The Princess Void
What the death of originality means for feminism.
The Disney remake movies are getting tired. Audiences are getting sick of regurgitated narratives attempting to combine nostalgia with the ‘woke’ factor, sparking debate online and inspiring prolific battles across comment sections. Left-wing analyses of the films are finding these films to be increasingly questionable, despite their attempts at progressiveness. The feminist view, in particular, has shifted to one of disgust at Disney’s pseudo-feminism, highlighting a widespread cultural disillusionment with classical fairytales.
Most recently the announcement of a live action Snow White to be released in 2024 has brought into the public eye debates around what it means to create feminist media. Lead actress Rachel Zegler received immense backlash after commenting that “[Snow White is] not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be,” bringing together the dissatisfaction with the death of originality in Hollywood, and an ongoing online re-evaluation of what feminism looks like.
This feeling hasn’t always been present in the mainstream debate about the remakes. Throughout the 2010s, the craving for more female-centred stories led to a call for feminist retellings of classical narratives. We see this in Amanda Lovelace’s The Princess Saves Herself in This One, in the TV show Once Upon A Time, and, of course, in Maleficent (2014), marking the beginning of Disney’s live-action cash-grab frenzy. Within feminism (most notably liberal feminism) we were obsessed not with rewriting or with forgetting our past, but with reimagining it. We attempted to balance our nostalgia with our wish for change.
Now, though, retellings feel like a cowardly cop-out; an easy path to praise for progressiveness, without having to deal with uncomfortable repercussions of addressing pressing topics head on. It feels disingenuous that the extent of female-centric storytelling in pop culture must be reduced to a twist on an old fairytale.
The focus on retellings feels as though Hollywood is turning an intentional blind eye to the real issues at the root of feminism. The problem was not necessarily that there were movies centred around a romantic plotline – the problem was that these narratives were overwhelmingly the only genre made accessible to women, and that they often depicted and reinforced anti-woman patriarchal rhetoric. Female characters had no complexity, and minimal agency. They were defined exclusively by their relationships to the male characters, and by nothing else.
There is a certain aggression present in Hollywood’s response to these criticisms. Where the call was to simply approach relationships more carefully, and to prioritise female-centred storytelling, the response was to entirely remove the romantic element. We can either have a toxic male-centric romance plot, or we can have nothing. It is deeply disconcerting that in media we continue to fail to imagine the coexistence of feminism with romance, particularly across these retellings. And if the misogynist undercurrent goes so deep that an integral element to the narrative must be removed in order to make it palatable to a modern audience (how will Snow White wake herself from her death-like slumber?) perhaps these are not stories that should continue to be pushed.
As more of these ‘progressive’ retellings are slung onto our screens, it becomes more noticeable that they are there to placate us. With each retelling, a space is filled in Hollywood that could have been taken by a fresh voice, with a fresh narrative. The extent of female-centric stories was never meant to be defined by Disney remakes, and yet it monopolises the mainstream market. The intense focus placed on the feminism of these movies feels like a new tactic to distract from real intersectional voices – rather than uplifting black female creatives in producing an original work, Hollywood has vomited out a retelling of The Little Mermaid (2023) starring Halle Bailey as Ariel, as if this half-hearted homage can reconcile a past of intense racism and misogyny.
As well as this, I find it distasteful that these attempts to brush off a problematic history do not impede the sales or legacy of media relating to this apparently bygone era. If anything, the retellings encourage the continued consumption of classic Disney films and merchandise, regardless of the dated views displayed across them. Interestingly, these retellings came at a time when the Disney Princesses in particular were under fire from the public, with the dawn of critical feminist texts such as Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter in 2011. In response, Disney simultaneously feigned accountability with the production of a new series of ‘progressive’ retellings, skilfully managing to avoid threatening their existing intellectual properties.
It becomes clear that the Disney retellings were never supposed to reflect a move towards feminism in Hollywood. Instead, these movies are actively inhibiting progress in media, preventing the production of original material showcasing marginalised voices. The cultural appetite for a return to nostalgia is beginning to die down, leaving us with another series of Disney movies that feel hollow.