Why do I care so much about Snow White?

a rant and a symbolic analysis

If you are a movie enthusiast, you may have noticed that Disney’s Snow White live action came out in theaters last weekend. If you are not a movie enthusiast but terminally online you also may have noticed that the movie is out given the sheer size of memeable material that flooded the web. It was a gruesome wait, marked by up and downs, back and forth, twists and turns, right in the nexus of the zeitgeist shift that peaked with the last US election, but we’re finally here.

So the movie is out and, boy oh boy.

Yes, it is that bad. I will spare you screenshots from IMDB or Rotten tomatoes, the signal is clear.

Now, Disney bombed already a few of the last projects they launched, so this is not a complete surprise to anybody, also the live actions remakes of the last years are vastly inconsequential in terms of storytelling, and so this release should be treated as a no-news event.

Instead.

Instead, I found myself avidly doom scrolling on X stopping on the most salacious takes, furiously clicking refresh on IMDB to see how low the score would go, checking the box office numbers day by day. Every time pervaded with greater and greater waves of satisfaction as badder and badder updates would trickle in. And so I hunched and grinned over my laptop like the the Evil Queen under the guise of the Old Crone, until I turned my head towards the mirror and saw the reflection of this unsettling figure that I have become. A question came through the glass clear as crystal: why do I care so much?

Why do I care so much

On one hand, I am upset by the petty and annoying (and more and more out of tune) attitude that everything rooted in the past is a legacy of the patriarchy and, for the liberation of modern minds, we need to ridicule, dismantle and reconstruct it according to the current ethos¹, championing the unsaid premise that the soul and purpose of any legacy story is fundamentally one of oppression, and so its eradication is a moral duty. In fewer words: subverting is the mission.

This is nothing new in the woke movement to rewrite art and history² but I have seen it happen too many times to care. What hits me the most is that Snow White is an eternal story, one of the ones that define not only culture but the whole symbolic system with which we interpret (and cope) with reality.

Also, and most importantly, because among all Snow White is about a topic extremely dear to me, and messing with it really messes with me: the coming into being of womanhood.

I already hear the troops marching to came and pick me up for a shame walk towards the gulag. If that’s my fate, so be it, but before dispensing of me for being a offspring of the patriarchy hold on 5 mins and hear me out defend my thesis

Snow White is the fundamental story for female development and, as such, toying with it risks to harm functional models of femininity

How important is to have functional models of feminity? It’s fundamental.

Men are vestigial. Women are the seat of life, the womb of humanity. They govern on the innermost, most sacred spaces. The locus of resort. The safe harbor from which everything originates. Mess with it. You mess with everything.

I’m not helping myself with this statement, but I guess I’m on this journey and I’d better go forward or the bayonettes will be to close.

A [reduced] symbolic analysis of Snow White

I promised myself that I would stick to 2k words, and I only have 1.4k left, so please forgive if the analysis that I propose is severely reduced. I think there are 4 symbolic themes that needs to be explored to substantiate my thesis.

The banishment

The pure princess, the tender seed that disclosed herself to the world encountered the hyerarchical structure that governs and defines it, the Queen. The hostile encounter forced Snow White to move away to the zone of comfort and go beyond in the land of unknown. There she is, alone in the woods. A prey in the dark.

All is hostile, all is danger, all is unknown and obscure. All is fear.

This is the first moment in which contact with the world outside home is made. It is the moment of forced exploration, separation from the maternal harbor (in this case the Castle and the Village, feminine symbols of care and protection) and the dark, wild side of human interaction. Where the assumption of familiar love is not sustained anymore and before gaining trust you are necessarily (rightly) overwhelmed by fear and pain. Then, after trial and error, you recognize some patterns to discern friend from foe. Birds can sit on your fingers. A moment of peace is restored and a path can be paved. Shaky, curved and crooked, but allowing you to explore this strange new world.

An important note here is that Snow White is embarking in a typical masculine role: exploration into the unknown, leaving the familial home behind, paving a new road towards self discovery.

The incomplete masculine

And here a home is found. An house lost in the middle of the forest. Which is a less than ideal place for a home. And in fact what she finds there are less than ideal men.

The dwarves themselves embody fragmented aspects of the masculine psyche that remain unintegrated and immature. They represent exaggerated characteristics such as anger, intellectual detachment, laziness, naivety, and dependence—each dwarf representing a caricature of a psychological trait rather than a mature, integrated masculine counterpart.

While Snow White successfully brings order into their chaotic lives, but none of these incomplete masculine figures offers her the partnership necessary to achieve full emotional and psychological integration, thus she is left alone at home, still exposed to the danger of the forest/the world.

The encounter with the dwarves represents the tendency of adolescent girls to mature faster and and in a more integrated way compared to their male counterparts, leading the inability to fully bond with peers, and generally causing a further push into the unknown in the forest in search for more integrated masculine archetypes.

The self awareness trap

The predatory life, the strange lands are still out there, and they coalesce embodied in the witch that comes to pay visit. Unable to eat her heart following banishment, she is set on a mission to render Snow White as similar as possible to herself, bring Snow White to her plane of existence and finally overcome her. How does she plan to do it?

If you have only seen the Disney movie you may not know that the witch pays three visits to Snow White, first she offers a Corset that becomes so tight that makes Snow White faint, then she offers a Comb that makes her unconsciuos as long as it is in her hair. Both of the magical gifts are created only through the sacrifice of symbols of beauty of the queen, the nails for the corset and the hair for the comb. The first two attempt fail because are not powerful enough and the dwarves are able release the girl from the grip of the magical artifacts. Then the queen makes the ultimate sacrifice, she pours her blood to imbue the apple with poisonous spirit. Now with all of her beauty lost, the queen comes back to Snow White as a old crone for the last attempt, she offers the poisoned apple, Snow White accepts, eats the apple and she falls asleep, unable to be awaken up.

What the hell happened there?

The first two temptations that the strange lands offer to the maturing feminine are clear, a tight corset to represent societaly pressures for beauty and conformity, tight that too strong and it will take away vitality, a poisoned Comb to represent vanity and narcisistic self preoccupation, pushed too deep will dissolve the attention towards the true self.

The apple then. The final trap is, yes, a biblical reference of the access to knowledge. But what knowledge? My reading of the story points towards self-knowledge.

The queen imbues the apple with the essence of herself and as Snow White eats the apple she finally recognizes herself as a woman and stops being a girl. Childish innocence is lost at the talons of the predatory world. She dies as a child and enters the final step of her maturation journey, her heart is lost, and the sacrifice of her childlike nature is the price to pay to become a woman.

The dwarves find her sleeping on the floor, unresponsive and inaccessible. They put her in a cristal case and bring her in the woods to rest.

There’s a lot to unpack here, the incomplete masculine gives up at this stage, itself realizing of not being up to the task of playing a role in Snow White reawakening. Only the world can, the hostile predatory world. The world from which Snow White is now protected by the glass limit of the Crystal case. She can be peeked from the outide but not interacted with, locked in an emotional paralysis and unable to love.

Coniunctio Oppositorum

Than a man comes and saves her.

Uh, no not really. As said, this is not a story about men, and it’s not possible for a man to save Snow White. Only she can save herself. And she does it by lowering once again her defenses, allowing a stranger to enter her glass case, opening her heart and being able to love again. Letting go of fear and accepting the chance of pain that comes from interacting from the outer world. The prince is not a saviour, but rather represent her animus coming back from the darkness of the unconscious to reunite with her as one again and make her whole. Ready to become an integrated adult, conquer and transform the forest in hospitable place. Fulfill her journey and become herself the new Village and the new Castle. The new home for her and the world under her care and love.

Snow White never goes back to her initial home, but moves forward in the world creating her own, new home.

This is where Disney’s Snow White fail. By failing to be awaken by love, consume the coniunctio oppositorum, the new Snow White stays forever in the crystal case. She wakes up in a weird form, where she now fully embodies a masculine role leading the rebellion against the oppressive hyerarchical system that pushed her away from home. So she come back with a vengeance, and wins of course. But that was not the point, vengeance is not the point of the story, reconquering the childhood home is a psychological regression that defeats the purpose of all of her pain and purpose.

The point of the story of Snow White is that by exposing yourelf to the world, being necessarily hurt by it, suffer and freeze, but then accept the leap of faith to lower the barriers again and welcome love, and love again, that is how you become an psychologically integrated human being.

And so what?

Well, first takeway, you should not mess with an eternal story without understanding what you are doing. This movie fails to understand the purpose of the tale is one of Self-discovery, self-integration and emotional becoming (or maybe it does understand that, but that just make it worse) and it subverts its principles, creating actually a disfunctional blueprint for feminine development.

Now, movie are much less influential that once were and so potential damage created is very, very limited, so I guess the only results is a flood of memes on twitter and my bad mood for a week.

Ok, but you can’t be mad just for this, it would be a waste of madness.

You are right.

I am angry because I was wandering alone in the woods and I found an empty Crystal Case. I didn’t knew her but I mourned her, and her absence torned me apart. They took away from me the potential to be loved by and to love a woman, the most beautiful thing the world offers a man. They took away my anima, and I long her.

1. More to come on what does that entail, off topic for now

2. What is particularly fun, or depressing, is that with the coming of woke culture kinda feels stagnating, with no great story worth narrating anymore, and so restructuring the past has become a major focus of the ensemble, of course this is by design