As Elsa’s palace of ice crystallized on the mountain, her song reached out and spoke directly to me. It wasn’t magic she was singing about, it was my own experience with creativity versus my own fear of the expectations of the people around me. That fierce joy of finally ignoring my fear and letting the stories out, of facing the danger of non-conformity, the danger of being powerful - I might as well be dancing around commanding water to become architecture, because that’s exactly what it feels like: dangerous, risky, powerful, but also glorious and thrilling and free.
But what’s that, you say? Frozen wasn’t an allegory about my own personal longings and fears? Then was Elsa, perhaps, singing about being a closeted homosexual?
Okay, so I hope that whatever your feelings on the matter are, that the blog I have linked to will give you a chuckle. Stories are like a bucket that we fill with our own priorities. There is no inherent sub-level of meaning to Frozen, like a dark basement hidden under the floorboards filled with treasure or corpses. The movie could as easily be about Elsa’s repressed desire to be a vegetarian as about sexuality or creativity. Frozen is a story about a girl’s relationship with her power and with the people around her - and that is all. Any other meaning that we see is what we, as the audience, bring with us to the theater.
Incidentally, there is a great deal of meaning in Frozen that isn’t any way hidden, but that nonetheless gets overlooked: in going from complete repression of her power, to letting it loose without restraint, Elsa becomes the villain. Personally, I adore the movie for precisely this reason: real people are rarely the heroes that we want to be. We make mistakes that put us in the role of the villain, too, and shouldn’t our stories reflect that? Shouldn’t we learn not just to strive to do the right thing, but to be sympathetic with ourselves when we fail? Elsa’s flirtation with darkness is what makes Frozen so powerful as a story, but I get the feeling that this isn’t understood on a conscious level by many of the movie’s admirers, children and adults alike. I think a significant swath of Disney’s audience is willing to swallow whole anything that the company creates, without thinking critically about it.
Heck, I think the same holds true for most literature for children. Because it is published, and because it is for children, it is safe. Like a pool that has no need of a lifeguard. . . .right?
Now, I happen to believe that stories for children are powerful, and that anything powerful can be so in a positive way or a negative way. I look forward to tearing into some examples of powerfully harmful stories for children. But, that is an essay for another day. But for now, back to Frozen. For a more comprehensive look at Let It Go, see this.
But, of course, if any of this “meaning” stuff in stories was obvious or simple, we wouldn't still be debating the meaning of the Taming of the Shrew five hundred years after it was written. Whether it was a misogynistic screed, or a mockery of the men who want to control women, Shakespeare never said. And neither does it matter. The play, when considered without the extra confusion of directors and actors, has whatever meaning that the reader brings to it.
A writer can’t control what ideas their audience will put into the story-buckets they craft. But a skilled author can anticipate what the audience will bring to the story, and shape the bucket to hold one particular idea better another. C.S. Lewis’ the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, was written specifically to hold Christian themes. But because these themes were not explicit, a non-Christian reader can quite by accident put their own entirely different meaning into the story.
A skilled writer can also deliberately construct a story to hold wildly contradictory meanings. Consider, for example, one of the most divisive English-language children’s books: Shel Silverstein’s the Giving Tree. He was not surprised by the success of the book, even though it was loved (and hated) by readers for very different reasons. In particular, the popularity of the Giving Tree exploded among Christians who interpreted the story as a positive parable, with the tree representing God or Jesus. Meanwhile, another slice of the population loved the book as a cautionary tale of a relationship gone wrong, be it a relationship between a parent and child, two lovers, or people and the environment. Given that Silverstein was already a skilled professional satirist when he decided to move into the children’s book market, I would conclude that he deliberately sculpted the bucket of his story to hold both interpretations, and had a nice long laugh at the expense of his audience.
There is also power in allegory: the power of plausible deniability. Garth Williams’ 1958 book about the wedding of two rabbits is sweet and harmless - and yet after its publication it was removed from general circulation in the library system of Alabama because - dun dun dun - one of the rabbits was white, and the other black. Williams denied that there was any hidden message about integration in the Rabbits Wedding - but was he just covering his butt?
A copy of the Rabbits Wedding sits on my shelf now precisely because of its “hidden message,” whether or not Williams intended it to be there. The place of honor next to it is filled by The Giving Tree, not because I agree with any one of its interpretations, but because I admire its empty bucket quality with which all interpretations are welcomed in, whether I like those interpretations or not. And I will continue to hold my own precious interpretation of Frozen - because it makes the movie so personal to me. Because stories are about the meaning that we give to them. Without an audience, a story is meaningless.
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