At the 11th Academy Awards in 1939, Shirley Temple presented Walt Disney with an honorary Oscar — a statuette accompanied by seven miniatures. It was, of course, a nod to his animation Snow White, which the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein had called “the greatest film ever made”.
As with all of his adaptations, Disney had reworked the original Brothers Grimm fairytale to remove its more gruesome and confusing elements. Intricate subplots involving not one but three deceptions by the jealous queen — a corset, a comb and then the apple — were whittled down; Snow White is revived not by the dropping of her glass coffin, dislodging said poisoned pomme from her throat, but by “true love’s kiss”. Most significantly, in the Disney version, the queen — a vain stepmother threatened by Snow White’s pubescent “fairness” — falls off a cliff. The original is more Grimm indeed: she is made to wear red-hot shoes of iron and dance until she dies, a morbid mockery of her desire for admiration.
Much effort was made to force the original tale into the contemporary moral mould of antebellum America. Now, as Disney braces for the release of its new live-action adaptation on Friday, a similar process is underway. This time, the sanitising is motivated by its star, Rachel Zegler, who has navigated the press junket so disastrously that studio bosses relocated a London premiere to a remote Spanish castle for fear of “anti-woke backlash”. All this was set in motion by Zegler’s comments in 2022, that the original film had followed Snow White’s “love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird.” Taking a further chomp at the hand which was so generously feeding her, she added: “I think I watched it once and never picked it up again.” This time around, Zegler promised, Snow White would not be dreaming “about true love”, but “about becoming the leader she knows she can be”, a phrase which single-handedly tanked the $270-million film’s predicted box-office performance. Shoehorning modern manners into this unruly fairy tale appears to have backfired. Why?
Disney’s dalliances with “wokeness” are well documented, and tiresome. In 2023, its casting of the black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid sparked outrage, much of it racist. Its megabucks Marvel franchise has attracted similar opprobrium. The conversation around Snow White, however, is summarised by outrage from the warriors of Mumsnet, who insist “there’s nothing wrong with dreaming of marriage”, and “I don’t understand why a man loving a woman is bad at all!” The lens of criticism is so relentlessly trained on the film’s feminism or lack of it that the underlying assumption is taken for granted: that mass-market cinema must contain a message, and that its plots can be used as a weathervane for contemporary sexual or racial politics.
There will always be an effort to ground adaptations in recognisable sensibilities — this explains the success and longevity of the Walt Disney original — but when this aim supersedes the desire to tell a story well, it dooms the project. And when, as has happened here, the sensibilities are not those held by the actual audience, but by an idealised progressive one, the project becomes a condescending exercise in wish-fulfillment. It seems to say, this is the audience we should have, and you should be ashamed for yearning for a version of the story which is backwards. Ramming an anti-romance message down the throats of little girls and their mothers will only have the effect of making love, marriage and the family seem under siege. In reality, of course, no serious feminists are questioning any of those things. But the upshot of Disney’s bungled reworking of Snow White means that fewer people will watch the film.
Perhaps more than in any other mode of storytelling, we look for moral significance in fairy tales. This is why, mishandled, they are so risky. Twisting tales which are so deeply rooted within the cultural unconscious is a dangerous game, not because doing so undermines our hopes and dreams, as those Mumsnetters suggested, but because it obscures a primordial truth. Fairy tales matter, and persist, because they are functional: they warn children about the cruelty of the world — and tell them to get ready. They carry echoes from the preliterate childhoods of medieval Bavaria, the maritime legends of Scandinavia, and the paranoid folklore of woodside hamlets where the young were warned that “tame wolves are the most dangerous of them all”. Scores of girls — little mermaids, little red riding hoods, sleeping beauties — totter towards the jaws of death in oral tales captured by the Grimms, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault; they mostly get gobbled up, their stories cautionary rather than aspirational.
Like much folklore, fairy tales have a didactic role: the child reared on such stories learns not simply to wait for a prince but to avoid the forest, be wary of adults and fear ferocious animals. Many of the children survive through ingenious deception, trickery and bravery — think of Hansel and Gretel shoving the witch into the oven. Modern children for whom unhappiness is so often pathologised rather than accepted as an unavoidable part of adolescence would do well to read these centuries-old stories of resilience.
No one understood this better than the Austrian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, whose 1976 analysis The Uses of Enchantment was heavily consulted by Stanley Kubrick during the production of The Shining. That film’s mostly latent horror, its masterful layering of symbolism, is traceable in Bettelheim’s accounts of fairy tales. The “use” of enchantment, he argues, is “overt and covert meanings” which “make some coherent sense out of the turmoil” of children’s feelings. Instead of distracting girls and boys from their “formless, nameless anxieties”, fairy tales help them understand them, delivering truths about the dangerous world of adulthood which are just abstracted enough not to frighten them. The archetypal fairy tale confronts children squarely with death, rape, abduction, exploitation — all at one remove. They are steeped in classical myth, Christian allegory and the golden suns and silver moons of pagan symbolism. For this reason they are mysterious and beautiful; for this reason they are long-lasting.
Bettelheim, a die-hard Freudian, discusses Snow White specifically as a warning to girls about the dangers of premature sexuality. For him the dwarfs are symbols of pre-oedipal childhood: they have no desires, and no identities (naming them and giving them distinct personalities is a Disney thing), but instead live in a “never-changing circle of work in the womb of the earth [they are miners], as the planets circle endlessly in a never-changing path in the sky”. Snow White must graduate from their company into mature sexual life, one which at first thwarts her (her desire for beautification via the corset and comb temporarily put her out of action before the final apple, Edenic totem of sexual knowledge) but which, after a long period of immobility, ultimately saves her via rescue by the prince.
The “deep sleep”, Bettelheim suggests, has a further allegorical meaning: that a healthy adolescence involves “time of rest and concentration” for deeper self-knowledge to develop. Fairy tales are not all swashbuckling and action; they are also repose, boredom, frustration. The story in general confronts children with an unwelcome but necessary fact: that they too will one day be forced to grow up, will leave the secure world of the dwarfs and be “expelled eventually from the original paradise of infancy” to be faced with dangerous people and their frightening desires. Sometimes, the story tells us, it is our own family that forces us into jeopardy — similar tales of absent, weak or dead fathers or jealous, vengeful mothers occur everywhere, as in Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast. The lesson here is not to fear your mother and father — they, after all, are probably the ones telling you the story — but to accept your own conflicted feelings about them, and so mature out of their care.
And so the functional role of fairy tales is revealed. More than simple amusements — and quite aside from dictums on sexual politics — these are strange glimpses into adulthoods that await the infant listener. When they tell a story about the greater vulnerability of girls, they are telling the truth — describing not the world we hope for but the one we are in. This is why the new film remake is so hideous: it wrenches apart the original and supplants it in a fantasy sanitised of the oppressive realities of girlhood.
The reason the trend of live-action adaptations feels dissatisfying is because it so often glosses over what is truly wonderful about the dark, cruel tales exchanged by our ancestors and hinted at in the Disney originals: that these are generous and sophisticated allegories with lessons important enough to have been carried in the protective shell of fantasy over many centuries. In modern childhoods beset with distractions and medicalised labels, coping with grand existential messages should be a priority; bedtime stories are best not when scolding us into correct opinions but confronting us with truths, their horrors just hidden enough that we might sleep.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
