Remember that scene in Slacker about the Smurfs being a subconscious method to ease children into accepting the arrival of Krisha? Here’s a competing theory which puts the Smurfs at dead-center of a Marxist utopia.
What does Gargomel want to do with the Smurfs? He has two ideas. The first is to eat them. This is unusual, because the Smurfs are small and rare, and would not make as good eating as, say, a deer. It is similar to Sylvester’s obsession with eating the golf ball sized meal that is Tweety Bird. There are two explanations.æThe first is that metaphorically, he wants to devour socialism, as the West wanted to do to the USSR and its satellites during the Cold War through its tactic of encirclement. The second is that as a pure capitalist, he wishes to turn everything into a commodity – including people. The second thing Gargomel plans to do to the Smurfs once he catches them is to turn them into gold. As the ultimate supercapitalist, he is more concerned with his own wealth than with equality and fairness. Like any Adam Smith style capitalist, it is his ‘natural’ state to want as much money as he can get.
Gargomel is a cold, bitter and ultimately empty man. This is because he has nothing else in his life but a soulless quest for wealth and possessions. A definite statement about the anti-social effects of economic rationalism.