I have had a bee in my bonnet about this for a while now and I finally decided it was time to write about it. Today’s subject: Frozen.
There was a lot of fuss about this movie due to a Mormon blogging individual and her myopic diatribe. My hubby read the article before we went to see it recently and we discussed it at length afterward. As you may be able to tell from the above I think it is a theory full of generalities, paranoia, small-minded us-vs-them mentality, and fear, but perhaps I am being to harsh... *shrug*
I will tell you right out, I bawled through the movie, especially during ‘Let it go’ and I intend to share why further on. It touched my husband in a simple and beautiful way and I think left him and our teen Tim, better people for seeing it.
The message that is being communicated in frozen is not so specific as to apply to one cultural movement. It is to everyone in the human race. For Elsa it is to learn to accept, understand, and love oneself. By doing this we can truly love the world around us. And Anna is an example of the amazing sacrifices we are able to make when we truly love ourselves and those around us. It is a poignant message of sisterhood and the importance of your family.
But to that “well behaved” Mormon Grandmother I would posit two other options to add to the basic message of Frozen:
Elsa & Anna’s isolation as a metaphor for everyone’s teen years
I am going to start with the obvious one…
Do those who feel different from the way the world is telling them they should feel relate to this? Of course. Do those who identify as LGBT relate to this. Yes. Does that make that community the targeted message of this movie or are they just a part of the greater audience who needs to hear the message.
Here I would like to point out that we live inundated in a false idealized and unrealistic world. All the people we see in ads and magazines are photo-shopped, we are told that what we eat is food and good for you when it isn’t (I am looking at you tomato sauce on pizza counting a veggie serving in school lunches), And the people we elect to be honest judges and guides to our society aren’t. It has left everyone feeling at least a little alienated and weird.
No one feels ‘normal’, especially not when your body is changing everything you knew to be normal into curves and clumsy awkwardness that makes you feel like a total dork with a target over your head. Our brains are being crammed with information on who to be, how to act, what to look like, what to learn, who to know and the worst advice ever: to follow your heart. Every teen feels isolated, if you didn’t then you are the exception not the rule. And Sadly many people do not ‘grow’ out of feeling that isolation, they have to struggle and fight with it all their lives.
Now onto the one that has deep personal meaning to me.
Elsa’s Acceptance of herself as correlation to sexual abuse recovery
Here is a subject I sadly know plenty about. When I was 4 I was molested, we will leave it there and not drag in more details as they are not pertinent to my statement. I was left, at 4 to mull over the statements my abuser told me “This was your fault, You made me do this, You are a bad girl” At 4 years old the mind does funny things to protect itself. My mind believed that lie and for the next 13 years until I was a high school senior, I felt like a horrible unforgivable sinner. I still struggle with that unnamed guilty feeling and the panic attacks it has always brought with it every night when I try to go to sleep.
In essence I felt I had to protect everyone from my sins, from the harmful nature I believed I was born with. So like Elsa I hid it from the world and even partly hid it from myself. However the effects were there and like Elsa I isolated myself from the world, from friends, from family. I had to protect them from the truth about me.
It took me 2 different councilors and over 15 months of intense weekly visits to get to the point where I had rooted out the overprotective fallacies that had built up my young personality and begin (just begin) to re-assemble myself into a whole, healthy person. The active counseling ended in 1998 and here in 2014 I am still assembling myself.
I remember the moment when I ‘Let it go’, and this is what made me weep tears of empathy, appreciation, and unity during that song. I remember the exact moment when I looked inward and realized I had forgive my abuser. That moment all the angst, they hate, the anger that kept me from trusting anyone just blew away like snow in a storm. For me the storm inside stilled and the sun came out. And to paraphrase, there I stood in the light of day and I was finally, FINALLY free.
Even if no one reads this, I would like to thank all the wonderful people in my life who make it all worth sticking around through the hard times, especially my husband Steve. And Gail Szkula, where ever you are, thank you for showing me the way to myself.
Also all who worked on Frozen. In my opinion it is one of the most inspired movies I have seen in my life and I do believe it will do and has done a lot of good for a lot of people.
