for the next Reboot That Makes Men Angry I’d like to submit for your consideration Lupita Nyong'o as Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones and the Temple of NAGPRA Compliance
in case you forgot that it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating
art is for making unpopular people angry! take, for the explicit purpose of taking, out of the explicit love of taking!
it will never end and life will never be worth tolerating
Life will never be worth tolerating… because some people said on social media that they kind of want a black woman Indiana Jones?
You’re still allowed to write exhilarating new adventures for the white male one, you know.
This wasn’t “Hey, this would bea cool character”.
This was “Hey, you know what would be a great way to take for the sake of taking?”
It is explicitly framed as good because it is about taking. It is good because it makes unpopular people angry. Its purpose is to make unpopular people unhappy. It is taking for the sake of taking.
Taking for the sake of taking, for the purpose of taking, out of the sheer joy of taking, is something everyone agrees is wonderful and great and virtuous.
What would be the point of making a black woman character if we weren’t also making unpopular people unhappy? We align ourselves with diversity not because we believe it is good, but because that is an effective way to claim authority to make unpopular people unhappy!
That is why life will never be worth tolerating. Because that will never end. Malice will never stop being exalted as virtue.
…I’m not especially on board with @brazenautomaton‘s broader framing here, but I do think he’s entirely correct on the object level, so let me try a slightly different construction…
It’s not about the #blacklesbian!Indy thing. Almost entirely not-about-that, anyway. You can think whatever you like about race-and-gender-twisted reboots, and there’s certainly plenty of cultural criticism to levy on that front, but…at the very least, the desire for them often arises from a sincere love of the property in question. Those people clamoring for a canon female Doctor clearly take Doctor Who very seriously and are asking for something that they would find personally meaningful; whether or not you think they should get it, there’s at least something admirable about the motive from a fan-participation perspective.
If you’re cracking jokes about temple-raiding being Bad Imperialism while talking about Indiana Jones, your motive is…not that. Indiana Jones stories are stories about temple-raiding. The people who like Indiana Jones want stories about going into the trackless depths of the jungle and finding the lost exotic wonders there. If you didn’t want that, you wouldn’t like Indiana Jones. It’s kind of the heart of the thing.
It’s OK to feel that way. You don’t have to like Indiana Jones, or anything. You’re allowed to find jungle adventure boring. You’re allowed to be really hung up on proper archeological practice. You’re even allowed to think that temple-raiding stories are Bad and Imperialist and that we should stop telling them for ideological reasons, although I may roll my eyes at you.
But @brazenautomaton is correct to note that this kind of feeling often generates a sort of entryist impulse that is less OK. The thing that says, not “let’s not watch Indiana Jones movies” or even “let’s try to destroy the franchise and make sure that no one watches Indiana Jones movies,” but “let’s gain influence over the franchise, and make Indiana Jones about Our Thing instead of about the themes of the original property, and ensure that the new movies will serve to mock and discomfit the people who liked the old ones.” That is cruel and philistine. That is perverting an artistic tradition for the sake of your particular axe-to-grind.
(…if you’re looking for a concrete example of this playing out successfully, check out the way that recent years have seen a Massive Ongoing Shift in the role of romance in the Disney Princess franchise.)
If new!Indy’s shtick were “returning artifacts from the museums that held them to ancient primitive temples,” it would be really hard to read that as anything other than “ha ha, remember back when we were so STUPID and UNENLIGHTENED and SHITTY that we actually had our hero be a temple-raider?”. It would be a repurposing of the fundamental project, taking the franchise away from the people who actually like it for the sake of…well, for the sake of people who like seeing their media land ideological jabs, mostly.
Yes, I understand that @beatrice-otter‘s comment was a joke, and (for that matter) a joke that comes from a place of sincerely caring about something worthwhile. But it’s not hard to understand why people aren’t inclined to find that kind of joke funny at this point.
So you’re not wrong… but the situation is more complex than that. (And I appreciate you find a non-cynical motivation behind the OP.)
Art can after all, have more than one theme. Or there can be a broader theme underlying the more superficial theme. And fans can be really attached to that more fundamental concept, and willing to uproot the more concrete concepts in order to create work that is more true to the thing they value.
Wow that was abstract and dry. Okay lets talk about Disney princesses.
You could say that the consistent theme of Disney princess movies was the romantic ending. Except this is kind of weird. Why would romance be such a standard of children’s movies? They’re not even particularly good romance stories most of the time.
But in the language of Hollywood, this romance is “the production of the couple.” The world was sundered in some disruption, and by the end everything is joined whole again. Man and woman come together and form a family, and you know all is well. This is much more fundamental to the logic of Disney movies than the particularity of a romantic story (with its stages of relationships, and sexual intimacy, and whatnot.)
As a representation of harmony though, this has become somewhat outmoded. Our society no longer sees romance as the correct way to represent “and all was well and happy, the different have been joined together.” Instead we now have the DANCE PARTY that ends so many movies. Amorphous dancing is the replacement for heterosexual romance as our culture’s understanding of harmonious relations and god you could write a lot about that.
Now, fans can still be attached to the old interpretation of the themes. But it seems equally legitimate to say “I want a modern interpretation of the themes, which means significant changes to the motifs we use to represent them.”
… also, since when is Indiana Jones about the theme of stealing treasures from dead civilizations? Going just by the original trilogy, the message seems pretty strongly “Leave Well Enough The Fuck Alone Or God Will Strike You Down.”
This analysis is too glib to work. By which I mean “it assumes, and elides, the heart of the matter under consideration.”
(There’s a long, long discussion to be had about the extent to which one can understand a text – and, especially, about the extent to which one can understand its broader social relevance – by looking at it in the symbolic-critical plane. But for now I’m happy to agree that we’re doing that. I just wanted to register that this is not necessarily the most productive methodology.)
So – yes. The traditional Disney Princess story is absolutely 100% about creating a model of the world in which and so it came to pass that all that was wrong was made right again is precisely equivalent to the prince and princess got married and lived happily ever after. The meta-message of those texts is the message of romantic-pair-bonding-as-ultimate-fulfillment. Disney even created, or at least reified, the distilled concentrated spiritual-crack-hit version of that message: the Romantic Ballroom Scene, as experienced by Cinderella and (especially) by Belle, is a really powerful encapsulation of “this moment right here is EXACTLY what you want out of life.”
Most of the most recent non-remake Disney Princess films have, in some way, strongly subverted and/or abandoned that model. You can see strong hints of it as early as The Princess and the Frog, but Tangled pretty much went back to the traditional mold, so we should probably count Brave as the beginning of the process. After which we get: Frozen, Maleficent, and recently Moana. Yeah. Ain’t no Ballroom Scene happily-ever-after up in here. And it’s not hard to see why. Disney bows to cultural pressure, and as you say, there’s been a lot of cultural pressure not to push the old message of romantic fulfillment.
This is not an accident. This is not a historical fluke. And this is not a representation of some untraceable will-less change in the zeitgeist. This is a manifestation of a political struggle.
I mean, we all know how this story goes, right? Back in the day, a bunch of cultural liberals and leftists decided that girls’ media was Too Romance-Saturated (which was both a cause and an effect of the macro-scale issue that girls and women were Too Hung Up on Romance Generally). They were right about that, as it happens. The previous generation of girls’ popular media was kind of a wasteland of floofy pink dresses and prom invitations. Having a greater available diversity of fulfillment narratives for girls was desirable.
Then the broader movement with which those people were associated got more and more and more traction, and became more and more and more successful on a variety of fronts. By the end, real-life women in elite circles started feeling embarrassed by any sincere (heterosexual) romantic devotion that they might feel, because that’s not supposed to be the wellspring of fulfillment; the idea that it might be is retrograde and shameful. And in media*, alternatives to the old romantic Disney model started pushing out the old romantic Disney model itself, until finally even the Disney Princess movies themselves succumbed. You’d be hard-pressed, these days, to find any kind of well-regarded media piece where the “production of the couple” gets to assume its old nigh-ubiquitous role as the marker of narrative fulfillment.
* Here I mean “well-marketed elite-driven media that’s expected to be popular in mainstream circles.” You can certainly find plenty of lower-tier shlock that runs on the old tropes.
So what are we to make of the people who are driving and fueling that transition?
Well, as with any large amorphous group of people, they’re going to represent a wide range of mind-states and motivations…
Overall, I’m inclined to say that romance has been treated shabbily of late in the world of media. It’s not a Perfect Resolution to All Problems, because in real life nothing is, but (for men and women both!) it’s probably as close as most people get to come to a real wellspring-of-fulfillment. It was narratively over-dominant for a while, but we’re in full-blown Massive Overcorrection Mode now, and it pains me to think how much love is being drained out of stories because Really Caring About Traditional Romance is Conservative and Icky. Certainly it has more to offer than the dance party. I wish the culture warriors would back off and make some room. This is its own fight, though; as you say, you could sure write a lot about it.
There’s no conspiracy, of course. No easily-identifiable group of specific people is responsible for the shift in Disney Princess narratives. But, as with this thread’s OP, you can certainly find a lot of specific people who at least fantasize about taking over popular media properties and remaking them. And such fantasies can be productively examined.
For starters, there’s a difference between “really caring about some aspect of the original text” (even if it’s a seemingly-minor aspect) and “wanting access to the cultural traction and popularity of the original text.” For both artistic and social reasons, I’m much more willing to be harshly judgmental towards the latter. It wasn’t hard to tell the difference between “women who’d dreamed of being Ghostbusters when they were little girls and found joy in a latter-day depiction of their dream” versus “women who didn’t give a shit about Ghostbusters but knew that an all-female Ghostbusters team would be a splashy culture-war victory.”
And beyond that, it’s helpful to ask “how much are you actually taking away people’s toys?” As I said, the Disney Princess meta-franchise is in many ways at the heart of the pretty-dress-and-ballroom-dancing paired-off romantic vision of happiness. A subversion of the property is pretty much an attack on that whole memeplex, one that doesn’t leave an awful lot of compelling alternatives. Write your own goddamn fairy tales to suit your own preferences, or take over some less-central part of the cultural dialogue, or something.
As for Indy and the messages of his movies: well, this is where detail-driven symbolic criticism starts to show its weaknesses. Yes, Indy’s temple-raiding keeps being “punished,” in the sense that the supernatural forces of Plot keep responding to it with exciting obstacles that require him to show off his manly daring. But the structure of the work as while presents him as a tremendously admirable and appealing figure, and his activities are all rooted in temple-raiding. Your average kid watching Raiders or Temple of Doom walks out saying “wow, I want to be awesome and wear a cool hat and plunder ancient tombs!” If your new text makes a point of saying PLUNDERING ANCIENT TOMBS IS FOR IMPERIALIST JERKFACES, it’s a nasty subversion.
So I feel like it doesn’t really work to compare movies that are not the Disney animated features with the other Disney stuff like Maleficent. Maleficent seems to be we will take fairy tales and play them in a separate thing - which I feel like is the thing you want people to do - vs. going into the animated feature movies line and saying no more fairy tales with romantic ends for you.
Curious how you think of Aladin or Lion King with in this - on one hand there is a romance plot to some degree or the other - but with male leads which makes it take on a somewhat different emphasis (especially in the case of the Lion King).In re Maleficent: I don’t buy it. For one thing, let’s be honest, the mere fact of it being Disney carries a huge amount of weight and a huge amount of cultural bias. (On some level, Moana is in fact exactly what I’d been asking for – not a jab, not a snipe, just a story for girls with a totally different focus – but the fact that it’s marketed as a Disney Princess movie makes the lack of romance a jab and a snipe.) But Maleficent is more than just a Disney product, it’s a fix fic with all the budget and cachet and canon-power of the official producers behind it. It’s a giant middle finger to everyone who actually liked the story of Sleeping Beauty. “Ha ha, you thought that something as LAME as heterosexual romantic love could heal the curse? GET REKT SCRUB, real love is for badass women only.”
In re Aladdin and Lion King: there are a lot of Disney Princess movies that play around with the straight-up romantic fairy-tale setup in one way or another. More of them that do than that don’t, really. Those two have their own thing going on, and so does Hunchback, and so does Pocahontas (she doesn’t actually end up with the guy!), and so does Mulan (at least to the extent that making the heroine an action star is different), etc.
(Also, Lion King isn’t actually a Disney Princess movie. Which probably has more to do with the fact that you can’t put Nala in a dress than anything else, but still, worth noting.)
Yet all of these films at least gesture at the idea that happiness and resolution are properly manifested in marriage or the equivalent, even if most of their energy is spiraling off elsewhere. You can play Prince and Princess Have Happily Ever After with all of them, without having to blatantly ignore or rewrite the text. This is not so with any of the most recent ones. Even Frozen, which actually does have a happy romantic pairing, but makes a point of how that’s not the metaphysically-empowered curse-breaking kind of love.
Well right but I think the fact that the Lion King isn’t a Disney Princess movie - but is arguably one of its more iconic works sort of gets at the problem of identifying what is the “key” Disney movie thing people care about and want to have different themes. If its really Disney Princesses than I think maybe you are right that its weird for people to sort of want to take all the fairy tell stuff you are talking about away and insist on these other sorts of themes. On the other hand Disney animated movies include things like 100 Dalmatians, Pinocchio, Rescuers, Bambi and the Lion King in which case I think Frozen isn’t so weird a shift in themes. I guess to me the “Disney Princess” thing is actually new in how I understand “Disney Movies” and so seems like a weird marketing construct. Disney movie ™ to me means the once a year animated movies that were ½ of the total movies that I saw as a kid (and horrified a certain type of purist like my grandmother for not being accurate to the book). It really had very little to do with Princesses. Would you feel better if people were more “I remember when Disney (animated) movies were not all princess” rather than sort of weirdly buying into the Princess thing but wanting a different sort of Princess ™?
I think it’s not too hard to square this circle. Even when you strip away the Narrative Fulfillment Through Romance, it’s not hard to identify key features of a Disney Princess movie (as opposed to any other Disney movie) – it’s animated, there’s a heavily-featured young human woman who is glamorously attractive in some way, she gets to sing the sort of catchy pop tunes that will do really well with kids, there’s a lot of focus on having a very attractive visual setting, etc. If you like, you can say “I wish Disney would make more non-princess-y movies like The Jungle Book or 101 Dalmations or whatever,” but that’s almost totally orthogonal to the phenomenon under consideration. It’s the princess stuff that’s serving as a cultural football here.
So I think your bringing up of Maleficent here is what led to the discussion disintegrating into boundary-defining. Maleficent really wouldn’t fit this for a number of reasons.
I think the delineation between “Disney Princess movies” and their other standards is not that clear. You can draw a line, but its not entirely natural.
(For instance, either True Love is a key element of Princess story, or not. If it is, why are these still considered Princess stories? If it’s not, then why is it a problem to get rid of it?)
And this matters because all the Disney movies (and animated movies in general) are moving in the direction I reference, of away from marriage and towards the dance party. And if you can see that there is a compelling reason for that besides “let’s show we’re over the patriarchy,” then it becomes less antagonistic that they do this to one subset of those movies under their umbrella.
OK, this may be a side point, but at this point I think it’s worth saying: the dance-party ending is not actually a Disney princess thing. It has not been pressed into service to fill the gap left by the loss of the romantic-fulfillment narrative.
…I guess you can sort of make a case for Frozen and its ice-skating party, which doesn’t feel at all the same from my perspective, but at least has some clear identifiable features in common.
But apart from that, we have –
* Brave: Merida looks out over a cliff while her narrator-voice says some inspiring things about courage and so on
* Moana: the tribe heads out into the Great Archipelagic Unknown on its massive fleet of mega-canoes
* Maleficent (if we’re counting it): Aurora is crowned, Maleficent abides in harmony with nature
The dance party belongs to shlockier fare like Shrek and Hotel Transylvania (which, notably, do feature standard romantic-bliss narratives). It’s hard to stake the claim that it’s really serving as a competitor, let alone a successor.
Yeah, Maleficent isn’t a central part of the Disney princess media line. True facts. I would argue that its content is very relevant to this discussion anyway: it’s a Disney-endorsed “canon fix fic” of a prototypical Disney princess story. In some real way it’s the “author” commenting on what is and isn’t OK to think about Sleeping Beauty at this juncture.
(If the live-action remakes of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast were similarly subversive, it would have been a huge fucking deal on this front. Cinderella absolutely wasn’t, though, and Beauty and the Beast looks as though it won’t be, so that is at least some evidence that the anti-romance cultural pressure isn’t totally all-encompassing.)