Two little girl princesses in some distant
northern land. The younger (Anna) badgers the elder (Elsa) to get up and play
with her. Elsa, though reluctant, is finally persuaded. She can make snow and
ice appear with a wave of her hand, and they play snow games in the hall of the
palace till Anna is injured. After this, Elsa is sequestered in her apartments
for fear her gift will cause harm, though Anna continues to knock on her door
and beg her to play.
In due course the king and queen are
drowned; Elsa, now grown up, is to become queen. Foreign dignitaries arrive for
the coronation. Anna makes the acquaintance of Prince Someone-or-other, they
share some flirtatious high-jinks, and she believes she is in love.
In the coronation ceremony, Elsa is asked
to remove her glove, thus unveiling her frost-dealing hand. When Anna comes to
ask for permission to marry the Prince, Elsa rebuffs her and lets loose a storm
of winter on the country. The people mutter, Elsa flees to the mountains and
conjures up an ice palace for herself.
Anna borrows the Prince’s horse and sets
out to find her sister and get her to lift the spell of winter. When the horse
can go no further, she falls in, at a general store in the wilderness, with
Kristoff, a mountain man with a sledge drawn by a reindeer; she enlists him to
take her to Elsa’s retreat. After many adventures they get there, picking up
Olaf, a talking snowman, on the way. Anna petitions Elsa, who evicts them with
the help of an ice monster.
Anna & co, pursued by the ice monster,
are forced to retreat down perilous cliffs, etc. In the course of this Kristoff
notices that Anna has incurred a deadly and progressive injury – a splinter of
ice has pierced her heart. It seems this can only be cured by true love, which
is defined as putting someone else’s need before your own.
Meanwhile, the Prince’s horse has returned
riderless to the palace, whereupon the Prince sets out to search for Anna,
accompanied by an armed force some of whom have orders to kill Elsa if they
find her. They have a much easier job of reaching the ice palace than Anna and
Kristoff did, and capture Elsa even while the attempts on her life are
frustrated by her own efforts and those of the Prince.
The Prince now announces that his intention
all the time has been to secure possession of the kingdom. Elsa is confined to
the palace, her potent hands locked into sleeves. Here, while Anna and Olaf
search for Elsa, Anna is overcome with outer and inner frost and left for dead;
Olaf revives her by lighting a fire to his own danger.
Elsa summons an explosion of cold; her
prison is blasted open and she escapes; Anna, tracking her through the snow,
reaches her sister just as she herself is transformed to solid ice. This breaks
the spell; summer is restored, the kingdom put to rights – and Olaf is granted
a little peripatetic snow-cloud to save him from melting.
What are we to make of all this?
There are, of course, familiar elements.
The paired journeys – difficult and easy. If the storekeeper who introduces Kristoff
looks like a Donor out of Propp’s Morphology
of the Folktale. Kristoff and his reindeer are surely Helpers from the same
schema, and Olaf can fill the role of the Hero’s wisecracking sidekick (the
girl Luned in The Lady of the Fountain,
the cat Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service).
The Prince’s volte face was a
surprise, but I could wear it as ‘False Hero is unmasked’. But who is the Hero,
and what sort of a narrative is it? For without knowing that, what satisfaction
can we take from its conclusion?
I am, of course, assuming a narrative of
four stages – the garden (a), the wilderness ($), the city (S1) and the new
place (S2) – occurring always in that order, but subject to
cyclic shifting so that any of the four elements may be initial. Propp’s
folktale, for example, begins with $ and ends with a.
Each of these stages has its governing
character –the Donor, the Villain, the King and the Princess respectively –
with whom the Hero interacts, and the transitions between stages are marked by
the requirement to perform tasks ($ to S1, S2 to a) or
undertake journeys (a to $, S1 to S2). Given this
framework, it should be possible to identify who is performing the various
roles.
Anna is the focal character, and as such
entitled to the first audition for the role of Hero. If we can leave aside for
a moment the complicated initial relation between the two sisters, the release
of Elsa’s destructive powers (violation of a prohibition) ushers in the wilderness phase, Anna’s meeting with
the Donor, her acquisition of Helpers, their difficult journey. Like the Green
Knight’s castle in its frozen wilderness, the ice palace stands for the city – the site where the Hero must
encounter the Villain. Who then has to be Elsa.
This is where identifying Anna as Hero
begins to lose credibility. The difficult journey should properly have preceded
the meeting with the Donor, we might have expected a task or tasks prior to
entry into the city – but allowing
for some telescoping of these elements, what do we make of Elsa as Villain, and
what is new about the place in which Anna finds herself after their encounter?
The new place is connected with
denouement, explanation, unravelling, ultimately with death: Anna has been
struck by a terminal affliction, certainly, but no overarching explanation is
offered for the course the story has taken so far.
We could conclude that the scriptwriters
were just using an incoherent grab-bag of familiar elements – Olaf the snowman
thrown in to appease the toddlers, for example, as Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review suggests – but is that
even possible, given the unconscious pressures writers and readers alike are
subjected to by the act of story-telling? The way Anna’s hair is lifted by the
wind may be delightful for the beauty and sheer virtuosity of the effect, but a
thousand such effects – and there must be a thousand – are not enough to
compensate for a worrying unease: not only do we have no resolution, but it is
not even clear what it is that needs to be resolved.
The only other character prominent enough
for the role of Hero in the story is Elsa – but what then to make of the three
injuries/rebuffs she gives Anna? The threeness is suggestive – it’s often
associated with the tasks the Hero must fulfil to make the transition from wilderness to city or, as with Gluck in The
King of the Golden River, from new
place to garden. Yet Anna’s
actions don’t easily square with the kinds of task the Hero is typically asked
to fulfil, whether it be sharing a meagre morsel with a beggar, or turning
aside from a quest to help an old woman. The best fit for the interaction of
Elsa with Anna is Propp’s D9 : ‘Combat with a hostile Donor’.
This, finally, is the key to unlocking the
significance of the tale and to explaining what makes it superficially so
impenetrable. The problem is ideological: once one realizes that ‘Frozen’ is a
Satanist fairytale, everything falls into place. The supreme good in this story
world is not the welfare of others, but self-fulfilment. What Elsa is trying to
win from Anna, and what Anna is so reluctant to give, is autonomy.
A common feature of the wilderness phase is the revalorization
of the Hero by association with some precious or beautiful thing: Cinderella
and the glass slipper, Owein and the magic ointment. For Elsa, it is her own
creation – the ice palace – not something bestowed by a kindly stranger. The city is her confrontation with the
Prince (the Villain), whose villainy is now completely explicable: he doesn’t
want to marry Elsa because he is a villain, but he is a villain because he
wants Elsa – his earlier flirtation with Anna is seen to have been a sighting
shot.
From here it’s an easy journey for Elsa to
the living death of confinement (?marriage) within what is now the Prince’s
palace, all her powers held in check. A supreme effort – difficult task –
blasts her out of this new place and
makes possible the garden finale:
Elsa reconciled with Anna, who has at last learnt to love Elsa for what she is
rather than seek what Elsa can do for her. Unlike the conventional Hero, Elsa
doesn’t win the Princess – she is the
Princess in her own fairytale. In a significant coda, Olaf too is freed to do
his own thing – to remain a snowman whatever the weather.
Anna’s story, though foregrounded, is a
subplot, and a subplot of the Bildungsroman
variety, which begins with S2 and moves through a
and $ to S1. This kind of story often begins with a separation
from parents – here Anna’s separation from Elsa is the event that initiates her
entry to the new place. Her
flirtation with the Prince (who here plays the role of Princess) is the garden, she journeys to find rejection
from Elsa in the wilderness (Kristoff
playing the role of Donor by telling her what true love is), and through the
difficult task of overcoming her own resentment she arrives at last in the city, a new social synthesis where her
broken relationship with Elsa is re-formed.
Though the story shares with Andersen’s Snow Queen the motif of the debilitating
shard of ice in the heart, it is hard to imagine anything quite so different as
‘Frozen’ from Andersen’s erotic allegory. But a Satanist fairytale is
something, I suppose – Aleister Crowley would have liked it, and the fantasy of
becoming an autonomous being appeals to the adolescent in all of us.
