'Snow White' still a bad apple of feminism [View all]

[Violet_Crumble]

I got dragged along to see it night before last, and disliked it intensely coz every time I saw Chris Hemsworth, I kept on humming the theme to Home & Away (see pic below)




Anyway, back to Snow White....


Philosophical questions: 1. Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? And 2. Is a Snow White wearing a metal breastplate and brandishing a sword still Snow White?

"Snow White and the Huntsman"stampeded into theaters Friday to mixed — often fawning — reviews and a box-office-leading $56.3 million, but the movie has a fairly open relationship with the original Grimms' fairy story. Not because there are eight dwarfs instead of seven or because there's a random scene in which a Christlike stag magically turns into a cloud of butterflies. Those are the sorts of minor changes that nag at fangirls but are acceptable when spinning new versions of old stories.

But when Snow White storms a castle, and Snow White learns to fight, and Snow White (spoiler alert!) ends up choosing neither of her two male suitors, preferring to sit on a throne alone — well, perhaps we should at least call the girl Snow Whitish, or maybe Snow Ecru. Or just rename the altered product, "Princess on a Fast Horse, Also Tames Trolls."

Yay for feminism, yay for fight scenes, yay for girls who know better than to lie around waiting for a lover's kiss to wake them from a coma — because honestly, in modern times that scene looks like a date-rape PSA waiting to happen.

"It's a desire to do a role reversal," says Brian Sturm, a professor at the University of North Carolina who co-wrote the scholarly article, "We Said Feminist Fairy Tales, Not Fractured Fairy Tales!" It's a course correction — a way of acknowledging that misogyny in old bedtime stories should be put to sleep.


http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-04/entertainment/ct-ent-0605-fairytales-20120604_1_jack-zipes-feminist-fairy-tales-grimms