This post has spoilers for a movie called Snow White: Fairest of Them All. But the real question is, does the reader care? xD
You will excuse me if I take today’s post to RANT RANT RANT?
Last evening, my mother, sister, and I watched a movie called Snow White: Fairest of Them All. The title and cover spoke volumes; I wasn’t expecting it to be particularly good. Fantasy films rarely are. This movie, moreover, was made for television. But we watched it anyway. I even voted to watch it. Who knows? I thought, I’ve been proven wrong about things before. Perhaps the adulations on the back cover have a point to them.
But they didn’t, of course. This experience has proved to me that when it comes to movies that I, personally, would not care to watch with any kind of enjoyment, my powers of foresight, while grievously mortified in other circumstances, are unerring in this instance. This is not boasting. This is a caution of the highest sort, D:
Fairest of Them All begins most unexpectedly: the only kingdom over which the Father and Mother of Snow White rule is their own rustic cottage. And when the inevitable fairy tale plot device has stolen away the poor Mother, the Father goes wandering through the snow in search of milk for baby. His despairing tears awaken a genie from the ice, and the genie grants him milk, a kingdom, and a queen. I wondered briefly after this odd beginning, but then concluded that it was due to the rule of the modern retelling of fairy tales: Our Fairy Tales Are Different. And Better. And Edgier. Cheers.
So Father is now a King and Snow White a Princess. But there is no queen to help rule and care for the child; the obliging genie hastens home and turns his sister (a veritable goblin to look at, complete with a Wicked Witch’s unspeakable fingernails) into a beautiful lady who can seduce and win the king. But the king’s heart still remains with his poor wife. His daughter screams bloody murder when the witch attempts to hold her.
So the witch flees back to her brother and her brother gives her a magic mirror to smash. Bits of glass rain over the kingdom, and a single, solitary piece falls into the king’s eye. The next time the witch shows up, all he can see is her (glamoured) beauty. He is effectively seduced, and Baby Snow White screams in her crib in the next room.
It was at this point that I turned to my mother and sister and exclaimed, “The witch should have put a bit of mirror in the baby’s eye. Who cares about the king—if she won over Snow White, then the king would have to follow suit and just think what kind of awesome story that would make! And anyway, it was so obvious she should have put that mirror in the baby’s eye; it’s the baby who hates her—”
“Ssh!”
So I hushed and mourned the waste of a spectacular inversion to the usual tale. A line of text informs viewers that sixteen years have passed; the next scene finds Snow White, her father, and her stepmother in a carriage, with the stepmother gabbling about the prince who’s coming for a visit and Snow White, sit down and stop waving to those peasant people no one cares about them blah. The exchange between stepmother and stepdaughter informs viewers of Mutual Dislike; Father pops in to inform viewers that the years have turned him senile and spineless. And he’s still pawing at the eye with its sliver of mirror. … It’s been sixteen years.
The queen beats a horse, to show us how evil she is, and the carriage arrives at the castle (where she steps on the carriage driver’s hand. To show us again how evil she is. And before now, she’s been turning dwarves and gnomes into statues. Just in case you couldn’t guess she was evil). She rushes upstairs to meet the prince, and stumbles in on him ogling Snow White from a window. She falls wildly in love with his curly hair. He turns to look at her and thinks, with horror, “She has lines in her face.”
Some stuff happens between now and the prince’s welcome feast, wherein Snow White appears into the queen’s magic mirror to declaim her own beauty (and her display of narcissism is perfectly repulsive; it makes the queen look tame and humble), king finally gets the glass out of his eye (… after sixteen years) and the queen decides to use the glass to ensnare the prince and his curly hair in a net of Enchanted Love. But the prince stares so long and hard at Snow White that his natural clumsiness gets loose, and throws the queen’s plans awry. She snarls at him, “Idiot.” This viewer then wondered why the heck she is trying to enthrall an idiot who can’t keep his eyes in his head or his jaw shut for half a second. He’s scaring Snow White as if he’s some kind of molester. He bumbles about worse than Bella Swan. He has no virtues aside from curly hair, and curly hair is not a virtue so I shouldn’t even be making this point. And yet... oh, whatever.
The piece of glass intended for Prince Curly flies instead into the eye of a servant, who ogles and leers at the queen. She facepalms. Meanwhile, Prince Curly stalks Snow White into a maze and confesses True Love. Snow White complains bitterly about the shallowness of people—they only ever see the outside of a person, but does outward beauty ever inform one of inner goodness? Nope. Nada. Never. The prince, with a strained look of glee on his face, presses his hand to her chest and tells her to look inside her own heart.
There’s an Aesop in there somewhere, and Snow White is supposed to be referring to the queen and all but… you know… Snow White and her tragic complaint are just not working. Snow White’s outer beauty is an accurate reflection of her inner beauty. People have been shown to react to both (though I have my doubts about the prince, =/). As for the queen, only the king has ever been enchanted by her beauty, and only just enchanted (that piece of mirror was defective from the start). Everyone else had seen right through her: peasants, carriage driver, Snow White, Prince Curly, all of them. The only people she’s fooled is her silly husband and herself. And her husband deserved to be fooled, as far as stories go: he wasn’t very intelligent to begin with. So just what is Snow White quibbling about? I am, by this time, growing rather sick of the idiocies in this movie. I think with longing on the 30+ tabs I have opened on TV Tropes.
Back inside the castle, the leering servant has pledged his Eternal Love to the queen, and she commands him to kill Snow White. He takes a torch and seeks out the princess in the maze. He leers at her and hides his face and shadow and as good as says, “Come along, little girl. I’ve got some candy for you in my van.” (Actually, he says something to the effect of your parents want to see you. ALONE. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.) The prince feels that he has not adequately convinced the viewers of his stupidity, and so giggles, “Why Snow White, you should follow the nice man! Just don’t leave me here too long!” Snow White goes. The servant turns into the woods. Snow White says, “Why ever are you leading me there, dear Hector?” Says Hector, “We’re going to check the rabbit traps.”
Says all three viewers: “Please. Hector. The obvious evil. It hurts.”
Some more stuff happens and Snow White huggles a rabbit until Hector raises a knife. She calmly puts the bunny down, turns on her would-be murderer a blank face and asks in monotone, “Oh Hector. Why.”
The piece of glass slides obligingly out of Hector’s eye. There is a muffled sound of outrage from the audience. It took the king sixteen freaking years—
This viewer, by this time, is fed up, and with great dignity, absents herself from the television screen and returns to TV Tropes. She listens to Snow White get into all sorts of scrapes (without once mussing her hair), to the prince getting turned into a bear and proceeding to lumber through the woods moaning, and to Snow White’s mirror image replying to the queen’s inquiries, “I am the fairest in the land. I am. I am. I am the fairest in the land. I am. I am. I am the—” ad nauseaum. I tune out after a while. The article on the Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots is positively riveting. Don’t click the link, or your life will be ruined.
I drift back to watch the end of Snow White: the queen has failed to kill Snow White and her genie brother returns to turn her ugly again. The prince regains his curly head of hair and his ogling face. At some point, there is some moralizing on beauty and ugliness, and how people never think to look beyond the outward person to the beautiful, sparkly inward person. Again, the Aesop fails. Snow White’s shining face and flawless hair are an accurate reflections of her heart. The evil queen’s TRUE appearance (warts and fingernails and everything) is a true reflection of her heart. So what if her brother glamoured her into beauty? That beauty was a veil, drawn over the truth of her appearance, and the truth of her appearance tells the truth of her heart. So much for beauty does not equal goodness. It does, in Snow White. And the queen is bad because she is ugly. Pixel Johnson, preserve us. Perhaps the Aesop is more subtle than my accusations. But perhaps such a consideration is overly generous.
I come to the end of this post and realize it was not much of a rant. I guess writing calms me down or something. Ah well. I hope, at the least, you the reader were entertained.
In other news, I don’t know what to write for NaNoWriMo. On the one hand, I’m considering a revision of my 2007 NaNo: seven characters tell seven stories to save one of their number from being fairy-snatched. It’s a perfectly useful idea: I can squeeze all the other stories I want to write into it—stories within stories, and all that jazz. On the other hand, I came up with a story, yesterday morning, that made me very happy: two estranged brothers are forced to come to terms with one another while they work to solve the mystery of their mother’s life (or they will be eaten alive by blackmail!) However, as time passes, coming to terms grows increasingly more impossible: the younger can’t let go of the past and the events that estranged them to begin with, and the elder is beginning to lose his grasp of reality as a result of the battle he wages against his sibling. He, a rational man dedicated to the pursuit of hard fact, science, and logic, concludes, by the end, that to win free of his brother, he must resort to exorcism, while the younger concludes that to resurrect the past (in which he was happy and his brother was not, but that doesn’t matter), he must put his brother into an enchanted sleep and bury him in a glass coffin. This was actually not inspired in any way by Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, xD
But I'll see.
