…it’s because they can’t come up with anything as good as the old stuff. Case in point, the new movie Enchanted. I watched it today with my family, and I couldn’t stand it. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have put on my headphones and turned on my mp3 player in the middle of the show (my sister was pretty offended by it), but I know that if I didn’t do that, I would have walked out of the theater, if only to spend five minutes vomiting in the restroom and the next twenty minutes recovering. I tend to annoy people a LOT with this habit, but I like to comment on movies as I watch them. Here are some of the things I wanted to say but held myself back from while I was in the theater:
<poisonous cynicism>
“This movie is like the equivalent of Scary Movie for Disney.”
“If her super power is to summon cute animals to do her bidding, why didn’t she do that when she first popped out of the manhole and was running around lost in the city?”
“You can really tell that this was written in 2007 by the fact that all the princesses’ and evil stepmothers’ dresses are strapless.”
“Yes, deary, of course all your dreams will come true if you eat this poisoned apple from the ugly looking stranger who threw you in the well!”
“How many princesses live in forest cottages and spend all their time with animals?”
“That cartoon version of the evil stepmother is actually kind of hot!”
“Of course! The chipmunk can’t talk when he falls through the manhole, but the evil stepmother retains all her powers!”
“Yeah, their fiances leave them and they randomly decide to get together without knowing each other, but don’t worry, they’re just minor characters–it’s not like they’re real people or anything.”
</poisonous cynicism>
I think that the thing that really got me about this movie was that it portrayed the fantasy genre, and fairy tales in particular, as stories sanitized especially for children, the same way that Madeleine L’Engle talks about how adults take out the really important and meaningful things out of children’s fiction and dumb the language down to make it “suitable” for them.
The reality, of course, is that it’s good when fiction–especially children’s fiction–deals with difficult issues like death, sin, crime, tragedy, and stuff like that. Orson Scott Card said in his 2007 House of Learning lecture that children should definitely be exposed to these kinds of things in fiction first, so that when it really happens they’ll know how to face it. L’Engle argued convincingly that if you take out these kinds of things, you kill the story and make it less truthful, less meaningful. Children’s literature needs to deal with complex and difficult issues–otherwise, it crosses the line between fiction and lies and obscures the truth instead of revealing it!
So, I disagreed fundamentally with the movie in its assumptions about the fantasy genre–that it’s this “everything always ends happily ever after and all your dreams come true” kind of place where real evil doesn’t exist. Evil, danger, and tragedy is at the heart of good fantasy! Even good escapist fantasy!
On that point alone, the movie turned me off in a major way within the first thirty seconds. But then it had all these frills and other stuff that I just generally don’t care for, like cutsiness and musical-type songs. I won’t say that those made the overall quality of the movie bad, it just goes against my personal tastes.
<spoiler>
There were some parts that I could tolerate more than others. I did like the fact that the princess didn’t end up marrying that clueless “prince charming,” because it would have just been wrong to send the message that people can get married without knowing a thing about each other first (as it was, they still sent that message in the fact that prince charming married that other dude’s fiance, but hey, they’re just minor characters–it’s not like they’re real people, right?).
</spoiler>
Now, it could be true that I’m just a horrible cynic, that I’ve lost my innocence and begrudge others there’s. I’ll admit that. The audience gave the movie an ovation afterwards, and everyone else in my family said that they really liked it (it was a matinee so most of the people were parents with their children, but that is still an audience that counts a lot in fiction). So there probably was some good in the movie. And, I’ll admit, it really didn’t have any of the subtle leftist socio-political messages that I’d regularly pick up on in the Disney of a decade ago. So there probably were a couple of redeeming qualities in the movie that I didn’t pick up on.
However, that underlying message about the meaning of fantasy just totally rubbed me in the wrong way. I think that we need a LOT less sanitizing in children’s lit, and that the really good stories–the fantasy that is really good–is the stuff that looks evil right in the face for what it is and still tells a damn good story.
