Frozen: Finally, a Disney Prince Who's a Disingenuous Dickweed

There 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).

Anna heads out to bring her back, and later, when she tells
her travel guide Kristoff, basically, the other dude in the movie, about her
new beau, Hans, he, too is all, what the
fuck is wrong with you, getting engaged in one day?

But in Anna’s defense, he did seem like a standup guy. We’re all just as snowed as she is, BTW.
Anna leaves Hans in charge of the kingdom he will ostensibly inherit with her
while she chases after her sister, and he’s super good at it. He is nice and
kind to people, and helps the poor shivering plebes trapped in this new winter
hellscape, and all-around leads like a leader-person. We see him as good and
worthy. Meanwhile, Elsa battles with Anna and injures her gravely, and whaddya
know, the only cure is true love. Believing this will come from beefcake Hans,
Anna returns to her well-kept kingdom to find that the jig is up.

This take
at The Atlantic, which argues
that this twist is “cynical” and “needlessly jarring,” puts
it thusly:

But just when he should be saving the princess,
the male lead reveals himself to be a greedy, throne-usurping would-be
killer: Hans leans in, supposedly about to give her that kiss … then sneers,
“Oh, Anna, if only there were someone who loved you.”

Ouch. That moment would have
wrecked me if I’d seen it as a child, and the makers of Frozen couldn’t
have picked a more surefire way to unsettle its young audience members.

Anecdotally, my 3.5 year old was only scared of the snow
monster and didn’t seem to register this betrayal, but that doesn’t mean other
kids wouldn’t. But yes, the moment was disconcerting. Unexpected. But also pretty
awesome, and not because girls should be taught that men who really dig them up
front are innately tricksters, just the first guy that likes you a lot. No really, learning that some degree of skepticism about fast
moves in relationships is valid for a reason, and of course, all the other
movies paint this sort of perfect dudeness/love forever as beyond reproach, so they kinda need to hear otherwise.

This Hans-as-Dick thing undoes the very cherished tropes of
the other films, which most of these girls have no doubt seen by now — The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty.
It is a counter to the steady diet of falsehoods, and, frankly, it’s high fucking
time.

Also, I think the shock is probably weirder for the parents,
who are kindly oblivious to how inured they are to those shitty old tropes. At
these unexpected moments in the film — when everyone gives Anna shit for
getting engaged too fast, when Hans is a mega-schlong — it almost makes you
feel embarrassed and gullible for being surprised by those reactions. I mean, really: Are
we so well trained to swallow that bullshit that actually seeing the more
logical emotional response to love at first sight and instant engagements is
actually weirder?! YES, the answer is YES. We have it backwards, is my point.

The Frozen Wikia page for
Hans says that because both Anna and the audience are convinced of Hans’s
goodness for so long in the movie (about an hour), this twist makes him “one
of the sneakiest and most sinister Disney villains.”

Well, it definitely makes him hotter (KIDDING) but The Atlantic writer points out that if
it were an adult movie, it might be hailed as sophisticated and smart for
pulling off all this subversion, only young children aren’t sophisticated and
so it’s shitty.

To me, that young children aren’t sophisticated means they
probably won’t parse this out on the same level, but also that Disney has
already fed them tragedy, villainous cruelty and terrible gargoyle people on
the daily since birth. Hell, the way Cinderella’s sisters and stepmother act
toward her guts me almost as much as how little she does to save her own ass.

But very young Disney audiences have already seen seen
parents die, cute animals killed, terrible evil people get their way. That most
Disney films make it super obvious who is batting for which team is logical for
very young children, but part of being alive in the world is a gradual exposure
to the nuance of the forms shitty people can take.

What’s more interesting to me is imagining what a lifetime
of Disney movies with Dick-Hanses would have been like for all of us. Frozen already offers a lot more nuance
than ever on the realities of relationships, sisterly and otherwise (hell,
there’s a whole tribute in there to the merits of picking the schlubby guy, too),
and it’s still serving it up with that requisite spoonful of sugar. As
slow-going as it may be, it’s no doubt the direction we should be headed, rather
than risking over-romanticizing the very flawed past.