Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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that Disney films are full of weak, passive women has gained a widespread, largely unquestioned acceptance.
Disney’s films are important in cultural terms because Disney himself was probably the closest thing the twentieth-century produced to a teller of national (and international) folk stories. In the past, from the most ancient times until relatively recently, it was through the telling of tales (or rather, listening to tales being told) that human beings learned about their society’s ways, traditions, history, and beliefs. In other words, it was through stories that people learned about the culture in which they lived in a more studied, self-conscious way than they might have simply by living in it. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in her study of folk- and fairy-tales Women Who Run With the Wolves, in which she discussed the role of story in society, described such stories as a kind of “medicine”.19 Estés noted that “Stories enable us to understand the need for and the ways to raise a submerged archetype”.20 Estés is referring to archetypes which still exist, but which have been repressed – or ignored – within the cultural concepts and folklore of a society. For her, these “submerged archetypes” are still present, technically, in the sense that they have not been lost or forgotten; their stories are not told, however, because – for whatever reasons – these archetypes do not resonate within society during a particular era. Her book focused, in particular, upon the ways in which various stories can teach and heal the souls/psyches of women. In earlier times, the younger generations turned habitually to the older members of their society for knowledge concerning the problems both of daily life and of life’s more complicated issues. In pre-industrial societies in particular, the various generations were more likely to spend time in contact with one another, and, especially in less literate societies, storytelling was perhaps the most common means of answering complex questions to do with such themes as love, morality, religion, justice, and truth.
As Western society became more literate, printed media began to replace the older form of storytelling. While printing stories does give them the advantages of being more widely disseminated and, therefore, ensures that they have a greater likelihood of being preserved, there are two great disadvantages inherent in the teaching capacity of the printed tale: (1) it is less likely to be “told” (or read, which-ever is the case) in response to a particular question or situation which may have arisen (and about which it might be able to shed some light) and is more likely simply to be read at random; (2) the story loses its cultural fluidity. This second aspect will be referred to later in relation to Disney’s modifications of traditional tales. If one individual is telling a “teaching tale”, he or she can alter certain aspects of the tale so that the listeners at that moment will hear something which is especially relevant to them at that time in their lives and, thereby, gain more from the tale than they might have otherwise. A printed story, however, as a consequence of being written down, is forced to be the same tale every time it is read. Although the ways individuals interpret what they read can vary widely, the words themselves – as physical structures printed on a page – of course do not alter themselves on the page in order to suit the needs of each individual reader. And it was in this way, as printed media became “traditional” for later generations, that certain versions of stories became “standard” or, in some cases (such as with the Grimm Brothers’ or Hans Christian Anderson’s versions) came to be seen as the “original” version of a tale. As with surviving oral versions of various folk tales and fairy tales, the historian can learn much about a society not only from the way a tale is told and preserved; much can also be learned from knowing which tales a society deems worthy of preservation and which tales it allows to disappear.
And then comes the medium of film. The ability of film to tell a story was recognised almost from the start, and effective uses of film as story-teller were quickly found. Stories could be told and retold in many different ways on film, and both film historians and cultural historians have noted the multitude of ways in which attitudes to love, war, religion, the family, and other “larger” topics and issues could be conveyed in films set in both historical and contemporary times.21 For example, it is possible to compare, amongst many alternative themes, the changes in the culturally-expected “effects” of marriage on a young woman’s life by looking at both the 1950 and 1991 Hollywood versions of the Edward Streeter novel, Father of the Bride. It is then possible to explore this theme further, as well as such themes as motherhood, ageing (Stanley/George Banks becoming a “grandpa”) and how to “let go” of one’s adult offspring in both Father of the Bride sequels, Father’s Little Dividend (1951) and the less-creatively titled Father of the Bride Part II (1995). It is because of this aspect of film’s use as a vehicle to explore larger themes, as well as Hollywood’s habit both of remaking older films and of producing different filmic versions of the same story (usually a literary text),22 that what is shown on-screen – and how this can change in different versions (as is the case with adaptations of classic literary tales or remakes of the same type as the Father of the Bride movies) – can very effectively illustrate changes in a society’s attitudes and beliefs over time.
And again, as with folk/fairy tales, the historian can learn a great deal from examining not only what types of stories have been made into films, but also how the stories were presented, what was left in the story, what was altered, what was left out altogether, and what new elements were added to it. For folklorist Vladimir Propp, these successive “variants” (as he called them) were crucial to understanding a society, since examining the differences between variants revealed much about both the internal and external changes society had undergone.23 As Propp expressed this idea: “Folklore formations arise not as a direct reflection of life (this is a comparatively rare case), but out of the clash of two ages or of two systems and ideologies”.24
If there is one single aspect of Disney’s films which is consistently criticised more than anything else, it is the changes made in the stories which caused them to differ from the “original” versions. Norman Klein mentions Bruno Bettelheim’s criticism of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937): that Disney had differentiated each of the dwarfs into characters with their own names and personalities.25 It seems clear, however, that Disney, in altering and/or “modernising” these tales, was essentially performing the traditional function of the storyteller by altering the tale he was telling to fit his audience, as well as to make the story work cinematically (giving each of the seven dwarfs his own name and personality was cinematically more interesting than simply having seven unnamed, undifferentiated major characters on screen). Furthermore we now know that Bettelheim was wrong to accuse Disney of initiating the change whereby the dwarfs are individualised; in the 1916 silent, live-action version of the story, Snow White (directed by J. Searle Dawley), the dwarfs are each named and made distinct from one another (albeit not to the same extent as in the Disney version).
More important than the cinematic changes made by Disney to these stories, however, are the ways in which Disney films present larger ideas and themes such as love and morality. Indeed, particularly significant are how these themes are presented, the ways in which these presentations change over time, and how consciously or unconsciously they are included within the Disney studio’s filmic texts. To quote Propp:
The old is changed in accordance with the new life, new ideas, new forms of consciousness. Transformation into an opposite is only one type of reinterpretation. Changes can be carried so far as to make things unrecognizable, and discovery of the original forms is possible only given a great deal of comparative data on various peoples and at varying stages of their development.26
Walt Disney was certainly seen by some of his contemporaries as being a “modern-day” storyteller. In a Today’s Cinema article from 1938, an anonymous writer, known as “Onlooker”, wrote of Disney that “Disney is one of the great creative artists that are destined to immortality. He is the Hans Anderson of the modern medium.”27 And, just as Propp emphasised that the written variants of folk tales were historical documents to be examined by scholars, so too are Disney’s film variants – they are simply filmed, rather than written, and their dialogue and images are, as historical documents, open to analysis and interpretation. In other words, Disney films carry on the tradition of telling these stories in ways which are relevant to their audiences: the stories went from being constructed