(Before I begin this article, I would like to say
that I did, in fact, enjoy Frozen. There were many things about it that were
fun and well-done. But for a movie that had so much potential, it frustrates me
that I didn't walk out of the theatre in love with it and that Americans are
deeming it such a step forward for women in film.)
I’ve written previously about Frozen in another
blog post back in January, but there’s another issue I’d like to discuss that,
really, doesn’t have much to do with the film itself, but has come up because
of it.
Feminism.
Now, before anyone loses their hair or lunch, I’m
not “anti-feminist.” But I think we need to understand what exactly “feminism”
means, because people have decided to take this word and transform it into some
kind of ugly monster that now makes the very mention of it polarizing. In reality,
feminism is not something that should be heavily debated, nor should it induce
such heavy rage as it seems to whenever someone dare utter the word.
By definition feminism is:
Equality. Really, that’s all that feminism is about: Treating women with the same respect and dignity that men give each other. It is NOT the idea that women are better than men, more important, more valuable, more intelligent, more anything. And it does NOT undercut the value of men or ignore the fact that men and women are created differently from one another. We are. Men and women are different both intrinsically and biologically, and there is ample evidence to suggest that this is not a debatable issue. However, regardless of what a man can do or a woman can do, we all have the same value.“The doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.”
For example, I love my brothers. One is seventeen
and the other thirteen. While they have some things in common, you would be
hard-pressed to tell me that they were essentially the same person and could do
anything that the other could do. The younger one is driven, clever, and a
natural peace-keeper. The older one is comical, responsible, and private when
it comes to his personal issues. While you could argue that they are both
extroverts and get along well with one another and the people around them,
there’s no way that they are “the same.” However, this doesn’t mean that my
parents or I consider one or the other more valuable. They are both wonderful
because they are people. Human beings. And no matter how much one of them kicks
and screams, they cannot change who they are.
For the purposes of this article, I'm going to
refer to the infamous Mary Wollstonecraft and her book A Vindication of the
Rights of Women, which is often used to demonstrate how the long-considered
Mother of Modern Feminism thought that men are evil or have always been
tyrannical in nature, suppressing women and keeping them from their potential.
And if you only bothered to read those quotes, then yes, it would be logical to
assume that Wollstonecraft felt that way about men and believed in the uprising
of women and their power.
Except she didn’t.
For every (out of context) quote that people toss
around, there are double the amount of quotes describing how she did not view
the male gender as inferior or the female gender as superior. Wollstonecraft’s
entire point of Rights of Women was that men and woman are equals, are friends,
and have the same intrinsic value. She criticized both sides for perpetuating
the subjugation of women: men for treating women like they had no real capacity
to think, and women for not doing anything to argue otherwise. Not to mention
she also wrote an article that coincided with Rights of Women: A Vindication of
the Rights of Men. She wanted everyone, not just some men or some women, to
have a thorough education so that society would grow and flourish. She saw it
very much in a stagnant, beginning-to-decay kind of way because of the
perpetuation of foolish ideologies such as the natural inferiority of women.
They weren’t just bad for women; they were bad for everyone.
Here are some quotes from Rights of Women to
emphasize my point:
“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”
Wollstonecraft wanted women to take charge of
themselves and their lives, rather than sit back and let a man do everything
for them. She didn’t believe that men were better, or that they should rule
over women like tyrannical dictators. She wanted women to recognize their own
potential and take charge of who they are, rather than sit back and let their
husbands do everything for them.
"Were women more rationally educated, could they take a more comprehensive view of things, they would be contented to love but once in their lives; and after marriage calmly let passion subside into friendship—into that tender intimacy, which is the best refuge from care; yet is built on such pure, still affections, that idle jealousies would not be allowed to disturb the discharge of the sober duties of life, nor to engross the thoughts that ought to be otherwise employed."
And here’s another criticism of women—far too
often, women believed that the same passion and exuberance they experienced
during courtship would last through their marriage. Then, when it inevitably
fizzled and the man may have turned out to be a bit of a floozy, the woman was
left bored and uninterested, leading to things like extramarital affairs to try
and regain that passion they once had with their husband. Wollstonecraft argues
here that marriage is a strong friendship, rather than a fondness. The husband
and wife should have things in common and actually enjoy the other’s company.
She also points out that rational thought leads to contentment—woman would no
longer feel like they needed to love more than once, suggesting that she was a
supporter of solid, happy marriages that lasted.
And for the sake of space and time, I won’t
continue. But with these points in mind, let us take a look at where Frozen,
and by association its fandom, begins to get on my nerves.
It was out of fashion, anyway.
 |
| It was out of fashion, anyway. |
For whatever reason, there seems to be a massive
backlash against the “Disney Princess” image. With the onset of “Modern
Feminism,” people seem to enjoy poking fun at the Disney Princess lineup, its
themes, characters, story lines, and just about anything that doesn’t fit into
the “modern” perspective on the world. Disney has even started taking shots at
itself with films like Enchanted, openly stating clichés or making obvious
jokes that the audience is meant to laugh at and go, “Oh yeah, remember THOSE
archaic views? Look how far we’ve come!"
Except, have we really?
As a society, we have become so obsessed with the
idea of representing females as strong, independent characters that we’ve begun
to lose sight of what it is that makes a character such things. Rather than
focus on simply making them people, we’ve turned them into she-men with the
exact same stereotypes and sucked all the individuality out of them. A woman
can no longer just be a woman; she has to be a strong, independent woman that
“don’t need no man” to complete her. That’s become our modern definition of
“feminism."
Frozen is one of the biggest culprits of this way
of thinking. While I enjoyed the film visually and thought it had some of the
best comedy of any of their films, there were so many moments that I wanted to
chuck my popcorn at the screen because I got so damn sick of hearing some
variation of the phrase “You’re marrying someone you just met” uttered every
ten minutes. I feel like most of the film went out of its way to buck a
stereotype that we seem hell-bent on insisting exists. Disney doesn’t add that
stuff into their movies because they’re “socially progressive;” they do it
because that’s what puts people’s butts in the theatre seats. That’s what
people want to see—the constant, habitual, uninterrupted lambasting of Disney
and their rich history of beautiful films that, by the way, were the most
successful when they weren’t focused on producing “feminist” characters.
Let’s look at Elsa, who has become the
quintessential example of the feminist ideology: She’s the beautiful, albeit
mentally and socially disturbed, queen of Arendelle. She spends the majority of
her life locked away in her room, forced to hide herself and her powers from
everyone, even her sister (because you know, us women have always been
subjected to being locked away where no one could get to us!). When it comes
time for her coronation, she exhibits more fear than anything else which, given
the circumstances, is justified. But instead of sucking it up and dealing, or even
offering to re-open the lines of communication with Anna who could possibly
help her not only understand her power, but learn to cope with it, Elsa chooses
instead to hide behind her fear. When her powers are revealed by a frustrated
Anna to a large portion of the kingdom, she runs away and abandons her duties
as queen to live in isolation in the mountains, doing nothing except singing
and looking pretty.
How exactly is this “feminist?” Come to think of
it, her actions and personality sound more like the antithesis of
Wollstonecraft’s feminist. She’s weak, selfish, incapable of standing up for
herself, isolating, and thoughtless. The person who is supposed to run her
kingdom with pride and dignity instead spends most of the film cowering in a
pretty, empty ice castle like a wet, shivering Chihuahua. With sexy heels.
But hey. That song is catchy.
I get the message that Disney was trying to send.
I really do: The idea was to be free from fear and anxiety and to let go of everything
that holds you back so you can live your life. But if Elsa really wanted to do
that, why did it require her to run away from all of her responsibilities, her
sister (who is the only remaining member of their family besides herself), and
her kingdom? That isn’t rising above circumstances; that’s running like hell
away from them. Not to mention she won’t even let Anna talk to her when she
comes to the castle. The sister that braves treacherous snow storms and
wilderness just to reconcile their relationship and knock some sense into Elsa
so she can save their kingdom from inevitable destruction is shoved aside for
fear that she could be hurt. Is it a valid fear? Sure. But the fact that
three-fourths of the way through the movie this is happening doesn’t portray a
strong character with a wide arc at all. It’s someone who is manipulated and
controlled entirely by fear.
Sure, she’s got a character—weak-willed,
narrow-minded, and lonely with a nice
face, pretty dress, and absolutely no sense of priorities—but a character
nonetheless. And that’s fine. Have someone who is like that and then either
dispose of them or give them an arc. Leaving her in the film to fester in her
own self-pity and then slapping a “she doesn’t get married in the end” label on
her does NOT make her a feminist icon. It makes her even less interesting.
Then of course Anna gets shunned for her stupidity
and carelessness when it comes to romance, because every teenage girl is always
an expert at relationships, especially when they are deprived socially. Anna
continues to be criticized throughout the duration of the movie, with everyone
and their brother commenting on how marrying someone you just met is foolish.
She’s seen as “weak” because she is engaged to someone in less than twenty-four
hours and Elsa is “strong” because she doesn’t? What on earth does that have to
do with feminism? If we’re still looking at Wollstonecraft’s model, she never
mentions the idea that true feminism requires women to detest quick marriages
(or marriage in general) or that to be a feminist character you’re not allowed
to want to find true love.
Why should Anna be shunned for the fact that she
wants to be married? Why have we, as a society, suddenly decided that the
desire to meet “The One” and get married is such a heinous idea? Judging by the
number of “dating tips” blog posts I’ve seen, it seems we’re all very much in
the same boat as Anna. Why do we villain-ize the romantic attraction young
women have towards men, at least in animated movies? Is it because of the time
frame it takes to happen?
Let me point out that these are, above all, movies.
Children’s movies, specifically, and all of them thrive on simplicity. The
simpler the plot and characters, the better. Unlike adults, kids aren’t looking
for complex story lines and well-developed characters. They just want to look
at a screen and be entertained for ninety minutes. In order to do that, Disney
has to cut corners here and there and carefully plan their plots so that they
are possible, but not necessarily probable, all while trying to create good
characters, update the fairytale, do justice to the original, and market the
film to as many people as possible. Falling in love can happen in three days,
but is it likely? No. But it’s easier to make a movie that takes place over a
shorter time frame because, if not, you have to make up for the missing parts
with either transitions (which can be tricky) or exposition (which can be VERY
tricky).
If Frozen took place over an extended period of
time, the plot would have ended up even clunkier than it was. Besides that,
it’s not even clear that Anna and Kristoff are married at the end of the movie.
They may have begun to realize their romance is blossoming, but neither of them
comes out and says, “I’m madly in love with you, please marry me.” They are, as
Wollstonecraft would have described, best friends, if nothing else. The
timeline isn’t meant to be realistic, it’s meant to be concise and, at the very
least, possible.
And yes, I have known several people who met their
significant other and knew that same day that they were meant to be together.
Some of them have been married for upwards of thirty or forty years.
But then there’s another question that we could
ask: Is it possible to have complex kids’ movies while still keeping a level of
simplicity? Yes. Disney’s been doing it for the past seven decades.
Of course, I’m not limiting this realization to
Disney Princess films. Ninety percent of the films that the company has put out
since Snow White have some layer of depth to them. Here are some examples:
Pinocchio
Bambi
Lady and the Tramp
Dumbo
Alice in Wonderland
Fox and the Hound
Jungle Book
Pocahontas
Lion King
Sword in the Stone
Princess and the Frog
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
Mulan
Tarzan
And the list goes on. Most of the time, Disney manages to
get some sort of secondary layer to their films, even if it is something that
has been beaten to death (like prejudice). But while these films all have some
kind of subtext that can be gleaned from them, their focus is on creating story
lines and some-what engaging characters, not limiting their leading ladies to
stereotypical, card-board cut-outs.
As another blogger pointed out, even in the Princess films,
the romance is something that comes secondary to the initial wants of the
characters. Every last princess—with the exception of Snow White, Cinderella,
and Aurora—begins their tale with a desire to have something, be something,
change something, etc. Ariel wanted to see the human world before she came
across Eric. “Part of Your World,” the prime example of the “Whining Song,”
happens before she even runs into his ship. Belle wants something greater than
herself, whatever that might be. She denies Gaston not because he’s a man, but
because he’s a self-absorbed jerk. Tiana wants a restaurant because of her
close connection to her father and a love of cooking, falling in love with
Naveen only after he stops whining about being a frog and starts to pull his
own weight. Rapunzel wants to see floating lights and get out of her tower,
Mulan wants to save her father’s life and sacrifices her own safety and
security in the process, Jasmine wants to escape the constricting life of
royalty and be her own person, and Pocahontas just wanted peace. All of these ladies
find love only after they begin their adventure to achieve their initial goal.
The romance is almost always secondary.
Instead of recognizing plain ol’ good characterization and
clear motives that have developed in Disney movies over the past several
decades, we’d rather focus on all of the movies that don’t necessarily hit that
mark. But even when you look at films like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty—two of
the most common films that get beat with the Sexist Stick—you can see that
Disney opted for simplicity in the storytelling and the characters in order to
make room for the stunning animation which, at the time, was all done by hand
and took lots of blood, sweat and tears to produce (not that current films
don’t, but hand-drawn films will always be more impressive to me). Not to
mention that these were made in 1950 (Cinderella) and 1959 (Sleeping Beauty),
at a time when culture was drastically different, and that neither of these
movies were original material. They came from fairy tales that were passed
around for centuries, all over the world, by women.
And I think that, with all of this outrage over the themes
and characters and sexism and improbability of story lines, we are only making
things worse for our kids. Children are not born with sexist ideas. They’re
raised to see them. And when we sit down and tell our daughters that “Disney is
bad because they don’t make good female characters and you should always watch
movies that strip women of any lady features because that’s weakness,” we’re
the ones creating the problem.
Bill Cosby was once quoted, after being asked what would be
the best way to stop racism, as saying, “Stop talking about it.” His point was,
essentially, race is an issue because we continually talk about it and make it
an issue. The same thing applies to feminism. When we spend all of our time
trying to tiptoe over the issue or slam it in people’s faces, we’re only
exacerbating the problem and creating a larger divide. Why do female characters
have to be labeled “strong?” Why can’t they just be “female?” Why do we have to
marginalize the role and qualities of men just to make women look stronger?
That isn’t equality, that’s a problem. And it certainly isn’t feminism.
We’re not giving our kids enough credit. Even in a day and
age when everything has the potential to be “offensive,” kids are still
rational creatures. Watching a movie isn’t going to make them suddenly
transform them into an air head. Sure, when they’re little they may think in
simpler terms, but that changes when you get older. You grow. You learn. You
analyze and develop opinions on your own.
Case in point: When I was little, my family had VHS’s of
both The Little Mermaid and Cinderella. I remember that each day I would get
up, grab the VHS, and would watch Cinderella over and over and over and over
again. All day long, for weeks straight. I did the same thing with The Little
Mermaid a few years later. Why? Because I liked the movies. That’s it. No other
reason. In fact, my strongest memory of either of those films was the scene
where the stepmother locks Cinderella in her room and Lucifer tries to keep the
mice from letting her out, as well as when Triton destroys Ariel’s collection
of human artifacts. I remember those scenes because they moved me—I was so
angry that the stepmother was so mean and that Triton could be so heartless
towards his daughter.
You know what I don’t remember?
The sexism. The shallow characters. The forcing of men and
women stereotypes on everything. I didn’t remember those things because I was
five and I didn’t give two dog turds that Cinderella fell in love with a man
she met once or that everything about her character looks vapid and
uninteresting from modern day standards. I thought the mice were cute and Ariel
was pretty.
I didn’t grow up to be an irrational, dim-witted floozy. I
fully recognize that beauty is on the inside and that people falling in love in
two days isn’t realistic. I have not been tainted or transformed by a few dozen
children’s movies, and chances are, neither will any other child. As a parent,
it’s your responsibility to teach your son or daughter that their value is
found on the inside—not Disney’s.
So leave the Disney Princesses alone and relax. Enjoy the
movies for what they are, and stop trying to force a feminist ideology on
characters. Let them be people—let them be human beings. When you shoot for
anything else, you’re bound to simply fall flat.
