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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...
So the movie was not very good, and also not Snow White.
I’m wondering if proof of concept for AI actors was the point, but surely that’s already done?
Fuck it I’m taking up the hlynka posting mantle- they’re the same thing. They’re both revolutionary ideologies calling for to radically remake society in a short period of time. They merely disagree about who gets cushy sinecures doing stupid bullshit(black lesbians or white men). The DR weirds out classical conservatives once they figure out it’s not a meme. There is a de Maistre shaped hole in the popular consciousness but the slow growth of more functional societies will eat the revolution alive.
Once again I am begging you people to recognize that Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is not the Default Ideology against which all others are measured.
Communists and Neoreactionaries only appear similar to you because they are both roughly equidistant from American GOP-style conservatives along the axes that are most important to you. There are other orthogonal axes along which they are also very far apart from each other, and those axes are equally important, if not necessarily to you personally.
As I told Hlynka frequently, your analysis here is useful to you as a Schmittian friend-enemy identifier, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of actually understanding the internal motivations of the people and movements you’re analyzing.
I’m a classical reactionary.
Communists and neoreactionaries are similar because they are similar. They believe in top-down change according to rationalist principles. In a sense, they’re both totalitarian ideologies. The NRX patchwork state is many tiny countries, not many individuals living in different ways in the same country, not many institutions enabling their members to live different lifestyles under one state. There’s no pillarization. There’s no room for the unknowable, for non-state institutions, only for the subsumption of man into the state, as varied as the state may be.
The main difference is who they think should be in charge/receiving sinecures.
Huh? This does not match my interpretation of anything that figures such as Yarvin have advocated. “Totalitarian” means the populace is fully politicized and expected to interface thoroughly, on both a practical and, more importantly, an *affective level, with the state. Yarvin’s model is a depoliticized populace whose relationship with the state is either that of an employee to his employer, or otherwise that of a consumer to a provider. He doesn’t want the average person to have any reason to form an opinion regarding state policy, nor to have any illusion of political input regarding policy decisions. This might be authoritarian, but I don’t see much resemblance between that and, say, North Korean juche or Third Reich state-worshipping rallies. Perhaps you and I have differing understandings of what totalitarianism implies.
"Authoritarianism is when there are things which you cannot talk about; totalitarianism is when there are things which you cannot be silent on"
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