else to turn to”, Ursula attempts to portray herself as a benefactor, when in reality the help that she provides “the miserable, lonely, and depressed” somehow always ends with them belonging to her, body and soul. The game is rigged, and Ariel is not allowed to fail or succeed without the sea witch pressing on one side of the scale. Ursula attempts to sabotage her efforts at winning Eric’s heart with the help of her amoral morays, for example flipping over Ariel and Eric’s boat, and, later, by using Ariel’s own voice to steal Eric away from her. When Ariel seems set to succeed, Ursula denounces her as a tramp and then uses sorcery rather than rhinoplasty to mimic the appearance of a beautiful young woman and conceal her true monstrous nature. In this guise, she hypnotizes Prince Eric and is set to marry him.

Like any dual citizen, one must only scratch the surface to uncover Ursula’s true nature. Even though it should be the easiest thing in the world, the sea witch cannot refrain from behavior such as kicking Eric’s dog. Such a move comes back to bite her in the butt, literally, when Ariel and her allies rally the creatures of the ocean to halt the wedding, break Ursula’s charm holding Ariel’s voice, and reveal her identity to the disgusted guests. But even though the spell on Prince Eric has been broken and the sea witch found out, Ariel still failed to receive her kiss from him, and so she is returned to her mermaid form as well and, what’s more, she belongs to Ursula.

As Ursula plunges into the ocean with Ariel in tow, Eric follows, determined to rescue the girl he loves from the clutches of the evil sorceress. It appears to be too late to stop her scheme. King Triton reluctantly hands over his crown, and his power, to Ursula in order to save his daughter from slavery. This following the sea king’s initial response, which was to blast the contract that Ariel signed with his magic trident, but even in Triton’s own domain, his power cannot affect Ursula’s legalistic wrangling, and he can only accede to Ursula’s bargaining.

Confident in her power, Ursula sheds her final illusion and grows to an enormous size, paralleling the size and might of the jewish diaspora which is rallied to the purposes of worldwide jewry. She attempts to drown Eric and blast Ariel to pieces, ensnaring both in the center of a whirlpool swirling around her bloated form. The spiral allows Eric to turn the tables, however. Using lessons learned from his time at sea among the sailors, the common people, the prince seizes control of a sunken galleon and drives its bow into Ursula’s side, killing the loathsome sea witch. This victory, like ours will be, is predicated combining a rediscovery of our history (symbolized through the resurfaced ship) with an iron determination to steer the ship in the right direction.

With Ursula slain, Triton regains his crown and his power. All seems set to return to the status quo, except that the sea king has undergone a change of heart. Seeing how much Ariel loves Eric, and the sacrifices she was willing to undergo, the risks she took, in order to be a part of the human world, he uses his own magic, a magic not wrapped up in contracts and double-meanings but powered with love for his daughter, to transform Ariel into a human. There are no catches, only a happy ending, as Ariel is swept up into the arms of her love. Witnessing this, the words of Carl Jung came to mind: “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”