Here's an idea. "Frozen" is a fairy tale
that critiques fairy tales.
So after our recent episode about spoilers,
I'm actually struggling with myself a little bit
about whether or not to warn people about spoilers.
But, like we said, pals before portents,
so Frozen spoilers ahead.
Lots of them.
Spoil the whole thing.
All of it.
You've been warned.
A couple weeks ago here in New York
we suffered a pretty awful heat/humidity wave.
And so, for obvious reasons, and with my AC
cranked to arctic blast, I decided to rewatch "Frozen."
And I started thinking that, you know,
as late as Idea Channel would be to this dance,
we really should say something about this movie.
But what?
So much has already been said.
I even asked Twitter what there was left to talk about,
and the response was basically unanimous--
(SINGING WITH IDINA MENZEL) Let it go, let it go.
Turn away and slam the door.
(NORMAL VOICE) This is really not in my range.
Which, yeah, is true.
The number of thinky blog posts written about "Frozen"
is well beyond the ships launched
by Helen of Troy range.
"Frozen" has inspired no shortage of critical response--
people asking if it's feminist or misogynist, if it challenges
the notion of what true love really is, if it illustrates
the ways we tend to treat people who suffer from things that
are invisible-- things like anxiety or depression.
People have written about the nature of the Norwegian imagery
and dress, asking if it is a celebration or appropriation
of the culture of the Sami-- the indigenous people
of Scandinavia.
Link, doobly doo.
And of course people have asked if Disney
is trying to indoctrinate all the children
into the radical gay agenda.
Yoo-hoo!
"Frozen" launched all of these think pieces not because of its
beauty or, not only because of its beauty,
but because of its complexity.
"Frozen" is in essence something of a fairy tale about fairy
tales, or at the very least a fairytale
that critiques fairy tales through its use
of the usual fairy tale tropes.
It is based on an honest to goodness
tale of the fairies, Hans Christian Andersen's "Snow
Queen."
But over the course of something like 15 years in production
purgatory, all of the pieces comprising the original story
were rearranged like the memories of the sister
that you accidentally hurt with your cryokinetic magic.
Elsa, originally the evil Snow Queen, was made good.
Anna, her sister, was added.
And the main character became the person
affected by the inciting incident,
not the one who caused it.
Hans, the Prince Charming character, became the bad guy.
And the bad guy, the Duke of Weselton,
became some vaguely xenophobic source of comedic relief.
Weselton!
It's Weselton!
Sven I think was always a thing.
And, I mean, it's a Disney movie,
so you have to have some animal that's not a dog but behaves
like one anyway, right?
Meaning "Frozen" has all of the fairy tale parts,
they're just in different places.
There's a love interest, but it's not who you think.
And there is a dastardly force, but whoops, just kidding!
It's over here!
There's evil magic, but one of the good characters wields it.
And there's true love but it is between sisters.
I see this as an implicit critique of what
can count as a fairy tale.
"Frozen" is a vaguely progressive example
of how traditional, fantastical type stories can
be told while still maintaining their meaning
and intended effect on a modern audience.
Look, I'm retired.
We're always going to feel the need for strongly
moral stories, but, you know, morality changes over time.
The pace may seem glacial but ever
since the start of the so-called Disney Renaissance
with "The Little Mermaid," there's
been no shortage of these types of stories
with modern twists, the most present of which
is the non-traditional family structure.
But none of those stories I don't
think take the genre as head on as "Frozen" does.
The upshot being "Frozen" is easy to approach
critically because it is itself a piece of criticism.
The story is simple and familiar but the details
are novel to the point of being innovative.
The same thing can be said I think about "The Fault in Our
Stars" and "Firefly"/"Serenity," which, along with "Frozen,"
I think it's important to point out didn't really get real
votes of confidence from the Duke of Weseltons of the world.
Weselton!
Duke of Weselton.
"Frozen," for example, was significantly undermerchandised
at its release because so many people thought it would flop.
Turns out that they had snow for brains.
Anyway, there's a school of critical thought
that says it is only through critique that a finished
work is realized.
The experience of the audience, of the fans and all that stuff,
is very important.
It activates a work's soul.
But as Terence Hawkes writes in "Structuralism and Semiotics,"
the critic creates the finished work by his reading of it
and does not remain simply an inert consumer
of a ready-made product.
Thus, the critic need not humbly efface himself before the work
and submit to its demands.
On the contrary, he actively constructs its meaning.
Amongst other things, this means the work isn't
some monolith of intention.
Its meaning, purpose, and legacy is determined
by its effect on its audience but also
how it's shown to fit into the larger cultural situation,
both past and present, and how it functions as a work.
Hawkes was writing specifically about literature,
but I think it applies to what we're talking about as well.
In some sense "Frozen" wasn't realized
until it was pulled apart by every Anna, Christophe,
and Olaf under the sun.
But in another sense we might also
claim that the fairy tale as a genre
is not realized until it becomes the object of criticism.
So here we are-- fans critiquing "Frozen,"
itself a critique of well-worn, nearly
culturally-ingrained types of stories which
does so as a well-worn, nearly culturally-ingrained type
of story.
If criticism means that something has been realized,
has reached its full potential, and with "Frozen"
we've reached a kind of recursive meta criticism-- hand
motions.
Maybe then fairy tales-- not a particular individual fairy
tale, but the genre of fairy tales
has been realized in some way.
Which is not to say that "Frozen" is the first thing
to ever turn the fairy tale on its head.
It's certainly not.
There have been things like "Wicked, "The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe," "Coraline," TV
shows like "Grimm" and even "Supernatural" arguably.
I'm also not saying that fairy tales are over
in the grand sense, like in the way that I refuse to throw away
my chain wallet even though chain wallets are over--
unless you're a biker, in which case you look great.
Rather, it seems meaningful that Disney,
generally regarded as the pop culture purveyor extraordinaire
of soft-focus, traditional, hypernormative capital F Fairy
capital T Tales haircut has culminated a long journey
referred to as its Renaissance with a movie like "Frozen"--
not necessarily the cause of a massive change in the fairy
tale genre, but maybe the result of one.
It is a fairy tale which seems, in my estimation at least,
to gather up all of the fairy tale tropes
only to just-- I'm sure you see where I'm going with this-- let
them free.
Let's them free.
What do you guys think?
Does "Frozen" signal the culmination
of some process that has changed fairy tales somehow?
Let us know in the comments.
And (SINGING) for the first time in about a week,
I will ask you to subscribe.
These are-- These are my singing hands.
I don't-- I don't know why I feel the need to do this.
I hope everyone who attended had a safe and fun Comic-Con
and everyone who didn't had a great week looking
at awesome photos and feeling really sad about it.
I know that I did.
Let's see what you guys had to say about cosplay as theater.
Maximus Thaler sees a connection between cosplay and theater
through the lens of someone who works on puppets,
which is really interesting.
They talk about how the thing that comes to life
is the performer.
But then also a group-level identity,
which is really interesting and I think also
raises a bunch of questions about where
you can assign the agency.
Is it the person who's doing the performing?
Is it their garb?
Is it the puppet?
Is it the thing that they're using?
Is it the audience?
Is it the general situation in which everything happens?
Or, you know, some combination of all those?
Which, yeah, I would-- I would guess that it is.
Aster Fliers talks about Peter Brooks and his idea
of the immediate theater and says
that while it might be troubling to call
Comic-Con as a whole theater, that there are these moments.
There are these tiny interactions
that you could call theater because there
is a kind of, like, agreed-upon, understood activation
of a space.
And so you have these kind of fleeting theater moments, which
I think is just-- yeah, that's a-- that is a beautiful idea.
Lit Crit makes some really salient points about how
cosplay might be lent some legitimacy by calling it
theater, but that in the long run
you might end up doing more harm than good because as
far as most people's conception of theater is concerned,
cosplay would be bad theater.
And so that, you know, might not ultimately be helping.
And, yeah, the ramifications of what
happens when you call cosplay theater
is a thing that we spent regrettably little time on.
So this is an awesome comment.
Links to this one and all the rest in the doobly doo.
Jennifer Gallihugh says that intention
is a very important part of this equation
and that simply putting on cosplay
does not automatically make something theater.
It's the performance, the acting,
that makes things theater.
And that, you know, it seems like, yeah, there
might be some emergent kind of performance or theater.
But it only exists insofar as people
are intending to create some kind
of performative space, which I think is a very good point.
On the other hand, Jim Nyenhuis, who--
Jim, if I completely butchered your last name,
I'm very sorry-- says that you can presuppose
a certain level of intentionality
when people are cosplaying at a con.
And that this is something of the fundamental magic
of theater-- that you, you know, that it
interacts with the real world.
However, Alan Wexelblat on Twitter
said that these kinds of assumptions of intentionality
run the risk of being assertions of dominance or power at worst
or just disrespectful at best.
And I think that these are all very valid points and things
worth considering, especially if you are a con-goer
or cosplayer interacting with other con-goers and cosplayers.
Sheva Gunnery and a bunch of other people
made a connection between cosplay and improv theater,
which is, yeah, a very clear connection, right?
That as far as someone is behaving as the character
that they are dressed as and are improvising
with other con-goers, that that is most certainly
a kind of performance that you can view as, you know,
micro theater.
And, finally, a list of the words
that I mispronounced in last week's episode
set to "Yakety Sax."
[MUSIC - "YAKETY SAX"]
Chavez, commedia dell-arte, satsuki, and cosplay--
which I have said "coz-play" to probably hundreds of people
and no one has said anything to me ever.
And it's like when you're hanging out
with friends for four and a half hours
and, like, three hours in, they're like,
oh, you got something in your teeth.
And you're like, why didn't you just tell me?
Just tell me and I'll get the thing out of my teeth.
I'll say "cosplay" the way you're supposed to.
This week's episode is brought to you
by the hard work of these Anna, Christophe, and Olafs.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
Links in-- you guessed it-- the doobly doo.
And the Tweet of the week comes basicallydan,
who points us towards an article about a person who
invented another person online.
Identity is confusing.
And for this week's record swaps--
sorry about missing last week's record swap.
We are going to be replacing Television's "Marquee
Moon" with Iannis Xenakis' "GRM Works."
[MUSIC - "YAKETY SAX"]
I know lots of people are going to be
really sad to see "Marqee Moon" go, but adios "Marquee Moon."
Welcome Iannis Xenakis.