Cinderella is a stark contrast to ‘edgy’ television drenched in grit and grimdark-inspired fantasy novels. The film’s sets are improbably opulent, glittering, and overridden with beautiful stuff, an indication that Cinderella readily embraces its own moral exaggerations, a potentially gusty move in a time where pop culture strives to be ‘realistic’ and marks this realism with morally ambiguous characters and plot.

Cinderella is a cultural conversation between cynicism and hope. The audience is paired with an oppositional binary: cruelty versus kindness, epitomized by the step-mother and Cinderella, respectively. The characters are reduced to these traits so that the relationships and interactions become similarly exaggerated. As a result, Cinderella is committed to the tropes of the fairytale genre and is, in this way, differentiated from Everafter, the latter of which tells the story of a fairytale without using its structure, allowing for a darker retelling.

Socialized into accepting skepticism as a marker of sophistication, I initially identified these exaggerations as problems. Parody works the same way, I thought, and Cinderella looks much like Voltaire’s Candide, whose protagonist believes that optimism and destiny will eventually lead him to a fruitful end–it doesn’t. So while Cinderella clings to her dead mother’s advice (have courage; be kind), the audience sees how these words are rendered absurd in the face of abuse and neglect. Cinderella isn’t rescued by her own merits, but by a Fairy Godmother. If kindness and courage couldn’t be sustained without the help of magic, then their relevance to our everyday lives became questionable. I was spiraling deeper into condemning a fairytale for being insufficiently real and nuanced, as though the criteria for realism and nuance were determined outside the bounds of ideology. (They’re not.) Cinderella schooled me pretty quickly.

When confronted by her step-mother about how she acquired the dress, Cinderella responds that someone gave the dress to her. Her step-mother snarls back that people do not simply give and that there’s always a price to be paid, a conclusion she has reached from a lifetime of pain and loss. Cinderella says no, that sometimes people can be kind and offer help for no ulterior motive.

If fairytale exaggeration is similar to parody, then the audience is the butt of the joke. Cinderella’s response to her step-mother disrupts our assumptions about plot –in this version of the story, the dress, shoes, and carriage are not gifted to Cinderella as a reward for her kindness. To assume that the dress was a reward is an assessment that adopts the step-mother’s gaze, where good behavior should be adopted only because the consequences will be beneficial. However, Cinderella’s be kind; have courage mantra are rendered into Kantian absolutism–be kind, and damn the consequences.

I had initially misread the Fairy Godmother’ s role as that of magician and plot mechanism, instead of what she really was–a godmother. The magicking of a pumpkin into a carriage isn’t a plot device used to transport Cinderella to the ball, but a demonstration of a loving relationship. The role of the Fairy Godmother is thus subverted from reward-giver to a helping friend. In this sense, the fallacy of self-sufficiency and its subsequent lionization is subordinated to love and care.

The film isn’t perfect, of course. The narrator, voiced by the Fairy Godmother, amplifies the fairytale-like tone of the movie by shifting the film closer to the folk roots of oral storytelling. Unfortunately, the narrator doesn’t possess a distinct voice and merely describes what is readily apparent on the screen (Cinderella is sad), rendering the device entirely superfluous. A real opportunity was lost here; the film shines when illustrating how pain and grief can either twist or strengthen a person. Instead of addressing this thematic point, the Fairy Godmother repeats Cinderella’s mantra. The third person omniscient point-of-view (the voice from nowhere is disembodied, and therefore not prone to a body’s subjectivity) is used to bolster the alleged authority of the narrator, rendering the have courage; be kind mantra into objectivity instead of a suggestion with political connotations. Which, okay, fine. Film is always trying to convince the audience of something. A television show like Game of Thrones uses the aesthetic veneer of grit and grime to convince the audience of its realism, whereas a fairytale uses the omniscient voice to impart an ‘objective’ educational lesson. The issue here is that the narrative voice was redundant and offered nothing that couldn’t be gained by watching Cinderella interact with her step-mother. The narrator simply didn’t commit to its own authority.

Nuance and exaggeration often appear at odds (nuance is supposedly characterized by subtlety, after all), but in this case they blend together and challenge the audience to question why enthusiasm and sincerity seem further away from ‘realness’ than, say, the manipulation and greed in Game of Thrones. The step-mother uses her cynicism as a sign of worldliness and as way to dismiss Cinderella’s claim. The dress could not be a gift because the world is nasty, brutish, and short (to quote Thomas Hobbes.) Cinderella must have stolen the dress, instead. The step-mother, and the audience that shares the step-mother’s gaze, conflate cynicism with realism, as though “have courage; be kind” is more ideological than the dark aesthetic that is currently popular in television. The film, wonderfully, painfully, forces its audience into questioning why skepticism has become naturalized into common sense.

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