Tea at Trianon: Flawed Kingdom

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Flawed Kingdom

From The Imaginative Conservative:

The recent disclosures of the overt sexualization of Disney cartoons have outraged many American families. Disney executives have openly stated that they have increasingly injected LGBT content, characters, and themes into their films and that they do, in fact, have a “gay agenda.” They have spent millions to promote left-leaning political causes against the interests of their main customers.
While upset families are right to cut off Disney from their children’s imaginative formation, they should have been doing this a long time ago. The now-blatant sexual agenda of the corporation is only the final manifestation of a distorted and perverse view of reality that has pervaded the “Disney” brand for quite a long time—even from the earliest of its feature-film cartoons. While the original films may not have presented a dysfunctional view of human sexuality, they did present a distorted view of the world and of the family. Most never were what we might call “age-appropriate.”

Step back a moment and consider the original Disney feature-films for children, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Fantasia, and Pinocchio, and then ask yourself: Is this the imaginative world of an innocent child or of a wounded adult? Do these films introduce nightmare images to a child’s mind, or do they offer a way out of nightmares inherent to the child’s mind?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s excellent essay, “On Fairy Stories,” addresses the very problem that Disney had from its inception: the notion that fairy stories are exclusively children’s stories. They are not. They are stories allowing adults to examine the world from a new perspective to find a better way to live. Tolkien asserts that people connect “the minds of children and fairy- stories,” but “this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.”

The Brothers Grimm collection of fairy stories are not meant for bedtime reading to young children. Yet Walt Disney and his original production team chose a Grimm story, Snow White, as their first feature film in 1937 for families with young children. Most readers will recall the basic plot of the story, so let me briefly analyze the problems in this film as I argue that it does not properly form a child’s moral imagination.

First, Disney combines nightmarish images with buffoonery. Once her life has been spared, Snow White runs screaming into a chaotic forest whose darkness is cut by stabs of light illuminating demonic faces and silhouettes—an intense, unsettling scene of garish light and noise. She (along with the four-year old audience member!) passes out from fear but then awakens to a gentle scene filled with loving animals who lead her to the house of the bumbling seven dwarves. The scene radically shifts from its preceding one, and the viewer sees now only Snow White’s peaceful life with goofy, bumbling, appropriately-named dwarves. A flash of fury interrupts these pastoral scenes when the evil queen realizes Snow White still lives. The “fairest of them all” then radically shape-changes into a frightening-looking beggar woman who finds Snow White’s forest home and interjects her ugly face into the window, breaking the beauty and harmony of the refuge.

This shifting of the sands of safety undermines a keen sense of what is real. Is the nightmare-state reality? Is the pastoral? The two cannot be blended but must be determined clearly in the mind first of the adult and then the child. To present the nightmare in such serious terms and the pastoral realm with such buffoonery suggests that the more “real” of the two is the first, the nightmare. This is a significant problem if you want your child to have a firm foundation in the powerful assurance of the true, good, and beautiful. If this triad becomes associated with the farcical, the absurd, and the humorous but ultimately impotent world of the seven dwarves, then the child loses the power and majesty of these three realities. The peaceful world of nature is ineffectual as a guard against the serious presentation of evil’s invasion. (Read more.)