Do You Believe in Fairytales?
I like fairytales. A spectacle of music, colorful villains and a kiss of true love powerful enough to cut through that wall of thorns surrounding the castle where the cursed princess is waiting for her prince charming to come and save her. A deeper insight into the original stories shows it wasn’t meant to be child-friendly at all. A bit like chocolate which was bitter and not that tender on your palate when it was originally brought to Europe. So we mixed in milk, sugar and fruits, getting hooked on the sweet concoction since 1875. Walt Disney got us hooked on fairytales he harvested from the heritage of Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. It worked impeccably because we now associate characters like Snow White and Cinderella with him instead with the German 19th century book Children and Household Tales.
Europe is full of castles that inspired the creation of Disney World like Neuschwanstein in Germany built by king Ludwig II of Bavaria as his retreat. It embodies a Wagnerian fantasy in which the country is full of dark forests, ornate medieval castles and sorcerers. Of course, rulers that devote more time to their fantasies than to politics usually don’t get a happy ending, like Shah Jahan. He built Taj Mahal as the world’s most famous monument to immortal love. The decadent German king would have enjoyed living in our modern times obsessed with identity aesthetics and canonising cause champions of the past whose ideology has been carefully re-arraged to fit one’s own ideas to add them more historical gravitas.
The difference being that Ludwig’s castle sits on top of a monumental forest and Disney’s Cinderella’s Castle in the middle of a theme park with Micky Mouse and Donald Duck instead of Sir Lacelot and Sir Galahad. The sanitized bubble in which we keep our children and their imagination rarely allows a glimpse of the cruel truth behind harmless tales that they are served.
A scene where Mother Goat slits open the big bad wolf, fills his stomach with stones and subsequently kills him to avenge her children is not for the faint-hearted, let alone innocent children and their unspoilt imagination. The sadistic nature of revenge in Grimm’s narratives is justified as a triumph of good over evil though it’s sometimes equally evil in its ultimate form. It begs the question: what gives victims the moral upper hand if retribution is almost as sickening as the crime itself? Do we have to turn into savages ourselves in order to defeat them? Is there any way to preserve our sanity in the face of it? There seems to be little doubt.
In terms of European culture, no one can match Hollywood’s capacity to distort and dismember it beyond recognition. Terry Gilliam’s film The Brothers Grimm with Heath Ledger and Matt Damon is a big-budget sledgehammer that turned important German literary heritage into an action movie that’s conceptually as flat as a pancake. Imagine Michael Bay’s Bad Boys in baroque puffy shirts instead of bulletproof jackets. That’s how bad it is. Storytellers set the stage for further literary developments that would eventually led to greats like Shakespeare, Russian Realist or Franz Kafka. That’s why you can hardly get through the educational grind without at least a short brush with the Divine Comedy or Crime and Punishment.
Whatever your attitude to it, it serves a better purpose than just cultural paraphernalia for pub quizzes. We can dismiss it all as a yet another form of postmodernism by now as innovative as pineapple on pizza but there’s so much more if you only focus on the source written by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Brothers, academics and philologists published their milestone book in 1812 as the result of a their research and collecting authentic materials. Since censorship was even then almost as bad as today, some vaguely sexual details were omitted, but readers certainly weren’t spared the parts bordering on snuff. It’s also indicative of a different approach to women in literature compared to today.
Unlike Rapunzel, girls today see the world as a patriarchal minefield for empowered women that don’t need a man to save them from harm. Each and every one is as strong as the Hulk with confidence and body to match. So he got his female equivalent She-Hulk and we’re probably not very far away from a new New Testament with an all-female cast. The Grimms created a much more textured picture of women where they’re equally capable of good and evil. Not necessarily always the innocent princesses locked up in a tower but also the witch holding the keys to her cell.
Humans are complex beings and this provides them with that mysterious allure in the first place. In other words, there’s a prince in every monster, which is especially pronounced in The Beauty and the Beast. Its Disney adaptation even snatched the best picture Oscar nomination in 1991 as the first ever animation to do so. But the praise was certainly deserved: Angela Lansbury’s Mrs Potts remains a benchmark performance in the genre, making Emma Watson’s Belle in the live action film seem underwhelming in comparison.
We still need fairytales because they are a promise of justice in a time where there’s few reasons to believe in it. In perilous waters even a fictional raft will do, at least for a moment. You can read certain premonitions into it. Snow White’s rotten apple could be a symbol of a crisis where healthy food is a privilege instead of a universal right. They teach us that sometimes a bigger power can actually work in favor of the ordinary people even if our reality persistently denies it. Its superiority is warranted by its treatment of those not edowed with it by default. The tale of the creation of the cave underneath a medieval castle in the Croatian city of Pazin is a good illustration.
The castle prominently sits on the cliff above it, seemingly about to fall over. According to it, desperate locals asked a giant called Dragonja to help protect themselves from the surge of water threatening to drown the city. The giant kicked with his foot into the ground which opened up and a cave was left behind into which the river Pazinčica now descends. I had the opportunity to stay in a house close to the cliff that felt like a box with a good view in a grand theatre. You certainly don’t need to believe in fairytales to admire the supernatural beauty of the sight unfolding underneath your feet so dramatically. I wonder what the great storytellers of 19th century Europe would have made of this. However it did find its way into literature though it might have had been a backdoor rather than a grand entrance.
It was the famous French author Jules Verne who opened them in his novel Matthias Sandorf, parts of which take place in Pazin. When you enter the castle, I hate to admit you feel similarly like Heath Ledger on whom it dawns that he’s possibly facing something much more profound than his own mind can comprehend. Though reason keeps getting in the way of it, it’s quite compelling to entertain the thought that one day in distant past, an unhinged giant crept straight out of a book and metaphorically put his foot down in a small town that needed his help.
A book of fairytales sits on my nightstand. It won’t make me believe me in them or happy endings, of course. But better safe then sorry. It can at least remind me of a time when I did. And it doesn’t matter. The imperfect reality we live rarely adhers to a predictable pattern that’s the axis of what Brothers Grimm have put together for us to appreciate and enjoy through centuries as a source of solace, inspiration and joy. You’re certainly unlikely to find darker elements of their work in places like Disney World. But at least you can expect a photo with Goofy since imaginary Istrian giants are too far away. I promised myself one someday, and I don’t intend to die before.
It’s never too late for Magic Kingdom, since it’s as close to the Kingdom of Heaven they tell you about at Sunday School as can be. I usually preferred my Sundays in an amusement park with ice cream for lunch and Space Mountain for those whose imagination can’t reach the stars. Not that I ever needed help with it but it’s good to know it’s still there. In the meantime, there’s Google Earth and its drones but nothing beats the real thing.
Who knows what the future brings. It might as well be just around the corner, just like a fairytale. And if you’re lucky, there’ll be a Mama Goat you can count on when the big bad wolf comes to visit. Maybe you’re just unaware of it. Sometimes having two evil sisters is better than being an only child, even if the shoe fits and your happy end is just a kiss away. Even those that don’t need it could do with a really dirty one. Emma Watson’s Belle would probably never do it, but fortunately real people are not afraid to occasionally misbehave.
