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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Which of our recent Cinderellas -- including Hilary Duff, Anne Hathaway and Julia Stiles -- really deserves to wear the glass slippers?
Aug 12, 2004 | Myths and fairy tales have always constituted something of a magic fishpond for artists, writers and, of course, filmmakers. With the tale of Cinderella, in particular, Hollywood keeps dipping its golden fishhook into the waters: Now and then it comes up with a glittery, golden version of the same story we've heard a hundred times before; other times, it barely succeeds in tarting up the same bewhiskered, ancient carp.
The past few months alone have given us three movies riffing on the Cinderella theme, stories about girls striving to channel their inner princess: Martha Coolidge's "The Prince and Me," starring Julia Stiles as a no-nonsense American college student who falls for the European prince who's attending her school incognito; Mark Rosman's "A Cinderella Story," in which Hilary Duff plays a modern-day San Fernando cinder girl who hopes to go to college but who may be sentenced to working full time in her stepmother's diner; and Garry Marshall's "The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement," in which Anne Hathaway, guided by her queenly granny (Julie Andrews), needs to find a royal mate in order to ascend the throne of the country she was born to rule.
The problem with these movies isn't the recycled theme itself: The story of Cinderella is one with sturdy corset bones, and as plenty of cultural critics and mythology scholars have noted, it embraces a range of human hopes, desires and fears that go beyond romantic notions of finding a nice boy to settle down with. Stripped to its barest framework, the Cinderella template speaks to our basic urge to survive and to our desire for security: One of the story's earliest versions comes from China and involves a mistreated orphan whose only friend is a magic fish that helps her obtain essentials like food and clothing.
Obviously, the princess fantasy as Hollywood has recently packaged it is largely designed to appeal to young girls -- not in itself a bad thing. What girl of any age doesn't occasionally like to fantasize about being put on a pedestal -- or, at the very least, to be appreciated for whatever virtues (beauty, kindness, intelligence) she might possess? The big problem with the current spate of Cinderella movies -- particularly "A Cinderella Story" and "The Princess Diaries 2" -- is not that they encourage unrealistically high romantic expectations in girls, but that they're barely romantic at all. Instead, even beneath their frothy, seemingly fun surfaces, there's something numbingly instructive about them.
It's easy to see where the impulse toward this kind of mainstream instructional entertainment comes from: We want our daughters, the girls and young women of today, to know that they can do anything they want in life and that they don't need a man to take care of them. How could we not want economic autonomy and emotional security for them, particularly in a world where women still earn less than men do for comparable work? In short, we only want the best for our girls and young women -- so why not give them entertainment that also builds that essential and universally unassailable commodity known as self-esteem?
