Woke “Snow White” Abandons the Fairy Tale’s Christian Roots

Growing up in a home of overly competitive board gamers, it isn’t surprising that I am now a board game nerd with an acquired taste for overly complicated Euro-style board games. But there is a charm to the simple games of yesteryear – such as Would You Rather? – that you can find on the shelves of big-box retail stores. In this game, the reader reveals a card presenting two horrendously icky or painful or terrifying actions, and then the other players try to guess which one the reader would choose.

I thought about this game recently when I was asked to review the new Snow White film, and what horrendous things I would rather do than sit through all one hour and forty-nine minutes of Disney’s latest live-action flop. Since I don’t own a brutally honest magic mirror, I consulted the closest alternative I could find: my wife.

My dear, my dear, of blunt wherewithal
What is fairer than watching Snow White, wall-to-wall?

To this, she answered:

Eating pizza topped with cicada husks.
Scratching upon chalkboard, from dawn to dusk.
Tightrope walking between two skyscrapers.
Trapped on the toilet with only sandpaper.
Across the land, these and countless terrors –
Are yet, my love, a thousand times fairer.

I was satisfied with this answer, for I knew my dear spoke truth. But, like the royal huntsman, I was required to shoulder this grim duty. And while (like the huntsman) I was tempted repeatedly to flee the theater and feign completion of my analytical task, I forced myself to complete the grisly vivisection. But before dissecting the new Snow White, let us first recall the various ways in which the original story (and in some respects, the 1937 animated classic) was quickened by deeply biblical and Christian themes and imagery.

In the original story from the Brothers Grimm, a queen prays for a child “white as snow, red as blood, black as ebony,” which she is granted, but the queen dies. The king remarries a beautiful woman who – in her pride and arrogance – can brook no rival to her beauty and obsessively seeks affirmation of it. The queen is revealed to be “godless”: a satanic figure who manifests a particular form of disordered self-love. She does not see her physical beauty as a gift to be offered to the glory of God and the good of others but as her possession by which she demands the praise of others as a sort of goddess, a worldly renown that is telescoped into the magic mirror’s words.

The fairytale explores how the capital or deadly sins feed off one another. After the mirror tells the queen that Snow White is fairer, her pride is said to grow together with envy “like a weed in her heart.” The queen’s pride, as we have seen, is a kind of excessive self-love in which she ascribes to herself excellence above her station – i.e., not under God.

Snow White can thus be seen as an Eve-like figure, who is created in innocence and radiant beauty, and outshines the Luciferian one who misused the beauty God first gave her. Hence, Snow White’s creation stirs envy in the heart of the queen, which is a sorrow for the good God has bestowed upon another. And this is followed by wrath: a hateful desire of vengeance to be visited upon the girl and the God who gave the gift of surpassing beauty to another. And this is followed by gluttony, for the evil queen proceeds to eat what she believes to be Snow White’s lungs and liver. After learning she has been tricked, the queen repeatedly tries to infiltrate the dwarves’ domicile to tempt and kill her, like the demon with designs upon the wayfarer’s soul. That the queen is a demonic figure is underscored by her use of witchcraft to ensnare Snow White.

The story even subtly evokes specifically Catholic themes. The number seven is repeated throughout: Snow White’s beauty fully manifests at seven years old, seven dwarves live across the seven mountains, and their house is furnished for seven. (And notably, in contrast with the animated film, Snow White finds the dwarves’ house orderly, “so neat and clean that no one could say otherwise.”) The numerical motif hints not only at how the queen embodies the seven deadly sins and Snow White the seven cardinal virtues, but it is also suggestive of the Catholic priesthood. The Catholic priesthood fulfills the Levitical priesthood, whose consecration and ritual duties are rife with the number seven (e.g., Exodus 29:35 – 37; Leviticus 4:6, 8:33). The Catholic priesthood embodies the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and guards and administers the seven sacraments, to succor the wayfarer.

The seven dwarves – who are not named for emotional states in the original story – can thus be seen as a metaphor for the priesthood. When Snow White arrives beleaguered and exhausted, she eats “a little bread from each little plate, and from each mug she drank a drop of wine,” after which she “entrusted herself to God,” before falling asleep. The dwarves return and discover the young maiden. As the Catholic priests provide the Eucharistic nourishment to the Christian in the refuge of the Church, so the dwarves promise the continued nourishment of bread and wine and the protection of their cottage from the wilderness. And, like a pastor who exercises his teaching office to guide the spiritual life of his flock, the priestly dwarves also offer counsel to Snow White about how to guard against “the godless queen” when they are away.

Like Satan’s temptation of Eve, the queen offers Snow White a poisonous apple to which, despite the dwarves’ warnings, Snow White succumbs. Even the wayfarer quickened by the sacraments – the soul made beautiful by God, white as snow – is frail and can be deceived. And only the coming of a Man – of a loving prince – can ultimately save all who have fallen asleep under the curse. The dwarves prepare and adorn the sleeping maiden with a funeral rite to await the Lover who can resurrect her.

Unsurprisingly, the new Snow White film abandons or obscures most of the biblical and Christian themes and imagery that made the original story great. It is apparent the backlash to leaks from the set and the woke gaffes from the actress portraying Snow White (Rachel Zegler) led Disney to rewrite and rework parts of the film. The original remake apparently had a sharper “modern edge”: a girlboss plot of a plucky young heroine who dreams not of Prince Charming but of leading a political revolt against a tyrant at the head of her crew of diverse “magical creatures.” Disney brought back the dwarves and forest animals through CGI (which now seems to mean Cringey Grotesque Images). And they shoehorned a semi-romance back into the story. The result is a messy combination of identity politics aimed at late modern audiences with some quasi-traditional elements sprinkled in. We are left with something akin to when small children mash together different colored chunks of Play-Doh.

In an astonishingly wooden performance, Gal Gadot plays the evil queen. While the vices of pride and envy are certainly present, they seem to take a back seat to chiefly political vices such as over taxation, conscription, and imposing cruel and unusual punishments. And Snow White’s virtues – fearlessness, bravery, fairness – are keyed on political justice. Rachel Zegler’s performance is serviceable – she clearly is a talented singer – but there is only so much the actress can do with such a poorly written script.

Snow White defies the queen by freeing the handsome, roguish bandit Jonathan – who claims to fight for the mysteriously disappeared king, Snow White’s father – from a cruel punishment. It is this act that changes the mind of the magic mirror that Snow White is the fairest. Huh? If the mirror – which proclaims to be bound only by what is “true” – is the arbiter of fairness in the sense of beautiful moral character, how did Snow White’s quiet and humble service as an unjustly enslaved scullery maid not garner the mirror’s notice? How is it that Snow White’s assistance of the resistance is a sufficient act of political virtue to make her fairest, but the queen’s tyranny was insufficient to make her morally ugly in the mirror’s eyes? This is just one example of the incoherencies generated by transforming Snow White’s virtues into those of a political revolutionary.

If the original story is at least in part a metaphor for the dramatic contest between the divine lover and demonic hater of the soul, the animated film cloaks the metaphor behind the veil of romantic love, particularly in the tunes “I’m Wishing,” “One Song,” and “Someday My Prince Will Come.” On the level of romantic love, the traditional Snow White sees herself as radically incomplete without a husband – and when read in light of the spiritual economy and the plane of divine love, her soul longs for God. This acknowledgement of the need of marital and divine friendship is characteristic of traditional Snow White’s humility.

The late modern Snow White cuts all of this out. The main theme song of the film is “Waiting on a Wish.” No longer is the beloved waiting on her Lover. Snow White is now waiting until she has the strength to make her own girlboss wishes come true.

Will she lead or just be led? . . .
Someone who could finally start
Start speaking with a fearless heart
Someone who just might be brave
Someone no one needs to save

The implication is that a different sort of pride is good – a self-sufficient political pride in which the oppressed scullery maid rises up against the tyrant and takes the throne. True, Snow White promises to undo the evil queen’s tyrannical policies, and “fairness” is not merely the queen’s diktat. But the guise of “fairness,” which seems to actually be a kind of sentimentality, only obscures Woke Snow White’s own disordered self-love.

Hence, Snow White practically has to be forced to stay with the dwarves, who are largely relegated to charmless and feckless appendages to Snow White’s path to self-empowerment. She leaves the dwarves’ cottage after just one day to seek out the resistance fighters, whose story arcs we neither know nor care about and who are largely background figures to Jonathan.

While he is also mostly irrelevant to Snow White’s arc, the screenwriter deigned to give Jonathan the job of waking Snow White up from the apple’s poison with an awkward kiss laid partly on her cheek and partly on the corner of her lips. Doubtless, Woke Snow White had mixed feelings about being kissed without her signed and notarized consent. No profession of love is made – no desire or plans for marriage expressed. Instead, the not-prince quickly disappears from the screen so that the climactic final confrontation can take place, in which the empowered Snow White defeats the evil queen and assumes the throne.

Thankfully, Disney does not go so far as to turn Princess Snow White into Mulan, a warrior assassin. So how does she effect the revolution? With a deus ex machina march to the palace, protest speech, and bloodless coup so implausible it should make even the writers of Superman: The Movie blush. (That was the one where Superman flew around the earth really fast to reverse time.) The final scene – an utterly cringeworthy mass dance scene in which everyone is dressed in white for no apparent reason – is not the celebration of a marriage but of the girlboss who asserted herself, made her own wishes come true, and didn’t need saving (except, of course, for that nonconsensual kiss).

With such inane and incoherent storytelling, is it any surprise that Snow White has been a disastrous flop at the box office?

In all honesty, I wasn’t as strong as I implied earlier. I took a couple of my daughters with me so I wouldn’t have to suffer through the film completely alone. Afterward, I asked them:

My dears, my dears, hearken my call,
Would you say this movie was fair, or not?

They replied:

The movie itself was decidedly not,
But it was fair to have a date with our pa.

I was satisfied with this answer – in any “either/or” that involves a date with my daughters, one choice is always a thousand times fairer.