The fact of me seeing and enjoying a contemporary movie is
such a rare occurrence that I decided it should be commemorated in a blog post,
so I’m reviewing Disney’s Frozen (2013)-- even if it means I’ll have to repair my credentials as a highbrow in the weeks that follow.
More seriously, I've found myself ruminating about this movie to an unusual degree, which suggests to me two things: 1) that it is a quality film-- reasonably thoughtful and well-scripted; and 2) that it is
probably a rather poor film for young children, who face very different crises
of identity and consciousness than we do and often ruminate on very different
subjects.
But first: no review of a new animated feature from Walt
Disney Studios would be complete if it did not rake the movie over the
coals of Political Correctness. Far be it from me to deny myself the pleasure of
joining the swarms of P.C. scorekeepers who have descended this year on Frozen
(2013), as they have on each of its predecessors, to start checking off boxes marked
“race,” “gender,” and “class." Why do we get such a thrill out of this? Probably, we are somewhat embarrassed by the frank
enjoyment we have gotten from the nostalgia and wish-fulfillment on screen and
feel the need to distance our adult, “rational” selves from this childlike response, and the easiest way to do this is
to hunt down pretexts for criticizing what we have enjoyed, and thus kicking
away for others the same ladder of fairy tale pleasure we have just
ascended. The other, related
explanation is that reviewers and “culture and media studies” gurus want to simultaneously get paid to watch kids movies and to seem clever
while doing it—two goals which, in the absence of political moralizing, might
seem irreconcilable.
There were one or two aspects of Frozen, however, which really did cry out for the intervention of us P.C. referees.
One was the concerning fact that the only identifiably non-white voices
in the film belonged to “Trolls” rather than humans. The first Troll who speaks on screen is
unmistakably a stereotype of a heavyset black woman, for instance, and was evidently voiced
by a black actress. Am I reading too much into this? It’s “seek and ye shall find” where bad
racial politics in Disney movies are concerned, after all. Well, I would be more hesitant to cry unconscious racism here if
children’s animated films didn’t already tend to feature black and Hispanic
voice actors in unsympathetic and comical roles, and very seldom in heroic ones
(James Earl Jones’ Mufasa performance standing here as at least one majestic
exception). It’s also not like Disney
hasn’t been called out on this so many hundreds of times already that it
couldn’t possibly have known better.
In short, I don’t think it requires a hyperactive liberal
conscience to worry that this habit of casting minority actors as unlikeable or
subhuman characters might convey a damaging message to kids, especially in
conjunction with the faceless and liveried white servants who populate the
castle scenes in Frozen. The unconscious message
being, I take it, that there exists one class of persons who live “real
life,” and who are the consistent objects of our attention; and another class,
lower in status, which exists primarily to observe and help along the
members of the former class. When of
course the world shouldn’t—and in fact does not—work this way. We are all the heroes of our own stories, as
David Copperfield says.
It is the gender politics of Frozen more than anything else, however, that have inspired commentary.
Predictably enough, the film represents one more last-ditch Disney effort to
present itself as acceptably feminist; and equally predictably, it has still
raised journalistic hackles for not going far enough in this direction. Says one critic: “It encourages young women
to support and stay loyal to each other—a crucial message when mean girls seem
so prevalent—as long as some hunky potential suitors and adorable,
wise-cracking creatures also are around to complete them. […] It all seems so
cynical, this attempt to shake things up without shaking them up too much.”
Let’s leave aside the fact that the people who make these
movies are mostly Hollywood creative types and pretty much just like the people who raise these sorts of objections in their education and political
outlook. Never mind that the creators of this film are
clearly falling over themselves in Frozen to forestall exactly the sort of
criticism this comment represents. Let’s
just assess the claim on its merits. Do
the “hunky potential suitors and adorable, wise-cracking creatures” in Frozen
“complete” the heroine? Or do they just
help her along? Without giving away any
spoilers, I think most viewers who watch the movie through to the end will
incline toward the latter view.
Meanwhile, it is only one of the two main female characters who shows
any romantic inclinations in the film—the other, Elsa, the Nietzchean creatrix, is
never seen with a suitor of any gender or any degree of hunkyness.
However, the reviewer might have a point that the romantic subplot is inappropriate in this film. It chiefly reflects adolescent concerns and identity issues, in other words, and asking younger children to relate to such things is asking too much. I would imagine, in fact, that it could even be damaging. So
much of the media already directed at pre-adolescent viewers in our society teaches them to want
to adopt and imitate teenage identities and concerns – to worry about dating
and romance and peer status conflict, etc. when these may in reality be
incomprehensible and even threatening to prepubescents. If
kids go along with this emulation of teenager patterns, they will feel profoundly at odds with themselves –
even ashamed. They may conclude that there is
something wrong with them, for having childlike inner feelings that are so
distinct from the adolescent ones society seems to expect and approve.
I suspect therefore that the proper viewership of this film may be quite distinct from its "target audience." Many adults I know have enjoyed Frozen quite a lot—mostly Millennials
like me, whose collective journey out of adolescence has been a notoriously
abortive one. My sister teaches in a
high school in Massachusetts, meanwhile, and assures me that her (female)
students are all totally gaga over this film.
But what about the young children toward whom these sorts of movies are
actually aimed and marketed? Did they
like it— and really like it? We don’t know, because we can’t really trust
statistics on this subject. Kids in this age group don’t make their own
movie-going choices, and are often ritualistically planted by their parents in front
of all animated films, regardless of quality or age-appropriateness.
We could try to make some guesses, however. My chief aid in this is Bruno Bettelheim’s
classic study of Western fairy tales, The Uses of
Enchantment (1977). Bettelheim was an
eminent child psychologist in his day, and while his book contains some
Freudian clichés that have not aged well, it is also full of insights. Chief
among them is Bettelheim’s central claim that children process their emotions
and conflicts through stories, and the way
in which they do so is so dissimilar from the ways in which adults
make sense of their own feelings, that most of our attempts to speak directly to “what’s on the child’s mind” will fail. Our best bet, says Bettelheim, is to trust in
folk stories that have been related for centuries or longer. Their longevity and their staying power in our collective memory suggests, says Bettelheim, that they answer to the child’s way of
seeing the world in a way that rationalistic adults could not have otherwise
foreseen.
Fairy tales succeed, says Bettelheim, because they don’t
hector (as “fables” do, by contrast); they don’t preach or moralize. They also don’t simply mirror a child’s
reality back to her, which would be a frightening experience and violate the
protective distance which sits between us and the fairy tale world and which
makes conflicts in that other world less unsettling in this one.
I’m not sure Frozen stacks up according to Bettelheim’s
standards of what a fairy tale should be.
The world it presents, while supernatural, obeys too much the logic of
adult and teenage reality. This is
especially true, as already hinted, in its portrayal of romantic relationships,
which conforms to an adolescent model.
We could dispute first of all whether it makes any sense to
depict romantic relationships in films aimed at prepubescent children. One could argue that no, it does not: such
relationships aren’t on the radar of most kids at that age and are likely to be
of little interest and relevance to them. I know
for one that if you had plopped me in front of Frozen as a child I would have
writhed in agony for the whole two hours.
What I wanted at that age was not love and marriage, but to project
myself into vast moralized conflicts between implacably opposed principles of good and evil. My imagination didn’t
dwell on future weddings or candlelit dinners, but on the number of Rivendell archers
you could fit along the roof of my house, and how long they could hold out against the advancing spawn of Mordor.
(Though let it be noted amidst my ignorant armies
clashing by night that I was a male child—all you retrograde sexists out there
can attach significance to that fact if you so choose.)
But if we really must have romance in kids movies, the
dialogue between the partners should not be patterned after 1940s screwball
comedies the way it is in Frozen. The
sort of banter and teasing that the chief romantic couple in this film trade
back and forth is no doubt delightful to adults and adolescents: it is clever and was well-executed for what it attempts. But this sort of
flirtatious sparring only makes sense to people old enough to have experienced sexual tension in their relations with other people, and the incongruous mixture of mutual frustration and fascination that it creates.
Adult or teenage behavior based on sexual tension will be
incomprehensible for kids who haven’t been through puberty—and it may even seem
threatening to them. When preadolescent kids see adult romantic partners, they perceive them as parents, not as fantasy versions of themselves. And within the child's simplistic model of how parents should behave, if they love each other (and romance always means love in Disney), they should be nice to each other. The only romantic relationship I
can recall liking or relating to as a kid in a Disney film was that between
Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and it was because the pair were just straightforwardly
kind and polite to one another – and therefore seemed like proper parents. (I suppose there was also my proto-Red thing going on too, in that they were both comrades in a struggle against injustice.)
For young children, any grade of tension and
frustration between two people means conflict and hostility—nothing more. The idea that people might express their
mutual interest and attraction to one another through squabbling would be a confusing
and upsetting one to kids for this reason. I
suspect therefore that if you could really know what pre-pubescent children felt while
watching Frozen – and not just what they claimed to feel, in emulation of
parents or older siblings—you would find that they were made uncomfortable and
even somewhat angry by the romantic subplot.
Supposing the filmmakers had nixed this plot, however, I don’t think
they should have lost the main male love interest, Kristoff, who I think is
constructed along acceptable Bettelheimian lines. There is something atavistically gratifying
about his role in the film as at once a loner, who lacks the obvious sources of protection from a surrounding society, and nonetheless a "good guy," who cares for other people.
Bettelheim offers a description of the ideal type of the fairy tale hero
which suggests why this might be so: “The hero is helped by being in touch with
primitive things – a tree an animal, nature [reindeer and ice, perhaps?] – as
the child feels more in touch with these things than most adults do. […] The fate
of these heroes convinces the child that, like them, he may feel outcast and
abandoned in the world […] but, like them, in the course of his life he will be
guided step by step, and given help when it is needed. Today, even more than in past times, the
child needs the reassurance offered by the image of the isolated man who
nevertheless is capable of achieving meaningful and rewarding relations with
the world around him.” (p. 11).
Keeping Kristoff and ditching the romance was a completely
viable option—it simply would have meant making his and Anna’s relationship a
Platonic one. It is strange how opposed Disney has always been to this
sort of solution, and how fiercely committed the studio is to inserting romance in every storyline. Presenting a Platonic male and female friendship in the film might have
encouraged young children in the belief that the opposite sex is not “threatening
or demonic,” which Bettelheim regards as one of the earliest attitudes that
children must transcend in the development process (p. 12). Flirtatious sparring, by contrast (this is my view-- Bettelheim
says nothing on the subject) is more likely to reinforce the attitude that the other
gender is threatening when observed at the wrong time of life—one in which all teasing reads as hostility.
The second feature of the film which may be developmentally
inappropriate is the lack of an obvious “villain" in its plot. Of course, there are in fact a few outright
baddies in Frozen, but they are easily forgettable, and the central conflict of the
film unfolds entirely without their intervention. The basic problem which must be solved in the
film is Elsa’s ambivalent relationship to her own magical powers, which have
the ability to harm those around her but which also seem to grow more deadly
and potent the more she tries to repress them. This has profound symbolic resonances with
the struggles of adolescence and early adulthood, as we will see below. For a young child, however,
the notion that you can do incredible harm by meaning to do good, that you
could have tendencies inside you that escape your control, might be too
disturbing and too alarmingly real a notion to face directly.
Bettelheim defends the role of the caricatured villain in the fairy tale on the grounds that it is only by
“externalizing” the principle of evil that a child can reassure herself that
she can eventually conquer or subdue it within herself.
According to Bettelheim, a child recognizes on some subconscious level
that the villain of a story embodies traits she also finds in herself. But because the villain is also not
really the same person as the hero of the story, the child can gain confidence
in the belief that destructive and aggressive inclinations, even her own, are
not all-controlling.
If Bettelheim is right, and I think he is, then presenting
Elsa as simultaneously a good person and the source of the destruction and
aggression that set the plot in motion might be a mistake, in a movie intended
for young children. Suggesting directly
that you can be “your own worst enemy,” rather than suggesting this indirectly and
symbolically, as fairy tales do through externalized villains, might be overwhelming to young children—it might, in fact, destroy the confidence they
have built up that destructive inclinations can eventually be mastered. So Bettelheim would say, at any
rate, if he could view it.
This is why Frozen probably should have been marketed as a
film for adolescents and young adults.
If it had been, there would have been very little for me to complain about,
apart from subaltern Trolls. After all,
these older age groups need fairy tales too, which help them to resolve their own inner dramas: and Frozen does very well at that, especially in its Elsa storyline.
The teenager, after all, is only just starting to bring to conscious
awareness her own power to create and destroy, and she finds that she cannot do away with these powers or repress them out of
existence—yet such repression is precisely what adults and peers and “society” seem to expect of her. The struggle of the
adolescent is therefore to free herself from “bad conscience,” as Nietzsche
would call it, and accept her own creative and destructive power as a part
of who she really is. This is achieved in the first
part of Elsa’s storyline, and the “Let it Go” show-stopper is the triumphant moment
of emancipation (“Here I stand,” says Elsa, like Luther in the Diet of
Worms). It is also most likely the only moment in Elsa's storyline that the teenagers in the
audience are likely to respond to at an emotional level, even if they
accept intellectually that it is not "supposed" to be the end of the story.
The young adults in the audience, by contrast, are far more
likely to respond to the latter half of Elsa’s story. The question that needs answering for them is
not so much how to free themselves from what they perceive as an alien moral code. Most
already have more “freedom,” in the negative sense, than they ever wanted. Their concern is how to make use of their
freedom to create meaning in their lives, which requires a sense of values-- but one that is not just a retreat into the child’s
dependence on authority. The teenager is
only too happy to learn that life is just “the restless desire of power after
power, that ceaseth only in death” (to quote Hobbes). "Meaning" is provided for her by authority structures-- she already has more meaning than she can stomach. The young adult, by contrast, finds the Hobbesian idea to be the most
disturbing possibility of all. She needs
reassurance that by “letting it go,” and ridding herself of "bad conscience," something good will come
out of her too, and not just the desire for conquest. She needs to understand that her individual
personality is not just a refined instrument of destruction. Again, without giving away spoilers, the
ending of the movie is meant to provide this sort of reassurance.
This is all developmentally spot on.
Why then, we might ask, didn’t Disney simply market this as a film for
teenagers and young adults? Well, it is a product of the theory of “family entertainment,” which holds that there should be
“something for everyone” in a film if it is not to be simply an unremitting
bore for Mom and Dad and Big Sis. The
idea, I guess, is that the young kids watching Frozen will enjoy the snow man
and the reindeer while the older ones will enjoy – you know – the actual
story.
Needless to say, this theory is
driven by the logic of marketing, and not by any awareness of the emotional
needs of young children, who in fact need stories that speak directly to them, and not simply goofy characters
and pretty colors to distract their minds.
The Elsa story line which works so well for teenagers and
adults is likely to be confusing and maybe even hurtful to young children. They are not yet suffering from the knowledge of their distinctive individualities, and
they have not yet had any of the experiences of the young adult who, perhaps, really did
“let it go,” at some point, and found that she hurt people by doing so without
intending it. Rather, the young child’s
pressing concern is to gain trust and security in a world that is much bigger than
he is and is full of danger and the threat of abandonment. To gain confidence in such
surroundings, the child needs to know there are good people (and animals) in
the world who will help him along.
Who is going to offer the stories to young children that
they need if it is not Disney? Where in
society can parents go to find them? If
one could rest assured that parents would simply read to their kids from old
stories, and leave the movies to teenagers, the absence of such stories in Disney movies would be less disconcerting.
But I suspect what
is happening and what will continue to happen in our society is that young children are increasingly being exposed to adolescent concerns and models of identity, to the exclusion of the stories they need. Kids will conclude from this that they are supposed to
think and feel like teenagers, even though they don't naturally think and feel that way. And the
attempt to be something you’re not, as Frozen itself reminds us,
can only lead to trouble.
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