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.
