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.