Another Mormon's take on Disney's "Frozen"

This week another Mormon blogger, Kathryn Skaggs, has taken some flack because she had the audacity to suggest that Disney's movie Frozen promoted the gay agenda.

I don't agree with her.  I think Frozen covers issues that might be personal to gays, but I don't think the film promotes their agenda.

Still, I can completely understand where Skaggs is coming from.

I remember the first time I saw the film (I've seen it twice--because I wanted to see it, not because I was dragged to it by children), I sat with my hands clenched throughout the song "Let It Go" because I expected it to promote a gay viewpoint.

Why would I think such a thing?

Well, partly because it has been so common lately for films and television--especially children's films and television--to provide sometimes subtle, sometimes overt messages that bolster the argument that the only thing wrong with the practice of homosexuality is that society (particularly the evil religious fanatical part of society led by the evil religious fanatical Mormons) does not accept the behavior as normal.  If we all just got together and recognized homophobia (with all its shifting meanings) as the greatest evil in the world today, and if we all recognized that bullying of homosexuals is the single greatest cause of death among all races and classes of adolescents, then we could defeat the evil religious fanatics and begin living in our sexual utopia, complete with free and legal marijuana.

Or something like that.

I feel a little bombarded by the message.  So much so that I have come to expect it.

Why shouldn't I expect a gay agenda in Frozen?  After all, the (straight, married) song-writing team for Frozen earned Tony Awards for The Book of Mormon, a musical whose first incarnations were intended to be a response to the Church's participation in Prop 8.  The cute singing snowman was played by the actor who portrayed one of the idiotic Mormon missionaries, who blunders into doing good even though his religion is one of the stupider ones ever on earth.  The singer who sings "Let it Go" is same one who sang Elfaba in Broadway's Wicked.  (That's fodder for another blog, I suppose.)  I liked Wicked, but I liked it understanding that the book it is based on is written by a gay man whose intent is clearly to suggest that what we thought was wrong is not wrong.  (The musical is usually read as a tribute to the lonely, ugly, misunderstood girls growing up in a world in which the competition is weighted in favor of the beautiful and popular--a reason for its success among  female 'tweens and adolescents.)

Add to that the fact that I have been presented with an almost unrelenting message from NBC that Russia is the most evil country in the modern world--even worse than the former Soviet Union--because they (name two or three things, then add) have anti-gay propaganda laws (then add some other evils, like force people out of their homes to build the stadium). 

If you know too much backstory, it might be hard to see something like "Let it Go" and not see some subliminal pro-gay messages--even if they aren't really there.

Personally, I was very pleased with Disney's ability to focus the talents of those who did Frozen, and make a film that is so beautiful and so positive to all children.  It is, after all, the Christ story--a story of personal sacrifice born of innocent, familial love.  It is the most timeless, important story in the world, told either directly through scripture, or allegorically, through a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen.  

I disagree with Skaggs.

But I understand where she's coming from.

A front-page article in today's LA Times provides fodder for today's blog.  The front-page headline is innocuous:  "A bid to shake up Utah's liquor laws."  On an interior page, blazing across all six columns:  "Tearing down the Zion curtain?"
 
Now, the article is more balanced than the headlines would have one believe.  In fact, if anything, it supports the current Utah liquor laws.  It might be hard to see that, given the incendiary backpage headline and the article's continual reminder that the "politically powerful Mormon Church" controls things in Utah.  But even if I weren't in support of Utah's liquor laws, it would be tough for me to rush to change them because (gasp) they "stymie Salt Lake City's otherwise flourishing culinary scene and slow the growth of the state's $7.4 billion tourism industry."  Or, how about this:  "'It's silly--ridiculous'" that a restauranteur has the aesthetic of his restaurant hurt, or that a bartender has to pour drinks out of view of his patrons.

OMIGOSH!  LET'S TEAR DOWN THE ZION CURTAIN!!!!

Utah is being compared to the former Soviet bloc in a front-page article of the Times--and why?  It's liquor laws are different from California's?  And there is a sinister undertone in the "grandfatherly" voice of Apostle D. Todd Chistopherson because--why?  The Mormon Church favors limiting alcohol consumption?

This one, I confess, is a little easier to follow than some others from this week.  Hollywood has been in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, and when Hollywood can't get its drinks the way it wants them, heads will roll.  The Times is merely helping to roll the heads.

Along these same lines, I wonder why in the world I was led to believe that the Sochi Olympics were going to be the worst since Berlin in 1936.  Or what is so political about climate variations?  Or why, in the midst of the worst drought in 500 years, California doesn't just desalinate water from the largest ocean on earth?  There's a reason for everything, and it usually has nothing at all to do with such mundane things as the Olympics or climate variation or water.  It's usually tied in with someone's financial or emotional or political investments, and the only reason we are supposed to believe that contemporary Russia is worse than the former Soviet Union, or climate change means to vote for one candidate and not another, or there's something wrong with desalinated water (other than the tastelessness) is because somebody somewhere probably has a finger in some pot of money. 

Sonnet for Cindy, Number 17 (Valentine's Day, 2014)

If all I ever said was, "I love you,"
     I think you'd smile at my lack of brains,
          forgive me frankly, turn and love me, too.

I do so want to take the flailing reins
     of all my blindly running thoughts and say
          a sentence worthy of your heart.

                                                    And ev-
en when you let me have my simple say—
     "I love you"—
                           and you're satisfied,
                                                        I grieve
     that I don't know a way more worthy, more
          like poetry to say what you evoke
               in me.

                I have too many words
                                                  —my store
perhaps too rich—
                            and maybe what I spoke
     is all I need to say:
                                 I love you.

                                                   How?

Forever.  Mind and heart and body.  Now.

Vives les Jeux Olympiques!

For some reason, it seems appropriate to praise the Olympics in French.  If my spelling is wrong (it usually is in French, and increasingly in English), tell me soon.  Or let it ride and make fun of me privately.

I love the Olympics.  I have a special affection for the Winter Olympics, having grown up in Siberia--I mean Southeastern Idaho.  We watched the Summer Olympics with a large dose of jealousy.  We knew we could never compete in the summer games because we could never play summer sports long enough to get good at them.

But winter sports!

I mean, I played hockey outdoors.  None of this wimpy, ice dancing in an indoor rink.  Indoor ice was always soft and squishy and just a little wet.  When outdoor ice got that way (sometime around May), we gave up hockey for our summer job of gaining weight for the coming winter.

Those of my friends who could ski (I never successfully did that on snow) could do it year-round in Idaho.  When the snow turned to water, they water-skied (I did that successfully--once).  Maybe that's why so many great skiers were born in Idaho (Picabo Street, Christin Cooper, Jeret "Speedy" Peterson,,  and Sage Kotsenberg).

But for me, it's all about hockey.  When the games were in Salt Lake City in 2002, I paid to send my daughter to watch obscure hockey games (the only ones we could afford) and made her report back to us so I could vicariously live the moment.  When Russian hockey coach, Zinetula Bilyaletdinov, said that no other medals were as important to Russians as the gold in ice hockey, I thought I had truly found a kindred spirit.  Idaho really is a part of Siberia.  Idahoans and the Siberians truly understand each other.  Yeah, figure skating is really nice, and last Olympics I really got into curling (there is a large part of my heart devoted to all things Canada), and I understand the hunting roots of the biathlon (see my last blog about Bambi's mom), but it's really all about hockey.

I mean if we're talking about the Olympics only in terms of sport.

But they're not really just sports are they?  They are all sorts of things:  cultural exchange, international love-fest, war-prevention strategy, travelogue, history lesson, geography lesson, foreign language lesson (isn't the Cyrillic alphabet fun?  don't you love the idea that "Sochi" can be spelled c--o--upside-down h--backward n?).  I think if I spent the rest of my life just learning every language in the world, I could die in the midst of a spree of fun (all right, I'm an admitted nerd anyway).

As long as I can pause every once in awhile for the Stanley Cup and the Olympics.

Disney and the teaching of America's children

First of all, I need to say that I have done no hard research on this topic.

Second, I need to say that I am making no moral judgement on Disney.  "I like Disney" is the extent of my moral judgement.

Third, I would like to say that I think this would be a very productive avenue of research.  I am only musing.  If someone wants to offer me--an overqualified muser--an enormous grant to research this avenue further, I might take it, but I'd have to think about it first.

Having provided those disclaimers, I'll begin.

Disney released its fifth feature-length animated film, Bambi, in the summer of 1942 (that would make an interesting title for a book, wouldn't it?  The Summer of '42--oh, wait, scratch that).  I attended a re-release of Bambi in the 1960's that had a profound influence on me.  After I saw the film, though I had grown up in a home and in the midst of a culture that revolved around the deer season, I could not bring myself to seriously hunt deer.

I do not object to hunting, and I love the taste of venison.  Furthermore, my unwillingness to take a gun and go blasting away at Bambi's mother is born as much from my inability to see clearly (and the fear that I might blast my own father, let alone an errant doe) as it is the trauma of reliving this most traumatic childhood movie.

But I have wondered how many other people were influenced as I was by the film, and I've noticed a few correlations that may or may not be related.

The first modern federal gun control legislation (The Gun Control Act of 1968) was passed just two years after the US re-release of Bambi.  PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) was founded in 1980, five years after a 1975 US re-release.  Vegetarianism in the United States is said to have begun to become popular with the publication of Frances Moore Lappe's 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet.

Of course, this may all be post-hoc ergo propter-hoc fallacy, but I suspect that there is at the very least a lurking guilt for the death of Bambi's mom in all of these things.


AFI lists "man" in Bambi as one of the worst film villains of all time.

I'm not suggesting at all that Disney consciously intended to propagandize against hunting.  I think Walt found a good story that children would love, and he adapted it brilliantly.  (I personally think the film is better than Felix Salten's book, or at least I did when I read the book in the sixth grade.)  But there is no denying that the film is powerful and formative.

Why?  Apart from the Disney skills at work, the film is addressed to children.

And that is something that interests me a lot.