““I am two Mowgli’s,” he laments. “These two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in the spring.” Freud understandably adored the book.”
“Musical numbers have mainly been pared from this film (leaving more space for violence) and we get, instead, reverential recitations of Kipling’s versified—and, according to a recently discovered Kipling letter, filched from Inuit sources—Law of the Jungle: “For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack…”—even after Bill Murray’s (perhaps adlibbed?) dismissal of it. “That’s not a song,” he says scornfully. “That’s propaganda.” For a moment, we expect that the film might go off in a less cruelly authoritarian, and maybe even in an antiwar, direction. But no. If banding together with the other animals to exterminate Shere Khan—whose main enemy, understandably and forgivably, is the human race—is meant to be an example of the proper functioning of the law, maybe we could stand a little bit less of it.”