November 16, 2023
Dear Leland and Everett,
I recently heard a podcast where Malcolm Gladwell recruited a Hollywood screenwriter to rewrite the ending to Disney’s The Little Mermaid. While listening, something clicked. Or perhaps more accurately, a few things clicked, solving a few unanswered puzzles in my head.
First and foremost, in the rewrite Ariel recovers her voice by hugging Ursula (the antagonist and evil witch). This hit me on a couple of levels. First of all, I noticed that, unlike too many Hollywood endings today, they did not have Ariel recover her voice via more traditionally masculine heroic actions. Ariel did not attack, fight, or conquer Ursula. As Hollywood these days introduces us to more heroines (females cast in the lead and/or heroic role), they too often do so by having the heroines act like men. We increasingly see female leads cast as superheroes, literally fighting the bad guys. The top grossing movie of this year, Barbie, humorously explores traditionally masculine and feminine roles in society, and as far as I can tell resolves it’s plot complications by…having the women act like men. I genuinely root for promoting more females as protagonists, but find the idea of women finding themselves and their strengths by acting like men to be something of an inevitable dead end, and have wondered why we as a society don’t seem to have any better ideas.
This rewrite questioned the need for a masculine solution to our problems altogether. Ariel didn’t fight for the return of her voice. She hugged for it. She melted her enemy’s defenses with love. In the process, she found her voice, and we discovered that her voice, while unique, kicked off an intuitive recognition in others, as others intuitively knew the song Ariel proceeded to sing. We instinctively recognize when someone acts in congruence with their true selves, and witnessing someone in congruence invites us to move into congruence ourselves. What a beautiful message.
Earlier in the exploration, the screenwriter highlighted the deep truth which makes The Little Mermaid so long-lasting and compelling a story (while the Disney version originates in 1989, the story itself is nearly 200 years old): Ariel loses her voice. The screenwriter points out that girls often lose their voice as they grow up in our society. Something about this observation clicked for me: since writing my letter about masculinity, I’ve sensed some unfinished business with the topic. Why is it that women are increasingly acting like men? Why is it that Hollywood’s (and more broadly, society’s) solution to elevating the status of women is to encourage them to act like men? The screenwriter offered a pretty compelling hypothesis: women collectively feel like they have lost their voice, and are employing their best guess at how to find it.
The rewrite, again, deliciously challenges the need for masculine energy, at least in certain situations. Ariel solving her own problem (having lost her voice) through hugging, and unmistakeable expression of love, not only challenges the feminine heroic ideal, but challenges our heroic ideals altogether. Why do we so often assume we must resort to conflict or violence to solve our problems? Why can’t we teach people to spread love as our primary tool toward resolving conflict? This need not be an exclusively feminine ideal, but it could certainly be a heroic ideal introduced and championed by female leaders.
Insightfully, the rewrite proceeded to challenge some masculine archetypes. The role of the prince was recast as superfluous, which seems appropriate to me. The role of king (in this case, Triton) was exposed for being not just strong and powerful, but also too often hurtful in its severity and harshness. In this retelling, Triton’s harsh punishments were what actually spurred Ursula to become a witch in the first place; in so doing the audience are encouraged to rethink the role we give punishment as an effective tool in governance, as well as the need for the powerful militaristic archetype as leader.
My favorite aspect of the rewrite was the exploration of Ursula’s origins as an evil witch. Ursula’s origin story correctly points out that ‘hurt people hurt people’. We are so tempted to assign people into camps of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and thus universally weave such morality tales into our storytelling, that we forget (or perhaps fail to understand completely) the line between good and evil isn’t drawn between people or societies, but within the hearts of each of us. Each one of us holds an incredible, perhaps even unimaginable, capacity for good and evil; the struggle between good and evil plays out within each of us. And while we are tempted to fight evil by creating evil villains (in our stories or even in real life), what we really do is create distractions that allow us to avoid confronting the darkness within each of us. Or perhaps more accurately, we allow ourselves to believe that we are fighting off the darkness, or keeping the darkness at bay with our struggle, when in fact we give darkness deeper roots in our own hearts.
The better solution, as the rewrite so beautifully suggests, is to combat darkness with love. This allows us to see the darkness (or evil) for what it really is: fear and sadness that have been allowed to fester into anger, hate, and a density of emotion that leaves no space for love and healing. And the ultimate cure is a return to love.
Of course, when hate is actively spreading, the victims of hate must be allowed to protect themselves. Self protection can be hard to discern from unnecessary violence, a complexity I won’t attempt to tackle today. But once the spreaders of hate are stopped, and their victims protected, we should explore how we enable love to return and heal the wounds that have festered into the spread of hate.
Ultimately, what the rewrite finally enabled me to see (along with lots of other signs the universe has been sending me) is the degree to which modern society embraces the threat of violence and punishment in our fruitless efforts to stem the spread of hate. In the process we abandon any hope of spreading love where wounds exist. We need to shift. The implications will be radical; the alternatives are worse.
I love you both, and wish you luck combatting fear, sadness, anger, and hate with love. It’s not easy.
Love,
Dad
P.S. I discovered after writing that Disney itself has remade The Little Mermaid. The original Disney version, in 1989, was the inspiration behind the podcast and this letter (although I will admit I never saw it). I guess now I will need to watch the new version to see how they did by comparison.
Letters to Leland 