Snow White: Young Woman From Heteronormative Nuclear Family Follows Daddy’s Advice, Makes Good

Lord, I almost missed it.

I’ve been so wound up about the appalling violence done in this reboot of a beloved children’s classic that I overlooked this recently unearthed interview by Variety magazine with two of the film’s stars, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot.  (Zegler is still young enough to get away with the giggly, simpering co-ed vibe.  In a woman of Gadot’s age, it just grates.)

On being asked how this movie brings a “modern take” to the story, Zegler responds:

It’s no longer 1937. We absolutely wrote a Snow White…she’s not gonna be saved by the Prince, she’s not gonna be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true, and so it’s just an really incredible story for young people everywhere to see themselves in….

Wait.  What??  Snow White has a father????

Raise your hand, if you haven’t gone out of the way to study the matter, if you know anything at all about Snow White’s father beyond the fact that he must have married again after his wife’s death because there’s a stepmother involved.  Anything? (This is probably where I should mention that in very early versions of the story he doesn’t even merit this oblique attention, as the nasty, jealous plot device who is trying to get rid of Snow White is her own natural mother.**)

But here is the heroine of the new woke, diverse, and inclusive movie stating that Snow White was simply following her daddy’s advice, and living the life he had envisioned for her.

Now, I don’t find anything wrong with that.  Long live the patriarchy! I hope (and I think) that my daddy was proud of all his children and our own diverse accomplishments and lives.  We can argue about a particular father’s particular vision for his little girl, but that’s a different matter.

What I do wonder about, though, is how this version of Snow White is supposed to be accessible to children with two mommies, or two daddies, or an unspecified number of gendervague “parents,” or only one parent, or no parents at all?  In a world where children’s imaginations  are constrained in ways that allow them to identify only with others who already mirror themselves right out of the box (why else do you think the “seven magical creatures” in the movie appear the way they do?) it seems to me that giving Snow White’s father this much credit for inspiring her success in life is a serious mistake, and–in a world where more-and-more children grow up without fathers–is bound to be dispiriting to children who don’t have such a person in their lives, and who therefore can’t identify with Snow White at all.

This seems like a serious, counterproductive, and very undesirable undermining of the movie’s otherwise very woke agenda.

Now I find that I actually want to see this movie (not really), just to see if anyone else noticed and if this plot difficulty has been rectified in the ten months since Zegler spoke out…

**Given that very old fairy stories (and the outlines of the Snow White story are held to be very old) were probably told to children by their mothers, I don’t find stories of mother-daughter rivalries all that surprising, although this does carry it to extremes, particularly the cannibalistic overtones, when the huntsman brings back what the queen believes to be Snow White’s lungs and liver as proof of her death, and her wicked mother eats them, presumably in the hope that she’ll become as fair as her dead daughter.)