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Have we discussed the live-action remake of 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs since it came out?
In an effort to drum up business my local theater is running a promotion that includes free movie tickets for spending money at local bars and restaurants. While it's not something I would've spent my own money on, I elected to use one of my free movie vouchers to see the new Snow White because I was curious, and wanted to form my own opinion of it.
I expect most readers of this thread have at least a passing familiarity with the various controversies surrounding this production and more knowledgeable people than I have already done the business and Culture-war narrative side of things to death. So I'm going to focus on the on-screen product.
As a movie Snow White is solidly "Mid". Not good, but not terrible. The writing, acting, and set-peices are all passable. The humor is bland and inoffensive, and the songs are mostly forgettable. Gal Godot may have the dramatic range of an Electric SUV on 5% charge, but "Sultry Femme Fatale" is well within that range, and she seems to be having fun vamping it up (As is often the case the "villain song" is one of the better ones). To Rachel Ziegler's credit she sings well and serves adequately in the role of "pretty princess" / "coquettish ingenue" coming across as substantially less "Girlbossey" than I had expected given her off-screen persona.
The movie wastes no time establishing it's left wing-wing politics. The opening song and dance number is essentially all about how wonderful life is when people give according to their ability and receive according to their need. The word-play between "fair" as in "light-skinned" or "pleasing to the eye" and "fair" as in "fair use" "fair trade" and a "fair contest" is a recurring leitmotif throughout the script and it gets established in this bit.
Because Disney princesses are not allowed to have a mother the good queen falls ill and dies at the end of the song which is when a wild Gal Godot appears. She is a beautiful noblewoman from a far-off land across the sea whose people, covet wealth, power, and beauty above all else, and have magical powers. The King (Snow White's dad) is naturally smitten and immediately marries Gal Godot presumably because she is wealthy, powerful, and looks like Gal Godot.
In her new position as Queen, Snow White's stepmother immediately begins to subtly corrupt the Realm and remake it in her own harder and more covetous image (think Pottersville versus Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life). In case you haven't picked up on it yet, Snow White's canonical origin story in this movie is about a virtuous and happy left-wing government being subverted and taken over from within by an evil Jewish woman through a combination of sex-appeal, blood magic, and propaganda.
We skip forward an indeterminate number of years, Snow White has been kept cloistered in the castle "because it is not safe". The evil queen Gal Godot has been sowing fear about a nebulous threat on the southern border as an excuse to get Snow White's Dad out of the picture and to crack down on dissent. (I wonder what that was intended as an allegory for?) Snow White catches a thief named Johnathan played by Handsome McStrongJaw raiding the Castle's pantry, and he informs her that life outside the castle walls is not all sunshine and adorable woodland creatures. Snow White's response is to inform the Queen. You see, if only the queen knew what was going on she would put a stop to it. Johnathan is arrested and put to death, but Snow White helps him escape the castle because this is a Disney movie and he is the designated love-interest.
Snow White is getting a bit too uppity and too "fair" for her own good so Gal Godot convinces the one black guy in the palace guard to take Snow White out to the woods and kill her by getting all up in the guard's personal space and offering him anything he wants. Black guy takes Snow White out to the woods to kill her, but he gets cold-feet and decides to tell Snow White about the whole murder plot because she was nice to him and asked him how his day was going.
Snow White flees into the enchanted wood where she meets the Seven AI-Generated Dwarves we are all familiar with from the 1937 original. After some hijinks and another musical number the Dwarves inform her that the enchanted wood is also home to Seven Bandits. A troupe of erstwhile actors who are plotting to overthrow Gal Godot and have recently been joined by our "prince of thieves" Johnathan. Snow White sets out to find them and a bunch of stuff happens without any real rhyme or reason. There is singing, there is dancing, there is peril, but none of it really effects the plot or evokes a feeling.
The proverbial "final battle" of the movie is Snow White and the Seven Bandits leading a protest march against Gal Godot that ends with the Townspeople and Palace Guards
all drinking a pepsiturning on the queen and reinstating the socialist order from the opening musical number.In conclusion, for what is otherwise a very bland and boring movie in the watching there seems to be a lot going on. And im curious to hear other people's thoughts on it.
I also find it funny that what is easily the most "woke" movie in recent memory could plausibly be interpreted as endorsing dissident right ideals, Jews Bad, hereditary monarchy good, "the people" are sheep, etc...
I've been following the commentary around this movie in a desultory way for the past couple of years. So far it seems like it's doing very sluggish opening business, and because it's been delayed so long and gone through so much re-writes/add in CGI, the budget has ballooned and Disney is allegedly facing another box office bomb.
I think the main problem was Zegler shooting her mouth off. She's very young and would have been even younger when the movie originally went into production, but trash talking the original cartoon, claiming the central romance is creepy stalker and Snow White Don't Need No Man, and joking about the main male lead being written out and edited out completely, as well as "now 'who is the fairest of them all?' means 'being powerful and ruling fairly and not needing no man'" does not sell the movie to families wanting a traditional Disney movie they can bring their kids to.
Updating something from 1937 isn't impossible or a bad thing, but they should have put a muzzle on Zegler. Add in the delays and the unforced errors about replacing the Seven Dwarves with the Seven Persons Experiencing Unhousedness (who now turn out to be the merry band of thieves in the forest led by the prince who is no longer a prince but a bandit chief this time round) and then having to bring back the dwarves with poor-looking CGI, and you get a mess. EDIT: I also heard that the climactic battle is anti-climactic? Originally it was supposed to be Snow White and Evil Queen going toe-to-toe, but now she just falls off a cliff or something?
To my own eyes, Snow White's costume looked terribly cheap - for a big budget movie, where did the money go? So too late, too pulled about, and it's just a rehash of the cartoon so parents will probably wait for it to turn up on the streaming service instead of spending the money for a cinema trip which is increasingly expensive.
In the 1937 version, it's a bolt of lightning that precipitates her fall off a cliff. So this is pretty standard.
It's funny how the right played right into this. Hollywood made a dud and when the ship starts to sink the rats turned on each other and found a scapegoat. Her idiotic comments, no matter how daft, were not at fault.
The thing is, that actually has some symbolic meaning beyond the convenience of a clean death. The Queen's schemes of immortal beauty are cut short by a sudden fateful death, there's some depth to it, no pun intended.
But with the way the plot is changed, that doesn't actually make any sense anymore, except as a reference to the original.
Still, in the original tale, the queen dies by being forced by the Prince to dance to death in red hot iron slippers. Which makes a lot more symbolic sense, but I can understand how it's not children's cartoon material.
I think it should be, and hold with Tolkien that the problem with modern fairy stories is that they're too sanitized. The danger and horror are part of the point and kids want their horizons expanded that way. They'll find it where they can get it.
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Indeed.
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What do you mean? Studios have been blaming istophobic comments from muh toxic fandom, regardless of how people were actually behaving for the better part of the decade now.
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Seems like the main problem then was on the production side at Disney and Zegler was mostly just mirroring their energy. The ambivalence-at-best towards the source material seems to come from the top.
I don't think her inability to shut her mouth is good - why would you bring in Palestine on what's an already fraught campaign? - but Disney made multiple inexplicable decisions that not only apparently harmed the movie but ballooned the budget to the point it was far less likely to make its money back even had the changes worked. And now they're leaking that Zegler's big mouth put them in this mess to shift the blame.
Disney has a major problem where it is unwilling or unable to constrain budgets on productions.
I think midlevel execs get an ego boost from writing big cheques. It makes them feel important and powerful.
My theory is that it's fear of commitment. They're delaying every single production decision to the last minute because technology now allows them to and they're afraid that the audience context will change at the last minute and sabotage any choice. And execs are too cowardly to take bets, so everything must be CGI and reshoots galore, which means ballooning budgets.
Ironically, this particular movie (on track to be the biggest bomb ever) proves them right, the bad buzz around the dwarves most likely made them go for CGI counterparts, but the political landscape changed so fast and so unpredictably that the entire premise of the movie is a hopelessly outdated tale of girlbossing coming out on the tail end of a Kamalastrophe. Wicked made money, why didn't his work?!
The world is indeed changing too fast for execs to make the right choices. But as anybody with good artistic sense knows this calls not for indecision and fingerpointing, but long term vision and decisive action, the supply of which is nonexistent in Hollywood at the moment.
This will probably continue until we get new new Hollywood figures. The next Lucas might already be around in the shadows.
Part of it clearly seems to have been COVID breaking something because it's been significantly worse since.
But I don't think it's a coincidence that Marvel, which is notorious for fiddling, fired Victoria Alonso as the sacrificial lamb. And one of the complaints about her? She was infamous for pushing animators to their breaking point and making late changes.
They were already notorious for marginalizing directors Maybe COVID revealed to them just how far they could go with it and they hit a Lucas-level of hubris about the tech. After all, who suffers from this indecisiveness except animators who need to work with Disney anyway?
I find this far more sympathetic with Marvel, which had to do something even comics struggled with before doubling its output.
There's little reason for this indecisiveness around Snow White.
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I mean, that style of villain death is a Disney classic.
The classic Disney villain death is for the bad guy to fall off a cliff after getting into a final fight with the hero.
It's the best of both worlds; you get to see the hero defeat the villain in a climactic battle, the hero gets to show how good and noble he is by sparing the villain's life, then the villain dies anyway in a way that keeps the hero morally pure.
See Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, etc.
I was wondering if you were going to link to that Kulak piece as I read your comment. I haven’t been able to unsee that trope and ponder its meaning in each case I see it ever since reading it.
This is the first time I've seen it and it is a baffling article.
In particular it seems to build a case entirely from an imagined literary genre? He makes this appeal:
But the fact there is that if you do read those texts, they completely undermine his primary case, which is a plea for more retributive violence, even vigilante violence. If you read, say, Le Morte d'Arthur, you will notice regular and conspicuous displays of mercy to defeated enemies, and unnecessary bloodshed is portrayed as a major threat. Arthur and Pellinore become trusted friends and allies, for instance, and the fact that Pellinore killed King Lot, rather than spare him as he ought to, becomes one of the causes of his eventual death. Sir Gareth defeats several knights in a row, all of whom are acting as vicious bandits, and spares them (at a lady's request, no less) and they come to Arthur's court and are forgiven. When characters choose bloodshed, this is usually bad - the tragedy ends with Arthur's determination to kill Mordred, rather than allow him to flee, bringing his own doom upon him.
The trope of defeating someone and then forgiving them and becoming friends is extremely common in pre-modern literature. Half of Robin Hood's merry men are people that Robin defeated, and then extended a hand to in friendship, saying "you are a man after my own heart!"
Heck, this happens biblically: consider David's repeated and conspicuous refusal to harm his enemy Saul, even when Saul is in his power.
What about classical antiquity? Here I'd note something they have in common with the Viking sagas, which is deep concern about the possibility of blood feuds, and the demand that violence ought to be limited and proportional in order to avoid them. Destroying enemies in a temper is bad. The Aeneid ends with the defeated Turnus asking for mercy, or failing that, to have his body returned to his people for burial rites, and Aeneas' furious refusal to do this and act of retribution is presented as a bad thing, or as a moral failing. Likewise the way the Iliad treats Achilles' disrespect of Hector's body. Neither the Aeneid nor the Iliad are pacifist works that believe that violence is always bad, but they are written with an awareness of the dangers of vengeance. The same is true of the sagas.
What's the last one he cites? Elizabethan England? Suffice to say that I do not think the people who wrote this endorsed bloody-minded retribution.
Now, sure, in all of those cases there is a specific local context - David doesn't hurt Saul because he's God's anointed, and so on. All the examples are a bit more complicated. Everything always is.
Likewise there are acts of retribution, and those acts also have context - Odysseus kills all the suitors, not because they're his enemies in some general way, but because they have specifically violated the laws of hospitality, which are sacred, and even then the way Homer describes the slaughter does not seem to be one that we are intended to cheer for. In the Odyssey itself the act is presented as something somewhat transgressive. The slaughter itself is an extended sequence in which the suitors beg for mercy, try to rally a desperate defence, and so on; there is something terrible about it. And then in the poem the families of the suitors demand justice afterwards and Odysseus must reconcile with them, in book 24. Antinous' father gets up and makes a moving speech about his sorrow, and the suitors' families plan to attack. The Odyssey actually ends with Athena intervening and telling Odysseus to stop being violent lest he incur the gods' anger: "men of Ithaca, cease this dreadful war, and settle the matter at once without further bloodshed... Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, stop this warful strife, or Zeus will be angry with you."
Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.
Kulak has made LARPing a revolutionary his financial income. Back in the Canadian trucker protests he made repeated calls to resistance and violence and called it a moral failing for any man not to risk death or hospitalization for the righteous cause... while begging exception since he was already in a hospital for a medical procedure. Gotta look out for you own health first, right?
Alas, any cause that warrants risking hospitalization to prove virtue is worth leaving a hospital that you might be returned to.
Kulak is a modern day version of the man with their rocking chair by the fire who valorizes the virtue of fighting and glory of dying young to defend hearth and home.
To be fair he almost lost an arm and it was touch and go re: whether he'd ever get full use of his hand again, or even sensation. I've seen the scars (and the arm while it was healing) and they're wild. Took several surgeries. FWIW he also accomplished this injury while doing something badass, but I've said enough.
"Driving around the country" is just Tuesday man -- he reminds me of myself when I was his age in some ways, but if he wants to be badass he needs to do better than "I crashed my bike" (also "Tuesday" for a lot of guys I used to know) in my books.
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Victory in violence always demands the sacrifice of your body. You might hope to get away without injury, but you never expect it. People of violence understand this and accept it, or lose. So I am going to need more than assurances he did something badass if you want to change my mind that that incident didn't cement his status as a risible caricature.
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Why is that fair to him? He set the standard he judged others by, and he can be judged by it in turn. 'Fair' is not 'nice,' it is impartiality.
Did he meet his own standard of sincerity and moral courage that he accused other of lacking if they did not join a violent resistance despite risk of bodily harm as a consequence?
Or did he abstain on grounds of the consequence of bodily harm?
When someone makes moral judgements and accusations of cowardness for others not risking life or limb, the fair response to claims of personal abstainment on grounds of risk of limb if they went forth is not 'oh, you could get hurt? That's understandable.' It is 'so what, coward?'
Particularly since there have many been many other contexts, before and after, for him to have proven his bravery, if he wanted to tie bravery to political defiance and violence.
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TracingWoodgrains once likened him to Nikocado Avocado, a man (or catgirl?) made ever more grotesque by the vehicle that brought money and fame. I cannot unsee it, despite enjoying some of Kulak's earlier writing (like the Alex Jones/WWF piece).
I remember quite enjoying a piece he wrote about Shakespeare. But I suppose the internet does have a tendency to turn people into parodies of themselves. Even people like Trace, bless him, feel like they've become flattened over time - or at least their online personae have.
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Abolish the police
Give everyone a gun and a wink
???
Justice!
Give war a chance.
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This is basically everything Kulak writes. He makes up a version of what people in the past thought, from the ancient Greeks to the American founding fathers, that bears no resemblance to anything they actually wrote, but in Kulak's version always boils down to "Violence, violence, and more violence."
I'd say he's historically and culturally illiterate, but accuracy isn't the point. It's all a con to convince other people that violence is the answer (to everything).
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The dark meaning of mercy for the villain is the same as the dark meaning of opposition to the death penalty. Brutal thugs are not executed, but given long prison terms. Warehoused. Saved for later. This reserve army of brutal thugs is a valuable resource for avant-garde revolutionaries. Think 1917 Russian revolution. Its was a close run thing with a brutal civil war. Typically the avant-garde don't have the numbers. They may win power, but not have the numbers to hold on to it. They need to put boots on the necks of counter-revolutionaries. Since their tests for counter-revolutionariness have too many false negatives, they have to go large and put boots on the necks of the general population. Where do they find the feet to fill the boots? They release brutal thugs from prison to provide the muscle for the NKVD, KGB, Stasi, etc.
It is a very dangerous game. The avant-garde revolutionaries need to retain control of their brutal thugs. The thugs need to be kept divided. If some get ideas above their station, others are sent to kill them. But the Russian revolution and the French revolution both ate themselves. One faction within the revolutionary avant-garde sends their tame thugs to kill a rival faction within the avant-garde. The death toll rises and Stalin or Napoleon comes out on top.
I'm unclear on the causal connections here. Perhaps opposition to the death penalty is all high minded mercy. When the revolution comes, it is an unfortunate accident that the revolutionaries are gifted a reserve army of brutal thugs to help them consolidate their power. Or perhaps there are some strategic thinkers covertly funding the merciful people naturally inclined to oppose the death penalty. The money boosts the opposition to the death penalty, enough for mercy to defeat prudence.
It is not just domestic revolutionaries that one has to worry about. When the USSR took over Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, releasing brutal thugs from prison, to provide the muscle for the secret police, was one of the techniques used to impose the new communist governments.
Source on the use of prisoners for such tasks?
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The original communist revolutions in Russia and Germany were carried out by mutinying army units, not by condemned criminals.
Repeating myself
Think about what happens after the Kronstadt rebellion. The soldiers mutiny, and overthrow the Tsar. The Bolsheviks take power. The infighting starts. Where do they find the men to stab their colleagues in the back on their behalf?
It is not about the overthrow of the old regime, it is about the worst people rising to the top of revolution and needing henchmen to do deeds that are repugnant to the earlier idealistic revolutionaries.
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I’m on record as opposing the death penalty not because of any high minded ideals, nor because I want an army of thugs in reserve, but because the government is entirely untrustworthy. I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
In theory, not having the death penalty allows for a future government, or the people themselves, to rectify things in the future in the way that the death penalty doesn’t. If society was less bifurcated in their beliefs, I could see it being more of value (as people could more consistently agree on the targets of violence).
In general, though, I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power - people with a monopoly on violence should be severely limited on what else they can do, lest they use violence to seize all else in life.
That cuts both ways. Do you limit government power by permitting the government to accumulate a reserve army of brutal thugs, or by preventing this by murdering the nascent reserve army in its crib?
I've mentioned Communist revolutionaries. See https://theworthyhouse.com/2024/11/19/on-the-1956-hungarian-revolution/ for an interesting, horse-shoe twist
But one could read about Oskar Dirlewanger and where he found the men to staff the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirlewanger_Brigade
Coming up to date,
https://www.newsweek.com/inside-wagner-group-criminals-contractors-putins-war-1770392
I must stop writing this comment before I sink too deeply into despair, both about where government power comes from, and the level of counter-ruthlessness needed to oppose it.
The issue is that the government will only perform the death penalty on those that would be the army of their opponents, not their own. A left wing government would give slap on the wrist sentences to those that perform left wing coded violence, while bringing the full force of the law down on those that commit right wing coded violence (and vice versa is true too).
The advantage to “the government can’t kill anyone” is that it removes it’s discretion to do this - there are always ways for a government to avoid prosecuting those in its favour.
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In the United States? What precedent can you point to in the history of this country to justify this fear? The death penalty was widely practiced across the U.S. until well into the second half of the 20th Century, and is still practiced in many states today. As far as I’m aware there are no historical examples, whether at the federal, state, or local level, of it being used to punish pure speech crimes. Several American administrations have been more than willing to imprison political dissidents — the Wilson administration very famously harassed and imprisoned many socialists and anti-war activists, for example — but none (again, as far as I’m aware) has ever suggested executing them.
In fact, looking at the sorts of crimes people have been executed for over the history of this country, it seems like they’re all pretty much exactly the ones you’d expect. There actually does seem to be pretty widespread agreement, at least among those in this country who don’t actively oppose the death penalty, regarding which crimes merit it. This was true in periods wherein Americans were more “bifurcated in their beliefs” than they are now. (i.e. during the Civil War) It seems like paranoia about being executed for tweets is fairly disconnected from any sober analysis of the actual probability of that event coming to pass.
The USG has executed a few people for basically political grounds, granted that they committed actual crimes those crimes would probably not otherwise have resulted in the death penalty.
Mary Surratt seems like the clearest example; I'd guess you could also add the Rosenbergs even if I have no sympathy at all for them.
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I meant mean tweets as shorthand for any politically incorrect speech; and I live in Canada, not in the United States.
Remember that Britain (for example) spent state resources prosecuting someone for misgendering their rapist.
It’s actually not that hard to reach a state where the state could justify it. If words are “literally violence,” it is fairly straightforward to make the case that mean words towards a minority group is exactly what Hitler did (even without the literal violence clause, you could claim that the person in question is encouraging violence and erasure, which is literally genocide).
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Zegler isn’t ugly but next to Gadot Zegler looks like a soft 6. Relative casting matters.
In short, the problems from Snow White are:
Is this the consensus opinion? Like, not just something people repeat online for ideological reasons? (More on Xitter/Insta, not accusing anyone in here necessarily). I prefer Zegler but I'm also ageist and like women with wide eye spacing. Zegler is definitely more attractive to me on a superficial level, like a more exotic Anya Taylor Joy, Gadot is very above average but is older and has a more masculine edge to her. Also their skin tones aren't even that different. Zegler could pass for Mediterranean to me though I'm not an Ethnoguesser pro.
Zegler has a weird chin and sometimes looks, for lack of a better word, a little retarded.
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I don't think either of them is especially attractive but can see what people like about both. Gadot was a good pick for the role. Zegler, I don't think so. There were innumerable better options and would it have killed them to use someone with fair skin?
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Given how they apparently changed the way "fairest" meant in this remake, I actually wonder if the relative looks here was the point. Of course, they couldn't hire someone outright ugly as the lead, but making sure that she's significantly and noticeably less attractive than the Evil Queen (very easy to do when you cast Gadot as her) could have been consciously intentional for the purpose of sending little girls the message that good looks are bad, actually. It's interesting, though, that the original film had a pretty overt message about the evilness of vanity, which gets lost when you replace the Evil Queen's obsession about being the fairest-as-in-beautiful to fairest-as-in-just. I don't know how the remake justifies it, but it seems bizarre that a Queen who intentionally sends her King off to die and oppresses her happy subjects would obsess over a magic mirror's judgment of her as being fair-as-in-just. Perhaps there's some way the Queen's perspective is presented in a way to show that she actually genuinely believes that she is a just ruler? Given how much Disney's been into redeeming female villains like Cruella DeVille or Maleficent, this could've been a good opportunity to show her as a misguided soul who was traumatized by a man in her past that led her to an obsession with being a just ruler that nonetheless turned into evil. I haven't heard that from any reviews, though.
It sounds like much of the film was written with conscious messaging in mind, based on the descriptions I read and saw of the plot, which seems to involve pretty unambiguous pro-Communist messaging, and also an addition of a plot point presenting Dopey as someone unfairly bullied for his muteness and who turns out to be able to talk in the end.
I think the message is that good looks are largely uncorrelated from good morals. Which is an overdone message, but probably a good one for the middling.
Heck, half the trad discourse on X is "stop chasing the thots just because they are the hottest chicks in your field of vision and instead seek out a woman of virtue (as defined thus)". Map it that way, and "who is the fairest of them all" could easily come out of the right, which bemoans a leftist culture of shallow beauty over virtue.
It's all so tiresome.
This interpretation makes no sense in the context of the story, though. The evil queen is the second-most “fair” person in the entire kingdom, but decides to murder her innocent stepdaughter out of jealousy, which is pretty obviously not morally virtuous.
You cannot become a morally virtuous person by murdering all the innocent children who are more virtuous than you, except in the trivial sense that if you murder literally everyone else, you are “most virtuous” by default (which isn't what happens in the story). However, you can become the most physically attractive woman by murdering all the women who are more attractive than you.
So the story only makes sense if (at least the evil stepmother) thinks of “fair” as meaning “physically attractive”, not “morally virtuous”.
That just means she needs to be more virtuous than the competition, so if she killed everyone except even worse mass murderers she might be the “fairest” somehow?
Maybe the qualifications for citizenship in this kingdom is to be a genocidal maniac?
Worst mass murderers range at about 100 victims, and "killing everyone except" would be certainly much larger than any mass murderer
(I'm sure we could stretch the definition of mass murderer to include Pol Pot et al. and bullshit in a country's worth of these by harvesting across different timelines or whatever convenient plot and physics contrivance is needed, but...)
That still could theoretically work. Say every single person granted access to the kingdom must have killed at least 2 people; if the Queen and Snow White were the only two humans who weren't killers, then the Queen could kill Snow White only and still have the lowest body count of the entire kingdom.
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We're putting a lot of weight on the subjective judgements of a magic mirror. Maybe the mirror is as muddled as real people and lacks a satisfying resolution to a "fair" vs "fair" conflict.
Maybe the magic mirror was just gaslighting the queen about her daughter's bangability.
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Mirrors are shockingly uneducated in homophones.
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I certainly won't write apologia for the half consistent plot line.
I was only pointing out that a given message (whether consistent or otherwise in this particular film) can be right-coded or left-coded.
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The original of course didn’t shy away from beauty being good. But to your point vanity was bad. Yes Snow White was fair but also good hearted — she wasn’t consumed by her fairness. She inspired everyone around her to be a better person. She didn’t need to be a girlboss; the original Snow White was the paradigmatic young woman — fair, looking forward to building a family, kind, nurturing, and inspiring others to be better.
The modern iteration is…an activist
So fittingly enough, she was the paradigmatic young woman, in the context of the Modern Audience^(tm).
Yeah true. Problem for them is people just don’t like the paradigmatic young woman of the Modern Audience.
On multiple occasions I found myself wondering "who is this trying to appeal to?"
Outside of the bits with the AI-generated Dwarves it doesn't feel like a kids movie, at the same time it doesn't feel like a movie made for adults either. The whole thing has a very YA tumblr fandom "I'm thirteen and think this is deep" vibe to it.
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Oh yeah, I discount the "she's brown not white so not Snow White" stuff and she's pretty enough, but agreed: they did have to manoeuvre around "are you kidding me, Magic Mirror, who is the fairest?" to make it work. That then introduces the problem of "she's the Evil Queen, why the hell does she care about who is the 'fairest where that means most just' part or whether that applies to her?" but you can't have a Snow White story without the Magic Mirror, so, eh.
The evil queen literally does a whole song and dance about how you can get away with murder so long as you're rich and hot, but did anyone in the writers room think about how it fit into the rest of the movie? I don't think they did.
It sounds like nobody in the writers' room was thinking about the story as it got pulled here and there by reactions to reactions, hence all the revamping and reshooting and rewriting.
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