This reminds me of a scene from Tom Hanks/Dan Ackroyd comedy Dragnet.
The two detectives are at the zoo, where a lion has had its mane shaved off. Some kids are looking at the lion, disconsolately.
Detective Friday: It really gets me Streebek, how do you explain to those kids that the mane will grow back?
Detective Streebek [shouting]: Hey kids! It’ll grow back!
Kids: Yay!!
If a kid sees the Prince smooch an unconscious Snow White while growing up in the 1950s, it reinforces the pervasive contemporary mores relating to men getting to kiss women whenever they feel like it. If they see it now, it will be a mere bagatelle compared to the messages they are getting about equality and consent.
“Hey kids, don’t do that” should really be sufficient to undo any harm caused.
Which isn’t to say that I think a remake should have a kiss of life scene, just that… honestly, it’d be fine.
Ah yes, 2023, when all gender equality issues have been resolved, and everyone knows and respects the concept of consent. No more work to be done here!
Ah yes, 2023, where attitudes to consent are completely indistinguishable from the 1950s.
See, I can do it too.
Society is not perfect, but all the kids I know are getting very consistent messages from role models and media about the critical importance of consent. In that milieu, any competent parent should be able to undo the fiendishly subtle brainwashing of a Disney film with the minimum of effort. If living the values doesn’t work, “Kids, don’t do that” should manage just fine.
And if the parents can’t or won’t do that, Disney is neither here nor there.
I am so sorry for you life then if you believe that.
By people making shit up. The film indicates she is a young woman of no specified age. Yeah, there are many other versions of the story, with different ages. But we are not talking about them, we are talking about the Disney film.
I hardly think this one movie is going to undo every other message kids get. But is it a story that will play well today the way it was written in the 1930s, or is it a story that will play better if it’s substantially modified? That’s really what the thread is about.
I’m sure you understand the difference between “we are no better than we were in 1950” and “it’s no longer a problem today.” I think things are much better than it was in 1950, and I think we have a long ways to go.
I’m not sure if you have kids, but this just isn’t reality. As a parent, you can talk all you want about consent to your kids, but if they’re getting different messages from the media consume, you will not always succeed. And it is certainly not a “minimum of effort.” And for whatever progress we’ve made teaching girls about consent, we’ve made very little with boys. I don’t know what media you see, but I can assure you media in general does NOT consistently show appropriate consent.
“Kids, don’t do that” solves the problem? Have you actually encountered a teenager in real life?
Also, one of the ways we got from where we were in the '50s, to where we are today, was by calling out media that was promoting problematic ideas. One of the ways we get from where we are now to some better place in the future is by continuing to do that.
I don’t believe that’s the case; the apple caused her to fall into eternal sleep. If she died, surely she’d have gone a bit sour in the year it takes the Prince to show up?
Also not in the movie. Her age is never stated and there is no reference to a life event or something else timed that would indicate what it is.
While she was 7 in the short story, she’s supposed to be out there in the woods for ten years before the prince shows up.
Part of how parents do that is by influencing what media ideals they consume. Parents like their girls seeing empowered models and are not excited about buying media that promotes girls as the ones to be saved. They can undo bad role models; they would rather not have to.
No she was not. He thought she was. She appeared to be. But she was not
I am so sorry for you if you do believe in the One True Love myth.
I’ve been married almost all my adult life to the same woman. It has not been happily ever after. We’ve had issues and stress and supporting each other through difficulties. Falling in love was a process. Staying in love is work. And if one of us died tomorrow? I expect that either of would expect the other to find love again.
FWIW I am amused by those who think the Disney cartoon should be handled as sacred text. Disney changed the story to make it sell better when they created the cartoon; they will make changes hoping they will make it sell better now.
Girl power sells kids movies and products today and did not when the cartoon was made. The rest follows whether things should be seen as creepy or not.
I’m aware. But it jibes with the age she’s presented as. She’s certainly not an adult, and he is. If she’s 16, my argument remains the same.
There’s certainly not a ten-year gap in the movie.
I’ll have to console myself with all the non-fictional love in my life, I suppose.
Note that I said “True Love”, by which I mean the love-at-first-sight, it-doesn’t-matter-you’re-a-child, we’re-imprinted-on-each-other-like-young-animals kind of fairy story. It’s a terrible thing to celebrate in Snow White, it was a terrible thing to still be writing in Twilight, and we won’t get rid of that shit if we don’t call it out.
Further to this - it seems not in the movie itself, but apparently in the production treatment
“Snow White: Janet Gaynor type – 14 years old”.
Same source has the Prince as : “Doug Fairbanks type — 18 years old”. (Art of Walt Disney, Christopher Finch, 1995 edition, pg 125)
So that explains where the commonly agreed age comes from.
Yes, I have kids. Aged 14 and 11, a boy and a girl. They’ve got a good understanding of what consent is and why it’s important which they have picked up from, in no particular order, their parents, their school* and the media they watch. (I checked in with the 11-year old this morning, asking if anything she’d been watching lately touched on consent - in one show, one boy kissed another without consent, and was promptly told that was wrong by the kissee, in no uncertain terms. In general, stuff that is being made for tweens nowadays is actually pretty good on all this.).
It is not, in fact, particularly hard to stay on top of this stuff. My kids have seen their share of True Love fairy stories, yet they don’t believe in True Love. They have seen otherwise fine and enjoyable films with problematic moments and where necessary we have directly talked about the issue, or simply made some disparaging comment to provide a different perspective.
Much as I would like to say that this is because my kids are Very Special or that I really am, like my mug says, the World’s Greatest Dad, my actual hypothesis to explain the above is that the influence of film scenes like this is actually pretty shallow, there are plenty of countervailing influences and any moderately engaged parent can deal with it easily enough.
*The school maybe overcooked it a little: “You can’t send me to bed without my consent, Dad, they told us in class” took a little delicate unpicking.
Sure - I said above that I don’t think the True Love’s Kiss stuff should be in the movie - just that if it is, it will be something that parents can overcome without too much difficulty.
(In fact, this has reminded me: about 10 years ago I wrote a pantomime version of Snow White to raise funds for charity and in it: The prince - in fact, Robin Hood - gave Snow White actual CPR; it didn’t work; but that’s because Snow White was only pretending to be dead - she’d seen the Wicked Queen coming a mile away and pretended the apple killed her in order to more easily organise an underground resistance against the Queen. In the end, Robin Hood thinks he’s getting together with her, but it turns out he’s not her type, after all, this isn’t a fairy-tale. So, in fairness, it turns out I am bang in favour of updating the story).
And that sounds like a much more entertaining plot, and one that would play well with today’s audience.
I think media portrayals DO matter to what kids grow up thinking is appropriate. But i don’t think any one movie is going to make a huge difference. Kids get a lot of different messages. (That being said, after reading the gift book of Babar the elephant, i decided the blatant colonialism was not something i wanted to read to my kids. There are tons of great picture books out there.)
I feel pretty good about how I talk with my own children about media messages. I feel a lot less good about how tens of millions of other parents talk with their kids, and my daughters will grow up alongside those other kids.
If I’m telling my kids “consent is important,” great. But if Disney’s putting out movies that imply the opposite, and other parents aren’t having that conversation, then my daughters are going to grow up with classmates, friends, maybe romantic partners who inferred an ugly message.
And yes, it’s just one message, and yes, there are thousands of other influences. But this is a thread about one movie, and I’m talking about that one message.
It sounds like you’re doing things right, and if they aren’t consuming media that does a poor job with consent, then you are probably restricting or guiding them on what they access, because believe me, there is a TON of stuff out there that does a poor job.
But realize, some of this is luck. If you do a perfect job in teaching them, the odds are much better they’ll turn out OK, but not all kids do. Same way that shitty parents usually result in shitty kids, but sometimes kids escape that cycle and turn out fine. Parents are an influence, and done right can be the biggest influence, but they aren’t the only influence. Not at schools do as well as yours, not all media does it well.
Like LHoD says, your kids will encounter a lot of other kids who aren’t getting the good influences yours benefit from. There’s value in doing what we can to change that.
This is a fair point - there are kids out there who, one way or another, are being raised with values that frankly make them a risk to other people. And we all have a responsibility to make a society in which the number of those kids approaches zero. I guess I just don’t believe that watching the original Snow White is a meaningful contributor to those values. Not just compared to other influences, but in absolute terms.
But, much as I would love to take 1000 adults who’d seen it as kids, and 1000 who hadn’t, and obtain full relationship histories plus in-depth psychological evaluations then run a battery of tests to see if there were statistically meaningful variations, that isn’t really an option until I both win the lottery and lose all sense of perspective.
Again, we’re in a thread about Snow White. I don’t lie awake at night worrying about climate change, the pernicious influence of Trump on modern American politics, and whether some kid has watched the original Snow White without discussing consent. But in the context of talking about the movie, it’s a point worth discussing.
It also is a pretty good exemplar of stuff I don’t want to see in kids’ entertainment. @DrDeth is really opposed to depictions of smoking, IIRC. I’m opposed to positive depictions of nonconsensual kissing.