Happy "Snow White" Release Week

It’s finally here! And for the first time in a long while, Disney and its audience stand shoulder-to-shoulder, united… in the hope that as of Monday, none of us will ever have to hear about Rachel Zegler’s “Snow White” ever again.

But a week is a week, and with only a few days left to go, the Disney bots are out in force defending the movie by attacking the usual suspects. By now the pattern should be utterly familiar to everyone… if you aren’t excited to see “Snow White”, or if you give it a bad review, it’s because you’re a racist, or a misogynist, or a man who just can’t handle a strong female character… pick your poison.

It all boils down to what Hollywood has labelled “Toxic Fandom”… mostly because it’s easier to elevate and attack the obnoxious comments of a few online trolls than it is to address the legitimate concerns of movie audiences who just aren’t interested in what Hollywood is selling anymore.

One of the dumbest things Hollywood ever did was to elevate “toxic fandom” to Public Enemy #1 status in an effort to squeeze a few extra “resistance” dollars out of a really bad “Ghostbusters” reboot way back in 2016. The effects of that own goal are still being felt today, most notably via the growing power of an online army of “anti-woke” film critic channels that have sprung up on YouTube… a reactive phenomenon that might not exist at all, but for that fateful decision to blame audience sexism and bigotry for a terrible movie’s box office failure eleven years ago. By the time “Snow White” opens on Friday night, it’s likely that more people will have seen a Critical Drinker (2.25 million subscribers) or Nerdrotic (1.18 million subscribers) video dunking on “Snow White” than will actually pay to see the movie.

This is obviously not a sustainable business model, especially in an environment where much of America has decided Hollywood no longer wants their business. And doubling-down on the “you’re just a backwards troglodyte who can’t understand sophisticated modern storytelling” messaging is not going to solve the problem.

And yet…

One Twitter/X reaction to the advance criticism of “Snow White” which jumped out at me this week had this to say about the film:

“The backlash against Snow White isn’t about the quality of the film - it’s about the refusal to accept an evolution of storytelling that better reflects the world we live in today (…) in a time when we recognize that justice, kindness, and leadership matter more than surface-level characteristics this new version redefines fairness not as prettiest, but as most just - a shift that some refuse to accept. The Loudest criticism isn’t about plot, character development, or storytelling; it’s about discomfort with a change that challenges outdated ideals.”

This is nonsense… despite the assurances of America’s Year Zero know-nothings, the basics of human storytelling have not changed substantially since we were slightly above average monkeys sitting around a fire accidentally started by a lightning strike. No matter where you go in the world, no matter how far back in recorded time, the same thematic elements keep showing up throughout the long complex history of human myth making. The specific cultural touchstones of these stories may change but the most enduring tales are those that deal with universal human themes that everyone can understand and appreciate no matter who they are or where they’re from. It’s the reason why Greek myths and Shakespearean plays continue to enthrall modern audiences, and it is also the reason why both Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” and John Sturges’ American remake “The Magnificent Seven” became iconic cultural touchstones the world over… the themes of masculinity, courage and defense of the weak against the strong featured in both films are universal human values despite the wildly different cultures from which the two films sprang.

Or as my friend Michael Walsh put it, “Aristotle invented the rules of storytelling. The end.”

This newest version of “Snow White” has been plagued with problems from the very beginning, but the first time I became aware of this was when Zegler said, about the movie she (allegedly) wants us to see: “I just mean that it’s no longer 1937. We absolutely wrote a Snow White that ... she’s not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.”

Fine… there’s only one problem with this, and that is the fact that the search for true love is a universal human desire, while dreaming about becoming a leader, is not. The former is an emotion, the latter is a goal, and you can’t have a successful movie without both. But Zegler, and the anonymous X poster quoted above, want us to believe that universal thematic elements like the search for true love are no longer necessary in modern filmmaking… that Disney has stumbled on some new form of motion picture storytelling that is so revolutionary that your backwards bigoted flyover redneck mind simply cannot comprehend it.

Look, I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility that the story of a peasant girl who dreams of growing up to rule her kingdom is a great idea for a story. But a story is nothing without an emotional character journey, and I can think of a whole raft of movies that have generated billions of dollars in revenue off the fact that most normal human beings dream about finding true love, whatever their other life goals may be.

Which is not to say that the original “Snow White’s” 1937 vesion of true love isn’t horribly outdated… for a lot of American men and women, it absolutely is. But Hollywood, at the behest of modern Progressive activists, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater here by suggesting that a desire to find love has no place at all in a modern female-driven movie. For women in our modern American culture, to fall in love has been labelled “settling”… as if finding love means giving up on something bigger and more important, or to have one’s hopes and aspirations subsumed by those of the man in the relationship. This is ridiculous framing, but there is a certain kind of person in Hollywood who is absolutely convinced that if our movies aren’t constantly messaging against love, marriage and family, that some woman somewhere might choose to forgo a life as a successful businesswoman, doctor, lawyer or politician in favor of “settling” for love… and that this eventuality would constitute a terrible national tragedy.

Of course we don’t know how “Snow White” will handle a potential love affair, or even if there will be one in the first place. But if it’s true, as Zegler suggests, that the dream of true love is not a part of this more “modern” remake, it will be in keeping with an unfortunate Hollywood trend.

I wrote about the “Twister” sequel last summer. “Twisters” was a fun, entertaining movie that mostly stayed away from politics and modern messaging in favor of good old fashioned middle-American adventure filmmaking. But in the end it stumbled over an unsatisfying finale by deliberately refusing to deliver on the romantic promise of its two appealing leads. Or, to put it more bluntly, there was no kiss at the end. In keeping with the theme of this essay, the “Twisters” filmmakers noted that a big climactic kiss was shot but not included in the Final Cut of the film because they didn’t want Daisy Edgar Jones’ brilliant scientist character to be defined by her relationship with a man.

Well…

Almost everyone in America is either in love, or wants to be, and it’s insulting to suggest that any woman who finds love is forever thereafter defined by the man she finds it with. Besides, making a movie about true love, one that ends with a great kiss, is not only smart business, it’s what audiences want to see. And a successful movie about true love would be great for the national mood… to say nothing of our historically low birth rates.

So why is it so hard for Hollywood to deliver on what its audience wants? To ask the question is to answer it.

Because we are wrong for wanting it in the first place.

If you enjoyed this essay and would like to support the work we do here at The Continental Congress, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you, so much, for your time and your patronage!