Sunday, Bloody Sunday

As the planet keeps spinning, as my body keeps falling apart into stiff and wizened decrepitude, as the ice caps keep melting, as children keep growing up oh so fast and then dying horribly just like everybody else, as this smoothie keeps looking too much like barf for me to seriously consider drinking it, as the PacNW June continues being spring instead of summer, to everyone’s consternation even though it has been this way since the dawn of time, I have been woken up by my snoopy’s wet nose in my ear due to me sleeping on the couch due to having my period.

I played a show
We are starting a two-synth band
I dreamed I got a huge curly mohawk and it looked awesome but by the time I got home it had wilted and I just had a blob of random hair on the top of my head
Gary and I made a new internet-life pact (internet only with first cup of coffee and then may for one hour after dinner) and then immediately broke it

We went to see Snow White and the Huntsman. It was so-so. It starts out promising, with the wicked stepmother/queen having this whole actual backstory and character but then it just became kind of silly. We were laughing because someone in the credits was credited as “period details researcher” and like, what period is that supposed to be? It’s a fairy tale with trolls and shit.

Historical Korner

Also, I should add, MASSIVE SPOILERS follow

But I was really struck, suddenly–and probably this is going to sound facile and obvious–with the blast of awareness locating myself in historical time, which I think generally we don’t really feel in our day-to-days. I briefly researched fairy tales back when I thought my diss was going to be something else, and so while watching the movie I was thinking about how Snow White is this story that appears in many different cultures at roughly the same time–like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc.–with different details (sometimes the queen is her real mom; sometimes she eats a poisoned porridge instead of a poisoned apple; sometimes the Huntsman is a big character, other times he’s hardly even mentioned; sometimes the coffin is made of glass, sometimes ice, etc.) but the same basic outlines that are exploring something about mothers, daughters, power, weird Oedipal stuff (competing for various fathers’ attention) and feminine beauty. So okay, we have this folk tale that’s been passed down for hundreds of years, cross-culturally, then gets written down in 1812 by the Grimms, who basically canonize it because once a story is written down it get pretty fixed and is no longer being orally-transmitted by various cultures’ grandmamas. And the Grimms write it down in such a way as to pass on certain things to German children–now suddenly we have countries and nationalism and the Grimms for example don’t want children to think poorly of their mothers so they make sure all the evil mothers in their anthology are turned into evil stepmothers. For example! So then this is the version of Snow white (apple, stepmother, glass, huntsman barely mentioned) that goes on to be told to another couple generations of kids, until Disney canonizes it again in 1937, over a hundred years later, with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Which is basically the Grimms’ version, but with a lot of added stuff and fixing a lot of new details. Believe me, almost everything you think you remember about the fairy tale is actually stuff you remember from the cartoon. Go back and read the Grimm’s version–it’s hugely unsatisfying.

So then here we are in the year 2012, watching Snow white and the Huntsman with its insane CGI and Charlize Theron bathing in an immense tub of milk and sucking the breath of virgins and stuff. And, more importantly perhaps, watching Snow White literally stabbing people and LEADING AN ARMY ON HORSEBACK to reclaim her rightful throne. Also this idea of “rightful” is way more modern than you think, it seems so ancient but I can’t think of anything before, say, Tolkien, that really gets obsessed with rightfulness. (edit: Eileen just reminded me of for example Shakespeare, however, so I’m obviously wrong on this. But I can say that the Grimms’ versions are NOT obsessed with rightfulness in this same way, as far as I can tell) Like in this new Snow White, she is the land’s rightful queen to such a degree that she makes flowers bloom wherever she goes; a troll that’s going to kill the Huntsman stops, chagrined, when he sees her; the Princess Mononoke-like spirit of the forest is seen for the first time in a thousand years when he comes to bless her. She’s rightful not just because of her bloodline but because the EARTH ITSELF recognizes that she is good. She represents life whereas the wrongful queen represents death and poison and destruction. What a fantasy to come after World War II (Tolkien)! If only we had a RIGHTFUL king, instead of a psychotic dictator, all would be well, etc.

But anyway my point is that I was sitting there suddenly powerfully struck with the realization that this new movie is just another telling of this story. It’s one point along a vast centuries-long continuum of this story in history. With each culture in each time period re-telling the story to suit their own needs. So like maybe in 18th century Germany the story had some sort of Ugly Jew character, later excised to such a degree that we no longer are even aware of it (like how the character of the mute black slave, Toby, in the original Sweeney Todd, became a dog in the first musical version, and now people only remember the dog, but everything the dog does in the musical is drawn directly from what the slave boy did in the source material, but how would you know that unless you’d seen somebody deliver a super crazy archival research paper at a conference recently about it? As I just did). So now the Snow White for our place and time is this powerful, wise, physically virtuosic and manfully brave but still phenomenally femininely beautiful righteous leader, in suit of armor and sword and shield, on horseback, screaming at her men to follow her to their destiny. And how utterly foreign this Snow White would be to the Grimms, and to the hundreds of years of Grandmas that came before them, telling versions of this story by the fire. And how foreign even to Disney. There’s not even a prince in this version!!! She ends up being crowned alone, sole ruler of the land, unmarried. It’s bizarre.

I think there is this ironic distance, like oh yeah, this is a dumb fun summer movie based on an old fairy tale, but I suddenly realized that no, this is just still that fairy tale, being told in a different way for a different time. Not recited orally; not written down and read aloud; now it’s a film, but it’s still this same changing culturally-specific story. People argue that films fix things’ meanings–like Disney fixed Snow White in 1937–but that’s obviously not the case. This version has essentially nothing in common with the Disney version. It’s weird because a film is made by so many people who make such cynical decisions regarding it–but I put it to you that really it’s no more cynical/artificial than what the Grimms did when they collected their stories and then wrote down basically their own versions based on what they wanted to say about and to their culture. It’s just crazy to me, that here we are, still essentially sitting by the fire listening to a story about Snow White. I mean, you can make a movie about whatever you want–why choose Snow White? It’s like it’s just taken for granted that we keep re-telling these stories.

And so what are our cultural preoccupations now, as revealed by our version of Snow White? Judging by this Snow White, we are obsessed with environmental degradation and what it means to be a woman, a mother, or even a feminist. Ha ha! But seriously, it strikes home right? The film is all about the earth being poisoned and lifeless because it’s under the control of this materialistic dictator who cares only about enriching herself, not about any of the, if you will, 99% outside her window. And when Snow White takes back her throne shit starts blooming again and it’s experienced as this enormous, visceral relief. And also, this film has made SO MUCH MORE out of gender issues than any previous version I am aware of. The backstory of the Evil Queen is so intense. She delivers these monologues about how men use up women and throw them away, and how she will take her revenge using her beauty against them, etc. She emasculates and murders Snow White’s noble father in the first scene of the film. We even see a flashback to her own village being pillaged and her mother being hauled away for the raping–but not after putting a crazy spell on baby Charlize giving her immortal beauty and saying it’s her only weapon against men. And then periodically throughout the film we see these super gratuitous, amazing, hallucinatory scenes of Charlize doing increasingly horrendous things to maintain her beauty. Bathing in milk while outside her people are starving. Sucking the life away from a huge pile of virgins. Then she goes to the mirror and is beautiful once more but increasingly it’s seen as really wrenching and awful, the lengths she has to go to to stay beautiful. Meanwhile she’s filled with rage at the effortless “natural” beauty of Snow White, reinforced in a million ways. Snow White wears no makeup. Snow White has no artifice–she spends the entire film in ratty jeans and boots and a muddy half-dress, with her hair just tangled all around her, yet everywhere she goes men, women, children, animals, plants, mythical beasts, all bow before her beauty. It’s like the film is about this dichotomy between the beauty of the aging woman that is hard-won and fought viciously for, products and face lifts and botox and being unhealthily obsessed with trying to stay youthful, and how pathetic and destructive that is, it turns you into a monster. And on the other hand, the effortless beauty of a “natural” woman, who is just being herself, who cares about more than just her appearance. Is it an empathetic rendition of these themes or is it hateful? Is it just like “look how pathetic and ugly an old woman is?” or is it more than that? I can’t tell you because the film fails to exploit these themes to their fullest because it’s really a mediocre film. There’s also definitely something in there about our horror of aging and death. The scenes of Charlize aging (shot from behind, her ribs and spine standing out like a skeleton; her face wilting visibly into a map of wrinkles; her eyes getting cloudy) are lingered on really grotesquely–we’re forced to watch her age over and over again, and it’s presented as super disturbing. Is it about how disgusting old women are? Is it about fearing death–something modern American culture is FAMOUS ACROSS THE LAND for?–or are her transformations back into youthful beauty supposed to be more horrifying? Again, I don’t really know. It really wasn’t a very good movie.

I think we’re also more interested in men vs. boys, like What Makes a Man, or at least, that we’re interested in different facets of that issue, than people in the past. I think that much like femininity, masculinity used to be more unproblematic than it is now. It was pretty straightforward, what it meant to be a man/woman. I’m talking like 400 years ago. Is that shitty to say? Maybe I’m wrong. But now everything seems so fraught. What does it all mean, etc? And in this version of the story, for example, no one is interested in who is the appropriate match for Snow White–a great obsession of fairy tales. Her boyhood friend, the Duke’s son, has been obsessed with her ever since their childhood when Snow White was imprisoned by the Queen and he was dragged off by his father into exile, screaming her name. He’s vowed to save her, etc. He’s obviously the appropriate match in terms of blood and birth and even in terms of having spent his life fanatically devoted to her. But next to the Huntsman, he seems a mere boy, his lifelong devotion immature and unrealistic. “The Huntsman has a mature, widower’s love,” said my husband, which made me laugh but is true. The Huntsman is world-weary and sad, and proves that he actually understands what it means to love someone by his devotion to his dead wife, which seems really multi-faceted and honest, not fantastical. So even though by the end of the film there’s still not been even a hint of a romance between any of them, really, it’s made clear that Snow White feels more kinship with the Huntsman. They’re serious people interested in serious, emo matters, whereas the Duke’s son is all dewy and fresh and is like “I’m sorry I left you! I swear never to leave you again!” and Snow White is like “We were seven years old, what are you talking about?” So there’s something here about masculinity that’s deeper than just “be strong and brave.” Both men in the story are strong and brave, but the Huntsman has this way more wise view of people and feelings and relationships. It’s almost like the Duke’s Son (the “prince”) thinks he’s living in a fairy tale, where everything is straightforward. But Snow White and the Huntsman live in the real world, where horrendous shit goes down and nothing makes sense, and somebody kills your wife for no reason, and that shit is REAL, you can never take it back. Like now we prize world-weariness, instead of the youthful fresh idealist energy of the Romantic Era or whatever. The Romantics thought they prized depression but this seems different to me. Even their depression was unrealistic and overwrought. Have you read The Sorrows of Young Werther? Come on, there’s no way that wasn’t at least partially a joke. But the next generation took it serious as cancer. And is there something here about class, too? Like the film is emphasizing that just because one dude is the Duke’s Son, that doesn’t mean he’s a better man than this random working class dude? I don’t know.

Then I imagined what Snow White will be like in another 200-400 years. WTF!!!!!!!!!!!

The cool hipster dude behind us kept scoffing loudly whenever something magical happened onscreen, which I thought was pretty funny. Like, a beautiful white horse bows down to Snow White and lets her ride it, and the dude behind us goes “Oh yeah right!”