Down with love

'They can't order me to stop dreaming'

Disney’s project of self-cannibalization continues: like an ouroburos in a pink dress and tiara, it devours its own back catalogue and diminishes into an ever-smaller cycle of repetitive patterns, each time producing something of less substance and consequence. It is apt that the plots of its films are ever-more focused on the lionisation of the Self and the mere quality of being who you are: we have not quite yet reached the apotheosis of this philosophy - which I imagine as a CGI feature in which a parentless young woman simply goes about making herself Princess of the World like some Nietzschean ubermensch, perhaps surrounded by a handful of adoring, cuddly, slavishly worshipful ‘friends’ - but we are getting there. And so it is that Disney’s first masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, is being remade - but without a prince or apparently, indeed, seven dwarves. This is just Snow White, and there is no love in sight - only ‘leadership’ and ‘power’.

Let’s leave aside all of the many, many issues that arise from a reading of the very rich text that is the reporting on this story (to stave off any criticism along these lines: no, I have no problem with strong female leads or films with female main characters, though I do wish they would more frequently resemble actual real life women and girls that I know). And let’s instead focus on the crisis of love that seems to be afflicting Disney - and our culture more widely. We no longer seem to like love very much. Indeed, we increasingly seem to depict it as superfluous. An interesting proxy for this is the change that has taken place in pop music in recent decades - evident even to an old fart like me - which has seen the almost total disappearance of love songs from the charts, to be replaced by an emphasis on ‘lust and one’s physical attributes’. But it is clear, anecdotally, just from looking about oneself in daily life: the sight of young couples walking around hand in hand and evidently in love is becoming noticeably rare - as indeed is the sight of young couples on dates who are evidently enraptured in each other rather than their phones.

Rachel Zegler, the actress who will be playing Snow White in the remake, makes this mood starkly explicit:

"We absolutely wrote a Snow White that is not gonna be saved by the prince… She's not going to be saved by the prince and she's not going to be dreaming about true love."

These are not the words of somebody who just doesn’t see love as ‘the be-all and end-all’; they are the words of somebody who is contemptuous of the emotion itself. Who would be so foolish as to dream about true love? Who would cherish the idea of two people uniting together until death they do part? Who would sacrifice ‘leadership’ and ‘power’ for such an outmoded emotion? She speaks, it seems, not just for herself, but for her generation - who by all accounts are likely to form relationships less often than any generation in history, to have fewer children, and to marry less frequently.

The problem with love is that it requires sacrifice, and an awareness that another person - the object of one’s love - is a person in their own right, as important, as valuable, as nuanced, as complicated and as flawed as oneself (and, in the case of parental love for a child, more so in all of these respects). For a solipsistic society, raised on screens and the literal and metaphorical two-dimensional perspective this fosters, the idea that other people are not merely characters or avatars but real, living beings is not merely difficult to process - it is an affront to the special position that one occupies in one’s own moral universe. To put another person on a pedestal is to knock oneself off it - to accept, more generally, that one is only as important as anybody else - and this is something that we find it increasingly difficult to countenance.

At the same time, online interactions are by definition superficial, but in a way in which few people, ironically, deeply interrogate. To venture into the world of contemporary online dating is to be presented with a mass of people differentiated only by their photographs and the briefest of profiles. This in itself inculcates in the user the habit of seeing appearance and initial representation as the most salient of characteristics in another person. But love is, if anything, an exactly opposite method of perceiving the other. Physical appearance is almost the least relevant characteristic of all in the person who is loved; the fact that love transcends physicality is indeed perhaps its most central feature. We do not love our mothers, our children, our siblings or our spouses because of how they look, and we would look upon anybody who insisted otherwise as flawed in a deeply important way. But we are educated out of thinking of human relationships in these terms by the technological means by which we nowadays interact.

And one can’t, in the end, also ignore the decline in marriage and the increases in divorce and single-parenthood that have taken place over the last fifty or so years, and the role they play in fostering a suspicion of love. To many children growing up in the 21st century, romantic love between adults is either something that they do not personally witness, or, if they do witness it, it is understood to be a vague portent of threat - a new boyfriend or girlfriend for mum or dad, and perhaps a new stepfather or stepmother accordingly, with all of the destabilisation and anxiety which that entails. For them love is not something to dream of, but something to be wary about, or even fearful.

The Snow White remake has to be understood against this context, and in that respect it is completely natural for Disney to have written love out of the story in the way that they have done. They know their audience. Romantic love has been diminishing in importance in its output for years now, often being almost entirely absent (as in, say, Moana) or lingering as a vestigial nod to tradition (see for instance Frozen, in which Kristoff’s feeling for Anna is more the devotion of a golden retriever to its owner than an actual depiction of human love). Disney is nothing if not conservative with a ‘small-c’; it does not rock the boat, but faithfully gives its viewers what they want. And these viewers are habituated to a world without love.

This gives the lie to the line that is so frequently trotted out, to the effect that this kind of move is somehow ‘daring’ or ‘brave’. It is anything but. The Snow White remake is situated impeccably at the heart of the zeitgeist: it challenges no preconceptions, but only reinforces them.

In closing, then, it is worth considering the genuinely counter-cultural potential of true love stories in the age in which we live. The yearning for a faithful remake of the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is dismissed by somebody called Brittany Eldrige (commentary editor for the International Journal of Disney Studies - no, I’m not making that up) as mere ‘nostalgia’. I interpret it, though, as a sign that audiences are thirsty - parched, even - for a different message to the one that the movies nowadays put out; a challenging message; a message that will shake them out of their complacency and confront them with a concept that is genuinely shocking: that love exists, that it means something, that it can be permanent, that it is the fundamental feature of human survival and flourishing, and that is very much worth dreaming of. A film with that message would be a cultural earthquake. But it would take genuine bravery and daring to make it.