After dissing The Little Mermaid for subverting the legal system, Malcolm Gladwell moves on to weightier, and more substantial, issues in his three-part Revisionist History podcast. He is not the first to point out the lost potential of this movie. While Disney relied on the Hans Christian Anderson story for its inspiration, it did not seem to understand the story’s relevance in today’s world.
The phenomenon of girls “losing their voice” has been well-documented. Researchers have noted that even the most audacious girls often become more cautious about speaking out and less likely to assert themselves as they grow older. Many reasons for this tendency have been noted, such as societal pressure to conform. I would like to think that we, as a society, recognizing this inclination, have started to address it, but I’m not sure.
Ariel is the epitome of this problem. She goes from being a curious, independent and bold girl, to a muted supplicant for the attention of Prince Eric. Even worse, she is reduced to an observer’s role in fighting through this condition. It is ultimately her animal friends and Eric who rescue her from Ursula, and give her back her voice.
While Gladwell addresses these issues, he does so in an odd way. He interviews Angus Fletcher, a professor of “Story Science” at Ohio State. Fletcher says that there are two kinds of fairy tales. Those where good luck happens to those that are fools, usually resulting in a twist ending, and those where good things happen to good people and bad people are ultimately punished.
Fletcher claims that he measured the emotional reactions of children to fairy tales through a secret methodology (I kid you not), and, lo and behold, children prefer those tales where life can go from good to bad, or vice versa, on a whim, and ultimate results are unrelated to the worth of the protagonist. He concludes that children struggle with poetic justice, because they realize that is not the way life works.
Gladwell buys this hook, line and sinker. He ignores the underlying cynicism of Fletcher’s conclusions, and, without asking any further questions about the top-secret experiments, concludes that kids prefer fairy tales with random luck to those that offer poetic justice. This is one of Gladwell’s weaknesses. He tends to find experts who agree with his views, and then embraces them without much critical analysis. Then again, don’t we all.
Contrary to Fletcher’s conclusions, I think that Disney films are so successful because they give kids what they want. I am just a parent and not a researcher with a top-secret formula, but it seems to me that children want a hero they can root for. They want that hero to battle long odds. And they want that hero to overcome those odds, and vanquish evil. They want poetic justice.
We lose a lot if we don’t cater to kids’ desire for poetic justice. The world will come at them quickly enough. They will realize that good does not always triumph and that evil sometimes prevails. But a grounding in the notion that good can win is essential for both children and adults. Reality is harsh, but acceptance of a fatalism as the only reality leads to cynicism and indifference, and we have enough of that as it is.
Gladwell then moves on to rewrite the ending to The Little Mermaid. He engages Brit Marling, a screenwriter, to reimagine how Ariel could be given more purchase in her fate. Not surprisingly, despite giving lip service to Fletcher’s theory, Gladwell is smart enough to know that you don’t mess with success, and so he and Marling retain Ariel’s essential goodness. Where they go from there is questionable.
As is to be expected, in Marling’s reworking of the movie’s ending it is Ariel herself who stops the wedding of Eric and Ursula. However, she does not do so by biting Ursula in the bottom, or ramming her with a ship, but by embracing her and refusing to let go. Basically, she acknowledges Ursula’s pain, standing with her as Triton threatens to attack, until Triton stands down and Ursula is transformed into a paragon of virtuousness.
In a postscript ending, Ursula marries Triton, who, it turns out, was ultimately responsible for her badness in the first place. Eric, who has become a superfluous surfer dude, marries another man, and introduces vegetarianism into his kingdom. Ariel, no longer interested in settling down, goes back to her wandering, curious ways. And all live happily ever after.
While all this is very nice, it has much more to do with what these particular adults would like than what kids want. I think it is telling that Gladwell recruits 58-year-old Jodi Foster, someone his own age, to voice Ariel. It reflects his seeming belief that the film should be geared to him, and his contemporaries, rather than the children who are the true target audience.
The final battle with Ursula in the Disney movie is both scary and exciting. It packed quite a wallop on the big screen. Kids crave that rush of adrenaline as the heroine confronts her nemesis, as well as the release when she prevails. While stripping the movie of that collision may be satisfying to some adults, most children will feel robbed.
It is difficult for us adults to get into the minds of children. However, if we are going to talk about kids’ entertainment we need to at least try. Molding movies and books to our own desires without a thought as to whether the kids will find it compelling is a fool’s errand and does not solve issues that might exist in what kids consume. They would just turn away.
There is no doubt that Ariel should have been more proactive in her own redemption. Disney recognized this as well, and its female protagonists in later movies have become more self-reliant. But we should not strip the films of their essential conflicts in reaching that goal. Kids just won’t have it.
The broadway version wouldn’t work with this ending as triton and Ursula are portrayed as siblings. 😜