Vox ’s Todd VanDerWerff has perhaps best summed up the new Cinderella movie — “The overall effect is that Cinderella ends up being someone who suffers beautifully and... that’s about it, actually.” And suffering beautifully in a corset that makes her waist so tiny, that it magnifies everything else. Including the film’s flaws.
In an unconventional changing world, filled with despicable-but-true stories, fairy tales are absolute rubbish and quite unnecessary. (Then again, which movie is necessary by definition?) Fairy tales are but an excuse to let female characters assume second place to their male counterparts who often step in and rescue them, grab them forcefully and envelope the clueless lady into a hug, where her only duty is act shocked but also secretly enjoy it without revealing too much emotion. Fairy tales are truly the precursors to backward television soap operas.
Before I go any further, a quick history lesson: when the Grimm brothers collected stories around their European travels (to preserve storytelling), the tales were based on actual events that were quite ghastly. To sugarcoat the stories, the brothers changed them into happy heart-warming ones; stories that are now thoroughly dipped in a vat of icing and chocolate sauce and finished with a heavy film of glitter before they’re deemed fit for reading and/or watching. Not that I have anything against glitter or chocolate sauce for that matter, but sometimes it does defeat the purpose.
In an era when Marvel and DC are introducing female superheroes — to be fair, Wonder Woman has been a feminist icon for a while now — like She-Hulk, Ms Marvel or the intriguingly named Rat Queens, we’re still unable to shake off the chains of the past. Also, I have lost count of the number of times Cinderella has been remade, as a musical, a television series or just animation. And for a story that supposedly has more than 300 variants, what harm could one more relevant, sensible, modern variant do? After all, isn’t that what the function of lore is — to take on new forms? Just to be clear, I’m all for good happy endings, for the triumph of good over evil, for being patient and hoping against hope and changing the world but at what cost? The protagonist being walked over like a doormat? That doesn’t spell patience; that’s just stupidity.
If we’re indeed immortalising fairy tales, let’s at least celebrate the ones that have got it right. Like Parks and Recreation ’s Leslie Knope whose idea of feminism is interspersed with whipped cream, rainbows and puppies unlike her colleague April Ludgate, who aims at a darker spectrum. Or take for instance The Mindy Project where the protagonist Mindy Lahiri, an Ob-Gyn, finds herself pregnant, much to her surprise. What works for the show is that Mindy is still her same selfish self, a “hot mess” when she’s pregnant and a wardrobe many women aspire to have. But most importantly, she has the largest waist any princess could ever have.
