Elsa and Anna and the Icicle Dagger (PBS Revisited, semi, sorta)
In 1987 I tossed an insult at a loose aggregation of people that included me, calling us "PBS for the youth." Basically, I was fingering the punk/postpunk indie-alternative "underground," but also worlds and hairstyles and rampages that surrounded it: rock critics, letters-to-the-editor, on-edge heroin poetry zines, the appreciation and appreciators of American eccentrics and outsiders and outsider art, pop detritus, etc. A music marginal intelligentsia. My insult turned out complicated, since having some PBS impulses was better than having none, I decided, and the process of PBSification had grown out of what had initially seemed like untrammeled strength and was embedded in seed form in the most disruptive music of the 1960s; I cited the Rolling Stones in particular:
Richard Meltzer was right: Rock 'n' roll collapsed the distinction between awesome and trivial. Overall, rock 'n' roll could not have been great had it been merely awesome. I say "overall" because, when it comes down to the sound of specific bands, I prefer the awesome-awesome to the awesome-trivial. I prefer the Rolling Stones to Elvis. Meltzer tried to portray the Stones and Dylan at their 1965 peaks as trivial and silly (not to mention awesome and serious), just like the rest of rock 'n' roll. Meltzer was wrong, the Stones and Dylan were simply awesome - but I understand why he portrayed them in the way he did. He was trying to save them. Triviality protects awesomeness. The Rolling Stones, even more than the Beatles, saved white rock from being Bobby Rydell/Las Vegas shit but put it irrevocably, despite all their intentions, on the PBS path. By being merely awesome, the Stones laid the seeds for the destruction of rock 'n' roll. PBS can co-opt mere awesomeness. They can turn it into "seriousness" and oppose it to "fun." The Sex Pistols (who were the Rolling Stones reincarnated thirteen years later, and that's all they were) were a lot closer to PBS than to Elvis. They were better than Elvis, too - the awesome, sociofuckological aspects that made them closer to PBS helped make them better. But, though they saved punk for a couple years, they made punk socially significant hence digestible by PBS. (So do I, by the way - though I’m not great like the Sex Pistols or important.*)
I'm being a bit loose with the term "PBS." I mean a certain PBS head (attitude), which can include a cult taste for shitty horror movies, pro wrestling, African pop, comic books, Hasil Adkins... all this pseudofun is a covering for a mind set that's ruled by PBS. We're making horror movies safe for PBS. We have met PBS, and it is us. I mean an imaginary PBS of the future, with pro wrestling, splatter films, and leftist analyses of the Capitalist Entertainment Industry (scored by a reformed Gang of 4). All rendered lame in the context of our appreciation.
--Frank Kogan, Why Music Sucks #1, February 1987.
I don't consider this the most intelligible passage I've ever written. It was part of a long, unruly essay, in a long, unruly fanzine. For a clue as to what I thought I originally meant, here's a Cliff Notes version I wrote 20 years later for the Las Vegas Weekly (including, for non-Americans, a description of the actual PBS):
The Rules Of The Game No. 24: The PBSification Of Rock
I wouldn't say the LVW version really delivers: missing are the tumult and anguish of the original Why Music Sucks essays, the social life and the social detail, as well as the multiple twists and back-and-forth of my own thinking;** but it does clarify several points, as well as throwing a couple of pointed questions at me at the end.
Anyway, last month, in response to my quarterly list of top singles, Dave in passing referred to my PBS metaphor, which prompted a longer conversation in which I let loose with a bunch of reassessments and qualifications that I've thought of over the years. And lots of twists and back-and-forth. I'm reposting our convo here. This isn't the "PBS Revisited" essay I ought to write someday (I make reference to a 32-page email I sent Dave and Mark where I wrestle an issue I barely touch here), esp. given that what I value most in this interchange are the Elsa and Anna analyses; but it does give some indication as to where such a reconsideration might go. As I say, the PBS metaphor is never not going to be half-assed, and I'm never not going to feel it's essential. Dave = David Cooper Moore.
Dave: Albums-wise, I really want to write something about Kendrick Lamar and PBS - PBSification in the DNA of the album, which is quite good, but it's unmistakably "good for you," too. Problem is, I don't actually want to write about the Kendrick Lamar album (yet? Maybe ever).
Frank: I still think my "PBS" metaphor is (i) important, (ii) half-assed and problematic, (iii) never likely to coalesce into something that isn't half-assed and problematic, and (iv) important nonetheless. Something to remember - two things to remember - is that the metaphor really had two parts, the parts not clearly delineated or conceptualized in my initial WMS writeups:
(1) Postpunk (etc.) as a cultural corner (or something): so the metaphor "PBS" wasn't particularly saying that this band or that performer had broccoli-like "good for you" tendencies.*** Rather, the metaphor vaguely referred to a whole constellation of opinions and interests and attitudes that turned a broad and contentious (towards each other as well as towards the outside) group of people into an "Us" that believed itself better than a mainstream "Them." But what made (and makes?) the metaphor potent and shocking isn't that it fingered Talking Heads for being tasteful or the Clash for being socially progressive but that it also included stuff that the real PBS would never ever touch with a 10-foot pole: the Mentors (believers in "peaceful rape"), Psycodrama, GG Allin, the whole Forced Exposure/Conflict vibe. (My favorite Byron Coley contribution to Why Music Sucks was when he responded to Phil Milstein's question, "Isn't it time they put Johnny Carson out to pasture? And the Rolling Stones too, for that matter?" by saying "If you mean, is it time that we take these persons to a field & then fuck them from behind, then I must say 'No.'") And PBS included me. So it wasn't all nice stuff. But it all more-or-less constituted a loose nexus that rationalized and justified and made respectably "challenging" a whole bunch of "out" behavior some of which was unapologetically do-good (the Clash) and some of it almost the opposite, a lot of it viewed by postpunk without being part of postpunk or knowing it was being viewed, but all rendered lame in the context of our appreciation. If I were to try to locate a "PBS" today, again not the real one but a more "out" one, I'd certainly include "poptimists" (which is now focused on Freaky Trigger), and your Tumblr world, and The Singles Jukebox. Regarding the new Lamar, which I haven't yet heard, the way it would fit into this "PBS Part One" isn't by being "good for you" in itself but by being embraced by "Us" for being the sort of thing that appeals to us. -An album's being genuinely good for us can be, you know, good, but that's also what makes it eligible for being rendered lame by us. Note also that our genuinely worthy attempts to embrace and understand hip-hop as a whole, including Rick Ross and ilk, are also "PBS." And our having some PBS tendencies is better than having no PBS tendencies, but creating a PBS nexus is worse than having just some PBS tendencies.
(2) A culture-wide "PBSification" that tends to support and romanticize fringes that move "out" but that also, once it perceives some phenomenon as "significant," turns the phenomenon into a symbol of its own significance and lets the symbol substitute for any actual significance. ("The symbol stands in for the event" is how I put it in WMS.) That "our" PBS renders things lame in the nexus of our appreciation etc. is an example of this cultural process whereby a symbol replaces the event it's supposed to symbolize.
-I wouldn't say though that, out in the wide world, symbols of "outness" always, without fail, neutralize what they symbolize. As I said, my metaphor is problematic. Among other problems, I manage to include a whole broad range of stuff in it, and the inclusion of this or that often seems arbitrary, even if it doesn't feel arbitrary. But the metaphor is important nonetheless because what it tries to describe does seem to actually happen, sometimes.****
Dave: Yeah, I'm often hesitant to project PBS onto music itself because most of the time I'm saying to myself something along the lines of "Remember, I am, in part, PBS-or-whatever and that is not entirely a bad thing but can make things lame, my very being here and doing this will have some impact on the thing that may also kill the thing, though hopefully it will make it better..." (which is a longwinded to say usually I use it as a tool for thinking about my /"our" relationship to something less than the thing itself).
In that version of PBS, YG (to use a recent example) and Kendrick Lamar, both of whom (e.g.) reference life experiences and culture that most people (not all) in the social circle of PBS know nothing of firsthand, created music those folks, or that circle, would rate pretty highly. But here Kendrick is sort of playing to and against that audience - in playing against the audience he's playing into their hands - he's closer to the circle himself even though he doesn't need to be for PBS to happen to him.
I'm not sure the metaphor really works in this milieu anyway. Do I think the symbol is replacing the event in Kendrick Lamar's album? Not really, or not entirely. It's infected but it isn't dead yet. And I often think about the idea that some PBSification, of the second type, has a kind of preservative effect, and that one doesn't need to (oh lord forgive me for the pun I'm about to commit) kill the butterfly entirely in the context of one's appreciation (or, from the vantage of the artist, in the context of someone else's presumptive appreciation) to exploit it. (If there's no one "in" to hear something "out," does it make a sound, etc?)
There's something to the precariousness of this process, being right on the edge of marking as significant (no scare quotes) and damning as "significant" (maybe scare quotes AND no scare quotes?).
For some reason this evening I'm imagining it a bit like gentrification, where looking merely at its results paints too simplistic a picture of what's happening on the ground - some features that seem "evils of gentrification-y" (let's say, upwardly-mobile artist types moving into vacant buildings in an area of working class people) don't necessarily end in the phonification (that's "the process of making phony," not "the process of inundating with telephones") of the neighborhood that once was - a little bit of movement may even benefit the whole neighborhood. But in large doses, it essentially pushes what was once unique or special out entirely, sometimes, in the process, "keeping" the neighborhood's "charms" without any of the actual things (or people) who ostensibly made it charming.
Problem with THAT metaphor, though, is that it's too easy to point to "gentrifiers" and "authentic neighborhood people" - which I would like to actually kind of be my point (i.e., gentrification itself doesn't really work this way, it's more complicated) - but it still doesn't quite work, because in the case of PBSification who counts as "out" and who counts as "in" is less a form of colonization and more... I dunno, cannibalization? "We" are kind of out already, and we use "in" to broaden or legitimize it/us, and in doing so we replace this genuine thing (event) with a mere symbol of the thing. But there's not some "other people," some group of phonies, who did this process to the genuine people - we did it to ourselves (is the claim, as I understand it).
Frank: The preservative effect: Well, Shakespeare and Austen, Plato and Nietzsche, Mozart and Verdi all have a living presence in current culture, but for this to have happened there had to be people willing to preserve and in some cases go back and appreciate and resurrect them. Nietzsche might be the most relevant to this discussion, in that he gets to be broccoli by being "subversive," and academic "PBS" types who read him as such get to think of themselves as subversive - or at least as raising provocative questions. More penetrating but prosaic thinkers - Kuhn, Wittgenstein***** - can't be twisted so easily into this role, though there've sure been attempts. In any event, Nietzsche's being used now for what he can do now ("he"), for what we can do now with him, by types who do what they think they want or need to do using him. Which is as it should be, the problem often being with the types, not Nietzsche.
We do it to ourselves: Well, remember, I'm thinking both of the whole culture ("PBSification") and a subset (the punkish or postpunk Musical Marginal Intelligentsia I fingered in my first Why Music Sucks essay), the subset perhaps doing work on behalf of the whole. But that's a big "We" (the culture-wide) and a smaller "We" both doing the doing, perhaps. In any event, back in the Sixties (and prior to being "postpunk," obv., though the attitudes aren't significantly different), the MMI is plumping for blues and r&b, and is much more ambivalent about rock-as-opposed-to-pop than the burgeoning mass rock audience is. But the retrospective "gentrification" (as opposed to PBSification) of Sixties r&b and soul probably comes from The Big Chill (which I've never seen) and oldies radio and VH-1 docs and Grammy accolades and whatever; anyway, pretty directly from the mainstream. Whereas, what the Rolling Stones did (nonretrospectively) with r&b was to make it more potent and furious and to highlight loads that was contradictory and problematic in it, and to basically invent a new music out of it. This in itself wasn't PBSification at all. But I did claim in my essay that nonetheless the Rolling Stones were the ones who set us on the PBS path, their being so potent ensuring that neither the culture as a whole nor the cultures whom the Stones helped create were able to categorize them as mere entertainment (in the way Elvis had been categorized), and so weren't able to trivialize and protect their own listening and fandom or revulsion (the Rolling Stones were probably the most hated band in the world*****) as mere leisure time, either. Hence the capital-S Significance, hence the vulnerability to the symbol standing in for the event, and so on. But the late Sixties/early Seventies punk critics - i.e., the ones who got called punks and who invented the concept "punk," people like Bangs and Marsh - tried to reverse this (what I later called) PBSification by plumping for garage rock and bubblegum, the Troggs, the Ohio Express, all this stuff that could even in late '60s/early '70s retrospect still be trash and dangerous and silly and not saddled with Significance. And it's this trashy, accidentally silly and accidentally potent and accidentally subversive music, "96 Tears" and "Pushin' Too Hard" and "Yummy Yummy Yummy," that the punk/postpunk MMI effectively turned to spinach, like the profs did to Nietzsche. So anti-PBS becomes PBS one convolution later. Except "96 Tears" still kicks, when I hear it, and so does "Under My Thumb." (But without the profs, would Nietzsche have much of a presence? And without the punks, would "96 Tears" be anything but a safe oldie, or a lost classic? It would still kick, when I listen.)
Broader culture gives impetus and support to the margins
In any event, the "broader culture," which is full of multiple currents and countercurrents and conflicts, the conflicts being as defining as the common values, including even the conflicts over which conflicts should be defining, and including "us," the subculture that you and I belong to that I'm occasionally calling a marginal musical intelligentsia (MMI)******* and that I socked with my "PBS for the youth" metaphor back in 1987 (not that you, Dave, and me, Frank, are "PBS" or MMI in all of our aspects)... the "broader culture" can give impetus and support to various movements that move outward and away from a supposed mainstream: so, to survivalist movements, radical right, evangelical, progressive left, feminist, freak, punk, nihilist, and so forth. By "support" I mean that even before this or that "out" group is a presence, someone can be seeded with the romanticism that either propels her out herself or encourages her to give respect to and/or feel intimidated and awed by the person who does go out. This is the question I was asking you and Mark in my notes about social class: where does the MMI and where do freaks get their authority?
So...
Go for broke
When because of the weather we have inside recess, some kids go to the gym and get to run amok while others go to the auditorium where a feature film is projected, always a kids' film like the Croods, and just like in the old days of double features you enter whether the film is beginning or in the middle, and when your recess is finished you leave even though the film isn't over.
Also, first thing in the day, there's an early "recess" which isn't literally a recess but it's when the kids arriving early or the kids who are already there for Extended Day go to the playground, but when early recess is inside they all go to the auditorium and what they usually see is Angry Bird Toons or excerpts from Despicable Me.
Let's classify the midday recess feature films as "Broader Culture," with lots of comedy but also broad positive social messages.
Whereas we'll classify Angry Bird Toons as "our kind of toon" meaning there's no message, just (as Manny Farber had said about termite art) "go for broke art," pure where's the next bit of mayhem, where's the next belly laugh, etc. And although it's just as much from the Broader Culture as the feature films are, it's exactly the sort of stuff that "we" in our marginal halfway-out MMI "PBS" go apeshit for, extolling it in just the way that we extol and preserve the old Fleischer Studio and Warner Bros. cartoons, and the Bill Gaines comic-book output in his Tales From The Crypt days, and so on. (Or at least I would so extol it.)
Connecting the dots
To connect the dots between the two "recesses," the midday Broader Culture feature-length cartoons have a hodge-podge of positive messages some of which push "out": push one towards being oneself and empowering oneself and taking risks and taking on authority and leaping and soaring, flying, etc. etc. etc.
So, in one of the midday recesses I saw approximately 35 minutes of Frozen, from Hans to up the mountain and Olaf and the storm, if you've seen it. It contained "Let It Go" in context, where it was kind of thrilling (hadn't previously liked it and still don't usually enjoy hearing it). A couple months later Amanda, the Kinder teacher I work for, read a short picture-book version of Frozen to the class, so the plot's been spoilerated for me. Since I haven't seen it whole, I can't say one way or another whether the flick would work for me. But I suspect it would. As I was watching it, I assumed Disney had seen its task as making a princess movie that was also at least somewhat feminist, about female self-actualization and self-empowerment. Turns out that this isn't how the plot came about - according to Wikipedia, Disney had first been interested in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" eighty years ago, originally as part of a projected Andersen biopic to be co-produced with Goldwyn. ("The Snow Queen" may have appeared as a short ballet sequence in the 1952 Goldwyn film sans Disney; Wikip is unclear about this.) According to Wikip, the problem for Disney was always how to make the plot work. (Btw, I STRONGLY recommend that you not click the Wikip link if you haven't yet seen Frozen.) From Wikip's synopsis of the Andersen story, the Snow Queen seems not to be central to it, is more a metaphor of some kind of tantalizing entrapment for the male love object. In any event, after various attempts and abandonments over the years to make "The Snow Queen" the basis of a feature film, the project was finally given serious development in 2008, though from the account I'm not sure if it got the actual, definitive green light prior to 2011; and even with production underway in 2012, Disney still hadn't figured out the character and role of the Snow Queen in relation to Anna, the heroine. Finally - perhaps in desperation? - the decision was made to make Anna into her kid sister, to add family drama to what was now a protagonist-antagonist relationship between two princesses. That's how the princess thing entered the story. And shortly afterward, a new screenwriter, Jennifer Lee, was brought in to take over the script. But Elsa - the older princess, the incipient Snow Queen - still hadn't gelled. It was a couple of songwriters, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, in having to come up with a song for her and trying to work out what it felt like to be her, who then in effect reinvented her. And once they'd played Disney the demo, Jennifer Lee said to herself, okay, we did it! we've got the movie! but now I have to rewrite the whole script. So instead of "Let It Go" being tailored to the movie, the song was taken whole, not a lyric changed, and the movie was re-worked around it.
And if you haven't seen Frozen you really need to before you look at my next comment. Though the comment won't reveal much, I don't want to reveal anything, not even the beginning.
Let it go (spoilers)
SPOILER. DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE.
Elsa's no punk, she's not a Mick Jagger or an Eminem. But like Jagger and Eminem, she's an artist who's afraid of her art, of its power. And in the world of the movie, she's slated to ascend to actual political (read "cultural") power but she's afraid to wield her power, that her various powers will sabotage and destroy everything. And, according to Jennifer Lee, there's at least something of a subtext that, in moving from princess to queen, Elsa is potentially moving to full-blown sexual expression. (I don't remember The Lion King very well, but there seem to be parallels.) Anyway, Anna still understands little of this, so her journey to find her sister is also a journey to discover who Elsa is. Meanwhile, Elsa has decided that the only way she can be her powerful self is to be alone, to divorce power from command. Which of course means it's not full power, since the condition of letting herself go is that she - it - her art, her power, her self, her authority - doesn't go anywhere real, doesn't make a difference. So Anna's quest is also to bring Elsa and Elsa's power back to society, back to people.********
In half paying attention to the picture-book version (at the same time as I was wiping down desks and sharpening pencils), I never learned if or how the movie actually resolves what Elsa is to do with her power. I gather that regarding the ending Disney's energy was concentrated on how to make the narrative configure the multiple meanings of love. Lee and Buck were instructed to make sure they earned the love ending. I fear that this left the power issue somewhat in the lurch. Someday I'll have to see the thing in its entirety. Here's a great interview with Jennifer Lee where she goes deep into the process of creating the story.*********
http://johnaugust.com/2014/scriptnotes-ep-128-frozen-with-jennifer-lee-transcript
One thing I think I'm noticing in kid culture********** is that, despite Anna taking up way more screen time, it's Elsa the kids immediately think of when they think of the movie. This may be owing to the visuals as much as the conception, her light-blue and blondeness appearing more rarefied and enticing and princessy (perhaps this is me capitulating to a cultural stereotype, or Disney capitulating, or the kids).
"Let It Go"
The bad stuff that is therefore good
In its manifestation in the broader culture, PBSification is a movement outward, which is conceived of as both good for you (socially progressive if you're on the left, radically preservative and even apocalyptic if you're on the right) and bad for you (so touts bad girls and wildness and recalcitrance), and being bad is good for you because it challenges the mainstream's idea of goodness, even if it's the mainstream that generates this challenge to its goodness. And my complaint is that once we know or think we know this significance of the good-bad stuff (i.e., the "bad" stuff that we've decided is therefore good), once we realize that it actually does have cultural value and impact, we let the symbol, capital-S Significance, stand in for actual significance - but prior to our really comprehending the significance, the good-bad stuff was walled-off into entertainment, so was like Elsa isolated with her "power." So I'm sorta saying that Angry Bird Toons, prior to being lionized and crowned king or queen by PBS/MMI types like me, is like Elsa on her mountain, where it's safe from our really understanding its cultural value and we're safe from understanding its potency. So there, I've conflated Elsa and Angry Bird Toons, which is both a strength and weakness of my PBS metaphor, that I seem to be able to make it absorb anything. But remember that, though I wasn't using the term "PBS" entirely as a pejorative, it still primarily is pejorative, and as such it's not a criticism of understanding but of a type of neutralization that follows and perhaps undoes understanding.
In saying in 1987 that the supposed punk supposed alternative supposed indie supposed underground had become our own little "PBS," I was saying that in effect it had become a cultural niche, one that let the symbol of its own challenge to the culture substitute for any actual challenge, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that it - the subculture, the MMI - was generated by the overall culture and was part of the overall culture.
(And this claim of mine is ridiculously overbroad, but still somewhat right, and still necessary in its overbroadness.)
The movie's icy heart
Dave: I have seen Frozen (so spoilers ahead) - twice now, plus lots of 5-20-minute snatches overseen/heard when nephews and nieces are watching - and what I like and dislike about it are pretty much the same thing, and something that I was surprised, in retrospect (well, maybe not surprised, but pleased?) that kids picked up on, which is that it really is Elsa's story even though Elsa barely features in huge hunks of the movie, much to its detriment.
The formation (and eventual abandonment) of the ice castle is so the heart of the movie that it's hard to care about much else going on. A few folks had mentioned how disturbing it was for their kids to see the "prince charming" scenario turn sour for Anna, but for me the real disturbing stuff - the stuff that disturbed ME, that is, not sure how it would affect kids - was just how violent Elsa became in her quest for a quiet, private place of her own. (Mick Jagger thought two's a crowd, but I don't think he flung literal ice daggers at anyone who got near him, aiming to murder them effortlessly and indiscriminately, even if that was what he was feeling.)
But like I said, kids clearly picked up on the fact that Elsa is the star and the heart and soul of the movie. "Let It Go" is the right song for the right moment there, and it reminds me that when I was a kid I often fantasized that I had a special power to stay young and invincible, and sharp claws might have been part of the deal too - destined to brood and roam the earth quietly with the ability to beat up bad guys if absolutely necessary, which it would be, I imagined. But mostly I would just kind of be there, hanging around everyone, and they wouldn't notice me, would float in and out and around and I would be totally unremarked on. That this thought - of being alone in a crowd (h/t Hilary Duff) - became a source of constant anxiety in early adulthood is maybe ironic or else just the flipside of the same coin, I guess.
* * *
Y'know, I'm really struggling to actually remember how Frozen ends! If I recall it correctly, which I may not, Elsa learns how to use her powers in moderation, but...
[checks]
OK, right (spoilers!) Elsa is kidnapped from her castle - this is after her attempted icicle murder - and imprisoned in her frozen hometown, but she breaks free and hoofs it back to the castle, leading to a series of things I don't remember well even reading the Wikip description, yada yada, Anna expresses true love by offering herself in sacrifice, love is the key to controlling her powers.
I remember the ending (the "solution") not being nearly as interesting or convincing as the set-up (the "problem").
I never meta meta I didn't like
Frank: I gather that from the producer's and writer's(s') p.o.v., with Anna still in their mind as protagonist, the deliberate double misdirection and switchup as to what constitutes the act of true love that will save Anna was what they were fundamentally working towards, and was what motivated Del Vecho to make the movie in the first place: there's a kind of meta going on where the characters are searching (twice) for the man who will provide the act of true love that saves Anna - as the genre might make us expect - whereas what the story actually gives us is Anna sacrificing herself to save Elsa, this being the unexpected act of true love that ends up saving Anna as well as Elsa.
(If you haven't yet read the Jennifer Lee interview, I reiterate my recommendation.)
How do they solve the alienation problem?
Dave: Yes need to check out the interview. I get the switchup, and I like the switchup, both on paper and to a lesser extent on the screen, especially if the alternative is romantic love of the perfect guy. (I really like that we get to iterations of imperfection - one the seemingly perfect guy who has sinister ulterior motives and the other the bumbling friend she grows to love even though it's not "save the kingdom" love).
But I guess what it doesn't answer for me is how Anna's action actually solves Elsa's alienation problem. We know that the sisters love each other and would do anything for the other (that isn't in doubt for a second) and Anna's display is touching in its own way, but Elsa has a lot of power and it seems a bit like the "solution" is very much outside of Elsa, who by the end just kind of has cool ice powers (no pun intended) that she can turn on and off like a faucet rather than being blessed/cursed with an all-powerful firehose. I'd be interested in a sequel where she has to come to grips with the fact that she can still kill a man with an icicle dagger if she wants to.
* * *
Now I'm disagreeing with myself - of course the thing that's supposed to be at the heart of the movie is how Elsa slowly but completely shuts herself away from her sister, and the idea is that the sister's love melts her heart. I mean, I get it!
I'm just addicted to the ice castle impulse, which to me isn't necessarily yoked to the sibling love. I just feel at the end like there's no reason Elsa shouldn't feel, in some way, like she wants to go back to her castle, maybe. That the castle is always there, even if you have lots of love to keep you away from it. Maybe not very Disney...
Disney can't resolve it because people can't resolve it, either
Frank: Isn't the fundamental reason Elsa isolated herself in the first place, while growing up, that she was afraid of inadvertently hurting her sister again? And Anna doesn't understand this because, to protect her from remembering the original trauma, she's been given a memory wipe? So poor Anna doesn't understand why Elsa has emotionally shut her out, and meanwhile her being shut out makes her rebellious, and therefore a sucker for Hans? So in this way, in protecting Anna, doesn't Elsa herself psychologically injure her again? (Genuine questions, since I didn't see these parts.) And then later, in driving Anna off from the mountain castle, Elsa literally (though inadvertently?) injures her once more, as she had when they were kids?
But if I'm reading you and the movie correctly, while protecting Anna may be Elsa's first motive for isolating, the song "Let It Go" reveals another, more intrinsic reason for Elsa to hole up in her ice castle: the castle's where she can let loose with her icicle powers. Just her and her canvas, so to speak. But I don't think isolation is her goal. It's just the precondition of her being able to let go with her art, her joy, her power, her ice. But her power is incomplete precisely because she is alone (imo).
Disney can't resolve this because people irl can't resolve it, either. But I'm with you in thinking the script leaves Elsa's power as a loose thread, or a dangling dagger, or something.
PBS wrapped-up, like a fish in the freezer
Some additional thoughts on PBS, before wrapping this up for a repost:
In my trot I described PBSification as:
Something vital discovers a sense of its own significance, thereby losing certain psychological protections that had allowed it to fool around and maybe not grasp its own potent nature. I was thinking of '50s rock 'n' roll as being pre-PBS and then the British-Invasion groups such as the Rolling Stones - my favorite band ever - setting rock on a PBS path; but this can apply to any cultural form, not just rock music. Once the significance is understood, a reverse process takes over, and the performers imagine capital-S Significance for themselves that they don't in fact have, and sell this imaginary significance, which the audience buys.
Problem with that def'n is that it's way too broad, simply recounts a species of bad thinking whereby something gets extolled and someone who doesn't actually embody the thing being extolled nonetheless hops aboard the word that's used for it. Whereas what puts the "PBS" in PBSification is a certain kind of significance that combines the educational-TV aspect of PBS ("let's use our leisure time for worthy purposes") with the romantic inclination to challenge a supposedly dominant mainstream, to move outward into opposition, even if that socially worthy movement outward takes the form of getting wasted and throwing up outside the club and seeing oneself as untamed and undomesticated. We should add a dash of "elitism," too - the few, the proud, the punks! - whereby our vomit is better than your vomit: our vomit is more extreme and out there, or our vomit is truer and more authentic. Still pretty broad: PBSification creates competing PBS's (just as our MMI circa '87 competes with and outflanks the actual Public Broadcasting System, which has to then lift some of the MMI attributes in order to keep up). So whiskey vomit can compete with wine-and-cheese vomit, depending on which elitism you're playing towards. I'm willing to count Bukowski vomit and Toby Keith vomit as embodying competing PBS tendencies, which compete with EDM vomit and Psycodrama vomit. Still superbroad, and I'm not saying that PBS tendencies always result in the formation of a PBS grouping. Rather, that the culture-wide tendency to support outward movements, added to the tendency to link leisure-time pleasure-time pursuits to such outward movement, and to valorize them as such, and the human tendency to let symbols stand in for events, is a backdrop that supports the creation of vague groupings that are PBS-like.
More fish
To say that the supposed indie-alternative supposed underground was a cultural niche and a marketing niche - which it surely was, though "constellation of loosely related quasi-niches" is probably more accurate - doesn't preclude its being a genuine challenge to the overall culture. There's no contradiction there. Challenging the mainstream is a mainstream impulse. Perhaps you're not challenging the impulse to challenge, but why should you? The idea of a culture challenging itself in toto is unintelligible, but that doesn't mean it can't challenge itself substantially. Of course, a particular challenge may not be a good challenge. That's a different matter. My basic beef was with our letting symbols stand in for events, for letting the symbol of challenge stand in for an actual challenge. -By the way, I was - and am - making an authenticity argument. I was accusing postpunk indie-alternative of being phony. But I'm not saying that a cultural and marketing niche is phony by definition.
I was also accusing the indie-alternative niche of making bad music, and I think I was right about that as well. But my attempt to link my two complaints didn't and doesn't work (imo). That is, I was trying to say that the indie underground let the symbol stand in for the musical event, which is true only if by "stand in" I mean "mischaracterize" or "dumb down." But I went further and claimed that the symbols were replacing musical events (or at least depleting musical events), that people were in effect listening to the symbols rather than the music.*********** My claim was untenable in a number of ways, not the least of which is that you can't divorce symbols from sound (symbols are part of music, sound is part of symbols************). I wrote a long email to Simon Frith about this that I inserted into the PBS chapter of Real Punks. Also, people's liking for music is (loosely speaking) visceral, and if indie fans hadn't been getting their viscera fed by the music they wouldn't have shown up. I once sent you and Mark a 32-page email about this, which maybe'll go into a future collection, Real Slim Shadies Are Smarter Than Poptimists. My basic conclusion was that "Lets the feeling stand in for the event" is functionally equivalent to "Lets the symbol stand in for the event." Which means that viscerally effective music (not to mention good music, though that's not necessarily the same thing) can also stand in for a claimed event. Which it certainly can, but then I haven't explained why I think indie music is lousy music. It merely explains why I think indie music is phony. -Of course, I could simply decide that music that's phony is bad on account of its being phony, even when it sounds good. But I haven't made this decision, though I surely do downgrade stuff for being phony. And given that phoniness affects my viscera and that my viscera are not independent of my life and my ideas, nor are they more basic, my sense of something's being phony can easily coincide with my viscera being turned off. But it generally doesn't, in other genres.
Not quite done.
I'm not saying that Angry Bird Toons and Frozen ARE PBS (though it's possible the respective makers of Angry Bird Toons and Frozen got PBS-like schooling that informs their work, mostly in good ways). Frozen is here in this comment thread 'cause it works towards a positive self-affirmation message that links to outward social motion and therefore, by heading "out," is eligible to be PBSified. -What is eligible to be PBSified? The affirmation? The motion? Well, the filmmakers get kudos from me for being honest enough to make the affirmation and the movement dangerous and problematic, which makes the movie good and good-for-you in a deeper and richer way than I'd expected, though also makes it eligible for praise from people like me, which can lead to the symbol of such problematizing standing in for the event of problematizing, even while viewing a movie in which the problematizing actually happens. So, e.g., the applause we give to Jennifer Lee for problematizing Elsa, and that we give to Jagger and Eminem for problematizing themselves, can eventually get in the way of our actually taking in the problem as a problem; so, the problematizing is rendered lame in the context of our appreciation, even though understanding and appreciation are essential.
Whereas Angry Bird Toons can be reduced to, I don't know, art or something - I mean, in the context of our appreciation. I'm not talking about what might happen in future episodes.
Footnotes, incl. world's longest asterisk:
*I'm talking here about my music. My writing had yet to make an impact. It perhaps still hasn't, but fwiw, in regard to the writing, I think I do my thing as well as the Sex Pistols and Stones did theirs.
**If you'd like, you can find big hunks of the original essays in Reak Punks Don't Wear Black.
***I like the taste of broccoli, by the way.
****I brought up "Symbol stands in for the event" in my convo with Josh yesterday. It's on my mind.
*****I actually find Wittgenstein more potently poetic than Nietzsche, but he's not as readily epigramizable. None of this is meant as a slam on Nietzsche.
******As some Fusion writer, a Stones fan, probably Les Daniels, said at the time.
*******Or "musical marginal intelligentsia," or even "music marginal intelligentsia," depending on how I happen to type it at the moment.
********Anna's journey is a journey of self-discovery too, though I won't go into that here.
*********A big part of Lee's struggle was to make sure the movie worked as comedy as well as drama; that struggle is one I'm not dealing with in this comment.
**********Several weeks ago I was at a seder where a four-year-old who had yet to see the movie was nonetheless dressed in full Elsa costume, which she'd gotten with her parents at an Anna & Elsa boutique.
***********I complained that fun had turned into a style rather than an experience, so that whether or not a band was fun had little to do with whether it was designated a fun band. Problem with this argument is that, even when it's true that a "fun band" isn't a lot of fun, this doesn't mean it has no musical characteristics and no musical value - or for that matter that it can't have a lot of musical value. I'm thinking of Psy's "Gentleman," which is presented as "fun" but is much more angry than fun, and is very good.
************Not sure how this works for people who are born deaf, but my guess is that it does, that deaf people have capacities that function like sound, both in the sense that their brains can generate sound even if their ears can't hear it, and that a similarly sensual "color" aspect is included in how they respond to text. I can't pretend I know what I'm talking about, though.
Richard Meltzer was right: Rock 'n' roll collapsed the distinction between awesome and trivial. Overall, rock 'n' roll could not have been great had it been merely awesome. I say "overall" because, when it comes down to the sound of specific bands, I prefer the awesome-awesome to the awesome-trivial. I prefer the Rolling Stones to Elvis. Meltzer tried to portray the Stones and Dylan at their 1965 peaks as trivial and silly (not to mention awesome and serious), just like the rest of rock 'n' roll. Meltzer was wrong, the Stones and Dylan were simply awesome - but I understand why he portrayed them in the way he did. He was trying to save them. Triviality protects awesomeness. The Rolling Stones, even more than the Beatles, saved white rock from being Bobby Rydell/Las Vegas shit but put it irrevocably, despite all their intentions, on the PBS path. By being merely awesome, the Stones laid the seeds for the destruction of rock 'n' roll. PBS can co-opt mere awesomeness. They can turn it into "seriousness" and oppose it to "fun." The Sex Pistols (who were the Rolling Stones reincarnated thirteen years later, and that's all they were) were a lot closer to PBS than to Elvis. They were better than Elvis, too - the awesome, sociofuckological aspects that made them closer to PBS helped make them better. But, though they saved punk for a couple years, they made punk socially significant hence digestible by PBS. (So do I, by the way - though I’m not great like the Sex Pistols or important.*)
I'm being a bit loose with the term "PBS." I mean a certain PBS head (attitude), which can include a cult taste for shitty horror movies, pro wrestling, African pop, comic books, Hasil Adkins... all this pseudofun is a covering for a mind set that's ruled by PBS. We're making horror movies safe for PBS. We have met PBS, and it is us. I mean an imaginary PBS of the future, with pro wrestling, splatter films, and leftist analyses of the Capitalist Entertainment Industry (scored by a reformed Gang of 4). All rendered lame in the context of our appreciation.
--Frank Kogan, Why Music Sucks #1, February 1987.
I don't consider this the most intelligible passage I've ever written. It was part of a long, unruly essay, in a long, unruly fanzine. For a clue as to what I thought I originally meant, here's a Cliff Notes version I wrote 20 years later for the Las Vegas Weekly (including, for non-Americans, a description of the actual PBS):
The Rules Of The Game No. 24: The PBSification Of Rock
I wouldn't say the LVW version really delivers: missing are the tumult and anguish of the original Why Music Sucks essays, the social life and the social detail, as well as the multiple twists and back-and-forth of my own thinking;** but it does clarify several points, as well as throwing a couple of pointed questions at me at the end.
Anyway, last month, in response to my quarterly list of top singles, Dave in passing referred to my PBS metaphor, which prompted a longer conversation in which I let loose with a bunch of reassessments and qualifications that I've thought of over the years. And lots of twists and back-and-forth. I'm reposting our convo here. This isn't the "PBS Revisited" essay I ought to write someday (I make reference to a 32-page email I sent Dave and Mark where I wrestle an issue I barely touch here), esp. given that what I value most in this interchange are the Elsa and Anna analyses; but it does give some indication as to where such a reconsideration might go. As I say, the PBS metaphor is never not going to be half-assed, and I'm never not going to feel it's essential. Dave = David Cooper Moore.
Dave: Albums-wise, I really want to write something about Kendrick Lamar and PBS - PBSification in the DNA of the album, which is quite good, but it's unmistakably "good for you," too. Problem is, I don't actually want to write about the Kendrick Lamar album (yet? Maybe ever).
Frank: I still think my "PBS" metaphor is (i) important, (ii) half-assed and problematic, (iii) never likely to coalesce into something that isn't half-assed and problematic, and (iv) important nonetheless. Something to remember - two things to remember - is that the metaphor really had two parts, the parts not clearly delineated or conceptualized in my initial WMS writeups:
(1) Postpunk (etc.) as a cultural corner (or something): so the metaphor "PBS" wasn't particularly saying that this band or that performer had broccoli-like "good for you" tendencies.*** Rather, the metaphor vaguely referred to a whole constellation of opinions and interests and attitudes that turned a broad and contentious (towards each other as well as towards the outside) group of people into an "Us" that believed itself better than a mainstream "Them." But what made (and makes?) the metaphor potent and shocking isn't that it fingered Talking Heads for being tasteful or the Clash for being socially progressive but that it also included stuff that the real PBS would never ever touch with a 10-foot pole: the Mentors (believers in "peaceful rape"), Psycodrama, GG Allin, the whole Forced Exposure/Conflict vibe. (My favorite Byron Coley contribution to Why Music Sucks was when he responded to Phil Milstein's question, "Isn't it time they put Johnny Carson out to pasture? And the Rolling Stones too, for that matter?" by saying "If you mean, is it time that we take these persons to a field & then fuck them from behind, then I must say 'No.'") And PBS included me. So it wasn't all nice stuff. But it all more-or-less constituted a loose nexus that rationalized and justified and made respectably "challenging" a whole bunch of "out" behavior some of which was unapologetically do-good (the Clash) and some of it almost the opposite, a lot of it viewed by postpunk without being part of postpunk or knowing it was being viewed, but all rendered lame in the context of our appreciation. If I were to try to locate a "PBS" today, again not the real one but a more "out" one, I'd certainly include "poptimists" (which is now focused on Freaky Trigger), and your Tumblr world, and The Singles Jukebox. Regarding the new Lamar, which I haven't yet heard, the way it would fit into this "PBS Part One" isn't by being "good for you" in itself but by being embraced by "Us" for being the sort of thing that appeals to us. -An album's being genuinely good for us can be, you know, good, but that's also what makes it eligible for being rendered lame by us. Note also that our genuinely worthy attempts to embrace and understand hip-hop as a whole, including Rick Ross and ilk, are also "PBS." And our having some PBS tendencies is better than having no PBS tendencies, but creating a PBS nexus is worse than having just some PBS tendencies.
(2) A culture-wide "PBSification" that tends to support and romanticize fringes that move "out" but that also, once it perceives some phenomenon as "significant," turns the phenomenon into a symbol of its own significance and lets the symbol substitute for any actual significance. ("The symbol stands in for the event" is how I put it in WMS.) That "our" PBS renders things lame in the nexus of our appreciation etc. is an example of this cultural process whereby a symbol replaces the event it's supposed to symbolize.
-I wouldn't say though that, out in the wide world, symbols of "outness" always, without fail, neutralize what they symbolize. As I said, my metaphor is problematic. Among other problems, I manage to include a whole broad range of stuff in it, and the inclusion of this or that often seems arbitrary, even if it doesn't feel arbitrary. But the metaphor is important nonetheless because what it tries to describe does seem to actually happen, sometimes.****
Dave: Yeah, I'm often hesitant to project PBS onto music itself because most of the time I'm saying to myself something along the lines of "Remember, I am, in part, PBS-or-whatever and that is not entirely a bad thing but can make things lame, my very being here and doing this will have some impact on the thing that may also kill the thing, though hopefully it will make it better..." (which is a longwinded to say usually I use it as a tool for thinking about my /"our" relationship to something less than the thing itself).
In that version of PBS, YG (to use a recent example) and Kendrick Lamar, both of whom (e.g.) reference life experiences and culture that most people (not all) in the social circle of PBS know nothing of firsthand, created music those folks, or that circle, would rate pretty highly. But here Kendrick is sort of playing to and against that audience - in playing against the audience he's playing into their hands - he's closer to the circle himself even though he doesn't need to be for PBS to happen to him.
I'm not sure the metaphor really works in this milieu anyway. Do I think the symbol is replacing the event in Kendrick Lamar's album? Not really, or not entirely. It's infected but it isn't dead yet. And I often think about the idea that some PBSification, of the second type, has a kind of preservative effect, and that one doesn't need to (oh lord forgive me for the pun I'm about to commit) kill the butterfly entirely in the context of one's appreciation (or, from the vantage of the artist, in the context of someone else's presumptive appreciation) to exploit it. (If there's no one "in" to hear something "out," does it make a sound, etc?)
There's something to the precariousness of this process, being right on the edge of marking as significant (no scare quotes) and damning as "significant" (maybe scare quotes AND no scare quotes?).
For some reason this evening I'm imagining it a bit like gentrification, where looking merely at its results paints too simplistic a picture of what's happening on the ground - some features that seem "evils of gentrification-y" (let's say, upwardly-mobile artist types moving into vacant buildings in an area of working class people) don't necessarily end in the phonification (that's "the process of making phony," not "the process of inundating with telephones") of the neighborhood that once was - a little bit of movement may even benefit the whole neighborhood. But in large doses, it essentially pushes what was once unique or special out entirely, sometimes, in the process, "keeping" the neighborhood's "charms" without any of the actual things (or people) who ostensibly made it charming.
Problem with THAT metaphor, though, is that it's too easy to point to "gentrifiers" and "authentic neighborhood people" - which I would like to actually kind of be my point (i.e., gentrification itself doesn't really work this way, it's more complicated) - but it still doesn't quite work, because in the case of PBSification who counts as "out" and who counts as "in" is less a form of colonization and more... I dunno, cannibalization? "We" are kind of out already, and we use "in" to broaden or legitimize it/us, and in doing so we replace this genuine thing (event) with a mere symbol of the thing. But there's not some "other people," some group of phonies, who did this process to the genuine people - we did it to ourselves (is the claim, as I understand it).
Frank: The preservative effect: Well, Shakespeare and Austen, Plato and Nietzsche, Mozart and Verdi all have a living presence in current culture, but for this to have happened there had to be people willing to preserve and in some cases go back and appreciate and resurrect them. Nietzsche might be the most relevant to this discussion, in that he gets to be broccoli by being "subversive," and academic "PBS" types who read him as such get to think of themselves as subversive - or at least as raising provocative questions. More penetrating but prosaic thinkers - Kuhn, Wittgenstein***** - can't be twisted so easily into this role, though there've sure been attempts. In any event, Nietzsche's being used now for what he can do now ("he"), for what we can do now with him, by types who do what they think they want or need to do using him. Which is as it should be, the problem often being with the types, not Nietzsche.
We do it to ourselves: Well, remember, I'm thinking both of the whole culture ("PBSification") and a subset (the punkish or postpunk Musical Marginal Intelligentsia I fingered in my first Why Music Sucks essay), the subset perhaps doing work on behalf of the whole. But that's a big "We" (the culture-wide) and a smaller "We" both doing the doing, perhaps. In any event, back in the Sixties (and prior to being "postpunk," obv., though the attitudes aren't significantly different), the MMI is plumping for blues and r&b, and is much more ambivalent about rock-as-opposed-to-pop than the burgeoning mass rock audience is. But the retrospective "gentrification" (as opposed to PBSification) of Sixties r&b and soul probably comes from The Big Chill (which I've never seen) and oldies radio and VH-1 docs and Grammy accolades and whatever; anyway, pretty directly from the mainstream. Whereas, what the Rolling Stones did (nonretrospectively) with r&b was to make it more potent and furious and to highlight loads that was contradictory and problematic in it, and to basically invent a new music out of it. This in itself wasn't PBSification at all. But I did claim in my essay that nonetheless the Rolling Stones were the ones who set us on the PBS path, their being so potent ensuring that neither the culture as a whole nor the cultures whom the Stones helped create were able to categorize them as mere entertainment (in the way Elvis had been categorized), and so weren't able to trivialize and protect their own listening and fandom or revulsion (the Rolling Stones were probably the most hated band in the world*****) as mere leisure time, either. Hence the capital-S Significance, hence the vulnerability to the symbol standing in for the event, and so on. But the late Sixties/early Seventies punk critics - i.e., the ones who got called punks and who invented the concept "punk," people like Bangs and Marsh - tried to reverse this (what I later called) PBSification by plumping for garage rock and bubblegum, the Troggs, the Ohio Express, all this stuff that could even in late '60s/early '70s retrospect still be trash and dangerous and silly and not saddled with Significance. And it's this trashy, accidentally silly and accidentally potent and accidentally subversive music, "96 Tears" and "Pushin' Too Hard" and "Yummy Yummy Yummy," that the punk/postpunk MMI effectively turned to spinach, like the profs did to Nietzsche. So anti-PBS becomes PBS one convolution later. Except "96 Tears" still kicks, when I hear it, and so does "Under My Thumb." (But without the profs, would Nietzsche have much of a presence? And without the punks, would "96 Tears" be anything but a safe oldie, or a lost classic? It would still kick, when I listen.)
Broader culture gives impetus and support to the margins
In any event, the "broader culture," which is full of multiple currents and countercurrents and conflicts, the conflicts being as defining as the common values, including even the conflicts over which conflicts should be defining, and including "us," the subculture that you and I belong to that I'm occasionally calling a marginal musical intelligentsia (MMI)******* and that I socked with my "PBS for the youth" metaphor back in 1987 (not that you, Dave, and me, Frank, are "PBS" or MMI in all of our aspects)... the "broader culture" can give impetus and support to various movements that move outward and away from a supposed mainstream: so, to survivalist movements, radical right, evangelical, progressive left, feminist, freak, punk, nihilist, and so forth. By "support" I mean that even before this or that "out" group is a presence, someone can be seeded with the romanticism that either propels her out herself or encourages her to give respect to and/or feel intimidated and awed by the person who does go out. This is the question I was asking you and Mark in my notes about social class: where does the MMI and where do freaks get their authority?
So...
Go for broke
When because of the weather we have inside recess, some kids go to the gym and get to run amok while others go to the auditorium where a feature film is projected, always a kids' film like the Croods, and just like in the old days of double features you enter whether the film is beginning or in the middle, and when your recess is finished you leave even though the film isn't over.
Also, first thing in the day, there's an early "recess" which isn't literally a recess but it's when the kids arriving early or the kids who are already there for Extended Day go to the playground, but when early recess is inside they all go to the auditorium and what they usually see is Angry Bird Toons or excerpts from Despicable Me.
Let's classify the midday recess feature films as "Broader Culture," with lots of comedy but also broad positive social messages.
Whereas we'll classify Angry Bird Toons as "our kind of toon" meaning there's no message, just (as Manny Farber had said about termite art) "go for broke art," pure where's the next bit of mayhem, where's the next belly laugh, etc. And although it's just as much from the Broader Culture as the feature films are, it's exactly the sort of stuff that "we" in our marginal halfway-out MMI "PBS" go apeshit for, extolling it in just the way that we extol and preserve the old Fleischer Studio and Warner Bros. cartoons, and the Bill Gaines comic-book output in his Tales From The Crypt days, and so on. (Or at least I would so extol it.)
Connecting the dots
To connect the dots between the two "recesses," the midday Broader Culture feature-length cartoons have a hodge-podge of positive messages some of which push "out": push one towards being oneself and empowering oneself and taking risks and taking on authority and leaping and soaring, flying, etc. etc. etc.
So, in one of the midday recesses I saw approximately 35 minutes of Frozen, from Hans to up the mountain and Olaf and the storm, if you've seen it. It contained "Let It Go" in context, where it was kind of thrilling (hadn't previously liked it and still don't usually enjoy hearing it). A couple months later Amanda, the Kinder teacher I work for, read a short picture-book version of Frozen to the class, so the plot's been spoilerated for me. Since I haven't seen it whole, I can't say one way or another whether the flick would work for me. But I suspect it would. As I was watching it, I assumed Disney had seen its task as making a princess movie that was also at least somewhat feminist, about female self-actualization and self-empowerment. Turns out that this isn't how the plot came about - according to Wikipedia, Disney had first been interested in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" eighty years ago, originally as part of a projected Andersen biopic to be co-produced with Goldwyn. ("The Snow Queen" may have appeared as a short ballet sequence in the 1952 Goldwyn film sans Disney; Wikip is unclear about this.) According to Wikip, the problem for Disney was always how to make the plot work. (Btw, I STRONGLY recommend that you not click the Wikip link if you haven't yet seen Frozen.) From Wikip's synopsis of the Andersen story, the Snow Queen seems not to be central to it, is more a metaphor of some kind of tantalizing entrapment for the male love object. In any event, after various attempts and abandonments over the years to make "The Snow Queen" the basis of a feature film, the project was finally given serious development in 2008, though from the account I'm not sure if it got the actual, definitive green light prior to 2011; and even with production underway in 2012, Disney still hadn't figured out the character and role of the Snow Queen in relation to Anna, the heroine. Finally - perhaps in desperation? - the decision was made to make Anna into her kid sister, to add family drama to what was now a protagonist-antagonist relationship between two princesses. That's how the princess thing entered the story. And shortly afterward, a new screenwriter, Jennifer Lee, was brought in to take over the script. But Elsa - the older princess, the incipient Snow Queen - still hadn't gelled. It was a couple of songwriters, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, in having to come up with a song for her and trying to work out what it felt like to be her, who then in effect reinvented her. And once they'd played Disney the demo, Jennifer Lee said to herself, okay, we did it! we've got the movie! but now I have to rewrite the whole script. So instead of "Let It Go" being tailored to the movie, the song was taken whole, not a lyric changed, and the movie was re-worked around it.
And if you haven't seen Frozen you really need to before you look at my next comment. Though the comment won't reveal much, I don't want to reveal anything, not even the beginning.
Let it go (spoilers)
SPOILER. DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE.
Elsa's no punk, she's not a Mick Jagger or an Eminem. But like Jagger and Eminem, she's an artist who's afraid of her art, of its power. And in the world of the movie, she's slated to ascend to actual political (read "cultural") power but she's afraid to wield her power, that her various powers will sabotage and destroy everything. And, according to Jennifer Lee, there's at least something of a subtext that, in moving from princess to queen, Elsa is potentially moving to full-blown sexual expression. (I don't remember The Lion King very well, but there seem to be parallels.) Anyway, Anna still understands little of this, so her journey to find her sister is also a journey to discover who Elsa is. Meanwhile, Elsa has decided that the only way she can be her powerful self is to be alone, to divorce power from command. Which of course means it's not full power, since the condition of letting herself go is that she - it - her art, her power, her self, her authority - doesn't go anywhere real, doesn't make a difference. So Anna's quest is also to bring Elsa and Elsa's power back to society, back to people.********
In half paying attention to the picture-book version (at the same time as I was wiping down desks and sharpening pencils), I never learned if or how the movie actually resolves what Elsa is to do with her power. I gather that regarding the ending Disney's energy was concentrated on how to make the narrative configure the multiple meanings of love. Lee and Buck were instructed to make sure they earned the love ending. I fear that this left the power issue somewhat in the lurch. Someday I'll have to see the thing in its entirety. Here's a great interview with Jennifer Lee where she goes deep into the process of creating the story.*********
http://johnaugust.com/2014/scriptnotes-ep-128-frozen-with-jennifer-lee-transcript
One thing I think I'm noticing in kid culture********** is that, despite Anna taking up way more screen time, it's Elsa the kids immediately think of when they think of the movie. This may be owing to the visuals as much as the conception, her light-blue and blondeness appearing more rarefied and enticing and princessy (perhaps this is me capitulating to a cultural stereotype, or Disney capitulating, or the kids).
Click to view"Let It Go"
The bad stuff that is therefore good
In its manifestation in the broader culture, PBSification is a movement outward, which is conceived of as both good for you (socially progressive if you're on the left, radically preservative and even apocalyptic if you're on the right) and bad for you (so touts bad girls and wildness and recalcitrance), and being bad is good for you because it challenges the mainstream's idea of goodness, even if it's the mainstream that generates this challenge to its goodness. And my complaint is that once we know or think we know this significance of the good-bad stuff (i.e., the "bad" stuff that we've decided is therefore good), once we realize that it actually does have cultural value and impact, we let the symbol, capital-S Significance, stand in for actual significance - but prior to our really comprehending the significance, the good-bad stuff was walled-off into entertainment, so was like Elsa isolated with her "power." So I'm sorta saying that Angry Bird Toons, prior to being lionized and crowned king or queen by PBS/MMI types like me, is like Elsa on her mountain, where it's safe from our really understanding its cultural value and we're safe from understanding its potency. So there, I've conflated Elsa and Angry Bird Toons, which is both a strength and weakness of my PBS metaphor, that I seem to be able to make it absorb anything. But remember that, though I wasn't using the term "PBS" entirely as a pejorative, it still primarily is pejorative, and as such it's not a criticism of understanding but of a type of neutralization that follows and perhaps undoes understanding.
In saying in 1987 that the supposed punk supposed alternative supposed indie supposed underground had become our own little "PBS," I was saying that in effect it had become a cultural niche, one that let the symbol of its own challenge to the culture substitute for any actual challenge, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that it - the subculture, the MMI - was generated by the overall culture and was part of the overall culture.
(And this claim of mine is ridiculously overbroad, but still somewhat right, and still necessary in its overbroadness.)
The movie's icy heart
Dave: I have seen Frozen (so spoilers ahead) - twice now, plus lots of 5-20-minute snatches overseen/heard when nephews and nieces are watching - and what I like and dislike about it are pretty much the same thing, and something that I was surprised, in retrospect (well, maybe not surprised, but pleased?) that kids picked up on, which is that it really is Elsa's story even though Elsa barely features in huge hunks of the movie, much to its detriment.
The formation (and eventual abandonment) of the ice castle is so the heart of the movie that it's hard to care about much else going on. A few folks had mentioned how disturbing it was for their kids to see the "prince charming" scenario turn sour for Anna, but for me the real disturbing stuff - the stuff that disturbed ME, that is, not sure how it would affect kids - was just how violent Elsa became in her quest for a quiet, private place of her own. (Mick Jagger thought two's a crowd, but I don't think he flung literal ice daggers at anyone who got near him, aiming to murder them effortlessly and indiscriminately, even if that was what he was feeling.)
But like I said, kids clearly picked up on the fact that Elsa is the star and the heart and soul of the movie. "Let It Go" is the right song for the right moment there, and it reminds me that when I was a kid I often fantasized that I had a special power to stay young and invincible, and sharp claws might have been part of the deal too - destined to brood and roam the earth quietly with the ability to beat up bad guys if absolutely necessary, which it would be, I imagined. But mostly I would just kind of be there, hanging around everyone, and they wouldn't notice me, would float in and out and around and I would be totally unremarked on. That this thought - of being alone in a crowd (h/t Hilary Duff) - became a source of constant anxiety in early adulthood is maybe ironic or else just the flipside of the same coin, I guess.
* * *
Y'know, I'm really struggling to actually remember how Frozen ends! If I recall it correctly, which I may not, Elsa learns how to use her powers in moderation, but...
[checks]
OK, right (spoilers!) Elsa is kidnapped from her castle - this is after her attempted icicle murder - and imprisoned in her frozen hometown, but she breaks free and hoofs it back to the castle, leading to a series of things I don't remember well even reading the Wikip description, yada yada, Anna expresses true love by offering herself in sacrifice, love is the key to controlling her powers.
I remember the ending (the "solution") not being nearly as interesting or convincing as the set-up (the "problem").
I never meta meta I didn't like
Frank: I gather that from the producer's and writer's(s') p.o.v., with Anna still in their mind as protagonist, the deliberate double misdirection and switchup as to what constitutes the act of true love that will save Anna was what they were fundamentally working towards, and was what motivated Del Vecho to make the movie in the first place: there's a kind of meta going on where the characters are searching (twice) for the man who will provide the act of true love that saves Anna - as the genre might make us expect - whereas what the story actually gives us is Anna sacrificing herself to save Elsa, this being the unexpected act of true love that ends up saving Anna as well as Elsa.
(If you haven't yet read the Jennifer Lee interview, I reiterate my recommendation.)
How do they solve the alienation problem?
Dave: Yes need to check out the interview. I get the switchup, and I like the switchup, both on paper and to a lesser extent on the screen, especially if the alternative is romantic love of the perfect guy. (I really like that we get to iterations of imperfection - one the seemingly perfect guy who has sinister ulterior motives and the other the bumbling friend she grows to love even though it's not "save the kingdom" love).
But I guess what it doesn't answer for me is how Anna's action actually solves Elsa's alienation problem. We know that the sisters love each other and would do anything for the other (that isn't in doubt for a second) and Anna's display is touching in its own way, but Elsa has a lot of power and it seems a bit like the "solution" is very much outside of Elsa, who by the end just kind of has cool ice powers (no pun intended) that she can turn on and off like a faucet rather than being blessed/cursed with an all-powerful firehose. I'd be interested in a sequel where she has to come to grips with the fact that she can still kill a man with an icicle dagger if she wants to.
* * *
Now I'm disagreeing with myself - of course the thing that's supposed to be at the heart of the movie is how Elsa slowly but completely shuts herself away from her sister, and the idea is that the sister's love melts her heart. I mean, I get it!
I'm just addicted to the ice castle impulse, which to me isn't necessarily yoked to the sibling love. I just feel at the end like there's no reason Elsa shouldn't feel, in some way, like she wants to go back to her castle, maybe. That the castle is always there, even if you have lots of love to keep you away from it. Maybe not very Disney...
Disney can't resolve it because people can't resolve it, either
Frank: Isn't the fundamental reason Elsa isolated herself in the first place, while growing up, that she was afraid of inadvertently hurting her sister again? And Anna doesn't understand this because, to protect her from remembering the original trauma, she's been given a memory wipe? So poor Anna doesn't understand why Elsa has emotionally shut her out, and meanwhile her being shut out makes her rebellious, and therefore a sucker for Hans? So in this way, in protecting Anna, doesn't Elsa herself psychologically injure her again? (Genuine questions, since I didn't see these parts.) And then later, in driving Anna off from the mountain castle, Elsa literally (though inadvertently?) injures her once more, as she had when they were kids?
But if I'm reading you and the movie correctly, while protecting Anna may be Elsa's first motive for isolating, the song "Let It Go" reveals another, more intrinsic reason for Elsa to hole up in her ice castle: the castle's where she can let loose with her icicle powers. Just her and her canvas, so to speak. But I don't think isolation is her goal. It's just the precondition of her being able to let go with her art, her joy, her power, her ice. But her power is incomplete precisely because she is alone (imo).
Disney can't resolve this because people irl can't resolve it, either. But I'm with you in thinking the script leaves Elsa's power as a loose thread, or a dangling dagger, or something.
PBS wrapped-up, like a fish in the freezer
Some additional thoughts on PBS, before wrapping this up for a repost:
In my trot I described PBSification as:
Something vital discovers a sense of its own significance, thereby losing certain psychological protections that had allowed it to fool around and maybe not grasp its own potent nature. I was thinking of '50s rock 'n' roll as being pre-PBS and then the British-Invasion groups such as the Rolling Stones - my favorite band ever - setting rock on a PBS path; but this can apply to any cultural form, not just rock music. Once the significance is understood, a reverse process takes over, and the performers imagine capital-S Significance for themselves that they don't in fact have, and sell this imaginary significance, which the audience buys.
Problem with that def'n is that it's way too broad, simply recounts a species of bad thinking whereby something gets extolled and someone who doesn't actually embody the thing being extolled nonetheless hops aboard the word that's used for it. Whereas what puts the "PBS" in PBSification is a certain kind of significance that combines the educational-TV aspect of PBS ("let's use our leisure time for worthy purposes") with the romantic inclination to challenge a supposedly dominant mainstream, to move outward into opposition, even if that socially worthy movement outward takes the form of getting wasted and throwing up outside the club and seeing oneself as untamed and undomesticated. We should add a dash of "elitism," too - the few, the proud, the punks! - whereby our vomit is better than your vomit: our vomit is more extreme and out there, or our vomit is truer and more authentic. Still pretty broad: PBSification creates competing PBS's (just as our MMI circa '87 competes with and outflanks the actual Public Broadcasting System, which has to then lift some of the MMI attributes in order to keep up). So whiskey vomit can compete with wine-and-cheese vomit, depending on which elitism you're playing towards. I'm willing to count Bukowski vomit and Toby Keith vomit as embodying competing PBS tendencies, which compete with EDM vomit and Psycodrama vomit. Still superbroad, and I'm not saying that PBS tendencies always result in the formation of a PBS grouping. Rather, that the culture-wide tendency to support outward movements, added to the tendency to link leisure-time pleasure-time pursuits to such outward movement, and to valorize them as such, and the human tendency to let symbols stand in for events, is a backdrop that supports the creation of vague groupings that are PBS-like.
More fish
To say that the supposed indie-alternative supposed underground was a cultural niche and a marketing niche - which it surely was, though "constellation of loosely related quasi-niches" is probably more accurate - doesn't preclude its being a genuine challenge to the overall culture. There's no contradiction there. Challenging the mainstream is a mainstream impulse. Perhaps you're not challenging the impulse to challenge, but why should you? The idea of a culture challenging itself in toto is unintelligible, but that doesn't mean it can't challenge itself substantially. Of course, a particular challenge may not be a good challenge. That's a different matter. My basic beef was with our letting symbols stand in for events, for letting the symbol of challenge stand in for an actual challenge. -By the way, I was - and am - making an authenticity argument. I was accusing postpunk indie-alternative of being phony. But I'm not saying that a cultural and marketing niche is phony by definition.
I was also accusing the indie-alternative niche of making bad music, and I think I was right about that as well. But my attempt to link my two complaints didn't and doesn't work (imo). That is, I was trying to say that the indie underground let the symbol stand in for the musical event, which is true only if by "stand in" I mean "mischaracterize" or "dumb down." But I went further and claimed that the symbols were replacing musical events (or at least depleting musical events), that people were in effect listening to the symbols rather than the music.*********** My claim was untenable in a number of ways, not the least of which is that you can't divorce symbols from sound (symbols are part of music, sound is part of symbols************). I wrote a long email to Simon Frith about this that I inserted into the PBS chapter of Real Punks. Also, people's liking for music is (loosely speaking) visceral, and if indie fans hadn't been getting their viscera fed by the music they wouldn't have shown up. I once sent you and Mark a 32-page email about this, which maybe'll go into a future collection, Real Slim Shadies Are Smarter Than Poptimists. My basic conclusion was that "Lets the feeling stand in for the event" is functionally equivalent to "Lets the symbol stand in for the event." Which means that viscerally effective music (not to mention good music, though that's not necessarily the same thing) can also stand in for a claimed event. Which it certainly can, but then I haven't explained why I think indie music is lousy music. It merely explains why I think indie music is phony. -Of course, I could simply decide that music that's phony is bad on account of its being phony, even when it sounds good. But I haven't made this decision, though I surely do downgrade stuff for being phony. And given that phoniness affects my viscera and that my viscera are not independent of my life and my ideas, nor are they more basic, my sense of something's being phony can easily coincide with my viscera being turned off. But it generally doesn't, in other genres.
Not quite done.
I'm not saying that Angry Bird Toons and Frozen ARE PBS (though it's possible the respective makers of Angry Bird Toons and Frozen got PBS-like schooling that informs their work, mostly in good ways). Frozen is here in this comment thread 'cause it works towards a positive self-affirmation message that links to outward social motion and therefore, by heading "out," is eligible to be PBSified. -What is eligible to be PBSified? The affirmation? The motion? Well, the filmmakers get kudos from me for being honest enough to make the affirmation and the movement dangerous and problematic, which makes the movie good and good-for-you in a deeper and richer way than I'd expected, though also makes it eligible for praise from people like me, which can lead to the symbol of such problematizing standing in for the event of problematizing, even while viewing a movie in which the problematizing actually happens. So, e.g., the applause we give to Jennifer Lee for problematizing Elsa, and that we give to Jagger and Eminem for problematizing themselves, can eventually get in the way of our actually taking in the problem as a problem; so, the problematizing is rendered lame in the context of our appreciation, even though understanding and appreciation are essential.
Whereas Angry Bird Toons can be reduced to, I don't know, art or something - I mean, in the context of our appreciation. I'm not talking about what might happen in future episodes.
Footnotes, incl. world's longest asterisk:
*I'm talking here about my music. My writing had yet to make an impact. It perhaps still hasn't, but fwiw, in regard to the writing, I think I do my thing as well as the Sex Pistols and Stones did theirs.
**If you'd like, you can find big hunks of the original essays in Reak Punks Don't Wear Black.
***I like the taste of broccoli, by the way.
****I brought up "Symbol stands in for the event" in my convo with Josh yesterday. It's on my mind.
*****I actually find Wittgenstein more potently poetic than Nietzsche, but he's not as readily epigramizable. None of this is meant as a slam on Nietzsche.
******As some Fusion writer, a Stones fan, probably Les Daniels, said at the time.
*******Or "musical marginal intelligentsia," or even "music marginal intelligentsia," depending on how I happen to type it at the moment.
********Anna's journey is a journey of self-discovery too, though I won't go into that here.
*********A big part of Lee's struggle was to make sure the movie worked as comedy as well as drama; that struggle is one I'm not dealing with in this comment.
**********Several weeks ago I was at a seder where a four-year-old who had yet to see the movie was nonetheless dressed in full Elsa costume, which she'd gotten with her parents at an Anna & Elsa boutique.
***********I complained that fun had turned into a style rather than an experience, so that whether or not a band was fun had little to do with whether it was designated a fun band. Problem with this argument is that, even when it's true that a "fun band" isn't a lot of fun, this doesn't mean it has no musical characteristics and no musical value - or for that matter that it can't have a lot of musical value. I'm thinking of Psy's "Gentleman," which is presented as "fun" but is much more angry than fun, and is very good.
************Not sure how this works for people who are born deaf, but my guess is that it does, that deaf people have capacities that function like sound, both in the sense that their brains can generate sound even if their ears can't hear it, and that a similarly sensual "color" aspect is included in how they respond to text. I can't pretend I know what I'm talking about, though.