Tag Archives: Cinderella

Cinderella, Passive

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In his review of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Roger Ebert complained that the film ended with a pointless action sequence. “Time after time I complain when a film develops an intriguing story and then dissolves it in routine and boring action,” he says wearily. “We’ve seen every conceivable battle sequence, every duel, all carnage, countless showdowns and all-too-long fights to the finish.” Can’t anyone think of an end other than violence?

Ebert didn’t live to see the 2015 Cinderella live action reboot, but if he did, he would have at least been pleased on one count: it doesn’t end with a fight. Cinderella (Lily James) isn’t an action hero. True to the Cinderella template, she doesn’t physically fight, or even much struggle, against her fate. Her mother, who likewise wastes away peacefully, tells her that her ethos should be “Have courage. Be kind.” Ella interprets this as a command to passivity and deference. Her stepmother (Cate Blanchett, having a grand old time) treats her as a servant after her father dies, and Ella just takes it. When a friend reasonably asks her why, she replies that she has fond memories of her mother in the house…and therefore she lets herself be abused and humiliated because that’s what her mother would want? The logic is unclear, but that’s the way the plot goes.

Ella never grows a backbone; she escapes her plight through no fault of her own. First her fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) shows up and magically outfits her, then the Prince swoops in to rescue her. Ella’s only sign of resistance is a few words of rebuke to Cate at the end, and then a haughty “I forgive you.” It’s a fine passive aggressive moment, somewhat undermined by the fact that the film can’t admit to it being anything but the sincere effusion of a pure soul. Ella, so good and true and wonderful, isn’t even allowed to be bitchy or pissed off. To be a perfect Princess is to be not just nonviolent, but utterly unaggressive—and for that matter defenseless.

Roger Ebert asked why films have to end with violence; Cinderella, inadvertently, explains. Films have to end with violence because violence is the only way that these big-budget Hollywood films can express strength, agency, or even really action. Either you’re swinging a sword and decapitating the Jabberwock, like Alice in Burton’s film, or else you’re letting you’re step mother put her boot on your face because you just don’t have the gumption to do anything about it. You’re empowered and awesome or disempowered and pure. There doesn’t seem to be any middle-ground.

the middle-ground is, of course the place where most people live most of their lives. In most conflicts, in most lives, you aren’t fully empowered to beat the crap out of your enemy and have them cringe at your feet. Neither are you completely bereft of agency, waiting for a prince to save you. Instead, you’re somewhere in a difficult, grey middle, with some ability to make some choices, and push back against some power, if you’re cunning, and lucky,and don’t misjudge. Heroism comes not in using superpowers to blast all before you, nor in staying pure souled and above the fray, but in figuring out how to make the best of difficult situations, using what power you have, and what kindness you can muster.

There are some variations on Cinderella that manage to get at those issues in interesting and unexpected ways. Ella Enchanted explains Ella’s doormatness via a spell; the girl had a spell cast on her which makes her obey all commands. She then has to figure out how to use subterfuge, legalism, and ingenuity to abide by the letter of her curse while carving out a space for herself—not a bad metaphor for resistance under patriarchy. Twilight also presents violence as a option to be resisted when possible, negotiated where needed, and used as a last resort; Bella’s super vampire power is to dampen other vampire powers — she’s aggressively passive rather than passive aggressive. Nonviolence for her is a weapon.

But those are quirky, odd stories, notable because they refuse to fit into the more familiar binary. More common is the story which sees only power and powerlessness, the sword or waiting for someone with a sword to rescue you. The fact that we so readily sneer at pacifism isn’t because pacifism is silly, or because we’re sober minded and realistic, like Niebuhr. It’s because our imagination is, apparently, unable to think of any effective action that isn’t imbued with absolute power and bloodshed.

Embracing Exaggeration: A Review of Cinderella

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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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You can follow Sarah on twitter: @SarahShoker

Cinderella and the Museum of Minimally Counterintuitive Superheroes

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Lily James, the latest actress to embody Cinderella, declared the character “almost a superhero.” NPR’s Linda Holmes reversed the comparison: “Is Captain America a Cinderella story?” Holmes likened Cinderella’s pumpkin coach to the Batmobile, concluding that if the core of Cinderella is “just a rescue of a deserving underdog from an ordinary life and delivery to an extraordinary one,” then most superheroes belong in the combat equivalent of glass slippers.

It’s a fair point, but I think Holmes misses Cinderella’s most memorable qualities. Literally the most memorable, the ones researchers have proven are most memorable in psychological studies. Turning mice into coachmen and rags into ballgowns–apparently that’s the kind of magic our brains are wired for.

To explain why, we need to visit Cinderella’s home planet:

“I was sent as a diplomat to the planet Ralyks. Because the decision was very sudden and I didn’t have a lot of time to research Ralyks, I decided to take a visit to Ralyks’ equivalent of the Smithsonian — a large network of museums and zoos intended to provide a representative sampling of all of the different kinds of things of this world.”

 
That, believe it or not, is the first paragraph of a psychological experiment testing what kinds of ideas are easiest to remember and so retell. The researchers, Justin Barrett and Melanie Nyhof, sent 54 ambassadors to Ralyks in 2001. They all returned safely, but not their recall of the Ralyks Smithsonian.

The ambassadors (all college students ages 16 to 25, which, in my opinion, is recklessly young for intergalactic diplomacy) tended to forget the ordinary exhibits. Like the “being that is easy to see under normal lighting conditions” or the being that “consumes and metabolizes caloric materials to sustain itself.” They did better with the bizarre or unusual, like the being that “just does things randomly” or the one that “could make out the letters on a page in a book if it is as much as 50 feet away, provided the line of sight is not obstructed.”

But they were best with beings that possessed a feature that violated some intuitive assumption but still satisfied the majority of other expectations. Barrett and Nyof call these expectation-bending beings “minimally counterintuitive.”

I call them superheroes.

“I came to an exhibit about a being that is able to pass through solid objects.” So that would be either Vision from the Avengers or Shadowcat from the X-Men, right?
 

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And, speaking of mutants, here’s the Blob and/or the Juggernaut: “To the south of this room was one containing a being about the size of a young human that is impossible to move by any means.”
 

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And don’t forget Wolverine’s healing powers: “The second room illustrated a being that will never die of natural causes and cannot be killed. No matter what physical damage is inflicted it will survive and repair itself.”
 

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Probably not everyone will remember Multiple Man: “The next room I came to featured a being that can be completely in more than one place at a time. All of it can be in two or all four different corners of the room at the same time.
 

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Multiple Man premiered in Fantastic Four, same as the Watcher: “a being that can remember an unlimited number of events or pieces of information. For example, it could tell you in precise detail, everything it had witnessed in the past…”
 

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And let’s not leave out the mightiest mutant of them all, Professor X: “a being that can pay attention to any number of things all at the same time. For example, if ten people or ten billion people were talking to it at the same time, it would be able to keep track of what all of them were saying.” (Okay, the Professor might need the assistance of his mind-expanding computer Cerebro, but close enough.)
 

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Lest you think Melanie and Justin only read Marvel as kids, they included certain Kryptonian superpowers too: “a being that can see or hear things no matter where they are. For example, it could make out the letters on a page in a book hundreds of miles away and the line of sight is completely obstructed.”

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So all of Ralyks’ counterintuitive specimens would be at home in a comic book. I could argue that the supervillain the Collector secretly originates from the planet Ralyks, but let’s take this in a slightly different direction.

I hunted down Barrett and Nyhof’s study (“Spreading Non-natural Concepts: The Role of Intuitive Conceptual Structures in Memory and Transmission of Cultural Materials”) from a reference in Alex Mesoudi’s Cultural Evolution. (Ever play a game of scavenger hunt where each found item is a clue to find the next? Academics call that “research.”) Mesoudi wants to know how and why some ideas get passed on and others die out. Why, for instance, Cinderella remains so popular, while the vast majority of Grimm’s fairy tales have been utterly forgotten.

Barrett and Nyhof think we’re biased for the minimally counterintuitive. Basically we’re Goldilocks. Too much (“a jealous Frisbee,” suggests Mesoudi, “that turns into a caterpillar every other Thursday”) and our brains get burnt with ungraspable weirdness. Too little and our lukewarm neurons die of boredom. We, like Goldilocks, prefer Baby Bear’s “cognitive optimum,” that just-right balance between “satisfying ontologically driven intuitive expectations” (Mama Bear) and “violating enough of them to become salient” (Papa Bear).

Mesoudi looks at culture in Darwinistic terms, which makes those Ralyks specimens well-adapted mutants. They’re the fittest. They’re built to survive. Five of the six most frequently remembered specimens were counterintuitive. Common ideas died out fastest, and the “merely bizarre” had a tendency to mutate into the counterintuitive, thus increasing their survival rates too.

This, according to Barrett and Nyhof, could help explain not only Cinderella’s godmother, but religion too: “it is these counterintuitive properties that make religious concepts salient. Increased salience, in turn, enhances the likelihood that the concept will be remembered and passed on.” They cite examples from “religious systems and folk tales from around the world,” including stories about “people with superhuman powers.”

But when Barrett and Nygof invented their Ralyks Smithsonian to measure concept recall, they didn’t seem to know they were reproducing superhero character types (AKA “people with superhuman powers”). Which makes Barrett and Nyhof unknowing participants in a larger cultural evolution study. Their invented specimens are either examples of parallel evolution (meaning they dreamt up Superman’s X-ray vision and super-vision independently of his culturally pervasive character), or, more likely, Barrett and Nyhof absorbed their superpowers through cultural exposure and reproduced them unconsciously.

Either way, superheroes are especially fit cultural survivors. The character type may be a mostly 20th century American mutation, but one that satisfies something much deeper in the human psyche. The call of the weird-but-not-too weird. Superheroes occupy that sweet spot. Its part of their definition. According to scholars Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, an effective superhero must have superpowers, but those “powers are limited” and the character “human,” balancing the counterintuitive with the ordinary. Even the alter egos tends to be “an adult, white male who holds a white-collar job,” which to a white male white-collar reader is as ordinary as you get.

Maybe their Smithsonian didn’t include any category-bending specimens because the students placed them all into the pre-existing category of “superhero.” In which case, Melanie and Justin might want to schedule a return trip soon. I’ve never visited myself, but from the diplomatic dispatches it sounds like a planet well worth visiting:

“I left the building and went to my new office to ponder all of the things that can be found on Ralyks.”
 

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Cinderella, Feminist, Part 2

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The Godard Roundtable will pick up later today, but I thought I’d sneak this post in since we have a little space.
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Since I wrote my last post on the movie Ella, Enchanted, I reread Gail Carson Levine’s book Ella Enchanted, on which the movie is based.

The book is very different…and I’d say a good bit better. Ella wins the prince over not because she’s spunky, but because she’s smart and funny — and Levine is a good enough writer to endow her creation with actual wit. The love story is a lot more convincing too; the book lets it develop over months rather than over weeks.

The story is also much darker. In the film the obedience is definitely shown to be a curse…but it’s also fun, and funny (Ella grabbing her own tongue when told to hold her tongue; Ella hopping away when told to hop to it.) And sometimes the curse is actually even something like a blessing. Ella is, for example, magically able to obey commands to become a fighter and beat up ogres early in the movie; she’s able to become a talented singer when told to be so.

In contrast, in the book, the curse confers no magical powers. When Ella is sent to finishing school and told to behave like a lady, she just has to do the painful, grinding work of training herself to act like a lady. The book does a much better job of making you feel the oppression of slavery, not as a painful occasional trick, but as an everyday weight on the spirit.

Another difference is that in the film Ella’s father is distant and flighty, but not actively cruel. As a result, a lot of the movie doesn’t really make sense — why doesn’t Ella tell him about her curse, for example? Why does he marry the repulsive Dame Olga? In the book, though, Ella’s father is actually a grasping, cruel man — not completely evil, perhaps, but certainly caring far more for money than for Ella. This is made especially clear in a painful scene in which her father attempts to marry Ella off to a wealthy, older earl. He sees her as a possession; as chattel. And her obedience forces her to be just that.

The political ramifications of this are interesting. In the film, of course, politics is figured in terms of authoritarianism and revolution. The uncle-on-the-throne is evil and racist, and Ella’s obedience makes her sensitive to the need to treat others justly. In the book, though, the king is a good sort, and there’s no sense of widespread injustice. Instead, the injustice is gendered. It’s in the way Ella’s father treats her as a thing, and in the way that her stepmother and stepsisters treat her as a servant doing traditional woman’s work.

Ella’s escape from the curse in the book follows through on the logic. In the film, the prince asks her to marry him and she frees herself, as if becoming his makes her no one else’s. In the book, though, Ella finds the strength to break the curse by refusing the Prince when he says “marry me”. Ella knows that with her curse, others could use her to betray the Prince; an obedient wife would destroy the kingdom. It’s only when she breaks the curse and gains her independence that she can be a good wife — a person, rather than a chattel.

The book, then, is much more sensitive to patriarchy’s specificity; to the way that fathers and husbands are not just loved ones, but potential oppressors. It’s much less interested, though, in class injustices — Ella never extrapolates from her own servitude to wonder about the conditions of other servants, for example. It seems like you can have narratives about authoritarian regimes (like the Hunger Games) or you can have narratives about patriarchy (which I’d argue is the case with Twilight, where Bella is constantly thwarting Edward’s plans for her) but combining the two seems difficult.

Perhaps that’s because, when you do combine the two, it starts to seem much more difficult for our heroine to win? You can take public authoritarianism seriously or you can take private authoritarianism seriously, but both at once is maybe just a little too much reality for a fairy tale.
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This is part of an occasional series on empowerment.

Cinderella, Feminist

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We’ve been having an interesting discussion over the past week or so about Twilight, the Hunger Games, and the place of empowerment in feminism. Specifically, does a feminist heroine need to be empowered and in control of her own life? Or is the experience of disempowerment — including passivity (or selflessness) and irrationality (or emotional sensitivity) — valuable in itself? Or to put it another way, is feminism’s goal to integrate women into the male world on equal terms, or is it’s goal to change the world in accordance with female experiences?

The 2004 film Ella, Enchanted has an interesting take on these questions. Based on a (better than either Twilight or the Hunger Games) book by Gail Levine, the movie is a reworking of the Cinderella legend. Ella (Anne Hathaway) is as an infant visited by her incompetent fairy godmother Lucinda (Vivica Fox). The godmother gives Ella the gift of obedience.

As Ella’s mother instantly recognizes, and as Ella herself learns as she grows older, the gift is not really a gift, but a curse. Ella has to do everything anyone tells her to do. If her mother tells her to practice her music lessons, she has to practice her music lessons. If she’s told to shovel cake into her mouth, she shovels cake into her mouth. More painfully, after her mother dies and Ella’s evil stepsister discovers her secret, she is forced to perform a series of ever-more-terrible tasks — giving away the broach her mother handed her on her death bed; stealing from a store; and finally, insulting her best friend and telling her she will never see her again.

The film, in other words, is one long treatise about the dangers of disempowerment; the traditionally female virtue of obedience is presented as a kind of fierce and unrelenting slavery. The film, in this sense, is clearly, and strongly, in favor of empowerment — not least in the way in which it takes pains to demonstrate that, while Ella is controlled by her curse, she is not defined by it. Whenever she can, Ella thinks her way around her obedience — when an antagonist tells her “bite me!”, young Ella obliges instantly; older and told to gather bouquets for her stepsisters, she smirkingly collects poison ivy. Moreover, it is not Ella’s obedience, but her feisty independence and her refusal to be charmed by his beauty or rank which attracts the romantic lead, Prince Charmont (Hugh Dancy.)

And yet…is it so clear that Ella is not what she is because of her obedience? The narrator at one point says that Ella’s gift is actually what gave her strength of mind — it is the ordeal of having to obey everyone all the time that made her so determined to think for herself. Even more telling, one of the ways in which Ella has most conspicuously thought for herself is in her political views. She doesn’t like the prince because his uncle’s government has been systematically enslaving other races — ogres, giants, and elves. Ella makes the link quite explicit for the viewer in a discussion with the prince (who is not in on her secret.) After seeing some giants being forced to work in the fields, Ella tells him: “No one should be forced to do anything they don’t want to. Take it from somebody who knows.”

The dichotomy here between obedience-as-a-curse (slavery) and obedience-as-a-gift (source of wisdom and character) can perhaps be traced to the fairy tale source material. As I said, this is a retelling of Cinderella, and a retelling in a feminist vein. The original tale is about a woman being saved by marriage and love; the new tale wants to be a story of an independent woman. At many moments, you can see the fissures. For example, the climactic scene involves a (quite entertainingly silly) battle with a horde of ninja-knights. Prince Charmont battles ferociously — and so, too, does Ella, who has not previously shown any particular capacity for battle (except in one scene where someone ordered her to fight skillfully, that is.) Diagetically, there’s no reason for her to be able to defeat trained warriors; it’s just thrown in to make her look empowered and equal. As such, it comes across (for all its obvious goofiness) as almost condescending. You want empowerment; okay, we don’t really believe in it, but we figure you’re easily satisfied. Here you go.

The tension between Cinderella and Ella is perhaps most apparent, though, at the film’s emotional climax. Prince Charmont’s evil uncle Edgar (Cary Elwes) finds out Ella’s secret and orders her to stab the Prince through the heart at the moment when he asks her to marry him. Despite desperate attempts to escape, Ella has no choice — and as he asks her, she raises the knife. But…a miracle occurs. The strength of her true love releases her from her curse, and she lets the knife drop to the floor as she weeps in relief.

The movie makes some effort to suggest that the breaking of the curse is the result of Ella’s will-power, rather than of true love per se. But…well, come on, now. It’s true love. And even if you insist that it’s true-love-providing-incentive-for-will-power, you’ve still got some explaining to do. After all, as I mentioned, obedience made Ella break off her friendship with her closest friend whom she had known for years. Why wasn’t her love for that friend enough to break the command, while the love for some guy she’d known about a week was? However it’s parsed, heterosexual romantic love, and, indeed, the offer of marriage, is what breaks the spell. Which makes it hard to shake off the sense that the reason Ella is no longer under compulsion to all the world is because she’s under compulsion to one man in particular. And, indeed, Ella at the film’s end is not her own person, but a bride. Her signature achievement is not becoming a lawyer (like her elf friend) or ruling a kingdom (like Charmont. Instead, it’s marrying the king, and influencing him through her love to be a better man and a better ruler.

It would be possible to see these tensions as a sign of the film’s failure to shake off the Cinderella’s stories gushy romance of disempowerment; Ella is more empowered than Cinderella, but she’s not truly empowered.

I think, though, you could also see the ambiguity as a potentially more thoughtful conclusion. When the film goes for empowerment-for-empowerment’s sake in essentially male terms — beating up ninjas — it seems crass and stupid. It’s at its best when it reaches for an empowerment that learns from, rather than entirely rejecting, the Cinderella story. That fairy tale, after all, is about both the injustice of slavery and the beauty of love. Both of those insights, it seems to me, come out of distinctively female experience, and so it makes sense that Ella, Enchanted build its feminism — not perfectly, but still with some conviction and heart — on both.

 


Gratuitous Harry Clarke illustration, because Harry Clarke is bad ass.