Frozen and Maleficent: Disney's Recasting the Myth of True Love

Once upon a time, Walt Disney told variants of a single story from a patriarchal Germanic tradition in which passive, naïve and generally motherless girls whose only notable quality was superficial good looks ran afoul of dark, vindictive women powerful only in their capacity to hate, and from whom those passive, vacuous girls could only be saved by a gallant, upper-class male whom she might have seen once but who could deliver “true love’s kiss” to save the day and live happily ever after the end. 

That was the story, once upon a time.  It was a story that dominated the public mythos of much of the English-speaking world for decades, a story that whispered subtle moralizing guidance in the minds of generations of young girls and boys alike, encoding gender roles, and implanting subtle but powerful associations regarding the nature of True Love.

But these days, Disney seems to be telling a slightly different story, a mythos that is being newly alloyed and reforged in the crucible of social criticism and popular culture.

There is a curious relationship between what we loosely term “culture,” the complex and shifting pattern of language, beliefs, traditions and values that shapes a group of people, and the art forms, films and narratives produced by it.  On the one hand, a culture shapes its narratives, because those narratives are told by members of that culture who know the values and mores, the dramas and the styles that will entertain and inform other members.  On the other hand, the narratives that really move the hearts of large numbers of human beings, that inspire the imaginations of individuals—those narratives can shape and re-shape the larger culture.  It was the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas who first began to talk about culture as an organic, living thing, a matrix of symbols that both provides mythic narratives to its participants and receives them, and in the second decade of the 21^st Century, saturated by mass media, that dynamism has never been more apparent.

But what is it, in particular, about Disney narratives that seems to be undergoing a profound face-lift?  Consider for a moment the two most recent Disney feature productions; Frozen (2013) and Maleficent(2014).  One of the reasons Frozen immediately received such critical attention—as distinct from its popular appeal—is that it challenges traditional gender roles in which the passive princess could only be saved by the gallant prince and an act of “true love.”  In the case of Frozen, not only were there two princesses, and it was unclear for much of the film which one needed to be saved, but in the end one princess saves the other, her sister, and herself, in an act of self-sacrifice which turns out to be the curse-breaking true love—sisterly love.  In an added twist to the traditional tropes, she (the character of Ana in the movie) has to rescue her sister from the gallant prince, her own, handsome and barely-known fiancée, who turns out to be the villain of the story. 

In the more recent Disney feature, Maleficent, a re-telling of the 1959 animated  Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the “evil queen,” we see the familiar narrative cast in a very different way.  In the new re-telling, not only is the audience allowed to see the reasons Maleficent’s character has grown from fun-loving though fierce and protective fairy to hateful and bitter sorceress (a brutal betrayal by the young man she’d thought to be her own true love), but in the end, when the young princess, Aurora, falls into her enchanted sleep, the expected “true love’s kiss,” the kiss of the handsome young prince whom she’s seen only once, fails.   Instead, it is Maleficent herself, who cursed the princess in the first place in revenge for her father’s betrayal, who grows fond of the princess by watching her grow, and whose hardened heart softens with regret at having cursed her, it is she who breaks the curse with what can only be called a motherly love.  What truer love is there?

What is profound about this change in the mythic narrative of true love’s kiss is not only the changing gender roles—which a century of feminist critique has helped effect, and still has much to do—but the re-evaluation of the nature of love.  In modern America, arguably the most over-mediated nation in the world (bring it Japan!), we have a steadily increasing epidemic of divorce, domestic violence, and disposable relationships.  For a modern young person, falling in love is essentially indistinguishable from having an intense biochemical attraction to someone else.  And when that weedy infatuation falls to the scythe of incompatible lifestyles or values, as it often does, our hearts are broken, love is lost, and we question love entirely.  In my own life, I have often blamed the Disney Myth of True Love for programming me with assumptions about how a relationship should proceed, in what order things should be done, even the very notions of monogamy and loyalty.

Obviously, the youthful tendency for love at first sight is not a new phenomenon.  Romeo and Juliet, and the earlier Greek version Pyramus and Thisbe, give us fine historical narratives of lusty infatuation mistaken for love.  But Disney, with its unremitting happily-ever-afters and subtly (or not) coded gender roles, has so impregnated our minds with the notion that such a love, properly defended and championed, will see us through any hardship, break any curse, bestow any super power, that now love is even harder to define that it naturally is—which is substantial. 

Now, in these recent recastings of “true love,” and particularly insofar as both Frozen and Maleficent juxtapose the negative consequences of too hastily handing out our hearts in the traditional fashion, we see mythic examples of “true love,” which are not sexualized, not based on superficial or barely-known qualities, but based on intimate knowledge and compassionate understanding.  And if Disney, perhaps the most influential myth-maker of modernity, can offer us such a vision of love, perhaps we can begin to nurture it in our own lives.

Peace Amidst a Sea of Troubles

I don’t know that much about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. 

I know that one of my best friends, Paul, grew up in Belfast and that he, a Catholic, was jumped by a half-dozen Protestant boys when he was 16 and beaten badly, just because he was Catholic.  That was 1990.

I know that Betty Williams, the product of a Catholic-Protestant intermarriage, witnessed a car crash in 1976.  The car was driven by an IRA member who’d been shot by British police, and when he lost control, he struck and killed three children.  I also know that Betty Williams had two cousins; one was killed by Catholics, and one was killed by Protestants.  The aunt of the three children who were killed, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, contacted Betty and within days, the two of them organized a Peace march with over 35,000 people.  I met Betty.  She gives good hugs.

I know that there’s a long history of peace and war, intermarriage, love and hate between Catholics and Protestants, that it goes back all the way to the British occupation and the Protestant conversion of the English King Henry VIII, and more recently to the Irish War of Independence, when a thin Protestant majority in Northern Ireland decided to remain part of the UK.  I only know in the abstract, academic brand of ‘knowing’ that there were decades of bombs and bullets, atrocities and concessions on both sides that most people call “The Troubles.”

I believe that there has been some modicum of peace there for the last fifteen years or so, and that makes me happy, because Ireland sings in my blood, Northern or Republic of, though I’ve never set foot on the island. 

And now I hear that Gerry Adams has been arrested and is under investigation for a terrible murder that happened forty years ago, because of an interview for Boston College’s Belfast oral history project. I guess the interview links Gerry Adams and the Sinn Fein to Mrs. Jean McConville, who was accused of being an informant and was disappeared by the IRA, snatched from in front of her children, and that her family has been seeking justice ever since.  It was a terrible act of violence amidst a sea of Troubles.  I understand the McConville family’s desire for closure, and their deep need for justice, so often misunderstood for vengeance.

But here’s something else I know.  Peace is fragile.  Especially when it’s young, like a seedling, it is tender and needs nourishment.  It is easily damaged by things like vengeance and hate, which burn like a coal in the heart for years.  So when I see something of vast historical and academic importance, like the Boston College Belfast project, something that was launched in the spirit of peace and reconciliation, according to its director, seized upon to reopen old wounds (or keep open wounds that have never healed), I have to mourn. 

There will always be a need for vengeance.  It will always seem easier to continue to pursue retribution, even for forty years, because there’s a certain defining certainty to it, than it will be to embrace the uncertainty of trusting those who have been enemies. 

And so my wish for Northern Ireland is as it has always been: peace.  If Gerry Adams has to go to jail for something that happened forty years ago, that's not for me to say, though I'm sure he's a very different person now than he was then.  Truth is an important part of reconciliation, as the great Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela showed in South Africa.  But I also hold the wish that the oral histories of the IRA and UVF members recorded by Boston College be treasured, be honored, and if any new light is shed on the Troubles, that it be used to nurture the fragile seed of peace.

Hope and Expectation

Of the two identities that pulse together and intertwine at the core of who I am, writer and teacher, it is that latter that I reflect upon most often.  I realized I was a teacher at heart when it occurred to me that I unconsciously strive always to find the best in every person I meet.  It is a trait I inherited from my father, also a teacher.  There is some fundamental assumption I hold that each person really is doing the best he or she can do in life, that each person has the potential to reach fullness, self-actualization, and I feel inherently and unconsciously driven to address that part of her or him. 

Whether this is an admirable quality or a naïve one—or both—I leave for others to judge, but a curious consequence of it is that it tends to lend itself to expectation, which is itself a potentially dangerous habit to fall into.

Apprehending the future seems to be a natural and compulsive activity of the human being.  We reach out with eager fingers toward some more secure image of the landscape of tomorrow.  That grasping takes on a very different grip depending upon the feelings we apply to it: fearful, hopeful or expectant.  When we extend our mental fingers toward the future with fear, for example, we trap ourselves in fascinated dread, summoning up the very doom that we most wish to avoid, like the deer in the onrushing headlights.  (This, I think, is why such a rich and lovely word as “apprehend,” from the Latin “to reach toward or to seize,” takes on the negative and fearful connotation when we force it to become an adjective: “apprehensive”).

When we reach toward the future with hope, on the other hand, it is like planting a seed in the soil, trusting in the subtle and (for most of us) incomprehensible forces of nature to nurture that seed into life so that it may provide food for us later.  There is an extending toward the future, but, when Hope is done properly, it is a reach that already contains gratitude within its attitude.  It is an image of the future that still has gracious space for other possible outcomes.

Expectation, on yet another hand—why not have three hands, if we’re reaching?— expectation is a demand.  It is a vivid, well-defined, and therefore closed vision of what must come.  It is an outfit we must wear cautiously in our relationships with other people, since, stitched to the inside of those clothes, unseen but waiting for expression the moment we take them off, is disappointment.  As teachers, we are taught to cultivate this clothing, to wear it clearly for our students.  The famous quip, cited by Clinton Administration Education Secretary Richard Riley “the tyranny of low expectations” is often brandished toward educators as an admonition.  The meaning is clear: the more we hold our students to high standards, the more they will stretch to meet them and therefore the more service we provide them.  Having high expectations of someone (read: “someone over whom you have authority and influence”) offers that person an opportunity to tap potentials in herself that she was unaware previously unaware of.  High expectations are useful, important, and a necessary tool for those of us engaged in the co-cultivation of consciousness. 

There is, however, that darker side to the equation, which we might call "the crippling of high expectations," or perhaps more accurately, of unreasonable expectations.  So often, when we see an individual’s potential, and as teachers, we are predisposed to focusing on just that, we press him toward that potential.  With a student, a young spirit with an intricate life outside of the classroom, an ineffably complex mandala of prides and insecurities, pressures and doubts, it is a delicate dance between pushing enough to be encouraging, but not so much as to discourage, or even damage with the scars of failure.  Many of the kids I’ve worked with in the classroom have carried just these scars from their experiences in public schools.

As with so many vocations, however, it is dangerous to apply what is appropriate on the job to what is personal.  One of my biggest challenges in my personal life has been that I carry this natural predisposition—to see the enormous potential in people, to see where they have room to grow, and to press them toward that growth—into my intimate relationships.  Some of my most heart-breaking disappointments have come because I could see the bright, glorious spirit of my partner in her fullness, and held that against her insecure, habitual and tentative reality.  And it is exactly here, in this place of vivid, well-defined (and therefore closed) vision of the future, where we can most cruelly and unintentionally oppress our loved ones, over whom we always have some modicum of authority and influence.  And it is because of my heart-breaking forays and failures with this kind of apprehension of the future, applying to my loved ones the crippling of unreasonable expectations, I have learned to give up on expectation and place my hope in Hope.  (By the way, I’m still not sure it is unreasonable to expect a person to strive to become their best selves.) 

It is, I find, far more commendable, far more apprehensible, to see the best and highest in another, to hope her gently toward that, and then to comprehend that person exactly as she is, right now, in her fullest, most perfectly flawed present.  In the end, I still like to believe that everyone really is doing the best he can with what he has—I can say with not-quite-total certainty that I am.  Whether that is true or not, if we pretend that it is, it allows us to see others with patience and grace, and perhaps—perhaps, it allows them to look at themselves in that patient and graceful mirror, and to check in for themselves as to whether or not it is true.  I make a practice of that self-checking in, with the graceful mirror I see in each new person. After all, whose hopes and expectations are more important for us to measure up to than our own?

Heartsong

Take heart!

Even in the twisted times, when reason’s ring has wrung all meaning

From the lashings of our living’s lessons

When our lips like purse-strings draw the lines of lovers lost and keening—

Even when our deepest heart connections (so often indistinguishable

from our heart’s attachments) snap from the strain

Of holding circumstance in a static place it cannot linger—

Even then you can hear it

If you listen.

Yes, you can. 

There is a need for hate and hurt and pain,

There is a reason our deepest love can feel like hate when it snaps back

broken, there’s a reason you dig out the depths of your

Purpose with the jaded spade of despair (in those twisted times)

If only to make the well deeper—that well you’ll draw your passion from when

The twisted muscles have relaxed, when the fears of still more pain have receded

And the muse begins to whisper in your ear.

You are not alone. 

No never. 

Nor ever are you given more than you

Can hold, but just enough to stretch the muscles of your spirit,

And muscles lubed with patience, faith, and courage stretch with wider motion

Than devotion to some rigid rote can train them.

You are needed in the after hours—those hours after love has fled (the lily love

That keeps its fragrance while the springsun beams, but no longer).

You are needed in the desperate times, when love is menaced (the polaris love that,

Stringless and implacable, saunters narrowly around true north but never leaves it).

You are needed stretched and tested, for your heart can love and hate and clutch and snap

But always, always will it find more of itself to give. 

So take it.

Take Heart. 

You are needed.

You are loved.

-Darren Reiley