Well, there’s IMO two factors there…
Update on the photos story, and the various lies and half-truths Disney tried to spin about them.
Update? It’s exactly the same info we had before, just more poorly written.
I’ve come in too late to read every post, so forgive me if this has been addressed and I’ve missed it. But i have skimmed through, and i feel we are missing very important perspective.
Several points have been made about Mr. Dinklage starring in roles like the dwarf giant in Marvel or a movie called “Dwarf”. But these are not movies for very young children. It can be assumed that adults watching The Hobbit understand the difference between fairy tale humanoids and their colleagues at work.
That is in no way a comparison to a kindergartener who has to go to school on Monday after all his friends have just seen the new Disney flick that portrays people who look like him as asexual idiots.
In that age group, just calling attention to physical characteristics as category definers can “other” a child right out of every friend group. There’s nothing about this story which requires the men to be of short stature. They could as easily be the seven miners, or the seven woodsmen, or just the seven brothers.
But what Mr. Dinklage knows, and we can only guess at, is what it’s like to be a child watching that film. Seeing yourself represented at last - what are you being invited to identify with? What are other children being invited to compare you to? Is it flattering? Does it support self-esteem? Sleepy? Dopey? Happy?
Do they have to be men? I don’t think there’s a consensus whether the dwarfs in the original film were supposed to be understood as men (i.e. actual human beings of short stature) or mythological/folkloric humanoid creatures.
Could they be the seven bears, or the seven badgers? Or the seven gnomes? Or the seven glurbs, or the seven smordlings?
That is, is the problem what they look like, or what they’re called (using a word that, perhaps unfortunately, has two separate meanings: a fantasy creature, and a real-world human being with dwarfism)? And if it’s the latter, could the problem be fixed by keeping them the same but using a different word to refer to them?
In point of fact there are many versions of the story, collected by the Grimms and others. An interesting article:
The kiss is not present in all, for example. The Disney cartoon is not the final word.
Gaiman’s (linked to previously), thinking of Snow vampirically, implies a range of forest peoples.
Fairy tales can be dark heady stuff.
I want to point out the ‘kiss’ was a necessary medical treatment. Should I not perform CPR on a dying woman because I can’t get her consent first?
The prince had no idea the kiss would waken the the beautiful lady in the coffin. Maybe he gets a pass because he thought she was dead, and couldn’t be upset by it. But it’s not as if he was attempting CPR.
True, he was just giving his true love a goodbye kiss. But still- it worked anyway.
Sorry that seems creepier yet!
“My love for you is so strong it’s literally magic. Also, we’ve never actually met,” is pretty weird, too.
Dropping the coffin, to jostle the apple out of her throat, is a whole lot less creepy.
If Disney has any guts, they’ll go with the fan theory: Snow White is actually dead at the end, and the Prince is the Grim Reaper or angel of death taking her away.
Proof:
I’ve never seen “kiss of death” used that way. Usually, it means that something has been marked for death or failure at some future point. It comes from the Biblical story where Judas identifies Jesus to the Romans by kissing him.
I didn’t say it was a good theory.
Perhaps he is Hades and she is Persephone?
Snow is near a well when they met, but doesn’t “almost fall in.”
The Prince lived in magical times when it made perfect sense for him to kiss her on the lips because it’s a possible curative action. You don’t think he did for sexual gratification do you?
He 100% did it for sexual gratification–or at least romantic gratification. There’s no sign whatsoever that he was administering magic first aid.
As for whether it’s creepy, imagine a young relative of yours dies tragically. Some rich dude that doesn’t even know her name declares that she’s his true love, and approaches to kiss her corpse. Are you cool with this?
Hearing about Snow White in her glass coffin always makes me think “Has anyone tried kissing Lenin to see if he’ll wake up?” He’s in a glass coffin perpetually attended by … well, Russians, rather than dwarfs… but it’s close enough.
Maybe they’re afraid to wake him. “In his house at Moscow dead Lenin lies dreaming.”