I thought actress Sarah Porkalub, who trashed the (ridiculous) Broadway production of “1776” that had given her the chance to play South Carolina’s Continental Congress delegate Edward Rutledge as an Asian woman (Don’t get me started!), was the most irresponsible and arrogant performer I had heard about in decades, and, in fact, she might still hold the title. But it’s now a close competition, as Rachel Zegler, Disney’s star of the almost as ridiculous live-action re-imagining of its animated 1937 classic, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as “Snow Latina and the Seven Whatever-the-Hell-They Are” has been allowed to insult her film’s progenitor, which, among other things, is substantially responsible for her employer’s very existence.
“It’s really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful,” Zegler has blathered. “I mean, you know, the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. Um… there’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her! Weird, weird, so we didn’t do that this time…People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is — because it needed that… our version is a refreshing story about a young woman who has a function beyond “Someday My Prince Will Come.'”
The prince doesn’t “stalk” Snow White.
Disney, meanwhile, has apparently forgotten the ancient Hollywood role of the publicist, those pros who studios hire to carefully make sure actors didn’t undermine their careers and films by doing what Ziegler is doing now. Actors—let me put this delicately, since some of my best friends are actors—are not known for their probing intellect, impulse control, and diplomatic skills. One commentator has even suggested that Disney already knows this “Snow White” is destined to be bomb, and is deliberately letting Zegler shoot off her mouth so they can make her the scapegoat when the tsunami of red ink hits Orlando.
It makes no sense to denigrate the movie classic and the beloved fairy tale that her own movie is based on, because her project only exists because the original “Snow White” is so admired and respected. Nobody remakes bad movies, and her comments suggest that Walt’s masterpiece is an old, moldy, relic. (It isn’t. It was brilliant in 1937, and it’s brilliant today.) Zegler has one major screen credit on her resume—she was Maria in the painfully woke “West Side Story” remake (which bombed at the box office)—and as a typical 22-year-old knee-jerk progressive, doesn’t realize that her movie better draw from the half the country that doesn’t see “PC” as an asset, or it’s going to flop. She also doesn’t understand that audiences want to like their heroines. Making people root for the witch is bad marketing.
Ethics Alarms 
I am sorry, Jack.
I stopped reading about halfway through because a story from 1937 blah blah blah
How would she do a modern telling of the Iliad?
Helen could not have a face that launched a thousand ships.
Would the Iliad just be a long weekend bar brawl with Agamemnon and Menelaius beating the crap out of Paris while Hector and Achilles keep order?
Sadly, she probably thinks her perspective is enlightened, when it likely ignores the vast complexity of the human condition.
I much prefer the original Iliad to whatever a 21st Century Disney corporation would produce in its place.
-Jut
Jack,
Brilliant? Come on. It’s a fairy tale about a titular princess who has absolutely no agency in her own story. She’s carried entirely by external events, and has no motivation for anything she does, outside of her own survival. Her stepmother wants to murder her because Snow White has more beauty than her (sexist) and so she runs off into the forest to cook and clean (more sexist) for seven adult little people, portrayed as having the mannerisms of children (stereotyping). She’s then murdered by the Queen (that’s what an unwakeable sleep is) and resurrected by a Prince she barely knows who sexually assaults her (a full year later) in the process (by kissing her without consent). All so she can become … Queen herself, every woman’s dream (even yet still more sexism). Moreover, since the third act begins with her death, the audience is left without any real stakes (she and the evil queen are both dead, so who cares?) or urgency (what’s the rush?) for ending.
The story sucked when I was 8. The story sucks even more now, and the remake will (likely) continue that legacy because it’s a basic story, stolen from even older, even more basic stories. However “brilliant” it was centuries ago when the story first originated, it’s been retold, remade, and rehashed so often, it’s become just another (bad) cliche.
I usually have to pull this out for Cinderella (feminist critiques of Cinderella are my pet peeve), but it applies almost as much to Snow White:
Saying Snow White has no agency misunderstands the character and the moral of the story.
Snow White (like Cinderella) continually chooses to be kind and optimistic, in spite of events that should make her paranoid and cynical. That is her agency: she doesn’t have the power to control events, but she can choose how she responds to them. She responds in a way the story suggests is difficult but virtuous.
The story shows that while this can’t protect you from your enemies, it will make you allies who might come through for you even when all hope is lost (literally in Snow White’s case, as she’s as good as dead.) It’s the story of a princess who lost everything, rolled up her sleeves to make herself useful to a group of outcasts who kindly offered her room and board, and in spite of exhibiting no malice towards her enemy found that those allies defeated the queen and honored Snow White in a way that led to her being restored her to her rightful place.
The virtues of humility, turning the other cheek, and making the best of the position you find yourself in are out of fashion, but personally I think that’s a problem with the modern fashion, not the fairy tales. The real world could use fewer princesses fighting back and taking destiny in their own hands, and more princesses who start by making their beds (as Jordan Peterson suggests.)
With all due respect, it appear that you and Ms. Ziegler fail to truly appreciate the deep and important lessons that Snow White conveys.
In case you failed to notice, Snow White manages to maintain her kind, trusting nature and dignity despite the abuse she suffers at the hand of her stepmother, to overcome her immense fears about being abandoned in the middle of the woods and to calm herself down when her (perfectly valid) emotions get the best of her, and then to not only befriend a group of men who are very different from her, but to establish herself as the respected and valued authority figure among them, encouraging them to be better versions of themselves and bringing genuine joy into their lives. She doesn’t demean or belittle the people around her in order to make herself appear strong; she IS strong, in a quiet, gentle way, without the audience or other characters ever having to be directly told that she is.
The issue is not Snow White; it’s like many young women nowadays (including this schmuck) have been indoctrinated to believe that crapping on femininity and the usuals attributes associated therewith (kindness, consideration, affection, etc.) is required to establishes one’s feminist cred. It’s misguided belief that leaves those ladies, and people around, miserable and unfulfilled.
I’m surprised: you usually read more carefully than that.
A critique of the fairy tale is 100% irrelevant to the post. To being with, the movie isn’t all that faithful to the fairy tale. I wrote that “Walt’s masterpiece …was brilliant in 1937, and it’s brilliant today”…and it was and is. It is great art; ground-breaking animation; terrific direction; scary when it needs to be, and touching. The craft is dynamic and constantly surprising and original. The Director, David Hand, directed and/or supervised among is 20+ successful films at Disney, “Snow White,” “Bambi,” “Pinnochio,” “Dumbo,” and “Fantasia,” considered to be Disney Studio’s deluxe, A++ films, never to be duplicated, because they all placed art and perfection over profit. Only Snow White made a profit, but all animated films since look cheesy next to them.
The Fairy Tale is not the point.
In the original story Snow White is kind of an idiot; letting the queen in multiple times under different disguises. The movie improves on that, having her make the mistake only once, and that mistake being an act of kindness.
But yes, the Fairy Tale itself is somewhat beside the point, here’s a post that gets into even more detail about the film, and how Zegler just doesn’t get it:
Exactly: great article. I was going to look for one like that in response to Neil, and you got it first. In sum: brilliant art, brilliant adaptation, brilliant craft and creativity, brilliant innovation, brilliant risk-taking, entrpreneurism and trail-blazing. Easily one of the top five films ever in terms of importance, influence, and impact. Still.
I think “brilliant” is an understatement.
Neil said “resurrected by a Prince she barely knows who sexually assaults her (a full year later) in the process (by kissing her without consent)”
So if you ever see someone who has just died, to give them mouth to mouth resuscitation is a sexual assault.
I think you may be giving today’s publicists too much credit. This may be what the publicist told her to say. The echo chamber is that the marketing and publicity people still don’t know what Bud Light and Target did wrong. Since Zegler isn’t saying anything we haven’t hear before from Brie Larson about her movies or Kathleen Kennedy about her movies. Since they keep doing the same thing over and over agai with the same results, it must be intentional.
I second Michael’s point. Spot on. The idiots are running the asylum. This sort of thing is a feature, not a bug. Some young MBA from Harvard or Wharton probably green lighted this campaign.
These people are perfectly content marketing to their fellow travelers in Park Slope and writing off most of the rest of the country. It’s not about making money, it’s about racking up DEI points. And of course, this will work out well. Hah! Cue Kevin Klien: “Assholes!”
One of my longtime Usenet applies made a point on another forum that applies with equal force here.
https://forum.pafoa.org/showthread.php?t=380110&p=4515750#post4515750
– Christopher Charles Morton, dba Deanimator