Let it Go, Let it Grow

Helena's favorite two movies are The Lorax and Frozen, and as she has been singing the songs from both, it has become increasingly obvious that something similar is going on.  The anthem for Frozen, as everyone knows, is Let it Go.




The Lorax, though very successful, hasn't become such an integral part of pop culture, so you may not have heard Let it Grow, sung at the climax of the movie.




Let it Go, Let it Grow.  Even the melodies have something similar to them.  I don't think plagiarism has anything to do with the similarity, but that both movies are tapping into something very interesting about the zeitgeist.

Helena Iara also uses the same "Let..." construction, and quite often.  I notice it, because (informed by Portuguese grammar, which makes more sense to her) she will always say, "Daddy, let I climb on this chair..." or any other number of things she thinks I may or may not allow her to do.  This little gramattical error, however, points to the most interesting thing about Let it Go, Let it Grow, which is to say, who is the agent of the action?  When one says "Daddy, let me do x," who is the actor and who is acted upon?

Helena on the dunes near our house in Florianópolis

Let's look at how other similar sentences work: "Daddy, give me" or "Daddy, lift me" (in one case, the me as indirect object, the other as direct object), it is pretty clear that Daddy is the actor.  Daddy lifts, Helena is lifted.  Daddy gives, Helena has something given to her.  With "Let me", we seem to follow the same logic: Daddy is allowing, Helena being allowed.  "Let I," or the Portuguese "Deixa eu," confuses things more than a little bit.  I becomes the subject, the agent, while Daddy is more a barrier to be overcome.

What does Elsa mean when she declares the desire to "Let it Go"?  She is, in fact, freeing herself from social, gender, and age constraints.  There is no Daddy here to allow or not to allow he to be herself, only the unwritten rules of society, the disdain she fears that she will face, what "They" will say.  Elsa is very clearly the agent of the change, the subject of the sentence.  Interestingly, in the Portuguese translation of the song, we hear "Livre estou": I am free.

In The Lorax, the Once-ler's thneed factory has killed all of the truffula trees, and no plants can grow in the the city that has been built on the ruins of the forest.  Ted and Audrey, the young protagonists, get a last seed from the Once-ler and try to plant it in the middle of town, but the most powerful businessman in Thneedville wants to stop them.  Finally, convinced by Ted and Audrey, the people of the town sing "Let it Grow" as a way to reject the businessman's attempt to keep oxygen as a commodity that only he can sell.  (I've already written on the radical politics of the Lorax, if you are interested)  It seems, then, that the implied subject of "Let is Grow" is the businessman: "Hey, you, let it grow!"

Helena with her friend Luc

In fact, though, what would keep the tree from growing is the people as a whole: before Ted and Audrey convince them of the virtues of trees, they are fully on the side of keeping Thneedville as it is, "plastic and they liked it that way."  The command is not really given to O'Hare, the businessman, but to the people themselves.  "Let is grow" is the way that the people give a command to themselves.  Exactly the same is true of Elsa: she can only let herself be free by directing a plea to "Let it go" to some unknown figure who is the real agent of the story.

But who is the agent?  To whom is the "let" directed?  Elsa is talking to herself; the people of Thneedville are talking to themselves.  In fact, what we see here is a split between the thinking self and the acting self, where one tries to tell the other what to do.  Though this break might seem schitzophenic, in fact it is quite honest.  What is really keeping the people of Thneedville from cultivating trees isn't some abstract law or an oppressive power (even Mr. O'Hare): it is themselves.  Elsa's freedom is also limited more by herself, by her fear of what others will say, than by those others.  So in fact, while it might be more direct to say "Let's cultivate trees" or "I am free," both social agents need that detour in order to allow themselves to do what they want.

Amazing how complex the lyrics to children's songs can be...

Let the storm rage on: Frozen

Obsession with Frozen hardly makes Helena Iara unique.  Half of the little girls who pay attention to movies (and maybe a quarter of little boys?) have probably joined her in watching it at least 15 times since the DVD release a couple of weeks ago.  And as usual, I can only tolerate seeing the movie that many times by overthinking.  So I'll skip the easy (and very cool) things that a lot of critics talk about (the feminism of the movie, the fact that only 1% of Hollywood movies have two female leads, the redefinition of an "act of love") and go straight to the heavy philosophy.

In the mid-20th Century, the idea of structuralism took over continental philosophy: thinkers like Claude Levi-Stauss, Roman Jacobson, and Louis Althusser took a basic insight from linguistics and turned it into a way to understand the whole world.  In language, no sound means anything of itself, but only in opposition to something else: for instance, in Spanish, all of the sounds from b to v are pronounced the same way, but in English, it makes a big difference if you say "bile" or "vile."  Sounds come to be important when we learn to distinguish them from very similar, but minimally different, other sounds.    Structuralists made this insight into a rule of the universe: for Levi-Strauss, cultures had to divide the things of the world between the "raw" and the "cooked", between "high" and "low" and many other divisions.

At the same time, Disney began to put fairy tales on the screen, and (consciously or not) their movies fell into these structures.  There were active men and passive women.  Envious, serious villains stood against funny, collaborative heroes.  Real, loving family was opposed to resentful stepmothers.  I don't know if anyone ever did it, but structuralists would have had a field day with early Disney movies.

At first, Frozen appears to follow this kind of logic.  The never-opening door to a bedroom divides two sisters, the ice queen Elsa and the gregarious, funny Anna.  Anna lives in the world of "Inside" and dreams of the freedom of "out", symbolized by the first time that the windows open ("I didn't know that they did that any more," she sings).  Hans is smooth, urbane, social; Kristof is a awkward, poor, a loner.  According to the songwriters, the original draft of the script even had an evil Elsa against a good Ana.

The song "Let it Go" marks the end of the film's easy oppositional structures.  It was written ambiguously, so that Elsa could end up either good or bad, depending on the final script, and this ambiguity is the music's genius.  The first time I saw the movie, I thought I was seeing a genealogy of the Disney witch: how does the queen in Snow White or Malificent in Sleeping Beauty come to be who she is?  At the end of the song, her clothes are transformed into rock-star sexy and her ice castle constructed on an unreachable crag.  Though the song is "inspirational", as many commenters have said, the inspiration is rather Nietzschean: 

It’s time to see what I can do

To test the limits and break through

No right, no wrong, no rules for me

I’m free

Elsa has attempted to place herself "beyond good and evil."  The good girl, trapped behind her door by her feeling of guilt for almost killing her sister, becomes the witch. We have taken the first step beyond structuralism, seeing that the "good-evil" dichotomy, so central to 1950s Disney movies, can in fact be different sides or even different moments, of the same young woman.  The song, with its pounding piano-rock rhythm (so like the mid 1990s Tori Amos and unlike most Disney) captures this explosion of a-moral freedom perfectly.

By the end of the film, Elsa has become the good queen, redeemed by love (the love of her sister, not that of any man: perhaps this is why figures on the political right have accused the film of promoting lesbianism).  She has learned to control the power of the cold, using it for the good of Erindell.  If Elsa locked into her room, trying to control her power, is a symbol of the cruel superego, then the end of the movie is the happy ego.  Here's the point, though, and one with which Lacan, if not all psychoanalysts, would certainly agree.  There is no direct road between the repressed hysteria of Elsa locked in her room, and the relatively well adapted Elsa of the last scene.  To get from superego to ego, she must pass through the id.  She must traverse the fantasy of using and abusing her powers in the most extreme way,

I don’t care

What they’re going to say

Let the storm rage on,

The cold never bothered me anyway

Among the many problems of traditional Disney movies, we should list the passivity of the heroine's journey to womanhood.  She suffers, but always because of the actions of others (the poison apple, the witch's curse), and it is the action of the (male) hero that turns her into a (happy) woman.  In Frozen, Elsa must make her own way through her own dark night of the soul, tarrying with the negative (of her witchcraft) before finding her way out.  She externalizes her cold, which is no longer part of her being, and now something that she does to the earyh

I'm always reluctant to applaud the products of multinational capitalist corporation, but Disney got something right this time.