Saving cinderella, p.19
Saving Cinderella, page 19
Movie critics and princess critics (who were basically the same at this point) didn’t know what to do. They liked the movie — against their better judgment — and it was clear that audiences also loved it, which couldn’t be ignored. Some, unable to help themselves, tried to point out all the “anti-feminist” things about the movie while still basically giving it a good review. Others tried to find ways that Rapunzel really was a “feminist” and add her to the ever-growing canon of princess-critic-approved Disney princesses. But no one said what we all know to be true: it was Rapunzel’s very traditional-ness that made her feminist — or at least made her a good role model for girls. Because, in Rapunzel, girls found — for the first time in their lifetimes — a heroine who embodied the universal fairy tale shorthand, but spoke, reacted, and thought like a modern teenager. She was jut the princess little girls needed to reintroduce them to the role models they so desperately needed. If Disney hadn’t already been veering away from princesses — and traditional princesses specifically — Disney could have entered another Golden Age.
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When Disney began to shift away from the traditional and toward the “feminist,” the princess movie villains shifted from female to male. The story was no longer about a girl who journeys from childhood to adulthood by pushing back against an evil mother-figure, now it was the journey of a woman taking her independent place in the world by pushing back against the patriarchy. But, with Tangled, we get a female villain who’s as wicked as they come — the first since The Little Mermaid, over twenty years before. The inclusion of Mother Gothel — a witch obsessed with staying young and beautiful forever — returns us squarely to the fairy tale shorthand of growing up, symbolized by an adolescent girl breaking away from a jealous crone. Gothel is Snow White’s wicked stepmother yanked terrifyingly into the “real” world.
Mother Gothel kidnaps the infant Rapunzel from her royal parents because Rapunzel’s hair holds the magical ability to heal wounds, and keep people young. But only when it’s attached to her head. If it’s cut, it stops being magic. So Gothel takes Rapunzel, locks her up in a tower, and convinces her that she (Gothel) is actually her mother. But, instead of the overt evil of The Evil Queen or Cinderella’ Stepmother, Gothel is an emotionally abusive mother — the frighteningly realistic kind. She convinces Rapunzel that everything she does for her she does out of love — the world outside is scary and full of people who want to kill her, she’s just keeping her beloved daughter safe. She makes derogatory comments about Rapunzel’s weight, her looks, and her intellect and, in the same breath, tells her how much she loves her. And she refuses Rapunzel’s greatest wish: to go outside and see the “floating lights” that appear every year on her birthday (a sign, unbeknownst to her, of her grieving parents’ remembrance of the baby they lost).
So Rapunzel is a true ingénue — even more than princess Jasmine. Not only has she never been outside the walls of her tower, but the only other person she’s ever met is her awful “mother.” And she’s primed and ready for the most traditional of all princess adventures: growing up. Her task — it’s very clear from the moment we meet her — is to get out from under the thumb of Mother Gothel, assert her own independence, and get out there into the world. And, even though Gothel has convinced her that it’s “not so bad in there,” her heart cries out for the floating lights because they represent who she truly is — the life she should have had with her real parents, and the larger world which, in turn, represents her independence. So, her dream is more amorphous than the specificity of, say, Ariel’s wish to be human. But it’s much more specific than, for example, Pocahontas’ random dream of a spinning arrow that means nothing to her for most of the movie. “When will my life begin?” Rapunzel asks in her very first scene. She knows there is more than this tower, she just isn’t sure exactly what.
But, even though Rapunzel has literally never seen a male human being, she isn’t a total airhead. She cooks and cleans like a traditional princess, but she also reads, paints, plays chess, and charts the stars. She’s a bright, intellectually curious, talented teenager — the way Cinderella or Snow White would be if you pulled her into the real world and allowed her to be more realistic. And it is, in part, these accomplishments that allow some princess critics to find something to love about Rapunzel.
But the thing that really gets the princess critics’ little hearts thumping with joy is what Rapunzel can do with her hair. Because Mother Gothel can’t allow Rapunzel to cut it — lest it lose its magical properties — Rapunzel’s hair is as long as her tower is tall. And, while it does its traditional job of acting as a rope for Mother Gothel to enter the tower window, in this version of the story it can do all kinds of other things as well — like be a lasso, a whip, and a grappling hook. She “LEARNS TO FIGHT WITH HER HAIR” crows Beatriz Serrano of Buzzfeed. She twirls her hair “like a lariat,” said Tom Charity of CNN. “That mane is quite the force of nature, 70 feet long and capable of many things, including tying people up and batting them down,” wrote Kenneth Turan, in The LA Times. But, while Rapunzel’s hair does have a life of its own, it’s hardly the traditional princess-critic-approved weapon with which to fight as well as a man. It is a definitively feminine attribute and, when used in a fight, wielded out of necessity not martial prowess.
Rapunzel’s love interest (Flynn Ryder, real name: Eugene) is of the Aladdin/Beast variety. Much like Aladdin, he’s a thief whose dreams initially revolve around money and luxury. When we first meet him, he’s running over rooftops — like Aladdin — saying “I want a castle.” He steals a crown (which turns out to be Rapunzel’s) from the castle and is running from the royal guards when he stumbles upon the clearing where Rapunzel’s tower stands. He’s smooth-talking, vain (a running gag in the film has him obsessing over the way his Wanted posters get his nose wrong), and convinced of his overwhelming appeal with women. So we’ve got the traditional ingénue princess paired up with the more modern Aladdin/Beast type prince. “What is it with Disney and good girls who reform bad boys?” complains Antonia. (Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! I know!) It’s almost as if, in Tangled, the traditional princess has come back to undo the “feminist” storyline. Unlike Jasmine, who berates Aladdin into understanding that she’s not a prize to be won, Rapunzel shows Flynn — by being authentically herself — that love, connection, and wonder are more important than money.
When Rapunzel (whose eighteenth birthday is coming up) works up the courage to ask Mother Gothel for permission to finally leave the tower and see the lights up close, Gothel refuses. “Mother knows best.,” she sings, in a terrifyingly passive aggressive musical number. “It's a scary world out there,” she explains, full of “ruffians and thugs, poison ivy, quicksand, cannibals and snakes, the plague,” and, worst of all, “men with pointy teeth.” After terrifying Rapunzel completely, Gothel holds her close, singing “Mother's right here / Mother will protect you / Darling, here's what I suggest: / Skip the drama / Stay with mama.” And then she moves to the guilt: “Me, I'm just your mother, what do I know? I only bathed, and changed, and nursed you. Go ahead and leave me, I deserve it, let me die alone here, be my guest! When it's too late, you'll see, just wait.” Rapunzel, Gothel explains, is “sloppy, underdressed, immature, clumsy,” not to mention “gullible, naive, positively grubby, ditzy and a bit, well, hmm, vague.” She’ll never make it in the world. She also throws in “gettin' kinda chubby,” which she says she’s only telling her “'cause I love you.” And, after all that, Gothel says: “Don't ever ask to leave this tower again.”
It’s an amazing reanimation of the traditional symbolism of the mother-figure holding the maiden back from doing what she must: separating. It’s still the symbolic evil crone holding back the innocent maiden, but now she’s in the almost too realistic shape of an abusive mother. Rapunzel’s task won’t be easy, but it must be done. In order to be a fully-functioning, happy, and fulfilled adult, Rapunzel must get away from Gothel — even as Gothel does everything she can to keep her a child. The world, Gothel tells Rapunzel, is scary and frightening, full of awful things — like men! She’d be much better off remaining a child forever. The filmmakers could have made Gothel much more overtly evil and dropped the charade she has created for Rapunzel that she loves her. But, the truth is, a girl must separate from even the most loving parents if she wants to find her way to adulthood. Obviously, most seemingly loving parents don’t turn out to actually be evil witches who only want your magic hair, but placing Rapunzel in a situation where she believes she is loved and cared for and must fight back anyway is a much more realistic representation of this fairy tale trope.
When Mother Gothel leaves Rapunzel alone again, Flynn Ryder shows up. At first glance, his entrance looks like a nod to the princess critics — a feminist revision of the traditional fairy tale. Flynn doesn’t climb Rapunzel’s hair in order to rescue her and spirit her away. Instead, he’s running away from the palace guards and sees the tower as a place to hide. His motives are purely about him — he doesn’t even know Rapunzel is up there. And, when he makes it to Rapunzel’s room — using arrows as handholds instead of Rapunzel’s hair — Rapunzel is ready and waiting to do the thing that princess critics love her for: hit him over the head with a frying pan.
Serrano writes, “How cool is it for a Disney princess to grab a frying pan and use it as a weapon? Is there a more forceful way to reappropriate a symbol of feminine oppression than beating the s**t out of someone with it?” Okay so now the princess critics want to get symbolic? Are we really supposed to believe that every single other princess movie should be interpreted completely literally, but that this one gesture is symbolic of fighting back against the patriarchy? Seems pretty unlikely. How about this: Rapunzel is terrified of the outside world. Someone from the world is climbing up the side of her tower and into her room. She grabs the object she owns that is most likely to work as a weapon, and uses it. It’s a frying pan because she’s not a fighter — she’s a woman — and, when she isn’t being physically threatened, she likes to cook. And, once she’s used it, she screams and runs away. Because she’s terrified, and she’s never seen a man before. It’s believable that she’s able to knock Flynn out because she took him completely by surprise, rather than besting him in combat. And it’s believable, too, that she would be totally unsure what to do next. Essentially, she fights like a girl. And that’s good.
The first thing Rapunzel does, when she’s got Flynn knocked out on her floor, is check is teeth. Gothel told Rapunzel that the world was full of “men with pointy teeth.” The fact that Flynn’s teeth are normal-looking is the first crack in the narrative that Gothel has sold Rapunzel. Rapunzel has never seen a man before and, instead of being terrifying and monstrous the way she’s been told they would be, this man is handsome and intriguing.
Using her hair to help her — and with much huffing and puffing — Rapunzel manages to lock Flynn, unconscious, into her wardrobe. Even as Rapunzel performs physical tasks, she does them realistically. We can tell that Flynn is heavier than her and that she’s struggling with his weight. Without the help of her hair she wouldn’t have been able to get him in the closet and, even then, it takes her multiple tries. Knocking someone out unawares and struggling to drag their body across the room is very different than fighting in a battle. It’s true that she’s protecting herself physically, but she isn’t making any kind of assertion about how her physical achievements compare to a man’s. This movie — as opposed to the princess movies that came directly before — is not about gender difference. It’s about growing up, becoming your true self. And Rapunzel, here, is engaged in her first truly independent undertaking.
With Flynn locked up, Rapunzel finds his satchel and the crown inside. Not knowing that the crown is actually hers, Rapunzel puts it on her head and looks in the mirror. In that moment, Rapunzel sees a glimmer of her true self. She doesn’t know she’s really a princess, or that Gothel isn’t her real mother, but she recognizes that this crown means something for her. “When will my reflection show who I am inside?” Mulan asked meaninglessly. But, here, Rapunzel’s reflection actually is showing who she is inside. She is a literal princess, and the crown shows that, but she’s also a symbolic princess. Somewhere within — if she can only find it — is her true self, the ideal of perfection, the truly realized person.
When Gothel returns, Rapunzel is initially resolved to be a good daughter and tell her about the man locked up in her wardrobe. She’s proud of herself for being brave and wants to use that as proof that she could make it in the world. She’s still buying into Gothel’s story about the world and wanting to please her. But when, in a moment of uncharacteristic honesty, Gothel tells her that she won’t be leaving the tower “ever,” Rapunzel has second thoughts. Rapunzel loves Gothel, but she’s unwilling to remain a child forever. We meet her at the moment when her desire to break away has overcome her desire to remain safely a child. She finally sees that Gothel will never be wiling to let her go.
So she tells Gothel that she’ll stay in the tower but that she wants something else for a birthday present: a special shell to make paint from that can only be found far away. To keep her happy, Gothel agrees, and off she goes. In this moment, Rapunzel reveals herself to be resourceful and determined — like her traditional princess sisters — and willing to do what it takes to accomplish her goal. Cinderella will go to the ball, Ariel will become human, Snow White will find a way to survive. It’s the traditional princess narrative, unadulterated by complaints about gender roles. Her act of rebellion — unlike Jasmine’s, or Pocahontas’, or Mulan’s — isn’t about fighting back against a made up version of Disney princess patriarchy. It has nothing to do with a man at all. It’s simply about self-discovery, growing up, and becoming truly herself.
With Gothel gone, Rapunzel gets to work fulfilling her dream. She ties Flynn up with her hair and wakes him up. Flynn’s first reaction to being tied up by a beautiful girl is to try to get away by turning on “the smolder.” He tries to charm Rapunzel into swooning all over him and letting him go. Rapunzel, knowing nothing about the fake things that men and women do to try to attract each other, is totally unfazed. Here, again, is a princess whose complete inability to be anything other than who she truly is, allows the man to drop his guard and change for the better (like Belle). It looks, perhaps, like a princess-critic-approved moment, in which the woman has tied up the man and is in control and totally uninterested in his romantic overtures. But it isn’t men that Rapunzel is uninterested in, it’s artifice. She doesn’t understand what Flynn is trying to do and so it doesn’t work on her. Rapunzel is the first girl who doesn’t fall all over Flynn and this unnerves Flynn.
Rapunzel is now totally dead set on getting out of the tower. Her realization that Mother Gothel wants to keep her there forever has pushed her one step closer to separation. She shows Flynn that she has the crown and tells him she’ll only give it back if he agrees to take her to the floating lights. Like Snow White, Rapunzel uses her wits to find a way to get what she wants by making a deal. It’s her first independent act. It has nothing to do with Flynn as a potential love-interest. It is simply Rapunzel’s way of getting what she wants. Flynn agrees — because he has no other choice — and Rapunzel leaves her tower for the very first time.
Her reaction to leaving her tower is the realistic version of the fairy tale trope. “Rapunzel is stereotypically overly emotional, swinging from one end of a mood swing to another,” writes Natalie Wilson in Ms Magazine. Which is true, but it isn’t — as Wilson implies — a sign of her weakness. She is alternately elated and terrified. She runs around leaping and whooping with happiness and then starts crying in terror. She wants to go out on her adventure and then she wants to go back to her tower. She’s an emotional mess. As well she should be! She’s literally never been outside. She’s just taken a huge step towards growing up. She’s out in a world that she’s been told all her life is full of horrible dangers she’s unprepared to handle. It’s Cinderella losing her belief, Snow White lying terrified in the woods, Ariel sobbing in her grotto. It’s the moment when the princess isn’t sure she can do it — isn’t sure she can go it alone, forge her own path, and be her own person. But, ultimately, Rapunzel says “I can’t believe I did this!” She made this happen and she’s going to see it through. In response to Rapunzel’s conflicting feelings, Flynn sardonically observes, “This is part of growing up. A little adventure, a little rebellion.” He’s right: Rapunzel must rebel in order to get away. There is no situation in which she can do what she has to do and maintain her relationship with Gothel.
Flynn takes Rapunzel to a pub full of tough-looking ruffians because, at this point, he is trying to dissuade Rapunzel from her plan so she’ll go back to her tower and give him back the crown. But the thugs recognize Flynn from the Wanted posters and jump on him. Rapunzel — rather than jumping into the fray like a “feminist” princess might — uses her wits and her unimpeachable true-heartedness to stop them. She tells them she needs Flynn to help her achieve her dreams and asks the thugs if they have dreams. And, of course, it turns out they do.
It’s funny to watch these pirate-looking ruffian guys dancing around singing about their dreams of piano playing, flower arranging, and miming. But it’s also thematically relevant. On the one hand, one might say that it’s emasculating that these tough guys have secret dreams that are more “feminine.” But, on the other hand, within the trajectory that the princess narrative had been on since the ’90s, the idea that the big, scary, men of the patriarchy turn out to want to help our princess on her way is important. They support Rapunzel in her dream and they berate Flynn for being so jaded. “I don’t sing,” Flynn tells them when they ask him to join in. And when they force him to he sings that his dream is to be alone “surrounded by enormous piles of money.” The scary-looking men look down on Flynn for being superficial and cynical and praise Rapunzel for following her dream. It’s as if, in this very silly musical number, Disney is recommitting to the traditional princess narrative. And even though we know that the studio was actually in the process of dismissing this type of story, this movie begs to differ. And so did the fans.
