A while back I saw The Frog and the Princess. This weekend I saw Disney’s Tangled. Before I delve into those two movies, here’s a few thoughts on “The Madwoman in the Attic.” The portrayal and role of women in literature is often reduced to discussions of extremes; Whore and Madonna, Snow White and Wicked Bitch Step Mother, etc. This reduction deserve discussion, and as do the thoughts over “the tensions, the anxieties, hostilities, and inadequacies writers feel when they confront not only the achievements of their predecessors but the traditions of genre, style, and metaphor that they inherit from their forefathers” (1927).
Cue Papa Disney.
Old Walt did a lot of great things. He drew happy pictures. He built a train. He introduced a lot of people to the love of churros. However, in his films, and the legacy his company established, the forefathers of fairytales still crush a looming tradition onto all that watch them. While strides have been made away from explicit badness like this, the overall message hasn’t changed.
The Frog and the Princess is the following story: African American young woman works hard but is never rewarded. She doesn’t need a man. While serving her best friend, she is turned into a frog. Her prince is also turned into a frog. She can’t earn her humanity back. They get married and kiss and is turned back into a woman and is happy.
Tangled goes like so: After receiving the healing powers from a magical flower, the baby Princess Rapunzel is kidnapped from the palace in the middle of the night by Mother Gothel. Mother Gothel knows that the flower's magical powers are now growing within the golden hair of Rapunzel, and to stay young, she must lock Rapunzel in her hidden tower. Rapunzel is now [18] a teenager and her hair has grown to a length of 70-feet. The beautiful Rapunzel has been in the tower her entire life, and she is curious of the outside world. One day, the bandit Flynn Ryder scales the tower and is taken captive by Rapunzel. Rapunzel strikes a deal with the charming thief to act as her guide to travel to the place where the floating lights come from that she has seen every year on her birthday. Ultimately, they fall in love, her wicked mother hurts him, he cuts off her hair, they get married.
Oh and he narrates it. She gets one word in at the end that he corrects. Cute.
Here’s an interesting list of the lives of other Disney Step mothers.
Here’s several blogs who all have bits to say on this.
What I want to know is why was The Frog and the Princess seen as so ground breaking? Yes. Good Disney, not everyone is white with blonde hair. But from our theorists view, (and my own), it doesn’t stray one iota from the canon.
Disney has a different reduction of women. You can either be locked in a tower and resuced by a man OR you can use your simple folksy ways to make him “a better man.”
OR you can be a dead mother.
OR a wicked witch.
OR fired by Pixar.
P.S. It's not all lady hate. Men get shafted too.
^ That link is a video. watchhhhh it....
In the video you posted at the end, the scenes he uses from Beauty and the Beast actually seem to work against his argument. The Beast is actually praised for his weaknesses... In addition, while the barrel-chesting etc is certainly perpetuated in that movie, the Beast has the biggest barrel chest of anyone when he is a monster. You could almost say that this portrayal of masculinity IS his monsterness. However, since at the end of the movie he still falls under that general stereotype of what men should look like, it doesn't do a great job of ridding it of at least the physical reductionism for men.
ReplyDeleteFor me the real problem with Beauty and the Beast is that it perpetuates the idea that women (and only women?) can change/improve particularly "bad" men. Belle, a heroine admired for her independence and love of knowledge and books, finds fulfillment at the end of the movie in her requited love for a man, and her worth becomes focused on how she has improved/saved that man. She is reduced from an independent woman to one fully dependent on the man, and where we were cheering her at the beginning for her independence, we have been brainwashed right along with her by the end into cheering for her partnership and marriage to an emotionally and possibly physically abusive (though dedicated) husband. If he has changed that drastically, then he is a major anomoly. If he has not changed, then we have just told women that the best end for even (or perhaps particularly) the smartest, most adventurous, most influential women is to marry an overpowering husband who will abuse and take advantage of them.
Beauty and the Beast lovers, do you really believe that a man who would starve a woman for not obeying him is ever a safe match for her?
Also look at all the bad guys and notice how many of them have similar facial features...
ReplyDelete...especially a hooked nose.
You raise a good point, Sarah. I think a good chunk of the problem is the fact that there's not a lot of female influence in the film industry overall (which I just blogged about). One of the more fascinating quotes from the article I cited in my post really illustrates what you're saying here, too:
ReplyDelete"Despite the enormous success of films such as Mamma Mia! and Twilight, executives often seem perplexed by films with female themes. 'I've been there when a film with a female protagonist has been screened,' says Lauzen, 'and the guys at the top go, "Well, I don't get it." When the majority of people in power are male, who are they going to relate to most on screen, and who do they think other people are going to relate to? Males. That's no big conspiracy. I don't even think it's conscious, honestly.' Bird agrees. 'One of the big problems is that, 90% of the time, the people who you pitch your idea to are male, and even though they might be very sympathetic, they do look at the world from a different perspective.'"
So basically, the bigwigs at Disney don't understand women, so they can't portray them. Which I suppose is true to some extent, but I would think (or maybe just hope) that men are capable of seeing women as something other than objects.
(Of course, the other part of the problem is that most of the studio execs seem to be 15-year-old boys in adult bodies, so all they really want to see are explosions, action scenes, and boobs.)
Not particularly relevant but somewhat so comment:
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned the whore v. madonna dialectic. When we were in Ogden (you remember, but everyone else can benefit), there was a paper on the whore and madonna in Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire. In her paper, she set out to prove that, while certain characters are described with whore-like terms, and others as madonnas. She also showed that some of these characters (Blanche, for example), try to hide behind the idea of the madonna, while they better represent the whore character. The woman who wrote the paper basically argued that you couldn't really term them as either. All this to say...I guess there's hope? That the stereotypes can broken.
Disney is a cesspool of stereotypes and objectification. Then again: much of the fairy tales themselves were derived from similar environments. In "Hansel & Grethel," Hansel is the voice of reason while all Grethel can do is cry and be frightened (until she finally pushes the witch into the oven to save her brother, after which she promptly lapses back into the second fiddle). In "Snow-White and Rose-Red," the girls try with all their tiny hearts to be good people, only to be spurned by a gnome until the bear (a cursed prince) swoops in and saves their honor. Oh, and then he marries the prettier of the two. In "Little Red Cap," the girl is either saved by the big hunter or eaten. Only in one version does she save herself, and in one other her grandmother helps her.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it's interesting that the picture of the princesses states "Pretty girls don't even need to be alive to get some hot princely action." In the original legend, the prince finds the princess, sleeps with her and leaves, and then she gives birth to twins--all while she's comatose. Wow. It's so easy for women to be broodmares, they can do it in their sleep! -_-U
Also: "Beast"s real name is Adam. Little Mermaid Prince = Eric. Cinderella: literally Prince Charming. And that's all I've got. :)
Sarah,
ReplyDeleteThe article you posted about Pixar was really interesting to me, because while reading your blog, I was thinking of the Pixar films I thought of that didn’t fit into the Madonna/Whore model, or even within the typical Disney female model. I’m probably wrong on this, but here are some of my thoughts:
Ratatouille: The female chef in this is by far the more intelligent one. She’s a competitive, driven, knife-wielding, carrot chopping machine. In my opinion, it doesn’t seem that this is construed as a negative. She has a speech about how she’s had to be tougher than all of the men in the kitchen to prove herself, but I don’t see her portrayed as a negative character for this. Yes, she succumbs to love like everyone else in a feel-good kid’s film, but in all likelihood, she’s the one wearing the pants in the relationship. So here, the woman is the stronger character. Though, granted, the whole film goes to the rat.
Wall-E: I don’t think much explaining needs to be done for this one. Eve, aka “Eva,” is the badass in the film. She blows things up and constantly has to save Wall-E. He’s the emotional (as far as robots go) and silly one, whereas she’s focused on her “directive” and responsibility. In other words, she’s logical and powerful, he’s a dork, albeit an adorable one.
Monster’s Ink: This is probably a stretch, but I’m going to argue it anyway. I would say the majority of the female characters in this movie are represented as either braver or smarter than the male ones. First, we have Mike’s girlfriend, Celia I think it is, who is willing to tackle him in the halls. Yes, she pulls feminine stunts like pouting and fussing, but hey, I don’t see Cinderella taking the Prince out at the knees. Then there’s Boz, the bookkeeper slug, who turns out to be the mastermind behind…well, whatever the whole undercover thing was. Either way, she’s a woman, er, slug, who is in control. Then there’s Boo, who shows herself to be resourceful, intelligent, and fairly brave for a toddler. Yes, her being a small child might have a lot to do with that, but this is a girl, who stereotypically should be playing with dolls and not attaching herself to large blue monsters.
Finding Nemo: Okay, so Dory isn’t winning points for most intelligent, but, in some ways she is more rational than Marlin, who freaks out over every single thing. She’s far calmer, and much braver than her male companion (possibly because she’s also far dumber, but for the sake of my argument, we won’t go there.) Dory can also read – props to feminine education, thank you Wollstonecraft – whereas Marlin has no such mad skills. So we have to concede that without Dory, the male character would never have gotten anywhere.
(And yes, I had to look up all the character names and spellings just to write this blog. Took forever.)
Now, I’ll concede that in all of these films, the lead goes to a male character, be he animal or robot. That’s a problem. But is having a stronger and smarter “supporting” female role in these films perhaps better than the overly good and overly boring leads of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty? Maybe these films show at least a step in the right direction. Or maybe we’re still in a stagnate place and the writers of these just wanted more interesting characters, regardless of gender. I’m really not sure. What I do know is that this blog is making me feel really guilty for liking Disney/Pixar films and thereby unintentionally participating in the subjugation of my own gender……
Disney, Disney, Disney. It's all Horkheimer and Adorno. Disney is constantly playing w/ a formula that "makes a point" that doesn't offend.
ReplyDeleteFor me, Disney is upsetting because it features damaging archetypes in an appealing setting. Kids like it. And kids are always going to be drawn toward archetypes: good versus evil is just a universal dichotomy, even at a young age. But the thing is, you can cast archetypes without associating evil and minorities. Or women and subjectivity. Granted, you'll always be sending a message with any film that you make, but you can make a movie that kids will like without sending a negative one. That sort of thing is just damaging.
ReplyDelete