Rewatching Frozen

 I can never think back to that review of Disney's Frozen I wrote on this blog more than ten years ago without wincing. It strikes me now as unbearably pretentious. And the fact that my writing has not become any less pretentious in the decade since only makes it worse. Did we really—I think with a cringe of pain—need references to Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Martin Luther in that post? 

But when we re-watched the movie this past week with my nephew and niece (the first time I had seen it in the last ten years)—I had to admit that many of the same thoughts irresistibly occurred to me again. When Elsa stamps her foot during the "Let It Go" number and cries, "Here I'll stand/ And here I'll stay," I once again felt an overpowering urge to compare it to Martin Luther's historic foot-stomp: "Here I stand; I can do no other." 

And when she simply decides to unleash the will to power that she has kept bottled up for years at the behest of her parents, and allow the wintry darkness free reign, I can't help but think that she is indeed being a "Nietzschean creatrix," a Zarathustra speaking—just as I described her then. 

Indeed, the only thing I feel inclined to revise now is that I didn't put enough positive emphasis on this aspect of the movie—which remains its most powerful. After all, looking back on that post, I see that I spent a long time denigrating this aspect of the film, to the extent I mentioned it at all. Elsa's struggle to break free from the shackles of slave-morality was, according to the 2014 version of me, a characteristically adolescent struggle, the emotional force of which would be lost on younger kids and older adults alike. 

In that decade-old post, I positioned myself as someone who had resolved all of his adolescent conflicts of this sort, and who was now far too mature to relate to such a message in a film. But, as Mark Leyner observes in passing in a 2016 novel—the real story, according to the Freudians, is often to be found in whatever people are going out of their way to deny. And so, it seems plain to me now, my long digression in 2014 about how I didn't relate to Elsa was really my way of saying she was the one character in the film I completely identified with. 

After all—what was going on in my life in March of 2014? I was about two years into divinity school. I was there in the first place, and was continuing to labor while there, due to a profound psychological need to prove that I was moral and virtuous. I felt it was incumbent on me to vindicate liberalism from the charges heaped upon it by its communitarian and conservative and radical critics of being overly individualistic—by proving that actually it was the only intellectual tradition that led people to be altruistic. 

I therefore felt the need to be the perfect exemplar in my personal life of the liberal virtues. Everything I did and wrote—especially my sermons—had to be charged with humanitarian optimism and idealism. I needed to believe in and model human goodness in all my words and deeds. In other words—I tried artificially to be the sort of person that my dad, for instance, just naturally and actually is. 

But by 2014—two years into the divinity school experiment—I was starting to realize that there was something in me that didn't follow these rules. There was a part of me that longed to tell the truth, as I saw it—even when the truth did not foster idealism. There was part of me that laughed at optimism—and not with the commercially-acceptable tinkle of the "angel's laughter"—as Milan Kundera puts it, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—but with the "devil's laughter" that Kundera describes as the longing to give the angels a kick in the rear. This laughter wasn't the whole of me, perhaps—but it was part of me, and it would eventually find its way out. 

The blog—when I started writing it in 2013—was its first means of escape. The devil finally had his say on this site. And when it happened, it felt like a great release. It was rather like Martin Luther (to continue the analogy above), breaking through the shackles of his monastic training and finally giving vent to his spiritual rebellion. Indeed, 2014 was the year I read Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther—and Erikson's thesis that Luther's obsession with scatology was his way of symbolizing the need for an escape valve for his rebellion—a need to vomit up the dreck within, to express the devil's laughter he felt inside (and for Luther, the devil and scatology were always closely linked)—seemed somehow to apply to me as well. 

One of the poems that meant the most to me in that year, for instance—and that stirred my Luciferian and Lutheran depths most profoundly—was one by D.H. Lawrence: "Don't be a good little, good little boy/ being as good as you can/ and agreeing with all of the mealy-mouthed, mealy-mouthed/ truths that the sly trot out." Yes, I thought. Simple as the poem's instructions were, they felt like the one command I most needed to hear. I felt I had been chained up as a good boy all my life—and now I was finally seeing a way out. 

A friend of mine noticed this happening, and told me that my blog reminded him of a certain anime character who was displaying his supernatural strength for the first time. "When you turn a phrase on that blog," my friend told me, "you're just like that character: 'Now I will show you what I can do!!'"

The parallels to the themes of Frozen are not hard to spot. Elsa has been forced all her life to "Be the good girl/ You always have to be," as the lyrics run. She has had to "conceal" and "not feel." And when she finally unleashes the powers of perpetual winter that she has kept bottled up all this time within, it comes as a profound liberation. "No right, no wrong/ No rules for me/ I'm freeeeeee!" as she declares. "Now I will show you what I can do," she might as well be saying. Finally, someone has whispered to her the Lawrentian advice: "Don't be a good little, good little girl/ Being as good as you can." 

Eventually, of course, Elsa learns that she can't actually just "let it go" and abandon all rules of morality—at least not without hurting innocent people—including people who love her. Even by trying to be alone, she ends up wounding the world. She tries to embrace a Zarathustrian amorality, a Lawrentian life aesthetic, that is not actively harmful to the world—you go your way, and I'll go mine; you do your thing, and leave me alone; seems to be her message. But she finds that this is impossible. Human beings are embedded in relationships whether they like it or not. They cannot escape the net of sociality and hence of morality. 

But the answer is not therefore to go back to the prior approach, and try to suppress and conceal her powers again, she discovers—but to control and harness them. The answer is not to choke off the "devil's laughter" within (so long as it's there, it can't be permanently silenced)—but to find a way to use that laughter for the angels' cause—to mock injustice and vindicate the innocent. It is not to destroy the church, but to reform it, to continue the Luther analogy; not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, we might say. In other words, morality and the need for personal expression may be in tension—but if they are, it is a fruitful, dialectical tension; and as such, it can yield a higher synthesis. And it is toward that synthesis of two inimical yet equally necessary aspects of the human personality that Frozen ultimately leads us. 

Of course, I sought to downplay all of that, back in 2014. I turned pink at just how much a Disney movie actually did kind of speak to my twenty-four-year-old self, so I tried to deny it. "Not me!" I went out of my way to say. And all of those elaborate disavowals now read to me as nothing less than a flashing sign, reading: "This is totally me!" Elsa, the long-disavowed, but now acknowledged, queen—c'est moi!