Frozen: Finally, a Disney Prince Who's a Disingenuous Dickweed
LatestThere are a lot of things to like about Disney’s latest hit Frozen: the major relationship in the
film concerns two sisters, it doesn’t chase happily ever after in the traditional
sense, and it also takes actual screen time to mock the whole idea of love at
first sight as a reliable marker of future happiness. But the real SPOILER
kicker: The prince in the film — Hans — is a Grade-A classic dickweasel.
Frozen, as you may
know, is adapted from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Some of the choices in the adaptation have raised
feminist eyebrows — namely, that the original involves a girl saving a boy
and Frozen instead has a girl saving
a girl (and who can forget that gaffe
about how hard it is to animate women because of their emotions).
The basic plot involves sisters Anna and Elsa. Elsa, the
eldest, has magical wintry powers to freeze stuff, like the icy version of King
Midas or, say, Firestarter.
Basically, when she gets a case of the feels, shit gets real frosty, real fast.
Because Elsa once nearly offed Anna with those powers, the ‘rents instruct Elsa
in the fine art of icy repression. She wears gloves and hangs out in her room
alone her entire young life, probably filling up a LiveJournal (this
take equates that repression, isolation, and fear of Elsa’s growing powers,
and that there is no love interest for her character, as a metaphor for female
and/or queer sexuality, and it’s worth a read). As a result, the sisters are not
buds, and then the parents die, yadda yadda, now it’s time for Elsa’s
coronation as queen.
This opening of the palace doors and inviting in of the
commoners for this event is terrifying for Elsa, who is sure she’ll go frosty-ruinous
the moment she has to take the gloves off, and exciting for Anna, who, via a
little diddy called “For
the First Time in Forever,” waxes ecstatic about whether she’s gassy
or not, talks about how much she wants to eat some chocolate, and then wonders
if maybe she’ll “meet the one.” (It’s just clichéd enough, and
awkwardly so, that I suspect the lyrics are part of the subversion the movie
pulls off.)
And coincidentally, that very night, she does meet a guy! Enter Hans.
Perfect dude. Gets all the jokes. Finishes all the sentences. Sweet, attentive,
lovely, and seemingly in love with her. Also, like Anna, he too loves
sandwiches, a shared passion we should never discount. It’s a
wham-bam-thank-you-maam sitch, and before you know it, by nightfall, they are
engaged.
You’d have no reason to even register a shock at this moment
in the film, since the whole, one-dance-one-song-and-now-we-love-each-other
thing in Disney movies (Cinderella,
obvs) is de rigueur. So it’s kinda funny that what comes next DOES seem weird
in context. Anna excitedly tells her sister the good news, and Elsa is like, the fuck you are getting married. She
flips out and freezes everything, then bails for her ice palace in the snowy
mountains (which, as has been noted, is exactly what you’d picture a Celine
Dion Vegas set would look like, coincidentally).