The Brothers Grimm wrote Snow White 200 years ago as a story of love and friendship overcoming vanity and self-regard. Hollywood today has apparently traded the “love” part for some girl-boss “leadership” content.
Promising “a modern edge” to the classic, actress Rachel Zegler said, “It’s no longer 1937. ... She’s not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.”
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The modern moviegoer, at this point, is forgiven a sigh or eye roll.
This new Snow White will probably be pretty good. Adapting venerable folk tales is a great American folk tradition. Walt Disney and his writers altered the Brothers Grimm’s original, partly by adopting the twists thrown in by the 1912 Broadway musical version (such as giving each of the seven dwarfs a name).
But not every last movie needs to be given a feminist twist, and not every story needs to be about leadership and individual triumph.
We already have the mermaid Ariel to sing the virtues of expressive individualism. If they wanted a “great woman” leadership story, the filmmakers could have remade Atlas Shrugged.
“She’s not going to be dreaming about true love,” to be sure, is an accurate representative of the modern mindset. Americans, like much of Western Europe, put individual achievement over family formation.
Never before have fewer Americans been married: Only 53% of adults were married in 2019, way down from 67% in 1990. That massive decline is not just about legal nuptials, but it’s about decreased romantic pairings in general.
Never before have more people been alone. An epidemic of loneliness — living alone, having few friends, and being unwed — has even garnered the attention of our surgeon general.
And never before have young people been more accomplishment-oriented and less connection-oriented. A 2018 poll of teenagers found almost all agreed that “having a job or career I enjoy” was important or very important, while only about 40% said the same about getting married or having children.
By definition, not everyone can be or should want to be a leader, but almost anyone can hope to find true love.
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Our problem seems to be too much individualistic self-actualization and too little self-giving. In such an atomized culture in which dating apps, sexual predation, and obsession with material success have made love hard to find, why would you turn a love story into a leadership story?
Let Snow White be Snow White. We can only take so many Dagny Taggarts.