REASON MAGAZINE’S PETER SUDERMAN: Forget Woke Snow White. Disney’s Remake Is More Like Socialist Snow White.
[Snow White] is indeed a trainwreck. The problem isn’t that it’s woke. It’s that it’s awful—and lamely, bluntly socialist.
The remake’s big idea was to twist the idea of the word “fair.” See, in earlier versions of Snow White, an evil queen asks a magic mirror, “Who is the fairest of them all?” It’s always the queen, until one day the mirror responds that it’s actually her stepdaughter, the Princess Snow White. The question, “who is the fairest,” in other words, has always been a question about beauty. But in the remake, there’s something else going on. The movie goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the queen isn’t fair because she’s not a socialist. I am not kidding.
The film doesn’t quite use that word. But early in the film, Snow White encounters a handsome thief named Jonathan in the castle. Jonathan is the leader of a group of bandits who live in the woods and survive by stealing food. He feels justified in stealing because he and other ordinary people have very little while the queen has a lot and she won’t share.
This isn’t just a generic lesson in being kind. Later, after Snow White takes up with seven computer-animated dwarfs in the forest, one of the dwarfs explains that the bandits in the woods are “only there because of the queen’s greedy economic policies, which forced them there into a liminal space where ethics are harder to define.” This might not be a precise word-for-word quote—the line gets spat out so fast I am not certain I transcribed it exactly right—but it’s pretty close. This is a movie about how stealing is justified because of the evil queen’s economic policies. She’s not fair, you see, because her privilege and selfishness have impoverished ordinary people. It’s Snow White by way of Occupy Wall Street.
And now we know why Disney cast arguably Hollywood’s most prominent Jewish actress in the role of the Evil Queen. Or as Jim Treacher tweeted:
Though to be fair, between Zegler’s hatred of Israel, and the casting of Gadot as the capitalist Evil Queen its all pretty on-brand for Disney:
The slow speed it takes both to produce individual movies and for Hollywood to jump on new trends has long bedeviled the industry. One of the themes of Peter Biskind’s classic Easy Riders, Raging Bulls look at how the Young Turks such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, John Milius and ultimately George Lucas and Steven Spielberg got their feet in the door is that in the mid-to-late 1960s, the aging original Hollywood moguls were all in a doomed quest for a repeat of the mammoth box office of 1965’s The Sound of Music, even as audiences were growing increasingly sour on traditional musicals. When Antonioni’s Blowup, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey became surprise hits, the old moguls scrambled to find people who had some clue what those crazy “young people” in the audience wanted to see. (The trend would repeat starting in 1977, when now-corporate-dominated Hollywood was caught completely flat-footed by film that had unexpectedly massive legs: Star Wars.)
But moviegoing was still an ingrained habit in a world before VCRs, let alone streaming. In 2025, there will be lots more woke-era product dumped out by studios. But what comes next in an industry full of TDS, in thrall to the CCP, and conversely, a loathing of flyover country — but not their cash?