The
Pixar conquest of Disney—the ongoing effort by the new recruits
from Pixar to change the Mouse House's shallow culture of
self-indulgence and self-esteem with something much more morally
serious—has been an uneven battle up to now. But Frozen is
an unqualified victory for Pixar's morally serious and culturally
edifying storytelling, and its stratospheric success with audiences
and critics may well turn the tide of the war. It's a profound
movie on many levels.
The
most obvious lesson of Frozen—the
one made explicit in the movie—teaches viewers that love is not
about how you feel. It's about putting other people's needs ahead of
your own. This theme by itself profoundly inverts the old Disney
culture; it's a big win for the Pixar invaders. But Frozen not
only makes this point, it also traces some wide-ranging consequences.
It shows us why people are investing too much importance in romantic
love relative to other kinds of love, like sisterhood. The
responsible grown-ups who tell you not to burn down everything else
in your life for the sake of "true love" are not your
enemies; they're your friends. They're the people who really love
you.
When Enchanted subverted
these same fairy-tale conventions—getting engaged to someone you
just met—it was only going for laughs. Don't get me wrong, there
are a lot of laughs in Frozen.
It's the funniest movie I've seen in years. But there are not a lot
of laughs on this particular subject. Frozen is
not overturning the Disney view of marriage for fun. Frozen is
playing to win.
Everybody's
a Fixer-Upper
That
theme alone would be enough to make Frozen an
early contender for the most culturally regenerative movie of the
year. But there's more going on.
Under
the surface, Frozen deals
with two other subjects that are, if anything, even tougher
for our culture. One is the corruption of human nature. It used to be
that pretty much everyone agreed there was a systematic moral
dysfunction in human nature. Christians hold to this teaching in an
especially strong form, of course, but we are by no means alone.
Aristotle believed it, as did Kant. There is a whole song
in Frozen about
how nobody is what he ought to be: "Everybody's a Bit of a
Fixer-Upper." The villains in Frozen are
willing to kill, but the main threat to the heroine's life actually
comes from the selfish actions of a sympathetic character—someone
who loves her. This person, we are repeatedly and emphatically
assured, would never harm her. After the potentially fatal blow, the
question emerges: how could this person possibly do this? The
character held up as the voice of wisdom gives us the answer: because
all people have that selfishness inside them, and under the right
circumstances, it will surface. Even to the destruction of those we
love most.
This
theme, of course, relates to the main message that love is not about
feelings. We prioritize our own feelings rather than other
people's needs because other people are so disappointing. And our
lives fall apart when we prioritize our own feelings because we are
just as disappointing as everyone else.
We
Need Each Other
The
other submerged theme in Frozen,
one buried even deeper, is the tension between social rules and
individual freedom. Without giving too much away, I can say
that Frozen is
the movie Brave was
trying to be. Here's what Brave attempted
to say: society needs rules, and individuals who are not well served
by the rules must learn to subordinate their own desires to the good
of their neighbors as embodied in the rules. At the same time, social
authorities must recognize that the rules should accommodate the
needs of individuals—including the needs of those unusual
individuals not well served by the same rules that serve everyone
else.
There
was internal conflict over Brave at
Disney, and it shows. But Frozen succeeds
brilliantly where Brave faltered—better,
perhaps, than Brave could
have. Because in Frozen we
see what happens to individuals who try to flee from society in order
to escape its rules. They fall apart. Their lives become arbitrary
and meaningless. And they learn to hate. "The cold never
bothered me anyway," Queen Elsa sings as she builds an ice
castle to live in, alone, at the top of a remote mountain. She
doesn't realize that the cold is seeping into her heart.
We
all need freedom, but we also need each other. See this movie.
The
most obvious lesson of Frozen—the
one made explicit in the movie—teaches viewers that love is not
about how you feel. It's about putting other people's needs ahead of
your own. This theme by itself profoundly inverts the old Disney
culture; it's a big win for the Pixar invaders. But Frozen not
only makes this point, it also traces some wide-ranging consequences.
It shows us why people are investing too much importance in romantic
love relative to other kinds of love, like sisterhood. The
responsible grown-ups who tell you not to burn down everything else
in your life for the sake of "true love" are not your
enemies; they're your friends. They're the people who really love
you.