Polar Art in the age of Polar Politics: How Disney made a shit movie and knew exactly what it was doing

I've never liked Bud Light. I don't drink beer much, and when I do, I usually have to pick something a pure beer drinker would turn their nose up at in order to enjoy it. But we bought some Budweiser recently. It might never get drunk. That's because even though I'm not entirely on board with every talking point from the trans-rights camp, I thought the Budweiser boycott was so over-the-top and so disgusting, I had to help offset the costs Budweiser had incurred somehow. 

Of course, I'm never going to drink enough Budweiser to make up for the loss of its core customers. If you'd asked me a year ago if I'd lament the market loss of Budweiser, I'd have said no. I don't think it tastes very good, and I've never been able to understand why it's the default American lager. I also was never going to be able to support the NFL enough to make up for its loss of fans when some defected over the choice of players to kneel during the national anthem. The cost to the bodies of players makes me an ambivalent fan, and I never watch much other than the playoffs, even though I think football itself is a very compelling game.  

And I would never, ever have dreamed that there'd be a time in my life when I'd end up feeling obliged to defend Disney. If I were asked to think of a stereotypical evil corporation, Disney might be near the top of my list. Not because they're part of a conspiracy to usurp power from world governments, but because they own damn near everything in entertainment and that's just not good for people who want good art. But here I am in the two thousand and twenty third year of this here Christian era, having no choice but to root for them in the mother of all stupid feuds, because...well, I guess because Disney is more on my team now than the other guy down there in Florida. 

A shitty movie I'm forced to root for

I went to see the new Little Mermaid last week for a birthday party. The parents booked a theater. I myself have no idea why Disney has been cramming live-action (and by "live-action," I mean almost entirely gaudy CGI) versions of its 90s hits down our throats. Well, I mean, of course I know. It's--to use a phrase nearly a million people on the Internet have already used--a cash grab. (Most of these references differ only in which adjective they attach to "cash grab"--joyless, soulless, cynical, etc.) I really like the parents, though, so we went. There was also, as I'll get into below, another reason to go. 

I haven't seen any of the other recent remakes, so I was willing to at least give this one a shot, but it was worse than I feared. Very early on, I pulled out my phone to look up how long the run time was. It's 45 minutes longer than the original. By fate, my former spouse was a fan of the 90s Disney movies, so I'd seen the original many times. I'm not going to say I loved it, but at least you could say that what it did, it did concisely. 

I don't really want this post to become a review of Little Mermaid, but here are some things I hated about it:

-The CGI was awful. Somehow, Disney spent 250 million dollars making this thing and managed to make it look like an adaptation of a play that only had three sets in the original production. They didn't know what to do with all that money, and it shows. The people barely look human--or mer-human-- in the underwater scenes.  

-There is very little interesting visual development of the underwater world. For example, during Ariel's first big solo (which doesn't finally appear until like 20 minutes of the movie have gone by, even though it's the setup for the whole conflict), rather than get a lot of wide visuals that both develop the underwater world and give the audience a sense of the breadth of her ambitions, we get an endless series of face closeups. We get it. She looks wistful. Show us something else. As it is, that scene is classic tell-don't-show fallacy. 

-The frequent dark shots were strange. The big number, "Under the Sea," is almost the only color palette we get under water that's not incredibly dark, and then it's over-the-top garish. Ariel no longer comes from a happy world that's troubled by the Sea Witch. She comes from an oppressive world, and it's a wonder why it took falling in love to get her to leave. (I'd include a photo here to show what I mean, but Disney terrifies me, so I'm not going to even try for fair use of their photo.) 

-Did we need Eric to be developed? Part of the reason the show is so long compared to the original is that they decided to develop both Eric, the prince Ariel falls for, and his world. In fact, we see a lot more about the island he comes from than we see about Ariel's underwater world. But one of the things I like about the original is that it's a gender reverse of a lot of children's stories, in which the prince rescues the maiden. Often, the maiden has no real voice, personality, or agency. It doesn't matter what they think, because they're there to be saved. In the original movie, it's the reverse--only Ariel's interior life matters. It was a woman's story talking to women. I can see why someone thought it necessary to let us know why Ariel falls for this guy so much that she's willing to risk it all, but there was far too much bloat with the additions. 

-Sight gags that were just flat. 

Colorblind casting

I also don't want this to be a post about colorblind casting. If you've never heard of this term, feel free to Google it and lose the rest of your day reading about it. It's a big topic, certainly beyond me to do it justice. There are plusses and negatives to it, and it's not just conservative reactionaries who hate it. There are a lot of liberal who aren't fans, either. That's not surprising, because most liberal thought has moved away from espousing color-blindness as a model for racial equality, even though when I was a young person, color blindness was the "woke" position. En Vogue's "Free Your Mind" encouraged us to "be color blind," for example. It's strange to me that there are conservatives who object to colorblind casting, because it probably fits their proposed solutions to racial strife more than it does liberal solutions. 

But because there were people objecting to Ariel only on account of the fact that she was played by black actress and singer Halle Bailey, liberals were pushed into a position of having to defend the show. As a Vox article pointed out, it was pretty similar to what happened with Amazon's Tolkien-ish cash grab "The Rings of Power." (One thing Americans did not pay enough attention to, by the way, was how much Asia resisted a black Ariel. American public discourse probably does not give our country enough credit for not being the most racist place on the planet. But I digress.) 

For the record, I think colorblind casting does make sense in some cases. There have been some critics who particularly opposed it in the musical "Hamilton," but I think there's a case for that being the right venue for it. "Hamilton" isn't a period piece. It's a musical that's somewhat farcical, albeit still very serious. It's an interpretation of the meaning of America through song. That belongs to all of us, so if you want a black actor to play Jefferson, do it. The same thing with Shakespeare. Our local Shakespeare company has an all-black troupe. It also often casts women or non-binary actors in male parts. Cool. Great. Don't care. It's our common cultural possession. There's room for traditionally cast performances and non-traditional ones, too. As long as somebody is still performing Shakespeare, I'm happy. In "Rings of Power," we were (sort of) in Tolkien's legendarium, which is now nearly as much of a common cultural heritage as Shakespeare, so colorblind casting makes sense there, too. The show sucked, but not because it had black dwarves. Dwarves aren't real, so there can't be a "wrong" color for them. Also, one of the real problems reading Tolkien is how often "black" is used as a synonym for "evil." I have no problem with an activist attempt to mend this flaw. 

Intentional and absent-minded uses of color

In "Little Mermaid," I think we're in about the same place we are with "Rings of Power." Mermaids aren't real, so there's no wrong color for them. In fact, I kind of liked that all of Ariel's sisters were different races. Since they're supposed to be from the seven seas, it would make sense that each of them has a different outward appearance that mirrors the different qualities of the oceans of the world. Good. 

But "Little Mermaid" is kind of a story about prejudice. Ariel's father's prejudice toward humans is a direct cause of all the conflict. So maybe it wasn't right to use colorblind casting? In Eric's human island world, he is a white adopted child of a black mother who rules the island. There are a mix of people of color and white people in the island's society. There's nothing wrong with this, but maybe "Little Mermaid" is a story that called for a more intentional use of color in order to heighten the themes relative to prejudice going on. Maybe the mer-people should have been mostly people of color and the land people mostly not? Or vice-versa? 

It's not of great importance to me. It's a made-up world, so really, they can cast whoever they want anywhere they want, but in the case of an already sloppy movie, colorblind casting felt more like yet another sloppy detail rather than something intentional. The movie's overall inattention to color made it feel like its use of human color was also not terribly thought out, either. 

However, once there is a backlash specifically aimed at Bailey merely for being a black Ariel, I feel like I have to forget all the reasons I hated the movie and defend it, because as dumb as it was, anti-woke online campaigns are even dumber. Bailey is a very talented singer and and a beautiful young woman, which is about all that's required to play the part. There were ninety-nine reasons to object to the movie, but that wasn't one. 

Commerce, politics, and art

A movie like this from a company like Disney ought to unite right and left in our contempt for it, just like liberals and conservatives ought to both agree that Budweiser does not taste good or that Chik-Fil-A has amazing service or that the NFL produces a great product but at a heavy risk to its players. In our political environment, though, even banal choices like our beer become part of political team sports.   

Disney isn't stupid. Although franchises like the Avengers were cleverly middle-of-the-road in their politics, the company realizes that when it remakes its old movies, there is going to be hate from someone. So they make their choice. Production of Little Mermaid began long before their fight with the governor in Florida, but from here forward, their feud with DeSantis has essentially made it for them. They picked the side that tends to watch more movies. Conservative Christians haven't been letting their kids watch Disney since long before the company first gave health care to same-sex partners of homosexual employees. So if they must choose, that's their choice. 

My lifetime saw the rise in literary theory of the notion that there is no apolitical art. Even the choice to be apolitical is a political choice. This might be true, but man does not live by the bread of politics alone. Art is a primal human instinct, a reaction to the million inexplicable strange realities of existence that affect us all. Art has also always lived under political stress, from wars to censorship to famine. The current political environment, though, has given us a system in which it is increasingly difficult to market art without a clearly identifiable political belief system to sell it to. The insistence that everything is political has effectively made art, race, and politics the servants of commerce. Have an opinion about police treatment of black people? Great! No matter what the answer is, we know what to sell you!

Moreover, this arrangement of commerce and politics encourages a kind of art in which shibboleths to the intended audience are more important than the art itself. Whereas "Hamilton" had colorblind casting and was excellent, "Little Mermaid" had colorblind casting and was terrible. So was "Rings of Power." But it didn't matter. These were art decisions made by committees who saw success in one place and tried to imitate it. When they failed to grasp what made it work the first time, they cried foul, knowing it would force half the public to back them. 

Everyone ought to be able to agree that Amazon and Disney are two greedy companies that made garbage products, but because anti-Woke proponents just couldn't control their racism, it made their political opponents have to change their opinions of the products, at least in public. If people really hate seeing people of color cast as characters they've always thought of as white that much, they ought to at least wait to speak up until after they've seen the product. If it's as bad as "Rings of Power" or "Little Mermaid," the crap product will do their work for them. Decrying a fictional creature being played by a person of color, however, just triggers a political survival instinct and means that people like me are going to go out and buy a ticket--along with some movie-related merchandise for the birthday girl--when we might have otherwise stayed home. From Target, just for good measure.