Moving forward with the times: learning from and with Frozen

In her seminal work from 2001 All about Love: New Visions, the feminist scholar Bell Hooks notes:

There are not many public discussions of love in our culture right now. At best, popular culture ist he one domain in which our longing for love is talked about. Movies, music, magazines, and books are the place where we turn to hear our yearnings for love expressed. Yet the talk is not the life-affirming discourse of the sixties and seventies, which urged us to believe „All you need is love“. Nowadays the most popular messages are those that declare the meaninglessness of love, ist irrelevance. [...] Youth culture today is cynical about love. And that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling that love cannot be found. Expressing this concern in When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, Harold Kushner writes: „I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it not work out. I am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy.“ Young people are cynical about love. Ultimatey, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.’ (Bell Hooks, All about Love: New Visions, New York: Harper Perennial, 2001, pp. xvii-xviii)

Taking Hooks’ groundbreaking statement about the cynical attitude towards love of current media representations of humanity and nature, femininity and masculinity, war and peace, technology and emotions, truth and integrity, this article approaches Frozen (Walt Disney Pictures, directors: Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee), released in the year 2013 and enthusiastically acclaimed worldwide. Frozen seems to play an important role in the redefinition of femininity as a site of acceptance and compassion, instead of an active interplay of competition and power, as the feminist discourse and the historical reality modeled by that discourse has been constructing it for the past six decades. Equally important, Frozen tackles the problematic of femininity and its position in late modernity, while bringing into foreground the narrative foundation of old legends and folk tales. In soft tones of emotional transcendence, it obtrusively displays parables on the risk and responsibilities of uncontrollable power in the hands of individuals, and provides symbolic undertones of female empowerment through the prism of the weight of personal choices in the midst of increasing popularity and solitude, so that, ultimately, Andersen’s fairy-tale becomes a space of longing, and paradoxically, belonging.

In elaborating the complex dialectics of assertive power and compassionate empathy as represented in Frozen, I’ll move across three stages: firstly, in an initial explanation elucidating the technical data, I refer to its intrinsic characteristics, its idiosyncracies and specificities, both as a product of popular culture emerging in a specific geographical area and within a particular historical moment, and as a media-submitted reflection of a status-quo which crumbles under the weight of political correctness and cultural identity as ongoing individual projects. Secondly, I strive to connect late-modern feminism and feminist slogans with the original ideals and claims of proto-feminists and its reflection in Frozen – and what was, and still is, at stake when feminism is approached as a battle field, a “semiotic guerilla-war”, instead of an opportunity for growth and communication, an interface for understanding and cooperation, a spiritual journey in the quest for authenticity and love. Thirdly, in the conclusion, I focus on the interplay of Western and Eastern identity paradigms as reflected in products of popular culture such as Frozen and in its representation of femininity as the driving force for progress and enlightenment. As it will become obvious alongside the analytical explanations further below, the intricate, dialectical relationship between love, empowerment and identity construction as discursive products are actively negotiated by means of cultural production, marketing, consumption/perception and reproduction. This relation implies three main strategies – emotional ambivalence, the dynamic reconsideration of legends and myths, the subtle highlighting of the spiral-like dialectics of cause and effect – employed in the process of reconstructing the past as a repository of emotional energy and socio-cultural role-models, beyond economic-political compulsions.

The power of vulnerability: Frozen and the victory of the feminine love

As a high-caliber institution of the entertainment industry, Walt Disney Pictures has been establishing clear production standards, both ideologically and aesthetically, in delivering its products within the all-too competitive market of popular products. As to be shown further below, Frozen was released in a historical context in which a series of events at various levels – cultural, social, economical, political and not least technological and educational – had led to an increasing pressure to redefine “gender roles” in practical terms which would allow larger segments of the population to choose and to learn to cope with the new realities of the 21^st century. Intentionally or not, Frozen reiterates well-known plots based on an old fairy-tale while committing to a process of re-semantization of the plot through the creative employment of the characters and their interactions. Thus, there is a two-fold structure of significance: firstly, femininity and its core element “love”; secondly, identity and the function of “love” as a manifold force.

Loosely based on The Snow Queen, a Danish folk tale collected and re-written by Hans-Christian Andersen in 1845, Frozen extracts from its original the Nordic setting, some trolls and the basic idea of sorcery, but gives the powers of wintry transmogrification not to an evil queen, but to the elder of two sisters – Elsa, a blonde, brooding princess, who is born with the ability of turning anything she touches into ice. The story in Frozen opens with icemen from the kingdom of Arendelle harvesting ice, among them a young boy named Kristoff and his pet reindeer, Sven. Elsa, Princess of Arendelle, possesses cryokinetic powers, with which she is able to produce or manipulate ice, frost and snow at will. One night while playing, she accidentally injures her younger sister, Anna. Their shocked parents, the king and queen of Arenelle, seek help from the troll king, who heals Anna and removes her memories of Elsa’s magic. The royal couple isolates the sisters in the castle until Elsa learns to control her magical powers, warn her against ever revealing her powers, for fear it will be misunderstood. Afraid of hurting Anna again, and with her ability to control her powers deteriorating, Elsa spends most of her time alone in her room, refusing even to speak to Anna and a rift develops between the sisters as they grow up; when the girls are teenagers, their parents die at sea during a storm.

The process of re-writing Andersen’s story with the focus on the two royal sisters while making it a box-office success, involved a new approach to individualism and feminism, less aggressive, but still assertive in their reflection of socio-cultural reality in late modernity: it was supposed to combine both the direct references to the targeted audiences and the necessary links to the initial setting, while keeping alive its enticing mysteries and the fantasy environment (it also softly reminds of Tangled, another Disney great hit, and perhaps also remotely hits Broadway musical Wicked in mind, particularly for US-American audiences):

Hans Christian Andersen’s original version of The Snow Queen is a pretty dark tale and it doesn’t translate easily into a film. For us the breakthrough came when we tried to give really human qualities to the Snow Queen. When we decided to make the Snow Queen Elsa and our protagonist Anna sisters, that gave a way to relate to the characters in a way that conveyed what each was going through and that would relate for today’s audiences. […] There are times when Elsa does villainous things, but because you understand where it comes from, from this desire to defend herself, you can always relate to her. […] We do try to bring scope and the scale that you would expect but do it in a way that we can understand the characters and relate to them. (producer Peter Del Vecho, in an interview with Brendon Connelly „Inside the Research, Design, and Animation of Walt Disney’s Frozen with Producer Peter del Vecho“, in Bleeding Cool, September 25, 2013, retrieved May 31, 2017)

There are three episodes in Frozen which depict stages of maturing femininity while taking into account the necessity of communal responsibility and personal accountability.

1. The first episode is Elsa’s coming-of-age celebration, when the kingdom prepares for her coronation. Excited to be allowed out of the castle again, Princess Anna explores the town and meets Prince Hans of the Southern Isles; the two quickly develop a mutual attraction. Despite Elsa’s fears, her coronation takes place without incident. During the reception, Hans proposes to Anna, who hastily accepts. However, Elsa refuses to grant her blessing and forbids their sudden marriage. The sisters argue, culminating in the exposure of Elsa’s abilities in an emotional outburst. It is a moment of crisis, of open conflict between the two sisters, with uncontrollable repercussions: Declared a monster by one of the quests, the Duke of Weselton, a panicking Elsa flees the castle, while inadvertently unleashing an eternal winter on the kingdom. High in the nearby mountains, she abandons her restraint, vowing to never return to her kingdom, and builds herself a solitary ice palace, during the title-song Let It Go.
   
   
2. A second sequence of vital importance in the unfolding of the growing-up process is the moment when Anna and Elsa reunite in Elsa’s ice castle high in the mountains. Elsa refuses to return to her kingdom, still fearing that she might hurt her sister. When Anna insists that Elsa join her, she becomes agitated and her powers lash out, accidentally striking Anna in the heart. Horrified, Elsa forces Anna, Kristoff and Olaf to leave by creating a giant snow creature named Marshmallow that chases them away from her palace. As they flee, Kristoff becomes concerned when he sees Anna’s hair turning white. He seeks help from the trolls, his adoptive family, who explain that Anna’s heart has been frozen by Elsa, and that unless it can be thawed by an „act of true love“, she will become frozen solid forever, and eventually die. Believing that only Hans can save her with a true love’s kiss, Kristoff races back with her to Arendelle. As the result of their open aggressive confrontation, Elsa’s powers evolve again outside controllable dimensions, and within this release of tremendous forces, she hurts the very person she wanted, in fact, to protect. It is a brutal lesson in humility and self-discipline: those very abilities which make us special have the unlimited potential of destroying us – and, most importantly, those around us.
   
   
3. The third episode of fundamental importance in the heroines’ increasing awareness of their position in the world is the final confrontation between Elsa and Hans, after she had escaped and had been heading out into the blizzard on the fjord. Told that her sister is dead because of her, Elsa sinks in quiet desperation, while the storm suddenly ceases, giving Kristoff and Anna the chance to locate each other. Nevertheless, Anna, seeing that Hans is about to kill Elsa, throws herself between the two just as she freezes solid, blocking Hans’ attack, and thus saving her sister from a deadly blow. As Elsa grieves for her sister, Anna begins to thaw, since her decision to sacrifice herself to save her sister constitutes an “act of true love”: it was by giving, of herself, of her own life to a loved “other” that she could find a way to break the irreversible spell. Elsa realizes thus that “love”, unconditional, deep-going, meaningful love, is the key to controlling her powers, and in a sudden insight of her own ability to care and hope, she thaws the kingdom and gives Olaf his own personal flurry so he can survive in summer.
   
   

There is more that a silent revolution in terms of bold feminism in Frozen: there is the discoursive, media-reinforced message to be true to oneself, to believe in oneself and to search for solutions within oneself (while observing the environment and learning from ongoing experiences). Indeed, Elsa and Anna are Disney princesses per se, with dishy suitors and glamorous gowns, but in Frozen, being a typical princess is solely a superficial layer in the process of creating a credible fantasy universe in which tales are told and lessons are taught in a comprehensible, yet entertaining manner. While Anna learns the hard way that there is no short-cut in love and in pursuing one’s true heart, expectations and feelings of entitlement included, Elsa has to learn to forgive and accept herself, to “let go” of past pain and responsibilities beyond her level of maturity, and to enjoy her life as a continuous journey amid those she loves and cares about. At its very core, Frozen turns, thus, into a rhapsody of life and love with the profound message of savouring the “little things” which count, after all, the most.

Femininity re-discovered: Frozen’s necessities and challenges

At its very origins, feminism started out in an effort to re-capture femininity from the all-consuming jungle of industrialization and urbanization, the two main elements of modernization. Proto-feminists saw themselves in cross-fires within a society rapidly changing, which required both women’s reproductive and educative abilities and their skills to be employed at the workplace – a workplace patterned upon male necessities and ambitions, to be sure, in factories and ports, in coal-mines and on ships, in the building-industry and on the fields. In the historical context of a brutal and increasing de-feminization of women as potential members of the active workforce and of the male-dominated environment of the political, medical, technical/technological and cultural discourse, the intellectuals among women at the turn of the 20^th century and in the subsequent decades initiated a counter-movement targeted at disclosing female citizens as equal to the male ones, but different in their biological and emotional structure(s). The main ingredient within this discourse was “love” as the core element of the female identity, which erroneously was interpreted by the mid-century generations as equaling to “sex”, and to the “sexual revolution” being seen as the climax of female liberation and empowerment. What proto-feminists meant through “love” is, though, what sociologists would identify later on as the “missing link” in late-modern societies, which drives its members to loneliness, isolation, alienation: a vital force residing within the human being, the catalyst of all emotions and actions, connecting the universal energy and the individual aspirations into one powerful flow of intent, which consequently leads to profound bondings both on the surface of the social network and in the depth of the family cell. More concretely speaking, “love” as it is referred to in terms of gender affiliation to femininity, is that ineffable strength which exists deep-down in women and allows them to be mothers and educators, thus protecting the species from its own extinction, even in times of economical recession, political destruction (wars) or social disintegration.

The reconsideration of the concept of “love” as the core element of female identity and the very force which instigates female spirituality, its re-capturing by means of products of popular culture appears as the main focus in Frozen and draws on three main ideas:

1. Firstly, there is the failure of the paternal figure and, generally speaking, of the classical family model. It is good to remember instead that works of popular culture rarely deal with functional families and communities, but rather with dysfunctional structures. Parental love appears as a means to restrict and condition children, and leads those children into inevitable crises which might, eventually, strengthen their sense of self. In Frozen, the emotional needs of the children are not met, as the kids are advised “to conceal, not feel”.
   
   
2. Secondly, there is the failure of romantic entanglements as the solution to all evils. Elsa clearly shows that she does not need any man to help her out of her situation and lead her to find her own place in the world. Rather, Elsa’s fulfilment as an individual results from the transcendence of gender limitations and the sublimation of her own fears, mainly by acknowledging that runaway and loneliness is not an alternative to Elsa’s unlimited powers. The only control one might have over circumstances is one’s own reaction to them and the power to move on.
   
   
3. Thirdly, the solution proposed by Frozen is one of astonishing simplicity: it is indicative of that moment when the necessity and inevitability of building an own identity become imperative, accompanied by an urgent sense of self-awareness and responsibility. Elsa learns that runaway is no solution and no alternative to facing the realities of growing up and of confronting the outer world with one’s innermost yearnings and desires – and fears, for that matter, as well. She understands that accepting oneself leads, inevitably, to accepting the others, on one hand, and on the other hand, to a deep-going sense of authenticity and pursuing a life in which the self is free to love and to live.
   
   

The most important element in the construction of individual identity as the result of a process of constructing an own individual identity is, thus, an in-depth crisis followed by a conscious commitment towards one’s own self, ideals and flaws included, independent of outer compulsions. Overcoming the individual levels of self-questioning and self-recovery, this process of identity construction might find its completion in two ways: There is the utopia in Frozen, with the revival of the community and the restoration of the family, as it is sisterly love which saves the frozen kingdom. Altogether, Frozen scores points mainly for its originality in the tender acuity with which the relationship between the two sisters is observed. Suffice to say that for once, sisterhood feels like an abiding interest of the filmmakers and not a tacked-on afterthought. Mapping the contours, twists, intimacies and estrangements of siblinghood – a surprisingly underexplored subject for Disney – Frozen draws real, recognizable plumb-lines and casts a lingering spell.

Thus, individual fulfillment and a clear sense of self emerge from “love” as what one could call an “invented emotion” intensively negotiated by proto-feminists in their quest for a working definition of femininity and its features, its necessities and its challenges – as well as its ideals. It allows for transfer of significance in historical terms, which leads, in its turn, to socio-cultural affiliation as the result of conscious choices on the basis of everyday events and accumulated life experience. Emotional ambivalence delivers the impetus to intellectual activism transgressing time and space. Social actors, as Pierre Bourdieu put it, grow into responsible, self-aware citizens. More than being a plain animated bildungsroman in terms of classical education and formation, Frozen creates aesthetic-ideological spaces where the overcoming of loss and fear leads to the creation of the mature individual, embedded in historical reality, which turns, again, into a site of responsible, self-aware citizen participation. The responsible, self-aware citizen becomes able to live in the moment and to respect life as the most precious asset one possesses and could ever posses. Thus, instead of running away without looking back and rejecting any sort of responsible awareness, the “feminine self” of late modernity accepts its role as part of a larger community – and emerges from within this very community as a messenger of love, of gratitude and of forgiveness as well as of the power of remembrance.