Cinematic Identities... SNOW WHITE
| But how can be Disney' Snow White "inscribed" into a thematic relation with Ancient motives, reception of Antiquity, or even other popular culture products which evoke Antiquity? Or, what is "antique" in Disney's Snow White? My point of entry into this thematic area is cult/ritual, so let us see if the absence of costumes, names, recognizable myths, historical references and other usual signs of a film dealing with Antiquity ("peplos" films, e.g.) can concur with other forms of reception of Antiquity. The closest notion of myth that can be functional in this kind of research is Roland Barthes' notion of myth11: the mythology of Disney's Snow Whiteis the result of many ideological and power inscriptions which have to be mapped, read and deconstructed – this time in hope to trace contents of cult/ritual/Ancient.
Film does not belong to the "receptional site-catchement" of Antiquity: we cannot speak of any continuity of beliefs or behaviors from Ancient rituals contained in film presentations, except for the extremely rare films made by artists close to scientific interpretations12, but more of randomly revived narratives (often fragmented, sometimes altered beyond recognition), which are all part of phantasms provoked by and produced for needs initiated in social-cultural contexts in the time-span of one century, all over the planet. So what does "Ancient+ritual" mean in the production of fantasms in film? Without grasping for the collective unconscious, a very basic thesaurus of knowledge of Ancient/Classical can be imagined, responding to the professional and general education of Disney's illustrators and his own. At the time of creation of the Snow White, the praise of "Classical" (beauty, order, harmony, whiteness) was certainly heavily present in the state decorum and consequently in the media and popular culture in at least two European countries – Germany and Italy. Hints at Disney's sympathies for the nazi regimes are a kind of commonplace in his biographies13. The Alpine style of dwarfs' dwelling could indicate the original setting of the European fairy tale, while a pro-German feeling does seem like too much of a stretch. Negative labeling could be more indicative if we think of the evil Queen stepmother: she lives in the castle in which her laboratory, the place of her work, evil science/magic is at the bottom (vertical division of power, university inside the city), while dwarfs' "campus", including a typical mess of the American students' dwelling, has a horizontal (democratic) space-power distribution. European vs. American intellectual life and academic lifestyle? The existing/expected religious horizon of the Northern America has been communicating with many other religion-marked cultures all over the world, through the immigration and the media expansion. The possible answer could be that the Disney's Snow White is based not on recognizable big religious narratives, but on presumably fragmented cult and ritual narrative sequences – and the polytheistic system could be the best choice of narrative patterns in this case. The question is if the gender perspective changes at all between feature film and feature cartoon. Narratives and character building became quite close thanks to Disney's innovation with Snow White. Furthermore, Snow White marked a serious retrograde shift, in the full blooming of a special Hollywood film genre, a screwball comedy with a strong, unpredictable, slightly crazy female character, played by actresses like Claudette Colbert, Carol Lombard, and above all Katharine Hepburn. Snow White had certainly a backlash effect: in fact, it would have been almost unimaginable to present such a heroine in a feature film in the late 30', even in a children-targeting feature film. |
Should the attraction of Ancient topics in film making be compared to the attraction of Ancient texts and images for the Internet? Only two decades since Internet was created, a vast majority of Ancient texts in Greek and Latin is available to all, and also images, lexicons, philological handbooks and similar, including many periodicals. A basic explanation is simple – all of these are free for use, with no authorship and royalties to be respected or paid. Nothing could be more misleading: the correct use of Ancient topics in film, although it is all free, is unacceptable for the film industry's branch of script writing. Since the author cannot be consulted, and specialists are not included as a rule, Ancient plots are massacred, with a very few cases in which the original text could be recognized. There are no good reasons in the economy of words here: so many very verbal films have been produced, there are many effective ways of combining words and images in presenting monologues and dialogues in ways impossible in theatre. Moreover, there is a rich literature of diversified interpretations of Ancient texts, which could inspire film makers. But still, from peplos movies to Xena, Antiquity has been relentlessly distorted, falsified and mashed into unimaginable combinations. "Why" here would be an eccentric question, because the answer is banal. Therefore the challenge for a researcher lies also in finding fractured, fragmented, non-planned bits and pieces of reception of Antiquity which might have become something like a standard cultural "luggage" in everyday life. The critical reading of films, focused on Antiquity and gender, could reveal some of the processes of melting down knowledge into mythologies - again in the barthesian sense – which then could be designed into ideological patterns for use in the mass media culture and politics. This kind of critical reading could actually help feminist theory of film, which rightly condemn film reduction of the image of woman to a limited range of female stereotypes, but detailed analyses have not yet generated sufficient knowledge or theoretical tools to adequately explain these processes at work in a film narrative or how women interpret and respond to film representations.
But how we can construct our epistemological toolbox in the case of Ancient women's cults and rituals when appropriated by a popular cultural production of film? My choice of Snow White for such an analysis is obvious: having a different relation with the reality and creating a very specific naturalization, the cartoon immediately relates with folklore and oral cultural production, with symbolic presentations, but also with the popular culture. A largest possible reception is secured by the genre of fairy tale, and by the encrypted patriarchal narrative. It is indeed very easy to insert additional ideological signifiers, which, whatever the context might be, reproduce the globally desired model of a young woman. For Walt Disney, these additional ideological signifiers were American colonizing patriotism and more or less conservative political position. The presumed enemies of such an ideological setting are educated mature women and the European liberalism. I order to create such an imaginary world, Disney had to work on the European versions of the fairy tale: first, Snow White's mother is excluded from the causality of the story; then, the difference between the European and the American site of the production of knowledge is established: The castle, the evil stepmother's domain, is vertically/hierarchically divided space, power-to-knowledge downwards line is clear – this is, as I already indicated, the European university in the city. In the case of dwarfs' house, far away from the castle-city, it is an American campus, along with the laboratory-mine. » |
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11 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1957.
12 Such exceptional cases would be Pier-Paolo Pasolinis's films inspired by Ancient drama – Oedypus King (1967) and Medea (1969): in Oedipus King, Pasolini confronts Freud's interpretation and the "ritual", non-European one, which is surprisingly close to Jean-Pierre Vernant' anti-psychoanalytical approach, and that of his followers, like Page du Bois.
13 Eliot, Marc, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince, Carol Publishing Corporation,1993.
