Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. And “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is our great, noisy, troubled anthem. We can, at most, hope to be one small voice in the chorus, doing our best not to be drowned out, discussing the discussion of the discussion. Climb to the peak of a mountain, singing at the top of your lungs, and you’ll most likely find a crowd already there, arguing. But here in our agitated new century, it’s hard to imagine a single voice rising above the fray. In the 1990s, the classic Disney fantasy of individual escapism might still, just barely, have made sense.
#HOLD IT I JUST HAD A BRUH MOMENT FREE#
In a nation that prides itself on free speech, we devote approximately 90 percent of our speech to adjudicating the rules of our speech.
Who is allowed to talk about what? What can we say in public, in private, in seriousness, in jest? Who gets to decide? These anxieties tend to burst out in a variety of flash points and buzzwords and panics: cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, the woke mob. It echoes an anxiety that dominates our society: the fraught rules of public discourse. Lay it out like that, and you can see why “Bruno” is popular in 2022 America. By the end, everybody is talking simultaneously about what supposedly nobody is talking about. These voices pile up and overlap until the song becomes a huge ensemble showstopper, à la “One Day More” in “Les Misérables.” You’d need a crowd to sing it at karaoke. One by one, major and minor characters do talk about Bruno, listing his various prophecies and purported crimes (“he sees your dreams and feasts on your screams”) in a conspiratorial tone. Right from its title, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is self-contradictory - immediately and obsessively, it does the thing it says it’s not doing. For years he has been only an absence, a taboo, a raw nerve at the center of their world. He was a truth-teller, but people didn’t want to hear the truth. (Because it’s Disney, literal cracks rip across the house and landscape.) In the resulting chaos, everyone begins to fixate on a forbidden subject: Bruno, the family outcast. They live in utopian harmony, employing their gifts (superhearing, superstrength, etc.) to help nearby villagers - until their perfect world starts to crack. “Encanto” tells the story of the enchanted Madrigals, an ordinary human family blessed with magical powers. Instead of elevating us above the crowd, “Bruno” drops us right down into the anxious fray. “Bruno” is tense and busy - a crowded, convulsing, percussive, down-in-the-weeds medley sung, in shifts, by society itself. And yet “Bruno” sounds nothing like “A Whole New World” or “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” or “Colors of the Wind.” It is not an uplifting aria or a yearning lament. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the breakout song from the animated film “Encanto,” is the company’s biggest musical success since the old juggernauts of the 1990s. As Elsa puts it, “No right, no wrong, no rules for me - I’m free!” Disney’s signature ballads tend to be anthems of individual elevation - heroes transcending society. Aladdin and Princess Jasmine harmonize “A Whole New World” at cruising altitude, on a magic carpet, whipping past minarets. Elsa the ice princess sings “Let It Go” while climbing to the tippy-top of the tallest peak in a vast winter landscape. It’s all about altitude: High notes and high emotions are belted out at high volume, often by characters who rise, literally, high above their surroundings. It is slow and rising and inspirational - a bubble designed to lift us up, octave by octave, to a better place.
We all know, deep in the marrow of our animated American bones, what a Disney megahit sounds like. Illustration by Río Delcan La Rocca and Pablo Delcan
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