Snow White and the End of Happiness

In Which I Deliver a Blow by Blow by Blow

[This post contains spoilers, but you won’t see it anyway,y so I don’t know why I’m bothering to warn you.]

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Well, as I said on Facebook, Snow White was as ghastly as I expected it to be—a bleak, disjointed cinematic failure. Therefore, I think it would be best if I narrated my own Snow White Journey, from start to finish, shoving in the larger implications for a society that has to endure this kind of dystopian vanity as I go along.

Our appointment with the Girlboss of Destiny was 4 o’clock on Saturday afternoon. We were a large party—all six of my children, five more dear friends, and two little girls who love all things Disney.* We arrived just on time, stupidly of course, because there were going to be a lot of movie previews. We purchased buckets of popcorn. We trailed into the cavernously empty theater joining three grandparent-ly looking couples (not related in any way) with a few straggling small children huddled in the corners of that vast hall.

It seemed best to fill the vacant middle row and so we did, pushing the little buttons to try to make the footrests go up, and the headrests go back. All the while the deafening bombast of advertising filled the cosmos because the movie theater is basically YouTube or Facebook or Instagram now. You don’t see previews for movies when you first enter, but rather hysterical cries to check out Expedia and, well, I can’t remember what else because I devoted myself to scrolling on my phone till they had all ceased. Finally, after what seemed like hours, it was time to be tempted back to this darkened sepulcher because other movies will be shown, should we be interested. Jack Black, you will not be excited to learn, is in the upcoming Minecraft movie. Also, there is going to be a sequel to Karate Kid. And, guess what! A pedestrian and dull addendum to Freaky Friday. Oh, and there’s a movie based on a true story of a man who acquires a penguin, which somehow forestalls him losing his teaching job.

Finally, after contemplating the destruction of all the nice things of my youth, the lights dimmed, and we were for it.

So, first of all, I don’t understand how Disney can have been willing to humiliate itself in this fashion. That remains an unanswered question for me. Visually, the film is a complete mess. The opening scenes of the child Snow White and her two emotionless parents are chaotic and unfocused. The pedantically diverse inhabitants of the town dance around the square for some contextless festival, featuring pies made by Snow White all by herself, apparently, for there are no shots of anyone else in the big castle kitchen. The costumes in these opening moments are absurdly bright and horrid. Then Snow White—who got her name because she was born in a snowstorm—can be seen staring into a big well with her parents, contemplating the glory of who she will eventually be. Her mother fades out through death, her father sings some more (he never speaks normally, he only sings, and the mother never says anything at all), then Gal Gadot appears and the father goes away to war.

And verily verily, all these scenes are clunky and emotionally flat. The two people who are supposedly the parents of Snow White seem like complete strangers who can only grin foolishly in no particular direction. Snow White—a nice-looking little girl—can’t act, probably because there is no material for her to work with. The writing and music and cinematography are so leaden, what could she do but smile?

Ok so, Gal Gadot is prettier than Rachel Zegler. The meme is true. Ms. Zegler is by no means bad-looking, she’s just not gorgeous compared with Ms. Gadot. Also, Ms. Gadot can’t act. Everyone who points this out isn’t lying. And also, Ms. Gadot isn’t a very brilliant singer.

So after the departure of the king, there are endless shots of Snow White mopping the floors of the castle. They seem to go on forever. And there’s a great deal of singing. I can’t remember because it was boring…no wait! I should not pass by the fact that it was very important to the parents of Snow White that she “become” the “person she was going to be” or something like that.

And, as I tried to contemplate the depth of this astonishing thought, the only thing I could think was how Rachel Hollis says that there’s this platonic form of you in heaven that if you don’t live up to it while you’re on earth you will literally spend eternity in hell, your two parts—the ideal and the reality—having to glare at each other forever.

I don’t get why little Snow White, who is technically a princess, that is, the daughter of a king, would have to “become” her father’s daughter. She is that already. Could she learn more about it? For sure. Could the depth and breadth of such a gift be realized more fully? I would expect so. But that’s not what they’re saying. If you listen to Ms. Zegler belting out her musical numbers, you don’t get context or richness or pleasurable realization, only that she has to become her father’s daughter. This theme reasserts itself later in the forest when she’s woken up by True Love’s extremely tepid and unpassionate kiss. And what I asked myself was, why do they always have to have the mother die? If they were really going for women’s empowerment, why wouldn’t they let that poor, silent queen live just a bit longer?

Anyway, Snow White has to become her father’s daughter, and this is what I imagine Ms. Zegler was blathering on about when she said Snow White was going to become the “leader” she always knew she could be. It’s a riff off of Cinderella’s “have courage and be kind” bit, which was quite charming, but in this case, it doesn’t work at all because it is not focused on any particular circumstance. Snow White will just be “a leader.” It’s what her parents would have wanted for some reason. It seems like this will be a hard attainment for her, but, in the end, it is barely an inconvenience.

So anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Snow White is mopping the palace floors, and it seems she has had no contact with her stepmother ever and has no idea what kind of person she, the stepmother, is because of the potato incident. Jonathan, the Bandit, breaks into the palace and steals some potatoes and she, Snow White, thinks that’s bad. But then Jonathan of acceptable level Gen Z manliness says something—I forget what—and that really makes Rachel Zegler, sorry Snow White, think and so she goes to Gal Gadot, sorry, the evil Queen, but instead of asking for food for all the starving peasants, she explains that they need “kindness” and “pie.” And then, I kid you not, she goes and unties Jonathan’s very loose bonds, for he has been affixed to the palace gate to perish of cold, except that it doesn’t seem that cold. Also, get this, no one of significance is guarding Jonathan. He easily gets away.

The Queen does find out, though, and so she decides to send Snow White out into the woods to be killed by a friendly black man who can’t, of course, carry through with the evil deed. He sends Snow White running into the scary magical (for some reason) forest in her garish yellow dress, where she ends up at the cottage of the very freaky CGI dwarves.

This seems like a good moment to comment on the costuming. One of my young, clever, very well-dressed companions at this event had many precient thoughts on the subject of the clothes. First of all, the young Snow White should have been arrayed in splendor, but her dress was as dull as the entire movie. Then, the “rags” that were her lot while she was always mopping the floor weren’t terrible at all and were a lot more bearable than the yellow monstrosity that she wears for the Entire Rest of the Movie. The horrible yellow costume never gets wrecked for any reason. It doesn’t fit her. It looks like it was bought on Temu. It often clashes with whatever scene she is plodding through. It’s just awful.

Ok, so, Snow White takes over the dwarves in a sort of managerial fever dream. They’re away at the mines when she is brought to their house by the woodland creatures who honestly should have known better, and, like the awful Goldilocks, falls asleep in their beds. When they manage to wake her up, she teaches Dopey to whistle, and then, when they get into a big fight and destroy all their own stuff, she makes them clean up. “Whistle while you work,” she menaces. They all like her, except for Grumpy, who should have stuck to his bad attitude, and then she decides she has to go, so she does that, and falls in with the magical forest Bandits, or Baristas, as I believe a lot of people are calling them online.

She and the Jonathan person “flirt” if by that you mean singing a song written by someone—or at least he sings about how she’s not his problem, but then I think they also sing together. Anyway, they easily repel the Queen’s soldiers, except that Jonathan is hit with an arrow, and so back it is to the dwarves where he is easily cured by Doc, and then there’s some dancing and some more singing. I guess that Jonathan and Snow White are in love by this point, if by love you mean enduring yet another scene rewrite because Disney realized they had to have some humanizing situations for Snow White, and they gave it their best shot, but they were not able to succeed. This part of the movie made me feel like this:

I know this is getting tedious, but um, let’s see, after Jonathan is cured, everyone goes away, and Snow White (I think) stays where she is, but she’s got to go too because otherwise the dwarves will be in danger. But then Gal Gadot, who has had some costume changes that are, scene by scene, unutterably ghastly, and a couple of musical numbers, decides to poison the apple and make herself look old. So she does that real quick, and Snow White, who keeps promising to leave the dwarves but never does, eats the apple and collapses into a deep magical sleep—sans actual drama or magic. This circumstance, of course, makes the creepy dwarves sad. Oh, and Jonathan has been captured and is in the dungeon with the guy who was supposed to kill Snow White in the first place, and once he discovers that Jonathan just wants to be with Snow White, which happens because Jonathan tells him, they easily tear the big chain out of the wall and set themselves free and then Jonathan runs back to the forest where he administers that kiss I mentioned before and Snow White wakes up.

And the first thing she does is fall into the arms of Jonathan for like thirty seconds, but then she’s off to stare into the cloudless sky and remember that she was supposed to be working on becoming her father’s daughter, and so they all hatch the plan that she will just walk into the palace and take it all back, which she does by remembering the names of some random palace guards. Gal Gadot, instead of running away, gets absorbed into her weird AI mirror. She hits it with her stick and it shatters and then she herself goes into the mirror. Snow White watches in that expressionless sort of way she does everything.

And if the movie writers had been of a different sort of creative bent, they would have paused there for a minute and let everyone contemplate the very uncomfortable prospect of Snow White going about her daily life with a person who really hates her hidden there in the mirror, and how that might make her a sort of brittle and twisted and wrecked person after a while. Or something—anything with emotional complexity would do.

The whole thing ends with the Disney version of a Diddy White Party (ugh), or one of those Kanye West Sunday Services from the lost days when he thought he might be a Christian for about thirty seconds. Actually, this is more visually and artistically interesting than everything in the Snow White movie:

So, there you are, that’s the plot of Snow White. And from all the scrolling I did online, it seemed that no one but those who planned to grind through a long review like this bothered to see it. According to Grok, it only made 87 million worldwide over opening weekend. So, maybe if a lot of people decide to hate-watch it, they might make some of their money back, but that seems like an unreasonable expectation.

And here is my great and vast hope. I hope they go ahead and make a sequel. I hope they get Ms. Zegler and Ms. Gadot back to do it. It can all be directed by Peter Dinklage. I hope they keep trying to make Ms. Zegler into the leader she knows she can be. I hope they do whatever this is even harder—and soon—like next year. And then, after that, I hope they do it again. And keep doing it until they have so fully beclowned themselves that no movie like this is ever made again and the people who thought it would work are cast out from Hollywood and Disney forever.

I hope people look back on this period of American life and shudder in embarrassment and shame. I hope my grandchildren toddle up to my fat knee in their little lisping voices to ask, ‘Gramma, did you actually see Rachel Zegler in the theater? What was it like?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yes darling, I did. It’s the reason I’m a shadow of my former self. I had to listen to the Princess Problems song and watch those horrible “dwarves” trying to make human facial expressions and failing utterly.’ And then my grandchildren will wag their heads sadly, and work on making excuses for past trauma so that they won’t despise me and all their forbearers.

So anyway, have a nice day if you’re up for it. If you need me, I’ll be slaving away like a peasant on another bad book review.

*They hated this movie.