"Enchanted" Movie Moral
The following is quoted from an email I wrote to a friend:
>>I just finished watching "Enchanted." It was a fairy tale! They all lived happily ever after, enjoying the financial successes of their publishing and fashion ventures. That WAS the moral, right?
>And here I thought the moral was love conquers all and there's a right person for everyone...
Did we watch the same movie? This is my (tongue-in-cheek) analysis of the characters and their relationships...
First of all, there is the star: Giselle. She falls in love with her prince and sets off to marry him the next day. Less than a week later, due to some trickery induced circumstances, she is receiving "true love's kiss" from some other guy right in front of the prince, who is still technically her fiance!
Now then, there's the man who kissed her: Robert. He spends five years with this woman, Nancy, leading her on and never getting serious enough about her to let her stay the night "because of the child." Five years! I think that's long enough. Of course, Morgan's Mom isn't in the picture, is never named, and is only talked about briefly as having "left." Typical of this movie's dysfunction, Robert flatly refuses to discuss Morgan's mother with Morgan!
Luckily, as soon as Nancy and Prince Edward are dumped by their prior loves, they marry each other instead. This is the same pattern of failure established by Edward's father, King - er... Um, wait... Queen Narissa never mentioned a husband, a partner, or even a sperm donor, but she's obviously been wounded by love and left bitter and resentful. One clue comes from the queen's great worry that her daughter-in-law-to-be, not her son, is the one who will be after her crown. Projecting from her ambitious past? We don't know anything about Prince Edward's family life or where he learned his troll-abusing tendencies.
Frankly, we don't know anything about Giselle's family either. One might guess she lived alone in the eco-friendly treehouse, but we do know that she passed idle hours building "dream dates" out of household knick-knacks. The one thing her heartless, brainless, silent, soulless mannequin needed to be perfect? Lips! Love and kissing are equivalent.
True love did have ONE victory in the film: the divorcing couple. After a comment about her eyes, the couple decided to stay together after all. Aw, surely THAT will last. Even if it doesn't, that fractured, strained relationship is the closest to devoted "ever after" love that anyone in the movie gets.
Neither Nathaniel nor Pip find even this movie's shallow approximations of love, but they do find happiness in their book deals. The queen was killed, still bitter and alone in the world.
The movie is literally chock-full of emotionally dysfunctional individuals with unreasonable and unrealistic expectations about love which they shoehorn into the first convenient lover/victim who is willing to spend a few moments with them. Pretty much your typical Disney movie, though. (Disney movies are famous for dead, missing, or killed-in-the-movie mothers.)
>>I just finished watching "Enchanted." It was a fairy tale! They all lived happily ever after, enjoying the financial successes of their publishing and fashion ventures. That WAS the moral, right?
>And here I thought the moral was love conquers all and there's a right person for everyone...
Did we watch the same movie? This is my (tongue-in-cheek) analysis of the characters and their relationships...
First of all, there is the star: Giselle. She falls in love with her prince and sets off to marry him the next day. Less than a week later, due to some trickery induced circumstances, she is receiving "true love's kiss" from some other guy right in front of the prince, who is still technically her fiance!
Now then, there's the man who kissed her: Robert. He spends five years with this woman, Nancy, leading her on and never getting serious enough about her to let her stay the night "because of the child." Five years! I think that's long enough. Of course, Morgan's Mom isn't in the picture, is never named, and is only talked about briefly as having "left." Typical of this movie's dysfunction, Robert flatly refuses to discuss Morgan's mother with Morgan!
Luckily, as soon as Nancy and Prince Edward are dumped by their prior loves, they marry each other instead. This is the same pattern of failure established by Edward's father, King - er... Um, wait... Queen Narissa never mentioned a husband, a partner, or even a sperm donor, but she's obviously been wounded by love and left bitter and resentful. One clue comes from the queen's great worry that her daughter-in-law-to-be, not her son, is the one who will be after her crown. Projecting from her ambitious past? We don't know anything about Prince Edward's family life or where he learned his troll-abusing tendencies.
Frankly, we don't know anything about Giselle's family either. One might guess she lived alone in the eco-friendly treehouse, but we do know that she passed idle hours building "dream dates" out of household knick-knacks. The one thing her heartless, brainless, silent, soulless mannequin needed to be perfect? Lips! Love and kissing are equivalent.
True love did have ONE victory in the film: the divorcing couple. After a comment about her eyes, the couple decided to stay together after all. Aw, surely THAT will last. Even if it doesn't, that fractured, strained relationship is the closest to devoted "ever after" love that anyone in the movie gets.
Neither Nathaniel nor Pip find even this movie's shallow approximations of love, but they do find happiness in their book deals. The queen was killed, still bitter and alone in the world.
The movie is literally chock-full of emotionally dysfunctional individuals with unreasonable and unrealistic expectations about love which they shoehorn into the first convenient lover/victim who is willing to spend a few moments with them. Pretty much your typical Disney movie, though. (Disney movies are famous for dead, missing, or killed-in-the-movie mothers.)