Snow White, Racist?

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there was a little brown girl who liked watching Disney movies and reading fairytales. Although she liked to believe that the fairytales were real, the little brown girl knew better than that. You see, this little brown girl was always pretty sensible. She knew that there was no such thing as fairies, wicked witches, princes or princesses.

I still fret over how much those fairytales and their insidious messages of “happily ever after” have affected my brain.

2012 will mark exactly 75 years since the release of the animated version of Snow White by Walt Disney pictures. It also welcomes two “re-imagined” interpretations of the classic Grimm fairytale. I recently watched the new trailers for the “re-imagined” Snow White movies – Snow White and the Huntsman and  Mirror, Mirror (videos below).

Allow me to enlighten you on the original version of Snow White as written in 1857 by the Grimms in their book “Kinder- und Hausmärchen”. This should provide us with sufficient fodder for comparison to the 1937 Disney animation and the two “re-imagined” movies coming out next year.

In the original Grimm fairytale, the wicked witch is Snow White’s evil stepmother. She has a magic mirror and she asks it the same bloody question everyday — “Who is the most beautiful of them all?”. Insecure much? The mirror would reply that “She is the fairest of them all.” (The mirror seems to be the racist instigator villain in my eyes.) One day, when Snow White turned seven, the mirror stopped replying that it was the Queen and instead told the Queen that Snow White was the “fairest of them all.”

The Queen becomes jealous (of a 7-year-old, mind you) and orders a huntsman to kill Snow White. She also wants the guy to bring Snow White’s lungs and liver so she can make it into curry and eat it for dinner. When the huntsman takes Snow White to the forest, he is unable to stab her because he has fallen in love with her. Yes, he fell in love with a 7-year-old. Stinks of pedophilia if you ask me. He lets her go and tells her to hide from the Queen. He kills a boar and brings the Queen its lungs and liver.

Meanwhile, in the forest, Snow White discovers a tiny cottage belonging to seven dwarfs. The dwarfs take pity on this pathetic 7-year-old kid and tels her that if she cooks, cleans, washes, sews, knits and makes their bed for them, she can stay with them and have everything she wants.

After years of unpaid domestic labour, Snow White grows up into a beautiful young woman — with no help from proper beauty routines whatsoever. The Queen realizes she ain’t dead and decides to kill her. In the original fairytale, the Queen tries to kill Snow White three times but only (partially) succeeds in the last one when she disguises herself as a farmer’s wife and gives Snow White a poisoned apple. When the dwarfs find her, they can’t revive her so they stick her in a glass coffin.

One day, a prince travels through the land and sees Snow White in her coffin. He is enchanted by her beauty and instantly falls in love with her. He gets the dwarfs to give him the coffin and when he is ordering his servants to move the coffin , the servants accidentally stumble on some roots and dislodge the portion of poisoned apple from Snow White’s throat. He tells her he loves her and a wedding is planned.

The Queen is punished at the wedding and is forced to dance in a pair of heated iron shoes until she drops dead. Now that is true royal wedding entertainment.

Grimm fairytale version aside, let’s get back to the “re-imagined” movies. Perhaps what is most disturbing in the “modern” imaginations of Snow White is that there is nothing modern about the way the women characters think and act at all. Apart from both Kristen Stewart and Lily Collins as Snow White now yielding swords, nothing much has changed at all.

The movies may claim to be “re-imagined” versions but the story’s messages are still the same. Women are vain. Being fair (read: white) is good. Growing old  makes you vindictive. Women in power are evil hags.  A man (preferably handsome and prince-like or muscular and brave) will help you solve all your problems.

“Beauty is my power,” says Charlize Theron, the Queen in the Snow White and the Huntsmen trailer. Can someone tell me why this is regarded as some kind of stunning new secret? Modern research has determined that better-looking people have it easier. For a woman, beauty is a form of symbolic capital. It can pretty much guarantee you a lot of perks from free ice-cream to free rides on the bus to being able to “marry up” if you wish. So yeah evil bitch queen. Beauty is power. We ugly girls get it already.

And don’t even get me started on the whole “I’m obsessed with being the whitest white girl” thing.  Research, common sense and a realistic view of the world around us pretty much sums up the reasons why Snow White could never (not in the foreseeable future anyway) be a South East Asian woman. Or a Black woman. Snow White will never be anything but a straight, pretty, white woman. Why? Well, for one thing, white people prefer to see stories about white people. Also, movies don’t get funded if the story isn’t about white folk or at least told from a white person’s perspective. Recall gems such as The Last Samurai , Last of the Mohicans or the Massacre of Nanking. Heck, even if the movie was about fucking aliens or fantasy creatures that don’t exist (Avatar and The Hobbit anyone?),  the story is still told by a person with white skin. We can moan and whine all we want about how the story doesn’t have more “people of colour” in it. We can blame the studios, the casting director, the producers, the whole damn industry but for the most part, as long as people want to continue seeing Hollywood movies, they’re pretty much not going to stop making them the way they know how. Which apparently is sexist and racist with a dash of homophobia and a sprinkling of classism and ableism.

The only reason I could  conceivably forgive the misogynist undertones and highly incorrect representations of women in the original Grimm fairytale was because it was written in 19th century Europe. But that was the 19th century, people. As in when women were still not considered humans in most parts of the Western world. We now live in the 21st century. That’s nearly 200 years since the story has been written. Is there no other way to re-imagine the heroine of Snow White other than giving her a sword?

If they really wanted to re-imagine Snow White, they should re-evaluate the relationship between the Queen and Snow White. Why not make them a high-functioning stepmother-stepdaughter pair? Oh right. Because nobody wants to see a good stepmother who actually cares about the well-being of her step-daughter. No one is interested in how women actually support each other in real life. We’d rather see women as whiny, old, insecure hags or sexy, pretty little things fighting in a thwarted version of a supernatural, 19th century beauty competition.

Hollywood, stop pretending to re-imagine fairytales from yonder years for a new generation of children and moviegoers. Stop trying to appeal to the “nostalgia” of a lost generation and a world that is past. That world was fucked up for many different reasons and there is no need to re-imagine it by pretending that women were ass-kicking, sword-wielding “feminists.”

Hollywood needs a magic mirror to take a long, hard look at itself with. Maybe then the mirror can tell them to buck the fuck up and keep up with the times.

Contact the author: syahidah@morningquickie.com