The Little Mermaid 2023 Swaps Wisdom for Woke

 

The Little Mermaid 2023

Folklore, Hans Christian Andersen, and Corporate Race Commodification

 

A hundred years ago, in the foothills of the Tatra mountains, a peasant woman was warning her daughter.

 

"Pavlina, when you grow up, you are going to have babies, like I had you. After you give birth, don't leave home until it is time for you to be churched. You will hear someone outside, calling your name, oh so sweetly. Don't be fooled when you hear that sweet, seductive voice! Whatever you do, don't go outside till you are churched!"

 

Pavlina had no idea who would call her name, tempting her to go outside without being churched, but she vowed to resist.

 

"And beware," momma said, "of the one that lives in the river under the bridge!"

 

Pavlina always felt so tempted to dive into the Nitra's cool, glistening waters.

 

"You can go into the Nitra as long as the sun is out," momma said, "but if you are near the river under the moonlight, don't let him lure you in!"

 

"Who, momma?"

 

"The Hastrman! The Hastrman lives under the bridge and he'll drag you in if you go near the river at night! We'll never see you again!"

 

Pavlina believed when she was a little girl in Slovakia. "But I don't believe it any more," my mother said, after telling me these stories. "Do you?" she challenged me.

 

Yes, I do. I believe in the kernel of truth in folklore. Churching kept my grandmother from returning to work in the fields immediately after giving birth. It granted religious sanction to her rest and recovery. The isolation protected her and her vulnerable neonate from possibly disease-carrying visitors. The Hastrman "preserves souls of drowned people in enclosed mugs at the bottom of the pond." Hastrman folklore about a water-dwelling, humanoid creature communicated deep wisdom and necessary lessons.

 

Disney's Little Mermaid cost $250 million. It was released on May 26, 2023. It is a live-action remake of Disney's animated 1989 Little Mermaid. Both films are based on a literary fairy tale by the prolific and beloved nineteenth-century Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. Mermaid 23 is an enjoyable film and beautiful to look at, but it fails to convey the wisdom found in mer-people folklore.

 

"Literary fairy tale" means that "The Little Mermaid" is not a traditional tale that was handed down over the centuries by common people telling oral tales in communal settings. Andersen used folkloric material about mermaids, but he invented the plot and introduced his own obsessions into it.

 

Andersen's autobiography begins, "My life is a beautiful fairy tale." "Twenty-five years ago today I arrived with my small parcel in Copenhagen, a poor stranger of a boy, and today I drank chocolate with the King and Queen," Andersen would say.

 

As a child, Andersen would "glean," that is collect waste grain that the landowner had missed during harvest. "The bailiff … was well known for being a man of a rude and savage disposition. We saw him coming with a huge whip in his hand, and my mother and all the others ran away. I had wooden shoes on my bare feet, and in my haste I lost these, and then the thorns pricked me so that I could not run, and thus I was left behind and alone. The man came up and lifted his whip to strike me."

 

Andersen's father was "ill and broken" – mentally and physically – after fighting in Napoleonic wars. His mother, an illiterate washerwoman, rather than calling a doctor, sent Hans to a witch, who merely promised a ghostly vision, but no healing. The father's "corpse lay on the bed: I therefore slept with my mother. A cricket chirped the whole night through … 'The ice maiden has fetched him,'" Andersen's mother said. Andersen's grandmother said to her grandson that it would be better for him if he died, too, given that, without a cobbler father, he was now doomed to even worse poverty. Andersen's mother, an alcoholic, died in a poor house. His half-sister may have been a prostitute, like his aunt.

 

Young Hans went to work in a textile mill. He had a great singing voice and entertained the workers. All went well for a while, but then bullies grabbed him by his arms and legs and called him a girl. He ran and never returned.

 

The naïve, heartbreaking hope of Andersen's characters, and the cruel crushing of their dreams, his tales' masochism and maudlin quality, are all rooted in Andersen's biography. "The Tallow Candle" is a typical Andersen hero. The candle is beautiful and pure. It yearns to touch a larger world. With "the brightest expectations" the candle dreams of "a bright and splendid future." It would "keep and fulfill" its promise and live up to expectations. The candle "threw itself into life" seeking "the place where it best belonged …  But the candle had far too much faith in the world." The world is cruel. "Black fingers left bigger and bigger stains on the pure color of innocence." "False friends" throw the candle away. The candle is heartbroken and confused. Andersen makes the reader feel sorry for a candle.

 

In "The Fir Tree," Andersen makes the reader cry over the fate of a tree. "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" makes you cry over the fate of a toy. The tin soldier, and the toy he loves, a ballerina, both end up being burned, just like the fir tree and the candle. Reading "The Nightingale," you can cry over the fate of an underappreciated bird. In "Lucky Peer," a child is kidnapped by fairies and told "Everyone you know and love outside these walls is dead. Stay with us! Yes, stay you must, or the walls will squeeze you until the blood flows from your brow!"

 

In "The Little Match Girl," a bareheaded and barefoot girl trudges through snow, begging rich people to buy her matches. They don't, and she freezes to death. The End.

 

"Shivering with cold and hunger, she crept along, a picture of misery, poor little girl! The snowflakes fell on her long fair hair, which hung in pretty curls over her neck. In all the windows lights were shining, and there was a wonderful smell of roast goose … she sat down and drew up her little feet under her. She was getting colder and colder, but did not dare to go home, for she had sold no matches, nor earned a single cent, and her father would surely beat her. Besides, it was cold at home, for they had nothing over them but a roof through which the wind whistled even though the biggest cracks had been stuffed with straw and rags."

 

As she is dying, the girl hallucinates – as did Andersen's father as he died. "She was sitting under the most beautiful Christmas tree. It was much larger and much more beautiful than the one she had seen … through the glass door at a rich merchant's home. Thousands of candles burned on the green branches, and colored pictures like those in the printshops looked down at her. The little girl reached both her hands toward them. Then the match went out. But the Christmas lights mounted higher. She saw them now as bright stars in the sky. One of them fell down, forming a long line of fire. 'Now someone is dying,' thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star fell down a soul went up to God." In the morning, passersby see "leaning against the wall … the little girl with red cheeks and smiling mouth, frozen to death."

 

Andersen's work reflects the ugly poverty, powerlessness, abuse and despair of his brutal childhood, and the childhoods of millions of poor children across Europe before the modern era and its relative wealth and comfort. In Denmark, when Andersen was born, life expectancy was 40 years, and thanks to war and cholera, it decreased to 35 years.

 

For a really morbid, tearjerking, five-handkerchief wallow, read "The Little Mermaid." A mermaid wants to enter the human world. A witch grants her wish, but only after ripping out her tongue. As the mermaid walks on land, she feels as if knives are penetrating her feet. She sacrifices all this for a prince who cannot love her. She is offered the chance of returning to her mermaid existence if she will stab the prince to death. She chooses suicide. The end.

 

Andersen's characters' intense yearning so often brutally crushed – the burned Fir Tree, Steadfast Tin Soldier, and Ballerina, the Little Match Girl who freezes to death, and the Little Mermaid who kills herself – all of whom yearn for a better life and are simply destroyed by the heartless, careless, unthinking whims of those more powerful than they – are reflections of the agonies of the poor.

 

We aren't supposed to know about those poor, because they were white. A new narrative crushes down upon us. We must acknowledge that all whites have white privilege and that no white person can begin to understand what suffering is. Further, no white person has ever, through hard work and great good luck, improved his own lot in life, as Andersen did. We are absolutely forbidden from telling the story of the many Horatio Algers who started with nothing, engaged in humble self-discipline, self-sacrifice, and hope, and ended up, if not drinking chocolate with the king and queen, at the very least enjoying home ownership, regular meals, the vote, and education for their children. Now the Horatio Alger narrative is condemned as racist, as having "done damage" to "people of color."

 

In our new narrative, we are to believe that anyone who has been a victim of injustice has the right to "burn down this system and replace it" as BLM leader Hawk Newsome threatened during the 2020 George Floyd riots. Just like Newsome, Andersen critiques injustice. Reading "The Little Mermaid," you can't help but note what a creep the Prince is. He is insensitive and exploitative. And he doesn't even realize it. He smiles at everyone, but not the Little Mermaid, because he doesn't realize that she's the one who saved him from drowning. After she sacrifices everything for him, he keeps her as a slave. He kisses her, strokes her hair, and lays his head on her bosom, but has no intention of marrying her. He actually lectures her about the ocean. Talk about mansplaining! But she loves him so much she acts as if she is impressed. In a completely insensitive move, he tells the Little Mermaid how much he loves the princess he is about to marry. You can read this as Andersen, a gay man, yearning for love he will always be denied. But you can also read this as how Denmark's rich treated Denmark's poor. The Prince here is equivalent to the rich folk who walked past the Little Match Girl as she is freezing to death.

 

Andersen offers suffering readers hope: this world is not all there is. Those who suffer will be redeemed in ways that are not visible in this world. The Little Mermaid, after her suicide, which she assumes will obliterate her forever, since, as a mermaid, she lacks an immortal soul, is rescued by benevolent spirits who promise her eternity on the condition that she does good deeds for three hundred years.

 

In other Andersen tales, salvation is more overtly linked to Christianity than it is in "The Little Mermaid." The Little Match Girl, as she dies, is carried to heaven. In "The World's Fairest Rose," a queen is dying. Being a queen, she has a collection of the best roses in the world, but her enviable garden is not enough. Only the titular fairest rose, a rose that expresses "the brightest and purest love," can save her. A wise old man declares that the salvific rose "is not the rose from the coffin of Romeo and Juliet … It is not … the sacred blood that flows from the breast of the hero who dies for his country … Nor is it … the magic flower of science." It is not "the brightest and purest love [that] blooms on the cheeks of my sweet child when it opens its eyes after a refreshing sleep and smiles at me with all its love." The fairest rose, it turns out, "sprang from the blood of Christ shed on the cross … He who sees this, the world's fairest rose, shall never die!"

 

Sarah is "The Jewish Girl." She is discriminated against in a Christian school. She won't convert, so she is forced to leave, even though she is the brightest pupil. Poor and lacking an education, she becomes a live-in servant. She is a pillar of the family she serves, who sink into poverty with family deaths and illness. Her mistress asks Sarah to read the Bible to her; Sarah complies. She is impressed by Jesus, but refuses to convert. After her death, Sarah is denied burial in a Christian graveyard. Andersen, of course, does not end the story there. He insists that a Christian Heaven has a place for Sarah, the Jewish girl. "God's sun, which shines upon the graves of the Christians, shines as well upon that of the Jewish girl."

 

Not just Heaven is comfort for the abused protagonists of Andersen's work. There is also the fantasy of retribution. There's a tale-within-a-tale inside "The Jewish Girl." Sarah's master reads this story aloud one night to the family; Sarah listens closely. In this story, a Hungarian knight is kidnapped and enslaved by Muslim Turks. The Turks are brutal to this knight. They yoke him, as if he were an ox, to a plow. They beat him and refuse him water, even as he works in hot sun. The knight's wife sells everything she owns to ransom her husband. "Sick and suffering," he returns home. There is another war. The feeble knight is lifted onto his war horse. After his victory against the Turks, "The very pasha who had made him suffer pain and humiliation … became his captive." The captured Turk tells the knight that he, the Turk, must now suffer "retribution."

 

The knight replies, "'Yes, the retribution of a Christian … The teachings of Christ tell us to forgive our enemies and love our fellow men … Go in peace to your home and loved ones, and be gentle and good to all who suffer.'"

 

The Turk "burst into tears … 'I was certain I would have to suffer shame and torture, hence I took poison, and within a few hours I shall die … But before I die, teach me the faith which is so full of such love and mercy; it is great and divine! In that faith let me die; let me die a Christian!'"

 

Andersen knew his readers, the wretched of the earth, probably would have liked to get revenge on the powerful who hurt them. But he showed them that the path of "love and mercy" is the better way. The knight is not just a good Christian who foreswears revenge. He is also more powerful than the pasha. The pasha succumbed to the basest impulses. The knight controls not just the pasha, he controls himself. No doubt a Marxist would want to burn Andersen's books that offer "the opiate of the masses." Some Marxists do condemn Andersen; some want to claim him as a proto-Marxist.

 

"The Little Mermaid," the inspiration for two blockbuster Disney films, was not the creative flower of Disney studios. It was not a generic folktale told by people around the world. It was created by Hans Christian Andersen, a nineteenth-century Dane, born in poverty, who rose to great success. It reflects his culture, his Christian religion, and his obsessions. It can be read as reflecting the oppression and alienation of the poor, and also as reflecting Andersen's own emotional agony as a lonely homosexual. Like every other work of art, it deserves respect for its author, its milieu, and its audience.

 

Disney's 1989 Little Mermaid was a "resplendent" film that ushered in the "great Disney animation Renaissance," a period of "aesthetic and industrial growth." The Little Mermaid "established a pattern" for excellence in animation that would restore a floundering Disney to its throne as a major aesthetic and economic force in American culture. It won two Oscars and numerous other awards, and spawned lucrative products like toys, sequels, and a Broadway musical. Mermaid 89 marked both the first and last time for the use of animated film technology, as well as box office firsts, and it was very well received by critics. Mermaid 89 holds the record for the most money made in the initial run of an animated film. Critics award it a 92% positive score at Rotten Tomatoes. At the Internet Movie Database, fans young and old, male and female, gush about seeing the film for the first time, and then introducing it to their own children. In short, Mermaid 89 matters a great deal to many people's cultures, tastes, bank accounts, and hearts.

 

Disney posted a trailer for its new Little Mermaid on YouTube on September 9, 2022. In this live-action remake, Ariel is played by Halle Bailey, an African American singer. As night follows day, anyone who didn't welcome a live-action remake of an animated classic was labeled a racist. Anyone who didn't admit that America is a racist nation that heretofore has denied every good thing to black people and that Disney was performing a religious act by lifting up poor, oppressed black Bailey was certainly a "Racist!"

 

Racists do not elect a black man to the presidency, twice, and do not, year after year, vote for his wife as one of the most admired women in America. Racists do not elect black governors, mayors, and congresspeople. Racists do not catapult numerous black sports and show business personalities into the billionaire category. Racists do not make Black Panther a record-breaking box office phenomenon. Racist universities, churches, corporations, law offices, cultural institutions, police and fire departments do not dedicate millions of dollars, lower standards, and introduce quotas to increase black representation. Racists would not push a black Mermaid to the top of the Memorial Day box office, and racists would not hand Mermaid 23 the "fifth best Memorial Day opening" of any movie ever, even after the pandemic shuttered theaters and when audiences aren't returning in the numbers of the past.

 

Why, then, do Woke elites chomp at the bit to accuse Americans of being racists? Three reasons.

 

One, Woke elites rush to shout "Racism!" because it makes them, Woke elites, feel superior. American elites have jettisoned, and now demonize, the Judeo-Christian tradition. Their new religion is Woke, and they are the glow-in-the-dark saints and angels. The rest of us normal Americans are demons. By lording it over us, they imbibe the sweet ambrosia of sanctified superiority. Every time they call us "racist," they feel better about themselves.

 

Reason number two: they hate us. They hate us for living in uncool places. They hate us for our average-ness. They hate us because hating us, again, reminds them of how superior they are. They hate us because hating us cements their in-group ties.

 

Reason number three: power. Woke elites peddle a narrative that puts them at the top of their hierarchy and blacks at the bottom. "Oh, you poor sad, black person. You live in a racist country. There is nothing you can do to help yourself. You have to vote for our allies. They will give you money so you can survive, because you are incapable of earning money yourselves. Be grateful to us, your saviors, and vote Democrat."

 

Woke elites' accusations of racism epitomize straw man viciousness. Hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people worked hard to explain why the Mermaid 23 trailer irked them. Some were fanatical fans of Mermaid 89 and didn't want a live-action remake of an animated classic because so many live-action remakes have disappointed the audience. Others were simply sick to death of Woke litmus tests.

 

Others voiced more complex reactions. Woke and critical race theory have, in recent years, mandated a distortion of the liberatory American trajectory. Turn back the clock to the Civil Rights Movement. Look at archival photos: you'll see whites and blacks, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, marching together. And not just marching. Whites like Viola Liuzzo, Reverend James Joseph Reeb, seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner gave their lives to uphold the civil rights of their fellow citizens. Other whites, like James Zwerg, were beaten within an inch of their lives for their work for civil rights. Still others, like Nelson Rockefeller, gave large sums to the Civil Rights Movement; on one occasion, Rockefeller provided an MLK representative with a suitcase jammed with one hundred thousand dollars. Celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, and Charlton Heston marched and took other actions to advance civil rights. White and black Americans alike celebrated and worked for the dream where all Americans "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

 

Our previous religious foundation advanced a universal ethic. Genesis gave us one loving God who created the ancestor of all humanity, making us all siblings. The New Testament gave us the Good Samaritan and Galatians 3:28. Those ideas fueled the Civil Rights Movement and also the Abolition of slavery, a unique accomplishment in world history. Rejecting our foundational religions, the Woke elite have reverted to Pagan tribalism. Divinity, righteousness, the holy and the good, the precepts for behavior, are now to be found not in a universal, loving God, a universal law, a universal understanding of rights and responsibilities, but in tribes. Whites, all whites, are tainted with white guilt, white fragility, white supremacy, white privilege, white tears, white violence … and on and on.

 

Initiatives like the 1619 Project work to erase white abolitionists and white civil rights workers. Students in American schools want to renounce whiteness because they see the only authentic identity, the only worthy culture, the only sanctified tribe, is non-white. They have learned in school that to be black is to inherit a rich culture created by strivers, creators, and achievers. Sixty years ago, we were all supposed to embrace both Beethoven and Bird – Charlie Parker – as pinnacles of a civilization we all shared, we all benefitted from, and we all contributed to. Now Bird is black, no longer a product of the tainted West, and white people cannot claim him. Beethoven is problematic.

 

In schools, and through media, black kids are told that they are the inheritors of magnificence, including distinctly non-black historical figures, like Jesus, Cleopatra, Alexander Hamilton, and Queen Charlotte, who are now black. White heroes who can't be made black, from Christopher Columbus to Thomas Jefferson, must be demonized. Their statues must be torn down and defaced, along with those of Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian immigrant who gave his life to ending slavery, and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish Revolutionary War fighter who made significant contributions to the Abolition movement.  

 

If the Woke had any compassion whatsoever, or even just any curiosity, they would see why audiences might scoff at Disney's choice to depict a Danish literary heroine as black. A simple analogy would make the problem as obvious as a ten-foot-high neon sign. Disney releases a trailer for a new live-action film based on the West African trickster tales of Anansi, the clever spider. Anansi will be played by Ryan Reynolds. Disney releases a trailer for a live-action treatment of Papa Legba, the intermediary between supernatural beings and humans. Papa Legba will be played by Johnny Depp. Disney releases a trailer for a feature film about John Henry, a folkloric African American hero who "died with a hammer in his hand." John Henry will be played by Brad Pitt. Disney releases a trailer for a film about Yemaya, the Yoruba sea goddess worshipped in Santeria. She will be played by Jennifer Lawrence. And Disney releases a trailer in which Taylor Swift plays La Llorona, the Mexican water spirit.

 

There would be blood. Productions would be halted; feature films, shelved. Disney would grovel. David Remnick, Eric Deggans, Trevor Noah, pretty much every last columnist at the New York Times, and hundreds of other talking heads would jump on Disney like mosquitoes on a camper's shins. Disney studios might very well go under.

 

Thanks to Woke, we live in a tribal world, and Yemaya belongs to black people, and nobody else. Those insisting on that monopoly will point out that Yemaya was created by black people under a given set of circumstances that must not be blurred, and that Yemaya reflects black people's particular pain, creativity, and joy. These same people will never point out that the Little Mermaid was created by a poor, gay, Christian Dane, under a given set of circumstances that must not be blurred. Rather, the very same Woke who erect "Do Not Enter" signs around ownership of Yemaya erase the history of white poverty and white disempowerment behind stories like "The Little Mermaid." All whites must be seen as powerful oppressors. The yearning the Little Mermaid expresses must not be a universal yearning. That yearning must be made to belong exclusively to a black girl yearning after a white prince and singing plaintively that she yearns to be "part of your world."

 

I read hundreds of online protests against Mermaid 23. I encountered outrage at any change to Mermaid 89. In that film, Ariel's sidekicks include a seagull named "Scuttle." In Mermaid 23, Ariel's avian sidekick is a northern gannet named "Scuttle." Northern gannets are also large, mostly white birds who live at sea. Fans are outraged that the gull was flushed and the gannet was given a whack at stardom. "Stop changing movies we love," one fan protested. "Make something new. But it seems Hollywood is so void of talented writers these days their idea of 'new' is ruining our beloved memories."

 

Lengthy audience reviews go through the movie point by point and object to almost everything except Halle Bailey's skin color. Clearly these reviewers are huge fans of Mermaid 89. I can include only a few quotes, but these quotes give a sense of audience reaction.

 

"I only went to see the movie because of my daughter and we can both say that this movie did not live up to our expectations," one frequently upvoted fan review says. "The first thing that majorly bugged my daughter and I was all of the unnecessary changes that they made to the movie. They took everything out that made the original so beautiful. Prince Eric never had parents in the original, his father passed away before the movie starts and that's why Grimsby is desperately helping Eric look for a Wife so he can become King … Why now all of a sudden insert his parents into the movie? … As for the music changes, they absolutely infuriated me. It was completely unnecessary to have all of these new lyrics. Why have Ariel sing in Under The Sea? The whole point of the song was that Ariel disagreed with Sebastian … And are you kidding me that the Daughters of Triton song was removed? They even renamed the sisters! Didn't feel like we were watching The Little Mermaid at all but more of a huge ripoff of it. And don't event get me started about that Scuttle song, it was HORRIFIC!" There are many more such outraged reviews, protesting changes to the original, beloved film.

 

I watched Mermaid 23 during the first showing on the day it opened. I was in the theater at 10:15 a.m. with a lot of little kids. The film is 135 minutes long. Including coming attractions; I was in the theater for three hours. The kids mostly sat still and applauded at the end, so I'm guessing that they enjoyed it. I saw an adorable black girl, maybe five years old, hugging her black Little Mermaid doll. I want that girl to enjoy that doll and if a black Little Mermaid onscreen does wonderful things for her, I rejoice.

 

Mermaid 23 opens with stubble-faced, toothless, cackling, white sailors attempting to harpoon a mermaid. Disney is poking us in the eye. Black mermaids good; white sailors bad; if you object we'll scream "Racism!" and get a zillion more dollars in free publicity. The bad, bad white sailors speak with Cockney accents. It's specifically poor white people, then, not all white people, who are bad. Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), a white prince, prevents the bad white sailors from killing the mermaid. Eric speaks with a posh accent. He is clean-shaven and has nice teeth. Later in the film Prince Eric will announce that he is "trying to reach out to other cultures so we don't get left behind." Rich Woke white guys, good. I know that young girls tend to like wispy, androgynous young men. For me, Hauer-King was weak tea. I think he'd be better cast as Chopin, the androgynous composer, as he was dying of tuberculosis.

 

Ariel swims in a very brightly colored, very busy ocean. There are all kinds of sea creatures and sea animals. Javier Bardem appears as Ariel's father, Triton. A great WHITE shark – yes really – tries to eat Ariel. A crab sings a song about how great it is "Under the Sea" as sea creatures dance along; the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater provided motion capture for this scene. The dancing sea life reminded me a lot of the dancing kitchenware from the "Be Our Guest" number in Beauty and the Beast.

 

Ursula, a wicked sea witch (Melissa McCarthy) magically transforms Ariel into a human so she can unite with her beloved Eric. The evil witch is fat, as was the evil witch in Mermaid 89. Yes, it is still okay to equate fat with evil. But never fear – there is still room to be offended. Ursula's appearance is based on drag performer Divine. Drag performers are angry that a real drag performer, instead of an actual woman, was hired to play Ursula. If you'd like to participate in that protest, please take a number and get in line.

 

A fisherman, black of course, rescues the magically humanized Ariel and takes her to meet Eric. Ariel can stay human if Eric will kiss her sincerely within three days – evidently we haven't yet discarded all Christian allusions. Eric wants to but Ursula assumes human form and seduces him. Then there's a big hullabaloo underwater with Eric, Ariel, Ursula and Triton. Ariel impales Ursula on a ship's bowsprit. Little boys and girls, we will learn about phallic imagery when you get to college. The pretty girl kills off the fat girl with a symbolic phallus – and this is A-OK with Woke. In the final scene, sea creatures and humans hold a party to celebrate Eric and Ariel's wedding. "Our worlds have misunderstood each other for so long," but not any more.

 

Mermaid 23 is very pretty to look at, and "Kiss the Girl" was a highlight, but the movie is long, busy, and bloated. The single-line narrative – mermaid meets boy, mermaid loses boy, mermaid gets boy – is undermined. I enjoyed Mermaid 23 well enough, but I didn't feel the Disney magic, as I did when watching, say, the animated 1991 Beauty and the Beast, another girl-oriented love story between a human and an animal.

 

I think, again, of my grandmother warning my mother about the Hastrman. My mother would eventually attempt to swim in the Nitra, and almost drown. She was rescued by her neighbor, a boy named Cohen, who would later be murdered by Nazis. Why do I say that I believe the stories of the grandmother I never met?

 

It's not just that humans are terrestrial, and water is not our element. It's not just that drowning is all too common. There's more to that Hastrman belief. Even in my mother's abbreviated retelling, I can sense the element of seduction. If the moonlit Nitra were not seductive, my grandmother would not have to warn my mother against it. Over two thousand years ago, Odysseus felt that seduction. He poured wax into his sailors ears to deafen them to the seductive song of the sirens. The sailors then tied Odysseus to the mast so that he, with no wax in his ears, could hear the song but would not follow that song to his doom. When Odysseus heard the sirens, he begged to be released. He was seduced. His sailors kept him bound, thus saving his life.

 

European folklore is full of stories of love between humans and human-appearing magical creatures. These tales end tragically. A young girl like Ariel, on the brink of adulthood and sexual maturity, wants to break from childhood, from the safety of home and family. She is lured by an alien world full of temptations. Some temptations, if you follow them, kill you, just as surely as they killed the Little Mermaid in Andersen's tale. Even if a girl makes all the right choices, death looms. The adolescent will die to girlhood. She'll leave her natal home and never return. Her parents will die before she does. Her bonds with her siblings will never be the same. My mother left her village and entered America's coalfields. These folktales, as irrational as they may seem, inform us that there are boundaries in life we should never cross, and there are boundaries that we can't avoid crossing, boundaries that we can never uncross. You really can't go home again. Both the sweet seduction, and the bleak tragedy in these tales resonate in human souls, generation after generation, for very good reasons.

 

Disney was willing to force child audiences to confront heartbreaking truths when it killed off Bambi's mother, when Travis shot Old Yeller, and when Mary Poppins flew away alone. Mermaid 23 concludes with the mer-people and the humans partying together in a soggy visual lecture on tolerance and multiculturalism. Javier Bardem, as Triton, rises out of the ocean. Bardem, in his Triton costume, without the transformative backdrop of Disney's psychedelic ocean, looks ridiculous. For appearances sake alone, he should have remained underwater. Triton promises Ariel that he will aways be there for her. The thing is, he can't be. No parent can promise always to be there for a child on the cusp of adulthood. It's not just that Triton will eventually die. He is an aquatic creature, and Ariel will live out her life on land. She may never see her father again, just as my mother never saw her loved ones after she immigrated to America. Disney thinks that in this final scene it is conveying something scared: multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is all well and good, but all the Woke in the world can't make up for the missing big truths found in the simplest folklore about doomed love between worlds.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery