A New Kind of Castle: Disney, Feminism, and Romance

clsloan — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:25:04 +0000

In 1937, Disney's endearingly helpless Snow White cooked, cleaned and sang her way into the hearts of seven protective men and then slept her way into a happily ever after. Giving due props for the breathtaking animation, Snow White's reliance on heroic male figures to solve all of the naïve princess's problems will naturally prompt eye-rolling from feminists still riding the ripples of wave two. Before unleashing angst and anger at Disney, don't we have to acknowledge that Snow White is surely a far cry from the hardworking grit and psychologically complexity of Tiana, the heroine of Disney's most recent “princess” movie? Even though Tiana has a song sequence that basically accompanies her cleaning up an old mill, she's inspired by her own ambition instead of by the saccharine goodness of her squishy heart. Disney has certainly attempted to respond to cultural shifts in how America understands gender roles and romantic relationships. The question is: have these changes been sufficient?

There are several controversies surrounding The Princess and the Frog (2009), and I think two of them are particularly arresting. The lighthearted manner with which the writers treat “voodoo” elides the religion's cultural history and uses it as a near synonym for dangerous magic. In addition, Tiana, Disney's first black princesss, spends a decent chunk of her own movie as a frog. Disney's endeavor to be more “culturally responsible” sort of falls flat in a few places, and the ongoing obsession with Barbie-shaped women who wind up married irked, especially after the breakthrough promised by Lilo and Stitch (2002). While I'm in no position to comment on whether or not Lilo and Stitch successfully and sensitively creates a culturally-conscious Hawai'i (and would be quite interested in the thoughts of others), I do think that the movie's treatment of gender leaves all other Disney movies in the dust. I say all in order to not-so-subtly prompt disagreement, but after roughly a day of brainstorming, I can't think of one other animated Disney film that includes so many female characters and passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. I even harbor a suspicion that Lilo and Stitch tactfully comments on what I'll call the “Prince-Charming-Cure”: the Disney deployment of romance as a deus ex machina for all of life's problems.

Snow White and Aurora are saved with a kiss, Ariel's happy ending relies on getting a strange man to smooch her after three days in his company, and Belle liberates herself by falling in love with her captor. The Lilo and Stitch version of Prince Charming, on the other hand, swoops in right when all appears lost, when Nani has lost every chance of finding employment and it looks as though their small family is about to be split up. Instead of fixing the issue, though, he can do little beside give the sisters a brief reprieve from their troubles by going surfing with them. This simultaneously undermines the Prince-Charming-Cure while emphasizing the importance of relationships. Any one connection can never magically fix all your problems, but it can certainly help you work your own way through them. Let's get symbolic, shall we? While Prince Charming might carry Snow White away to his castle in the sky, a veritable heaven attainable only by fairytale romance, the sandcastle David helps Lilo and Nani build has more real-world relevance. It might be temporary, but at least it's comforting.

A Very Viz-y Halloween: The Horror of the Female Body

clsloan — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 13:04:28 +0000

Image Credit: Picgifs.com

At least once a year, my fevered, candy-addle, jumped-up-on-Halloween brain grapples with the compelling notion that the horror genre somehow contains the key to unlock some delightful secrets about our cultural, if not our human, condition. The genre fascinates because its appeal rests on its ability to draw forth all of the emotional and physiological reaction we, as a species, have been conditioned to be very, very wary of. I can understand why romantic comedies command so much cultural popularity, but horror movies? Revulsion, repulsion, terror, horror, disgust...the viewer is bombarded with stimuli that are designed to make you feel as though you should flee as quickly as you possibly can, and yet, riveted we sit, consuming horror with more fervor and delight than we consume popcorn. So how does this genre relate to gender?

In my travels through the windy realms of random conversation, I have stumbled upon the opinion that horror movies take advantage of cultural anxieties (dangerous strangers, home invasion, loss of self) in order to shock and titillate. Many horror movies mobilize these anxieties in a Christian-Old-Testament manner, using powers beyond human comprehension to dole out a form of moral judgment on any reprehensible flouters of social law. Consider the trope of the massacred drunken, sexually-active teens coupled with (pun intended) the survival of the abstaining, typically female, virgin. Halloween (1978) seems to be the big-name film that cemented this motif in the modern horror genre, though the trope itself goes back much, much farther. I'm particularly interested in this cliché because it idealizes the adrenaline-flushed, active female body while implicitly condemning sexually-oriented energies. Is it sublimation? Is it a way of giving the (supposedly heteronormative male) viewer a pseudo-pornographic thrill without the taint of actual sex? Speaking of a supposedly male viewer, what does the constant stream of female protagonists in horror movies indicate? The skeptic in me berates the genre for a) deriving so much affect from strictly female suffering and for b) parading a female body in front of the viewer to generate erotic responses while refusing to let the heroine herself enjoy her sex life without being chased about by ghosts, serial killers or zombies. Double standard, horror genre.

However! The optimist in me wonders whether or not the female protagonist might serve as a point of identification rather than an object of stimulation. Do we not feel her fear? Her despair? Does the emotional connection we make with her transcend the threat of her reification? In addition, some horror movies tackle sexual anxieties from a female, not a puritanical, perspective. Alien (1979) not-so-subtly preys on fears of pregnancy, “monstrous” or overbearing maternity, and parental responsibility. The Ring (2002), the American remake of the Japanese Ringu, examines a single mother's struggle to raise her precocious child. Coincidentally, the supernatural threat in the story happens to be a little girl whose adoptive parents “failed” to control or understand her. If horror movies do rely on secret social terrors to illicit fear in their viewers, the genre's politics, and maybe monsters, rely on the community those anxieties are being drawn from. A hyper-conservative moral community might generate a noncommunicative, hand-of-god executioner. A perceived viewing group of men and women worried about raising children in a modern landscape yields ghost children. Of course, the formula for monster creation isn't so simple, but it's a promising thought experiment.

viz. - gender studies

A New Kind of Castle: Disney, Feminism, and Romance

A Very Viz-y Halloween: The Horror of the Female Body