A Pocket Archive (46)

I see lots of posts on my platforms recently relating to the live-action release of Snow White. While I have no intention of watching the film myself (nor do the reviews make me want to), I have been mulling over old fairytales a lot recently, probably because the film made me think of them.

I am a huge Disney fan (at least pre-to-early 2000's), and I want my kids to be able to enjoy all of the same magical stories and movies that I grew up with. At the same time, I'm also very glad that my mother read the original Grimm's Fairytales to me when I was still very small. I remember asking her once why so many of them unhappy endings, and she told me something I'll never forget: she said that it's because in real life, not all stories have happy endings, but at the time, people also didn't expect them to. This made the old stories a lot closer to reality.

I like most Disney films, but even as a small child, I tended to gravitate more towards the ones that were thematically darker and more complex, perhaps because they felt more true somehow. My two favorites are Anastasia and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. While both movies are undeniable masterpieces with wonderful music and artwork, they also have genuine examples of tragedy in them as well as definite examples of real good and evil.

Frollo is a particularly well-written villian. I don't know that 4 year old me needed to understand repressed lust and religious hypocrisy, or how evil people will go to crazy, extreme lengths to manipulate and control others (especially when they're obsessed with someone), but the overarching themes still made sense to my brain somehow. Rasputin wasn't scary exactly, but I do appreciate the price we was willing to pay in order to get what he wanted, which I have also found to be very true to life in many ways. I also adored Dmitri, Anastasia's love interest, because while he wasn't exactly a bad person, he wasn't quite a good one either. He was selfish at first, and dishonest, but never malicious and he still came through for her in the end . He seemed so much more real and likable than most of the shiny 2D Disney princes ever did.

The plot and villian in snow white seem comparitively simplistic: a self-obsessed evil queen is jealous of her stepdaughter's beauty and seeks to have her destroyed as a result. When you think about it though, the character of the evil queen is actually surprisingly insightful. She spends most of her time looking into a magic mirror which reflects back everything that she wants to see. There second this stops, however, she goes out of her mind trying to destroy whatever the thing is that interferes with the perfect image she wants to see of herself. In the original Grimm's Fairytale, in addition isolating the girl and to hiring a huntsman to kill her, the Queen later attempts to murder Snow White 3 on separate occasions. The items she uses in her attempts are also significant: a corset, a comb, and finally a poisoned apple.

I think the first two items are important because they are things designed to enhance beauty. Part of what makes Snow White so lovely is that she's innocent and unaware of her own beauty. By presenting her with a corset and a comb, the evil queen is attempting to foster self-consciousness in order to make Snow White vain and insecure, which is also common in real-life abusive situations. A lot of people also ascribe the poisoned apple to biblical allegory, appropriating the queen to the snake in the garden and the prince to Christ rescuing his bride the church, but I don't think it's necessary to read into it that deeply in order to get the message: that evil, self-absorbed people will stop at nothing to destroy or covet whatever is good and beautiful purely out of spite.

I remember listening to a documentary recently on narcissism and psychopathy. One thing that stood out to me was that the presenter commented that while not all narcissists or psychopaths, all psychopaths are narcissists. The monster in my own story reminded me a great deal of the evil queen. It had spent years draining me before I realized what was happening, but once I saw through the fairy glamour and was no longer the perfect magic mirror reflecting back everything It wanted to see, I instead became something thw monster actively decided to destroy. I also came to realize sometime after that it had also actively spent most of its life surrounding itself with things and people it admired, not for the sake of quality companionship, but rather to steal bits and pieces of their lives and stories, weaving them into its own fictional biography. My monster was nothing other than a black hole: an empty, ravenous void that was visible only because of the light is sucked in from everything it devoured around it. It gave nothing and took everything.

I've spent years intermittently wondering why anyone would do such a thing, but eventually gave up trying to understand it. The problem with evil is that it is irrational, and if you're looking for an answer as to why it operates the way it does, you'll eventually drive yourself crazy.

My theory is that we tend to follow who we worship. On one hand, there is the devil who, despite being one of the brightest and most beautiful of all the angels, felt that he deserved more than what he was given. He wanted to be God, but was unable to create anything himself, so he tried to steal it, becoming the father of lies and the greatest plagerist ever to exist. He copies everything and subverts it, destroying everything lovely and beautiful. He knows what is good and right and true, but hates and chooses ro reject it. His followers are pretty much the same as he is: self-obsessed, pompus and possessive liars who only want to hurt and control others in order to build and support their own self-entitled sense of importance.

I don't want any of my little ones to grow up being afraid of the world, but I also don't want them to be unaware of wolves in sheep's clothing either. For this reason, as much as I want them to grow up enjoying Disney, I also want them to hear stories like Bluebeard and the original Grimm's. I'm have now idea how I will navigate that road further in the future, when they're older, but in the meantime, I think it's good for children to have have stories with genuine, believabile examples of villains for reference so they're not completely blindsided when they encounter dragons in the future.

As for me, I would continue to pray and wait for my Prince, who had promised to bring me justice.

As St. Agustine wrote, "The truth is like a lion; you don't have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself."