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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.
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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