I read that as “with modern stereotypes.” Now that’s an idea.
Karen and the Seven MAGAs.
We have Incel, Oathy, Sovcit, Nazi, Gunny, CT, and Dopey.
No. But even if there are legitimate criticisms to be made about a movie, someone who has never seen the movie and who has a mistaken idea about what it contains is not in the best position to make those criticisms.
Maybe not–but it doesn’t affect the quality of the criticisms themselves. To say otherwise is textbook ad hominem.
This is, I think, exactly Dinklage’s point. There is little doubt that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has created a cultural image of a “dwarf” that is demeaning to humans with dwarfism. Whether that fault is originally Tolkein’s or somebody else’s or nobody’s doesn’t really matter.
And rather than let the original film sink away into the gray mists of history like Song of the South, or Fantasia, they are remaking it, drawing it right back into the limelight.
Now maybe Dinklage and others will be able to use the new focus to highlight some of the public perceptions of dwarfism and combat some of the stereotypes. Maybe Disney will use this film to actually make the characters more fully realized.
But, in the end, the answer to “why are they doing it?” is money. And I think it’s reasonable for Dinklage to be a bit upset that Disney would rather cash in on a movie that has caused him and others like him some amount of harm over the decades than create something new. One can certainly imagine that this live-action remake, even if it is well-done with respect to its handling of the dwarfs, will cause people, including children, to revisit the original move as well. I’m sure Dinklage would rather that not happen.
ETA: Or to put it almost exactly how Dinklage himself did: If you were really as concerned about representation and not perpetuating hurtful stereotypes as you say, you wouldn’t remake this story at all.
Say WHAT?
I mean, I think Citizen Kane is overrated, if not the worst movie ever, because Wells brought in the aliens, I mean the advanced Mechas, at the end. And the talking chimp was not a good metaphor for Trump, at all. Prove me wrong!
Your criticism is invalid because you misspelled “Welles.”
The dwarves’ personalities are such a fundamental part of the the Disney version I can’t imagine a remake without them, but I can see there being a dwarf who sneezes and one who is bashful, etc., but it wouldn’t be their only trait, and wouldn’t be their names. Don’t know what they would do with Dopey since “dumb” as a synonym for “mute” is really offensive now.
I think, and others have already pointed this out, that Dinklage has a personal sore spot when it comes to the Disney cartoon and its mere existence has been a microagression to him all his life. Now that it’s being re-made by The Big Disney, it’s a macroagression and he was in a spot to speak his mind on it and decades of simmering anger came out in his statement about the remake.
Seriously, this guy has probably been made to feel like shit numerous times over in his life, with people saying stuff to him about the Disney cartoon.
It brings to mind a story arc in the show “Work In Progress” where the lead Abby McEnany (a real person playing a fictionalized version of herself) is basically tortured by the existence of the androgenous character Pat from “Saturday Night Live” being that Abby was androgenous and non-binary as a teen.
In the show, Abby actually meets and confronts Julia Sweeney (creator and actor of Pat) and she is a regular on the show, and they work through the Pat thing together. In ways that are both good and bad.
Anyway, the existence of Pat as a character and Abby as a person is kind of a no-brainer for us living binary lives in 2022 to see “oh yeah god that was so terrible!” but it did exist, it was terrible, and it affected Abby deeply (and I’m sure MANY andro/non-binary people. I have been called Pat before myself)
It doesn’t seem like a character as (now) “shocking” as Pat would be the same thing as the existence of these cartoon dwarfs, but I get the feeling for Dinkage it is. And if you were him, and you were doing an interview on a show like “WTF” you would definitely rant about it. Cuz it’s been in the back of your mind for 50 years and it sucks.
Since it’s 2022 and everyone is a bit more attuned to the idea of “microagressions” and how they suck, and Dinklage’s popularity and prestige is at a high, people have sat up and taken notice at what may have just been an angry rant 10 years ago.
I’m glad to see that other little people actors are giving their opinions, and that Disney is giving it some thought, bringing other little people into the conversation. Just like I was glad to see it with the Cleveland baseball and Washington football teams.
TLDR I bet Dinklage has been pissed about The Seven Dwarfs his whole life.
We are really talking past each other. I don’t care if you’re a world-renowned scholar on Citizen Kane, your criticism of the movie is stupid because of its multiple core inaccuracies, not because of your credentials or number of times you’ve viewed it.
In Dinklage’s case, his verbal gaffe about “living in caves” or whatever isn’t core to his criticism of the movie. If it were–if his whole problem is that (for example) it leads to people teasing him about being a cave-man, but he has no objection to the desexualized childlike nature of the dwarves–then his criticism falls apart.
But people aren’t treating it that way. They’re taking a tangential part of his comment in a freewheeling interview and thinking it invalidates the core point.
That’s absurd.
At one point, Disney was planning a Snow White prequel called The Seven Dwarfs, which would show how Dopey became mute after witnessing his mother’s death.
Thank you for that. I watched Work in Progress and Abby’s feelings about Pat from SNL may match Peter Dinklage’s feelings about the dwarfs. Perhaps he was taunted as a kid, “So, which dwarf are you like? Dopey? Grumpy?”
Dead mothers are the grease that keeps the whole Disney animated machinery running lo these many decades.
Some of this has been covered already, but I’ve written it so I’m going to post it.
I’m reminded of a joke (don’t worry - this is relevant) that goes:
IMO this is the kind of thing Dinklage is (rightly) worked up about. In the same way, say, that many Americans of Indian heritage have suffered from assumptions that they were all like Apu, Dinklage is trying to prevent people like him from suffering the effects of a resurgence of the ludicrous portrayal of dwarves in Snow White, something he has spent his life trying to erase.
I can understand why he’s pissed off at the idea of a new Snow White film, and hopefully he and Disney can have a constructive conversation about it.
Excluding deliberately antisemitic work, Fagin and Svengali immediately come to mind.
The pantomime thing is kind of a double-edged sword for these performers, in that it is a regular gig for actors who don’t have many other acting opportunities but it’s not (or not always) a particularly nice role for them (although the last Snow White panto I saw had an extremely sympathetic portrayal of the seven). I can understand why they wouldn’t want to lose what is a major source of income for them.
But could he play pinball?
The reason that joke works is a play on words (the adjective happy vs. the name Happy), and not any stereotypes or aspersions on people with dwarfism. So I don’t think there’s anything inherently offensive about the joke. But I can still see how it might bother an actual dwarf (or just a person who is sensitive to the issues they face) for reasons mentioned by @ZipperJJ and others:
Freaking seriously? The ONLY reason the play on words is remotely comprehensible is because of the stereotype from the movie. Try telling the joke and leave out the “dwarf” part.
That’s what I said: the adjective happy vs. the name Happy (i.e. the name of the well-known dwarf character from the movie).
It’s a great example of how, despite the fact that (wait for it!) the movie portrays the dwarfs as nonhuman characters, people conflate human little people with mythological dwarfs all the goddamn time. The joke dehumanizes the guy in the car, reducing him first to a single characteristic and then treating him as a nonhuman cartoon character.
The punchline works mostly because of the unexpected wordplay, sure. But it also gets its edge from learning that the narrator is an asshole. Anyone who would do this in real life–who would damage someone’s property and then dehumanize them in this way–would be a pretty shit person.
My impression is that the world is full of pretty shit people, and Dinklage encounters more than his share.
Yeah, you’re right about that. I’ve heard other minor variations on this joke, but if memory serves, this is common to all of them.
The nature of mythology is that it causes us to
… conflate humans little people with mythological dwarfs figures…