Revisionist History - Little Mermaid Part 2: The Fairytale Twist

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

The quest to revise The Little Mermaid continues. This week, we call in the experts. Part two of three. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In his best-known work, The Uses of Enchantment, the late Austrian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim asks us to consider the genius of the children's tale Three Little Pigs. You remember Three Little Pigs. You remember Three Little Pigs. The first little pig was very lazy. He didn't want to work at all, and he built his house out of straw. The second little pig worked a little bit harder, but he was somewhat lazy too, and he built his house out of sticks.

Then they sang and danced and played together the rest of the day. The third little pig worked hard all day and built his house with bricks. It was a sturdy house, complete with a fine fireplace and chimney. It looked like it could withstand the strongest winds. The wicked wolf visits the first pig with the straw house and says he's going to eat him. Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin, the little pig says. The wolf replies, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down. And so he does, easily.

The little pig escapes to his brother's house, the house built of sticks. The wolf gives chase, blows that one down too. Then the two little pigs escape to their big brother's house, the one made of bricks. And this time the wicked wolf can't blow it down. The wolf danced about with rage and swore he would come down the chimney and eat up the little pig for his supper. But while he was climbing onto the roof, the little pig made up a blazing fire and put on a big pot full of water to boil. Then, just as the wolf was coming down the chimney, the little piggy pulled off the lid and plop! In fell the wolf into the scalding water. Oh yes, the three little pigs, all huff and all puff. Everyone knows the story of the three little pigs. Bruno Bettelheim's question was, what works in a fairy tale? The three little pigs works.

And what doesn't work? The fable of the ants and the grasshopper. Do you even remember it? I don't think you do. Here's the story. The ants spend the summer working non-stop, preparing for winter. Meanwhile, the grasshopper fritters away his summer, entertaining himself. And now he's hungry. What? cried the ants in surprise. Haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer? I didn't have time to store up any food, whined the grasshopper.

I was so busy making music that before I knew it, the summer was gone. The ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust. Making music, were you? They cried. Very well, now dance. And they turned their backs on the grasshopper and went on with their work. That's it. That's the end of the story. Now, this one has the same basic lesson as Three Little Pigs. Life favors the hardworking and the prepared. Both stories have cute animals who just want to have fun, little pigs, grasshoppers, playing music, and the story of the ants and the grasshopper should be lodged in our memories because it was written by Aesop, of Aesop's fables, the same legend who brought us the tortoise and the hare. Pedigreed storytelling. But we don't remember it. Why? Because we love

the grasshopper, and Aesop just throws him to the ants. Deep into my investigation of The Little Mermaid, I realized that we make Aesop's mistake all the time. We don't understand how seriously children take their fairy tales. We think we can satisfy them with a few sternly worded lessons. Oh, but we can't. Think of The Three Little Pigs. There's a chase scene,

some trash talking, not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, no fewer than three home invasions, and a brilliant plot twist with the vat of boiling water at the bottom of the chimney, just waiting for the impetuous wolf. So the little piggy put on the cover again, boiled the wolf up, and the three little piggies ate him for supper. You swing at the pigs, you best not miss. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part two of my three-part forensic analysis of the blockbuster princess movie, The Little Mermaid. In part one, we heard from a law professor

who argues that the Disney company fumbled the tale of the young mermaid who wanted to trade her fins for feet. In this episode, I want to talk about the theory of fairy tales, why they matter, why they work, and why sometimes they don't work at all. The closest modern equivalent we have to Bruno Bettelheim is a literary scholar named Angus Fletcher. Fletcher is not a psychoanalyst like Bettelheim was. He trained as a neuroscientist. Are you the first person in history to leave neuroscience to get a PhD in English? Yes, tragically. I went in exactly the opposite direction from everybody else, and this is why I am bankrupt. Everyone's saying went from English to neuroscience,

and yes, I like the fool that I am. Somewhere your parents are just like crying. This is like devastating. Well, it's even worse because you can't tell because I've lost my accent, but I'm an immigrant. And so, you know, like all immigrant families, my parents are just obsessed with science and they wanted me to be a doctor. And, you know, they were disappointed when I only went into science. But they're like, well, I guess that's OK. And then, you know, poetry, it's humiliating for them. You know, they've disowned me. I wanted to talk to Fletcher because of a book he wrote

called Wonderworks, the 25 most powerful inventions in the history of literature, which is this strange and captivating work full of twists and turns and fascinating asides. It's the kind of book that makes you want to talk to the author just to make sure there aren't more bits of wisdom out there to be had. Anyway, I'm on the phone with Angus, struggling to understand what went wrong with The Little Mermaid.

And Angus, since he's Angus, says, Oh, the thing you have to understand is that there's actually two categories of fairy tales. The original kind and the modern kind. And then Angus starts talking about some of the earliest recorded fairy tales, like the stories collected by the 16th century Italian writer Giovanni Straparola. Straparola published a two-volume set known as The Facetious Knights. Puss in Boots is a Straparola story. So yeah, so there are these two amazing things that we start to see in Straparola's fairy tales, which again are the kind of most ancient ones we have written down. The first is that good luck happens to people

who are fools. So a fool might find a lucky fish. And by a fool, I mean an actual fool. I mean, somebody who is so dense in the story that he says terrible, rude things to everybody he meets is an inept fisher person, has no apparent positive qualities whatsoever, and then ends up a prince. And it can go even further than that. It can happen to people who are bad. A classic example of this kind of story is an ancient fairy tale about a girl named Adamantina. Adamantina's family is starving,

and she's sent by her older sister to buy food at the market. Adamantina goes to the market with the family's last money, and does she buy food? No, she makes a whimsical purchase of a doll that she sees because she happens to like this doll, and she takes this doll home with her. And her older sister is so distraught that she has this breakdown, as, oh my goodness, this is the end of the family.

You have ruined the family. It's all over. And lo and behold, the doll turns out to be a magic doll. And it spits forth money. And this is the beginning of a series of just bizarre, improbable happenings that occur in the story. And Adamantina does not deserve them at all. She's not virtuous. She's not smart. She's not nice. She's not kind. The doll is a lottery ticket. The doll is a lottery ticket. That's exactly right. Yes. Fletcher calls these kinds of stories fairytale twist stories. If you look at all the stories collected by Straparola, they almost always end with fairytale twists. For thousands of years, people sat around the fire and listened to storytellers. And what are the narratives that survived the evolution of centuries?

Stories in which heroes did not deserve their fate. Audiences wanted to believe that life could suddenly go from bad to good. It's not simply that life could suddenly go from, that there could be a sudden twist. It's that the twist would be unrelated to the disposition and character of the protagonist. That I didn't have to meet a certain qualification to be eligible for this good fortune. It was bestowed on anyone. Yeah.

But then, in the 17th century, fairy tales took a dramatic turn. The key figure was the French writer Charles Perrault. He read the fairy tales that had been collected by earlier writers and loved them, wanted to share them with the world, but Perrault thought they needed a little tweaking. He said, you know what, these tales are so primitive. They were written before the age of reason. They were written before the Enlightenment, and reason tells us that all these instances in which good things are coming from bad,

it can't happen because life follows this logic that's been created by God. And I want these stories to instill that. So I'm just going to make these changes. I'm going to change it so that good things only happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. And so there's no more good happening to bad. There's only good happening to good. Fletcher calls these kinds of fairy tales poetic justice stories. The classic example of this second type of story is Cinderella,

an ancient tale which Charles Perrault revised. Later, the Brothers Grimm did their own version of the tale in Germany. Here's how it begins with our introduction to Cinderella. The wife of a rich man fell sick, and when she felt that her end drew nigh, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, Always be a good girl, and I will look down from heaven and watch over you. Soon afterwards, she shut her eyes and died, and was will look down from heaven and watch over you. Soon afterwards she shut her eyes and died, and was buried in the garden. And the little girl went every day to her grave and wept, and was always good and kind to honor her mother. Cinderella's father remarries. Cinderella gets an

evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters, but no matter what they do to her, Cinderella remains pious and good. It happened once that her father was going to the fair and asked his wife's daughters what he should bring to them. Fine clothes, said the first. Pearls and diamonds, said the second. Now, child, said he to his own own daughter what will you have? The first brig dear father that rubs against your hat on your way home said she. So the father brings the evil stepdaughter's all manner of finery and Cinderella gets as requested a twig. He gave it to his daughter then she took it and went to her mother's grave and planted it there and cried so much that it was watered with her tears. And there it grew and became a fine

tree. Oh, come on. Cinderella is an angel. And what happens to this angel? You know the story. A magic bird gives her a beautiful dress and off she goes to the ball. The handsome prince falls in love with its mysterious, unknown beauty. She leaves behind her slipper. The prince says, whosoever fits into the slipper will be his queen. Her evil stepsisters try to fit and fail. Cinderella tries it on, and it fits perfectly, and she lives happily ever after. Virtue is rewarded. Meanwhile, what happens to her evil stepsisters? When the wedding with the prince was to be held, the two false sisters came,

wanting to gain favor with Cinderella and to share her good fortune. But they get attacked by pigeons that peck out their eyes. And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days. That's poetic justice. Thus, for their wickedness,

they were punished. The Cinderella Story gets adapted for the screen by Walt Disney in maybe the most famous of all of his animated movies. The dream that you wish will come true. But it's only the dreams and wishes of the beautiful, angelic Cinderella that come true. With Cinderella, Disney went all in on poetic justice. The famous movie that so many of us saw as children, Cinderella, that rescued the Magic Kingdom from bankruptcy and became the logo of Disney.

And ever since then, all of Disney's fairy tales have had that same story model of good coming from good or virtue rewarded or poetic justice. It's this inheritance of the Enlightenment. A few years ago, Angus Fletcher was approached to do a project on measuring children's emotional reactions to the stories they heard. We actually have a technology here which can track how interested kids as young as four are in things.

You know, if we have 10 or 12 or 14 kids, enough of a range, we can actually tell you very specifically whether kids like the ending or not and how much they like it. But the overall thing is... Is this eye-tracking? Is this eye-tracking stuff? How are you doing that?

It's secret, and I'm not kidding. So Fletcher does his top-secret analysis of little kids watching Disney movies. And he thinks he knows what he's going to find. The kids prefer Cinderella. They don't want the moral anarchy of the fairy tale twist. And sure enough, the kids squeal with delight. They love the songs.

But then it all falls apart. There's a kind of post-Disney hangover. There's been this whole history of condemning Disney fairy tales because they're not realistic or because they advance kind of stereotypes or kind of unrealistic expectations about what princesses should be and so on and so forth.

But it turned out it really wasn't any of those things that was going on. It was the narrative structure. The kids liked the characters, the adventure, the humor, the idea that mice and other animals could do all manner of cool things. But they struggled with the idea

that good always comes from good and bad from bad. Why? Because your child is perfectly capable of extrapolating what all this means. What your brain processes is, well, bad things are happening to me. Why are bad things happening to me?

They're happening to me clearly because I'm bad. And if bad things happen to bad me. Why are bad things happening to me? They're happening to me clearly because I'm bad. And if bad things happen to bad people and I'm bad, then worse things are going to start to happen because there's no way for me to turn this train around. And what we see is that these stories generate what's called catastrophizing. And catastrophizing is when you become convinced that there's no way to break the cycle of bad feeling. And this is masked in Disney fairy tales because the immediate emotional effect of watching a Disney story is to feel good, is to feel happy,

because the ending is so sentimental and so positive. But over time, it has this corrosive negative effect. Now, by contrast, what happens when a child hears a fairy tale twist story? Those kinds of stories defeat catastrophizing. They short-circuit that and they say, no, no, no, no, no. Bad doesn't always come from bad. Good can come from bad.

Just relax. Life is not logical. Kids prefer fairytale twists to poetic justice. They prefer Adam and Tina to Cinderella. Now, why does this matter to our discussion of the Little Mermaid film? Because the Little Mermaid is poetic justice on steroids. Good things happen not just to good people, but to rich and powerful and beautiful people. And bad things happen not just to bad people, but ugly bad people. When Prince Eric wanted to claim his beautiful bride, he got to take the law into his own hands, become a vigilante, kill Ursula in cold blood with no legal consequences whatsoever,

because he's a handsome prince. No other reason. Handsome, entitled, Eric gets away with murder. And Ariel, our beautiful spirited mermaid who wants to marry a prince, she gets to marry a prince. Without really having to lift a finger, by the way. In the end, Daddy does everything. Oh, then I guess there's just one problem left.

And what's that, Your Majesty? How much I'm going to miss her. Daddy gets at his golden trident and turns Ariel into a female human in a sparkly dress. This is unearned poetic justice. It's 1% poetic justice. I'm still waiting for the Disney sequel where Ariel gets into Stanford as a legacy admission after her dad endows the King Triton Institute of Aquatic Governance. One of the things I realized in talking to Angus Fletcher was how difficult it was to make the transition from poetic justice

thinking back to fairytale twist thinking. It doesn't feel right. Bad must be met with bad so that good can be met with good. It feels awfully rote. When you watch the movie, you just feel from the beginning like you know it's going to happen. So Ursula has great power under the sea and decides at the end of the movie that what she wants to do is to disguise herself as Ariel and or as a beautiful princess and marry Eric, right? The prince. But what if Eric is revealed to be actually kind of dull and nasty? And so Ariel realizes, let her marry him. You know, if that's what you want. It turns out the guy's a bit of a jerk. I wanted to give Angus my ideas for fixing the Little Mermaid, but I was struggling.

Or what if the idea of outside of the water, she loses her power? So she becomes Eric's bride, but she is now just a normal person who's stripped of all of the... Because she's chosen the terrestrial world over the underwater world, she's now just an ordinary hapless citizen. Now, I suppose what we're doing there is we're giving a bad ending to a bad person,

but at least it's a more interesting bad ending, I suppose. Yes, it's more creative. I hear a distinct lack of enthusiasm in Angus's voice. I don't know if there's any way not to... We do have to kind of put Ursula in her place.

No, you do not. I still couldn't get it out of my head that bad had to come from bad. It was as if everything Fletcher had tried to tell me had sailed right over my head. That's how deeply embedded poetic justice is. It's in our bones. I mean, we have this obsession in the modern world that somehow if you do something bad, you have to be punished for it. No, if you do something bad, we just have to make sure you

don't do that bad thing again. It's rehabilitation. It's medicine. I mean, you know, we don't punish diseases. Once we've removed cancer from the body, we don't then send it to jail and punish it. So you think we should be able to fix Ursula? Well, I think we should just stop her from doing whatever she's doing. We should have a conversation with her about maybe why this isn't helpful.

Fletcher's point was that making Ursula bad and then punishing her for her badness is what you do if you don't care about the story you're telling. You don't think about the audience, the little girl, who's trying to understand the way life really works. No, you've turned into Aesop, who says there's a boring ant out there

and a grasshopper who wants to make music, and I'm sorry, but that means the grasshopper has to starve to death. If he were alive today, Aesop would have a bungalow on the Disney lot. He'd be their rewrite man. It's not just that I think that Disney has sent a lot of fairy tales in the world, which have overall made us less happy. I think it's also that they are a force against innovation and change and growth in storytelling as a whole. And they are destroying our capacity

as a people to think of new directions and new paths and new plots. I mean, my kids love Disney Plus. I'm not going to pretend like I've somehow managed to keep it out of my own house. But, you know, I mean, I really think that we have reached a point in our society where we're repeating the error of the Enlightenment. And we're allowing this one institution that thinks it knows the right way to do things to crush out the basis of our nature, which is creativity, change, spontaneity, and, like you said, possibility. So I went back and watched The Little Mermaid again, only this time with Angus Fletcher's words ringing in my ears, and I began to realize,

I think we can rescue this movie. How old were you when you first saw Little Mermaid? You saw it as a kid. Oh, yeah. I saw it as a kid, and it was my favorite of all the princess movies. Oh, yeah. I needed a screenwriter, a good one, to try their hand at fixing the dumpster fire that was Disney's The Little Mermaid. And I thought, why not Britt Marling?

The co-creator with Zalbuttmanglage of one of my favorite TV shows ever, The OA on Netflix. Britt Marling struck me as the kind of person who could live inside the imagination of young Ariel, our little mermaid who longs for a better life. I remember as a little girl, I used to, not only was the only song I still to this day know on the piano is Under the Sea. Really?

So I can play that. I used to play that and sing that and charge people money to watch it. But also, Malcolm, I used to tie my ankles with like sweat socks and then jump into the pool so that I coulduring about the idea of being limited in the way that the Little Mermaid was. Being legless. Yeah, being legless. But I think it was what I was attracted to was how they positioned her in the first fourth of the film, which is like she was bold and fearless. The first fourth of the film, which is like, she was bold and fearless. The first fourth of the film. Let's be clear, none of us have any issues with the first fourth of the film. There was a shipwreck, and she's just like jumping amongst the, you know, flaming, falling logs. It was like, there was no other little princess being portrayed like that. Like,

Snow White, you know, and Sleeping Beauty weren't performing those kinds of acts of heroicism. But then it's interesting that like when I would play Ariel as a little girl in my mind, it was only the phase in which she was a fish. Because the moment she got legs, she loses all her agency. She's just sitting around waiting to be kissed. Yeah.

So. You're absolutely right. That's what's so, I mean, I never saw it as a kid. I only saw it two weeks ago as an adult. And, you know, I was, I have to say, mortified by what happened. I just like, I'm flabbergasted. Like, she disappears. She disappears. She stopped. She just disappears. And all she does is bat her eyelashes

at this dumb... Prince! Disney entranced the young Brit Marling. They owned her imagination. She was in love with Ariel. She was tying her legs together with tube socks and singing under the sea at the piano. And then what did Disney do?

They gave up on her. They lost her. They abandoned her with a plot that doesn't even do poetic justice justice. We are supposed to believe this is a girl who is a young girl who is openly defying her father's wishes. And what is the nature of her defiance? Pursuing and marrying a prince. Which is exactly what her father, a king, wanted for his daughter.

It's like, it's as if one of the Kardashians' daughters was so angry at her parents that she went out and started a reality show. It's not teenage defiance. That is joining the family business. Joining the family business. A hundred percent. Because you know Triton would be down

in his palace under the sea, rubbing his hands together and being like, and now I can broker a deal with the men on land and we can consolidate our resources and extract even more and take over more of the world together. You know, come on. We went back and forth, Britt and I, up and down. The movie just felt so slapdash,

as if its creators thought that six-year-old girls just wouldn't care about whether the narrative made any sense. What has Triton done about the hundreds of souls entrapped by Ursula? Nothing. Nothing until his daughter gets captured. And then all of a sudden he's like, oh, this can't stand. Oh, I got to go do battle with Ursula. Like, wait, what kind of model of leadership is this? That's, wait, that's good because there you're bringing the classism in again, right?

Totally. Because he doesn't care about everybody else who perished in Ursula's garden. He only cares if his princess ends up there. I mean, this is the most appalling king behavior that I've ever seen. There's no aspect of him in any way fulfilling the functions of his office here. You could also ask yourself this too, Malcolm. Why are so many people leaving Triton's kingdom and going to Ursula in the first place? Why are there so many dissatisfied citizens who are seeking out the help of the old wise woman, you know, traditionally in the woods,

but here, deeper within the sea. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, actually, that's... What's rotten at the center of Triton's kingdom that he has so many unsatisfied merpeople? A thousand of his subjects are enslaved under, like, half a mile away. Living as ghost algae, stuck to the forest floor,

scrambling for, like, youambling for bits of human flesh. It's sad. The man is appalling. Yeah. I could talk to Brit Marling forever, but I had to find out. Would she join me? Would she lend her magic to fixing the Little Mermaid with the promise of nothing except

the kind of random minor celebrity that comes from being a participant in a revisionist history episode. No money, no swag, not even legal indemnification if the Walt Disney Company comes after us. So let's talk about your homework. I hope it's not too onerous. I have sent you, emailed you, a copy of the script. Oh, wow. Nice. And all I want is not even a scene, a piece of a scene.

You don't have to resolve all these issues. I just want you to take a moment in the script where there is an opportunity to do something different. Do you know that this is literally my favorite thing? I can't honestly, I can't even accept this as a homework assignment because this is just like pure pleasure, unbridled pleasure for me. She was all in. I would not walk alone on this journey, this road of trials.

We're trying to give the feeling of what is possible. And then we'll, you know, I'd like to see whether we can create a groundswell, public groundswell among nine-year-old girls in this country for a better, a better version of Little Mermaid. A retelling.

The real one. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Next time on Revisionist History, The Little Mermaid done right. Ariel? It was you. It was you all along.

Duh. Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle, Leemon Guistou, and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton, and Ananain. Our editor is Julia Barton.

Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flan Williams, and engineering by Martine Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Amy Gaines. Our voice actors are Paris Glasgow and Melina Rose. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Heather Fane, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig,

Daniela Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming a Pushnik. Pushnik is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for $4.99 a month.

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