Disney’s project of self-cannibalization continues: like an ouroburos in a pink dress and tiara, it devours its own back catalogue and diminishes into an ever-smaller cycle of repetitive patterns, each time producing something of less substance and consequence. It is apt that the plots of its films are ever-more focused on the lionisation of the Self and the mere quality of being who you are: we have not quite yet reached the apotheosis of this philosophy – which I imagine as a CGI feature in which a parentless young woman simply goes about making herself Princess of the World like some Nietzschean ubermensch, perhaps surrounded by a handful of adoring, cuddly, slavishly worshipful ‘friends’ – but we are getting there. And so it is that Disney’s first masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, is being remade – but without a prince or apparently, indeed, seven dwarves. This is just Snow White, and there is no love in sight – only ‘leadership’ and ‘power’.
Let’s leave aside all of the many, many issues that arise from a reading of the very rich text that is the reporting on this story (to stave off any criticism along these lines: no, I have no problem with strong female leads or films with female main characters, though I do wish they would more frequently resemble actual real life women and girls that I know). And let’s instead focus on the crisis of love that seems to be afflicting Disney – and our culture more widely. We no longer seem to like love very much. Indeed, we increasingly seem to depict it as superfluous. An interesting proxy for this is the change that has taken place in pop music in recent decades – evident even to an old fart like me – which has seen the almost total disappearance of love songs from the charts, to be replaced by an emphasis on ‘lust and one’s physical attributes’. But it is clear, anecdotally, just from looking about oneself in daily life: the sight of young couples walking around hand in hand and evidently in love is becoming noticeably rare – as indeed is the sight of young couples on dates who are evidently enraptured in each other rather than their phones.
Rachel Zegler, the actress who will be playing Snow White in the remake, makes this mood starkly explicit:
We absolutely wrote a Snow White that is not gonna be saved by the prince… She’s not going to be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love.
These are not the words of somebody who just doesn’t see love as ‘the be-all and end-all’; they are the words of somebody who is contemptuous of the emotion itself. Who would be so foolish as to dream about true love? Who would cherish the idea of two people uniting together until death they do part? Who would sacrifice ‘leadership’ and ‘power’ for such an outmoded emotion? She speaks, it seems, not just for herself, but for her generation – who by all accounts are likely to form relationships less often than any generation in history, to have fewer children, and to marry less frequently.
The problem with love is that it requires sacrifice, and an awareness that another person – the object of one’s love – is a person in their own right, as important, as valuable, as nuanced, as complicated and as flawed as oneself (and, in the case of parental love for a child, more so in all of these respects). For a solipsistic society, raised on screens and the literal and metaphorical two-dimensional perspective this fosters, the idea that other people are not merely characters or avatars but real, living beings is not merely difficult to process – it is an affront to the special position that one occupies in one’s own moral universe. To put another person on a pedestal is to knock oneself off it – to accept, more generally, that one is only as important as anybody else – and this is something that we find it increasingly difficult to countenance.
At the same time, online interactions are by definition superficial, but in a way in which few people, ironically, deeply interrogate. To venture into the world of contemporary online dating is to be presented with a mass of people differentiated only by their photographs and the briefest of profiles. This in itself inculcates in the user the habit of seeing appearance and initial representation as the most salient of characteristics in another person. But love is, if anything, an exactly opposite method of perceiving the other. Physical appearance is almost the least relevant characteristic of all in the person who is loved; the fact that love transcends physicality is indeed perhaps its most central feature. We do not love our mothers, our children, our siblings or our spouses because of how they look, and we would look upon anybody who insisted otherwise as flawed in a deeply important way. But we are educated out of thinking of human relationships in these terms by the technological means by which we nowadays interact.
And one can’t, in the end, also ignore the decline in marriage and the increases in divorce and single-parenthood that have taken place over the last fifty or so years, and the role they play in fostering a suspicion of love. To many children growing up in the 21st Century, romantic love between adults is either something that they do not personally witness, or, if they do witness it, it is understood to be a vague portent of threat – a new boyfriend or girlfriend for mum or dad, and perhaps a new stepfather or stepmother accordingly, with all of the destabilisation and anxiety which that entails. For them love is not something to dream of, but something to be wary about, or even fearful.
The Snow White remake has to be understood against this context, and in that respect it is completely natural for Disney to have written love out of the story in the way that they have done. They know their audience. Romantic love has been diminishing in importance in its output for years now, often being almost entirely absent (as in, say, Moana) or lingering as a vestigial nod to tradition (see for instance Frozen, in which Kristoff’s feeling for Anna is more the devotion of a golden retriever to its owner than an actual depiction of human love). Disney is nothing if not conservative with a ‘small-c’; it does not rock the boat, but faithfully gives its viewers what they want. And these viewers are habituated to a world without love.
This gives the lie to the line that is so frequently trotted out, to the effect that this kind of move is somehow ‘daring’ or ‘brave’. It is anything but. The Snow White remake is situated impeccably at the heart of the zeitgeist: it challenges no preconceptions, but only reinforces them.
In closing, then, it is worth considering the genuinely counter-cultural potential of true love stories in the age in which we live. The yearning for a faithful remake of the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is dismissed by somebody called Brittany Eldrige (commentary editor for the International Journal of Disney Studies – no, I’m not making that up) as mere “nostalgia”. I interpret it, though, as a sign that audiences are thirsty – parched, even – for a different message to the one that the movies nowadays put out; a challenging message; a message that will shake them out of their complacency and confront them with a concept that is genuinely shocking: that love exists, that it means something, that it can be permanent, that it is the fundamental feature of human survival and flourishing, and that is very much worth dreaming of. A film with that message would be a cultural earthquake. But it would take genuine bravery and daring to make it.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. This article first appeared on his Substack. You can subscribe here.
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Without reading the article (so far), it’s absolutely daring and brave as this will turn out to be another financial fiasco the company has to shoulder for the sake of political reeducation of the unwashed masses of children some people still hope to reach in this way. One could almost make a fantasy thriller out of that. For how long will the evil cabal within get away with plundering the company coffers to further their political agenda? Will they manage to eradicate an American cultural icon while getting stinkin’ rich in the process in this way? Or will some white knight eventually come to the rescue of all that is good, beautiful and proper from the grip of the evil witches and sorcerers always mockingly cackling when trampling another children’s dream into the dust?
Snow Brown and the seven they-thems?
The more that Disney loses financially, the better – its around a billion USD over the last 10 flims, isn’t it?
What viewers?
Follow the money. Disney’s largest three shareholders are Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street. The company is worth about $100bn, which makes it small potatoes in the multi-trillion dollar portfolios of its owners. It looks to me as though the company has essentially been repurposed as a tool for cultural reprogramming in order to help bring about the kind of society that the financial elites want: one that consists of apolitical disempowered and dependent drones devoid of normal human emotions and without an understanding of even themselves, let alone the ability to form relationships and- heaven forbid- political consensus. Your politics is now what colour your hair is. It’s a desperate situation and if you have children like I do, extremely hard to navigate.
I grew up as an artist desperately wanting to work for Disney, and I’ve got a handwritten letter from Roy Disney that I received as a 10 year old kid in response to a letter and drawings I’d sent. I never thought I’d say it, but now, I won’t allow the mouse in the house!
You can’t culturally reprogram a non -existent audience. Nobody’s watching. Simples.
We have to get to Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ where ‘viviparous is a smutty word’ somehow….
Rachel Zegler is a highly indoctrinated, brainwashed, empty vessel. She spouts woke cliché after cliché as if by rote. Nothing she says reflects her own views: it’s pure ideology.
As intelligent as that?
She’s probably a fancy ChatGPT frontend.
Well its all she will be remembered for, I suspect her next role will be dressed as a banana
encouraging people to buy fruit outside of a supermarket.
As I’ve now read (more skimmed) through parts of the gibberish the holy woodians have chosen to execrete. For the eduction of anyone who isn’t genetically beyond it. Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge is not a story Disney invented. It’s a traditional German fairly tale the Grimm brother’s published in the 19th century, IOW, what you’re doing here is gross cultural appropriation (in your own terms) of genuinely German culture and the dwarves featuring here, undear Games-of-adultery-sickness-and-murder moron, are traditional magical creatures from Germanic mythology.
Original story: https://www.grimmstories.com/de/grimm_maerchen/sneewittchen_schneewittchen (in German).
Sadly, young girls and a huge number of adult women (a little surprisingly) have fell hook, line and sinker for this female empowerment messaging that’s been shoved down all out throats for a number of decades. It’s even sadder that these people – who’ve been beautifully played like a fiddle – show no sign whatsoever of even considering that enough is enough – that this campaign is only serving to divide us, and unite our enemies. No love, no long-term partners, no real sense of family. We’re going to be left with nothing really worth living for. Nothing to fight for. I guess that’s the plan.
Current films are absolute tosh. So many of them are now just full of woke messages and these just make the film empty and no fun whatsoever to watch. Woke is actually like a fungus killing our culture, urged on by humourless, uncreative little virtue signalling types. It will end at some stage because people won’t go to the cinema, theatre, the art galleries etc when they’re basically trying to tell you what to think.
I wish someone could explain ’empowerment’ to me. It’s all over the shampoo and hair colour adverts – apparently, getting a lurid pink mop of hair achieves it. No idea how. And what my dad would have called ‘dressing like a tart’ is also ’empowering’.
Honestly, I couldn’t stand to watch this kind of tosh! Do yourself a massive favour, stop watching this nonsense and stock up on old films and get a spare DVD player before they’re obsolete.
I’ve started adding some used Disney DVDs to my collection of classic films – they’re as little as £1 in my local charity shop. So far I’ve got Snow White, Bambi and The Jungle Book. They’re an absolute delight – beautifully drawn and presented.
The most recent Disney film I’ve seen is The Lion King, which was pretty good although I much preferred the stage production. I haven’t seen any of their recent output and I have no intention of ever doing so.
It’s become another company which I sincerely hope will join a list of “gone woke and gone broke.”
Its not Snow white is it? No 7 dwarfs, no Prince to awaken the deathly sleep of Snow White, so its definitely not Snow white, so why call it as such?
The useful idiot young actress, who I predict has because of her parroted blatherings will see her moment in the spotlight ending as she is thrown under a bus for her vaccuous words by the Disney Corp.
Disney has finally basically performed a dump on its founding father’s memory. Snow white was the first such animated full length film, it was and remains a classic, a beautiful film, using the classic hundreds of years old children’s fairy story. A story which teaches children about courage, resiliance, kindness, teamwork, the value of friendship and love.
The new rewrite sounds as if its all about narcissism, and selfishness, not exactly virtues to be aspired too.
The sooner Disney collapses and some grown ups who still view children as innocents to be entertained and educated about love, friendships and magic instead of sex, cynisism,and the adoration of the self the better.
It’s another bit of German culture the American left seeks to eliminate as it’s fundamentally incompatible with its core standpoints. They rightly understand that the evil queen who believes vain and idle love of her mirror image must be the be-all and end-all of the universe and who is willing to commit any atrocity to make it so is really them. That makes this a dangerous story, especially for children, and hence, it must be neutralized by eliminating all the positive characters from it. The only thing left is the evil queen who’s in the end overcome by a younger version of herself. That’s how the world ought to be regarded.
These are evil people.