“What other ways can there be to see?”
Nancy Zastudil, “Art on the Run: Austin’s Artist Run Club,” ACTX (June 5, 2023).
Susan Sontag declared in her influential article “Notes on ‘Camp’” that camp was “a way of looking at things…a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons.” … Sontag observes that “camp sees everything in quotation marks…to perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”
Sean Griffin, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out (2000), p. 68.
The most looked at post on this blog is one entitled “Edward P. Jones’ ‘The First Day’: Looking at Looking,” about a story in which a little girl, in the process of being registered for kindergarten by her mother, first perceives others’ perceptions of her mother while learning her mother is illiterate. I have since become attuned to the double meaning of “the way eyes look”–the way they look from the outside to other people looking at them, which would be in the form of an adjective, and the way they look from the inside to the person they belong to, which would be a verb enacting the individual’s worldview, i.e., the way they look at the world.
I was struck by the way Prince Harry’s ghostwriter framed his approach to memoir in a recent article:
[Andre Agassi] asked why I’d organized my memoir around other people, rather than myself. I told him that was the kind of memoir I admired. There’s so much power to be gained, and honesty to be achieved, from taking an ostensibly navel-gazing genre and turning the gaze outward.
J.R. Moehringer, “Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter” (May 8, 2023).
Per the subject of my last post, having a dead mother might be a significant element of defining or influencing someone’s worldview, potentially more so if the mother died when the individual was still young–as Prince Harry might well be the most famous case for. Happening upon his memoir, Spare (2023), in a sidewalk lending library on the route where I walk my dogs, I opened randomly to the page where Harry first visited Paris, years after his mother died there, and demanded his driver take him through the tunnel where the infamous car accident occurred–twice. It didn’t do anything to assuage the pain that had defined his life, but the tunnel itself is an apt metaphor for that life-defining pain: tunnel vision.
The death of Ariel’s mother in the 2023 version of The Little Mermaid also defines her worldview, though unlike Harry, she would have been too young to remember it. We learn in the 2023 update to the narrative that her mother’s death is the reason Triton has forbidden Ariel and her sisters from going above the ocean’s surface.
Zooming out to the audience’s perspective and the Disney live remakes in general, one question is what exactly is their point. For Disney, the answer is money, and for audiences, one answer would seem to be to wallow in nostalgia. With these remakes Disney seems to be consciously addressing criticism of problematic messages communicated in the original narratives, messages that “look different” as time passes and the culture changes. This entails updates to make the narratives more “woke,” a term the right-wing now spews like racist invective. Yet this now politically loaded term also encodes the way eyes look–eyes open, or eyes (and brain) closed?
Long before The Little Mermaid hit cinemas, progressives understood that they were basically obligated to support it for political reasons; even now, the narrative persists that anyone who dislikes the movie must be a racist troll (that is, unless they’re denouncing it for not being woke enough).
…Now consider the politically correct version of the same story, in which Ariel is conveniently saved, by amnesia, from knowing what she’s done — and hence deprived of any opportunity to own it, to reckon with it. The former story is about a girl who does things; the latter is about a girl to whom things happen. Which of these is supposed to be a vision of female empowerment, again?
From here.
So what does the “live-action” element add? The concept inherently contains enhanced realism, which in the context of Disney content seems essentially absurd–unless they were willing to excise their trademark talking animals, which seems highly unlikely. Returning to the Disney-Stephen King connection from the previous post, as a horror writer, King’s major talent seems to be rendering inherently unrealistic (i.e., supernatural) concepts with a level of realism that makes them utterly convincing, evidence that unrealistic concepts can be rendered realistically. This seems to have been a major goal for The Little Mermaid‘s 2023 director Rob Marshall, who breaks down his composition of the “Under the Sea” number here, explaining that he wanted sea creatures with a natural tendency to dance and that they do not play musical instruments as they did in the animated version. (Though apparently Ariel can be wrapped in jellyfish tentacles without being stung.)
Also excised for the sake of heightened “realism” is the “Les Poissons” number in which a French chef chases the crab Sebastian around the kitchen in order to kill and cook him. Yet the film found other ways to incorporate the food-chain hierarchy that leads King Triton to denigrate humans as “savages” for eating fish, including decorative images of hooked fish in the palace chamber Ariel is taken too once she’s human, leading her to wonder “Are we only food for slaughter? Is this life on land?”
The concept of hierarchy is embedded in Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale and the 1989 version:
The Little Mermaid establishes the world on land and the world under the sea as two contrasting spaces, one factual and one fictive, one real and the other imaginary. In this dualistic and hierarchical construction, the human world can be aligned with the white male system and the water world situated outside that system. In Women’s Reality (1981), Ann Wilson Schaef uses the term “white male system” to characterize the dominant culture of American patriarchy. According to Schaef, the white male system operates on several contradictory myths, at least two of which are relevant to the complementary worlds of this film. First, nothing exists outside the white male system; and second, the white male system knows and understands everything (8-9). Those who are privileged by the white male system are oblivious to anything outside the system, while those outside the system know about the dominant culture as well as their own marginalized culture. These two contradictory myths speak to the relationship between the land and sea worlds: the sea world is rendered either invisible or mythic while the land world is endowed with cultural validity. As contradictory and complementary, the two-world motif creates permeable yet dangerous borders, furthers the plot, and establishes a hierarchy of desires.
As Pat Murphy convincingly argues in his ecofeminist critique of The Little Mermaid, the film firmly establishes a colonialist, first-world/third-world relationship between the human and sea worlds. The world under the sea, despite its aristocratic decor, is the colonized space of marginalized or muted cultures, often invisible to the inhabitants of the white male system. Sebastian, and many of the other sea creatures, have the facial features of people of color. … When they venture across the boundary into the “real world,” they risk being reduced to human food.
Laura Sells, “‘Where Do the Mermaids Stand?’: Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid,” From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell (1995).
The casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel–or more specifically, the backlash against her casting due to her race–heightens the resonance of these “contradictory myths”…
More than just fodder for nostalgia, these classic stories are part of US myth-building about itself. Making a Black woman the central figure in that myth disrupts the well-established hierarchies that have been embedded in that national narrative.
Tayo Bero, “The global backlash against The Little Mermaid proves why we needed a Black Ariel,” The Guardian (June 9, 2023).
…and the role of the food chain in the narrative’s constructions of hierarchy:
“NEVER use the words ‘chocolate’ or ‘coffee’ or any other food related word to describe someone’s skin color, especially someone of color. I wrote a whole paper about how referring to darker skin tones as specifically chocolate was about aggression and appropriation and has links to colonialism. Think about it, what is the best way to show dominance? By eating someone – like in the animal kingdom. It’s a disgusting practice, so please watch yourself while writing biographies and replying to people, or even in your short stories/novels.”
From here.
The “links to colonialism” are very much heightened in the remake, which I’ll return to.
Ariel is not the only character who generated a backlash based on the way she looks. Enough people were disturbed by the way Flounder looks to constitute a “backlash,” while Flounder’s “look” again seems to derive from Marshall’s desire for him to look like a “real” fish. I was disturbed by the fact that in the trailer, the seagull Scuttle talks underwater. If Scuttle looks different from his 1989 animated corollary, this is in part because the character has not only been updated from a he to a she, but from a seagull to a “gannet,” a bird that dives underwater. The reason for this turns out to be related to how Ariel’s mother’s death has influenced the way she looks at her world, primarily with the desire to escape from it to the “above world,” as explained by the movie’s director Rob Marshall:
“I wanted to make it that Ariel had never ever been to the surface. Ever,” he said. “That was the goal for me. She’s never broken that rule, [so that helps] raise the stakes for that moment when she finally does it. If she’s up and down, up and down, it’s not a big deal.”
Jo Berry, “How The Little Mermaid differs from the Disney animation” (May 26, 2023).
In the 1989 version, Ariel appears to go to the surface regularly in order to get (bad) information from Scuttle about human artifacts.
The tag line on the above article that the changes in the remake are “not just about how Sebastian looks” reinforces the dichotomy of external v. internal looking. If crabs, fish and birds can be rendered to look more realistic because these things actually exist in the “real” world, what about mermaids? For me at least, Ariel’s 2023 look often directed the gaze toward her literal navel.
The fantastical premise requires lots of CGI, which I have learned looks different to different generations, having heard my high-school students laugh at how fake the shark looks in Jaws (1975) when I had always thought it looked pretty scary (an opinion supported by other people my age I’ve discussed it with). I grew up looking at movies whose special effects did not include CGI, while my high school students conversely did grow up with CGI. Their still-developing brains were conditioned to perceive it as looking “real” while mine was not; in contrast to what my developing brain was conditioned to look at as real, CGI looks fake. If the CGI shark in the new Little Mermaid didn’t look that fake to me, that’s probably due to its proximity to the fake-looking CGI mermaid. But at least the top half of her is real.
My father first took me to see the 1989 Little Mermaid in the theater while my mother stayed behind to potty train my younger brother using a train-in-one-day method she had read about that consisted of plying him with salty foods that would in turn prompt him to drink a lot of liquids–an apt metaphor for how consumption trains us. How the consumption of visual texts including but not limited to Disney’s trains us–or more specifically, trains the way we look at the world–is aptly described in a passage by Stephen King in The Shining, in which the rising action involves the ghosts in the haunted Overlook Hotel evolving from more ethereal to physically embodied (or put another way, becoming more “real”), marked by the human characters’ increasing perception of them:
It wasn’t a perception of sight or sound, although it was very near to those things, separated from those senses by the filmiest of perceptual curtains. It was as if another Overlook now lay scant inches beyond this one, separated from the real world (if there is such a thing as a “real world,” Jack thought) but gradually coming into balance with it. He was reminded of the 3-D movies he’d seen as a kid. If you looked at the screen without the special glasses, you saw a double image—the sort of thing he was feeling now. But when you put the glasses on, it made sense.
Stephen King, The Shining (1977) (emphasis mine).
Another major aspect of The Shining is the concept of how the “pictures in a book” can hurt you–Dick Hallorann tells young Danny, who shares his “shining” ability that facilitates the perception of ghosts, that when he sees such ghosts, they can’t actually hurt him, just like pictures in a book can’t. Hallorann turns out to be very wrong about this, thus implying that the pictures in a book can hurt you. One way they can do this is through problematic messaging via stereotypical depictions. If the animals in the 1989 Little Mermaid have the features of people of color, this implies people of color are less human, subtly reinforcing racial hierarchy.
If the ’23 Sebastian looks like a more realistic crab externally while his internal way of looking at the world remains essentially the same as the ’89 version, the way Ariel’s eyes look have changed both ways. Some interesting changes in the film’s framing of perspective revolve around the transitional device from the “above world” to the one “under the sea.” In both versions, we the viewer start out in the above world with the sailors on Eric’s ship. In the 1989 version, a sailor loses his grip on a live fish that leaps over the railing, and we follow it down beneath the surface of the water. In 2023, we open (after an epigraph from Andersen’s original tale whose text is set against the churning sea viewed from above) with the sailors attempting to harpoon what looks to them like a mermaid but turns out not to be, as Eric informs them, shouting “‘USE YOUR EYES!'” A sailor protests about the dangers of mermaids luring men to their deaths on the occasion of the coral moon, setting up a parallel misperception in the underwater world via Triton’s insistence that humans just want to kill mermaids. When a wave bumps the ship, the sailor says to Eric “‘See there?'” with Eric retorting “‘See what?'” The sailor falsely perceives the sea king as the cause of the wave, but of course Eric is evolved enough to see beyond that.
Thanks to another bumpy wave, Eric’s lackey Grimsby loses his grip on a telescope that we then follow down below the surface of the water, with the camera swooping and swirling as if embodying a specific mermaid’s point of view, though this turns out not to be the case. After a scene in which Ariel is revealed to be absent from a convening of King Triton’s daughters, the camera cuts to the swimming perspective again, via the preceding scene’s frame now embodying Ariel’s perspective, the viewer looking through her eyes before looking at her, with the dropped telescope again facilitating the perspective transition: we look through her eyes until she sees the telescope, then we’re looking at her as her body enters the frame to reach for it.
In the ’89 version it’s Scuttle we see using the telescope–the wrong way. He (and the viewer with him) uses it to look at Ariel, but looking through it backwards, she appears far away. When he puts it down she’s right in front of him, prompting him to comment, “‘Whoa, what a swim.'” In ’23 we look through the telescope with Ariel at Flounder, still the wrong way so he appears far away, prompting Ariel to realize the right way to look through it.
Looking through a character’s eyes rather than at them apparently had implications for a particular Disneyland attraction:
Imagineer Joe Rohde stresses that guests at Disney’s theme parks “are given roles within the narrative” in order to immerse them (2007: n.pag.). Early versions of some of these attractions thus even tried to convey the story from a first-person perspective of the main character, supplanting them entirely with the guest, something that failed massively in the case of the Snow White’s Adventures dark ride: “you were taking Snow White’s place […] you were the girl that was being threatened. And nobody got it. Nobody actually figured out that they were Snow White. They just wondered where the hell Snow White was,” points out Imagineer Ken Anderson (quoted in Rahn 2011: 94). As literary scholar Suzanne Rahn has chronicled, the perspective of the story had led to the ride being rather scary, following Snow White’s frightening journey while being chased by the evil old hag, and omitting most of the cheerier scenes with the Dwarfs and a likeness of Snow White herself. … as this example shows, Disneyland’s guests were expecting to see the Disney characters, songs, and scenes they knew from the films…
Sabrina Mittermeier, A Cultural History of the Disney Theme Parks: Middle Class Kingdoms (2021).
That is, the riders didn’t realize they were supposed to be Snow White; they wanted to look at Snow White.
The repositioning of Ariel from passively looked-at object to actively looking subject plays out the remake’s emphasis on an aspect of Andersen’s original text signaled by the epigraph: Ariel’s agency. The ’89 version predominantly, if not entirely, makes it seem like Ariel wants to become human for the sake of winning Eric rather than for the sake of being human in and of itself. While Andersen’s story also sends some mixed signals on this front, one of Ariel’s–or the unnamed “little mermaid” (none of Andersen’s characters get names)–defining desires is to gain an “immortal soul,” something that apparently humans have but mermaids don’t, though it can be gained through the love of and marriage to a human. As Halle Bailey notes, in the new version, Ariel’s desire for a man is, in theory, secondary, not primary:
“I’m really excited for my version of the film because we’ve definitely changed that perspective of just wanting her to leave the ocean for a boy,” Halle Bailey said in an interview with Edition.
“It’s way bigger than that. It’s about herself, her purpose, her freedom, her life and what she wants.”
Jo Berry, “How The Little Mermaid differs from the Disney animation” (May 26, 2023).
One of the new songs written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, “For the First Time,” would seem to emphasize this idea, occupying Ariel’s internal perspective as she “sings” it in her head after she’s given up her voice. It starts out describing the things she’s looking at but then almost immediately reverses:
Look at the sun and the sky and the sand
“For the First Time,” The Little Mermaid (2023).
And the sea behind me
Look at me, suddenly I am on land and I’m free
If the song is largely centered on Eric by the end, Ariel is at least taking responsibility for her choices:
Realize the price that you paid with your voice
“For the First Time,” The Little Mermaid (2023).
As he turns from you
Those sacrifices you made were a choice
That you can’t undo
The ’89 version definitely undermines Ariel’s agency when Triton tries to destroy the contract she signed with Ursula while Ariel protests “‘Daddy, I’m sorry–I didn’t mean to! I didn’t know!'” This is the opposite of taking responsibility for her choice, as in the lyrics above. While some think that the amnesia change in the ’23 version–i.e., that Ursula’s spell causes Ariel to forget she needs to get the kiss from Eric–robs Ariel of her agency, another way of looking at it is that it means Ariel appreciates being human for being human’s sake rather than for Eric’s, as emphasized by a servant observing the “faraway look in her eye.”
Last summer I became obsessed with the movie Elvis, which became the basis for the music-writing elective I taught the following fall. My obsession with The Little Mermaid and its recent remake is not the basis for the Disney elective I’m planning for this fall, but more of a happy coincidence. Nonetheless, even if the 2022 Elvis is a sort of inversion of the 2023 The Little Mermaid in making the realistic more fantastical while The Little Mermaid makes the fantastical more realistic (or attempts to), a likeness between them that jumped out at me was the likeness each one raised between its protagonist and antagonist: when Ursula tells Ariel that “‘In a way, we’re the same, you and I,'” due to King Triton’s attempts to control both of them, it echoes the Colonel, who has manipulated and controlled Elvis in the capacity of his manager, telling him that “‘We are the same, you and I,'” in being “‘two odd, lonely children, reaching for eternity.'”
In Elvis, the way eyes look play a critical role in the Colonel’s realization that Elvis is his “destiny” when he sees Elvis perform and is affected not so much by his performance itself as its effect on the girls in the audience; with the camera zeroing in on one of these female spectators, the Colonel’s voiceover intones that “I could see in that girl’s eyes that she was having feelings she wasn’t sure she should enjoy,” having previously articulated such feelings as the primary characteristic of the most successful carnival acts. Elvis’s mother echoes this when she tells Elvis with foreboding: “‘I don’t know how to explain it. But I saw it in that girl’s eyes. It’s something beyond us, but I know that whatever it is, it’s something that…It’s something that can come between us.'”
The way eyes look are indirectly foregrounded in the 2023 Little Mermaid with the inclusion of the epigraph in the movie’s opening shot from the narrative’s source text by Hans Christian Andersen stating “…mermaids have no tears, and therefore they suffer more.” The full passage from the source text (available here) reads: “When the sisters rose, arm-in-arm, through the water in this way, their youngest sister would stand quite alone, looking after them, ready to cry, only that the mermaids have no tears, and therefore they suffer more.” With this epigraph–a literary device I don’t think I’ve seen in any other Disney movie–Marshall signals that this remake is taking as much from Andersen’s original tale as from Disney’s ’89 take on it, including but not limited to the function of tears as a key transitional marker. While Ariel’s eyes appear to water with tears at a couple of points while she remains a mermaid underwater, the tears do not actually fall from her eyes until the film’s end, when she is a human leaving her mermaid father behind for her new human husband. She can now shed the water her body contains because she has shed the water containing her body–or rather, her father Triton has enabled her to shed it by being the one with the power to finally change her into a human, a patriarchal vestige Marshall was apparently unable or unwilling to find a workaround for. (The “little mermaid”‘s father has no significant role in Andersen’s original tale; rather her grandmother exercises a prominent influence, which appears to be a narrative aspect of Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, which, based on the trailers for it that ran before The Little Mermaid, appears to be something of a Little Mermaid riff if not a ripoff.)
“Bambi eyes” have become synonymous with a sort of infantilized femininity, as evidenced by a PVA student using it in reference to the character Rory Gilmore in the context of one student presentation; this happened to be the same week a PVA freshman used this descriptor in a story they wrote in what would appear to be a more common context when the phrase is Googled, that of the cosmetics industry: “Mascara is smudged into my Bambi eyes.” Another example, from an old profile of Taylor Swift:
She is in the midst of her second world tour, and every show begins with a moment in which she stands silently at the lip of the stage and listens to her fans scream. She tilts her head from side to side and appears to blink back tears—the expression, which is projected onto a pair of Jumbotron screens, is part Bambi, part Baby June.
Lizzie Widdicombe, “You Belong With Me” (October 3, 2011).
The childlike aspect of the “Bambi eyes” is apparently deliberate:
Appeal in animation is a key principal that was highly valued by Disney himself (Johnston & Thomas, 1981). Animators took to using the scientific principal of neotony, the act of making a character childlike, with large eyes and a head that is out of proportion to its body, in order to make the character more appealing (Johnston & Thomas, 1981).
Stacey L. Simmons, Arrival of the Queen: New Archetypes in Disney Feature Films
Implications for Depth Psychology (2016).
The legacy of these “Bambi eyes” would seem to extend to Disney’s princesses. In a feminist takedown of the original Little Mermaid on the ’90s ABC sitcom Step by Step in episode 5.9, “The Wall,” the character Dana Foster observes: “‘Here we have Ariel. Another helpless doe-eyed female waiting to be saved, by her brainless Ken doll boyfriend.'” (It should be noted that Disney owns ABC and Dana’s feminism functions as the butt of repeated jokes: we are meant to find her feminist reading of The Little Mermaid laughably absurd, as reinforced when Cody Lambert, the character who functions as the moral center of the show before being excised due to the actor playing him engaging in real-life domestic abuse, tells her to “lighten up” and offers his reading that The Little Mermaid is “like, a beautiful sweet little story about the power of love.”)
The “doe-eyed” trait even extends to the rare Disney female protagonist who is not a princess: reading Camille Rose Garcia’s Gothic illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “through a Disney lens,” Jade Dillon observes the “the docile, doe-eyed young girl of Disney’s construction” in their rendering of Lewis Carroll’s young female protagonist.
Yet there has also been another descriptor for Ariel’s eyes: Ariel is “still a saucer-eyed beauty of sylph-like proportions” according to David Whitley. While echoing a descriptor that Richard Chizmar used for the character of Gwendy discussed in the previous post, being “saucer-eyed” resonates with the aforementioned food-chain hierarchy themes in The Little Mermaid via the lyrics in “Under the Sea” that “the fish on land ain’t happy” because “One day when the boss get hungry / Guess who’s gon’ be on the plate?”
In keeping with the themes of hierarchy, Ryan Bunch juxtaposes images of Snow White from below with Ariel from above…
…in an article about the ’89 film’s expression of queer difference:
I saw The Little Mermaid (1989) when I was fourteen. With its spectacular animation and exhilarating musical numbers, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Watching Ariel sing about her longing for a better place to a soaring melody while floating in the water with her hair expressively swirling around her face reached deep into my own feelings of difference in the midst of an inexpressibly queer adolescence.
Ryan Bunch, “Soaring into Song: Youth and Yearning in Animated Musicals of the Disney Renaissance,” American Music (Summer 2021).
In keeping with refiguring Ariel from passive looked-at object to active looking subject…
…Sean Griffin, in his study of gay readings of Disney texts, invokes the concept of the “subject position”–the subject does the acting whereas the object is acted upon:
…regarding the “more obvious” homosexual readings of Disney…if reading from a “lesbian/gay sensibility” is no longer so “underground,” it becomes harder and harder to argue that such a subject position is radical or subversive. If the Walt Disney Company is not only aware of the “gay subtext”…but actively putting it into the text, a “gay sensibility” is not resisting the work but coming closer to the “ideal subject position.”
Sean Griffin, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out (2000), p. 180.
Is it subversive to read The Little Mermaid as a gay, trans, or nonbinary allegory? That Howard Ashman, producer and lyricist of the ’89 version was gay, as is Rob Marshall, director of the ’23 version (who also produced it with his creative and life partner John DeLuca), while Andersen, writer of the original fairy tale, was bisexual, makes such readings potentially less subversive, but even if they weren’t created by queer people, the content of the narrative would still be ripe for such readings.
Supporting a nonbinary reading, in the ’89 version Ariel and Eric actually look quite similar–their hair swoops the same way in the front, and if you removed their hair entirely, their faces would be hard to distinguish if Ariel weren’t wearing lipstick. It appears I’m not the only one who’s perceived this likeness…
In the updated version, Ariel and Eric might look more distinct physically/externally, but they look more similar internally, as emphasized by their shared penchant for collecting artifacts from other cultures. As Marshall comments:
“The great thing is we were able to find these two kindred spirits that have similar journeys,” he explained. “They both feel displaced, they both feel they want something more and they’re not afraid of someone who’s different from them, or a culture that’s different from them.”
Jo Berry, “How The Little Mermaid differs from the Disney animation” (May 26, 2023).
Such readings also potentially seem in line with one offered by some of PVA’s most recent graduating seniors: that the old animated Disney princes (as from the original Snow White and Cinderella) “look like butch lesbians.” I suggested this could be because the exclusively male designing animators from that period were men who were used to looking at women but never examined themselves. I.e., patriarchy.
As the film concludes with Ariel in Prince Eric’s arms, the dangerous message about appropriation and the sanitized cost of access cannot be ignored. Yet, even though Ariel has been complicit in the death of Ursula, and the destined alliance with patriarchy is fulfilled, I remain hopeful. After all, Ariel enters the white male system with her voice-a stolen, flying voice that erupted amidst patriarchal language, a voice no longer innocent because it resided for a time in the dark continent that is the Medusa’s home.
…
Perhaps I’m guilty of Tania Modleski’s charge that feminist critics often label a text feminist simply because we enjoyed it.
Laura Sells, “‘Where Do the Mermaids Stand?’: Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid,” From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell (1995).
And as a final peripheral point to the lens of eyes, it’s worth noting that one aspect of the remake that seems an effort to render it more feminist and inclusive (but introduced the problem of a false vision of racial harmony) was the casting of Noma Dumezweni as Prince Eric’s mother; Dumezweni played a significant character on Netflix series The Watcher (2022). The remake’s accentuated colonialism is primarily at play through the dynamic between Eric and his adoptive Black mother, with the reticence of the latter to explore outside the reaches of their island contrasted negatively with Eric’s desire to explore “uncharted waters” (that which Ariel sails off for with him at the end) in order to ensure their culture doesn’t “get left behind”–i.e., looking at hegemonic imperialism through quite the optimistic lens. At the end, Eric’s mother gives him her blessing to “‘change the world–or whatever it is you have to do so we don’t get left behind.'” The violent invasion of other cultures/countries would technically qualify as changing the world to not get left behind.
The watch itself has played a significant role in Disney’s history via merchandise:
Kamen’s firm quickly monetized Mickey Mouse‘s image, providing a much-needed line of cash to the struggling Disney firm through its Walt Disney Enterprises division. The following year, Kamen’s firm developed the Mickey Mouse watch, which was produced by Ingersoll-Waterbury and soon became the bestselling watch in the United States.[6][7] By 1948, revenue of licensed Disney products totaled more than $100 million.[7]
From here.
Then there’s the important narrative lesson of the dysfunctional Cinderella watch in Picture Perfect (1997), as well as other Disney watches…
Eyes change as the times change.
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 