Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers,…
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The quest to revise The Little Mermaid continues. This week, we call in the experts. Part two of three.
RESOURCES
Malcolm Gladwell
In his best known work, the uses of enchantment, the late Austrian psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim, asks us to consider the genius of the children's tale, Three Little Pigs. You remember Three Little Pigs.
Voice Actor 1 (reading)
The first little pig was very lazy. He didn't want to work at all, and he built his house out of straw. The second little pig worked a little bit harder, but he was somewhat lazy too, and he built his house out of sticks. Then they sang and danced and played together the rest of the day. The third little pig worked hard all day and built his house with bricks. It was a sturdy house complete with a fine fireplace and chimney. It looked like it could withstand the strongest winds.
Malcolm Gladwell
The wicked wolf visits the first pig with the straw house and says he's going to eat him, "Not by the hair of my ginny chin chin." The little pig says. The wolf replies, "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down." And so he does, easily. The little pig escapes to his brother's house. The house built of sticks. The wolf gives chase blows that one down too. Then the two little pigs escaped to their big brother's house, the one made of bricks, and this time the wicked wolf can't blow it down.
Voice Actor 1 (reading)
The wolf danced about with rage and swore he would come down the chimney and eat up the little pig for his supper. But while he was climbing onto the roof, the little pig made up a blazing fire and put on a big pot full of water to boil. Then just as the wolf was coming down the chimney, the little piggy pulled off the lid and plop in, fell the wolf into the scolding water.
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, yes. The three little pigs, "I'll huff and I'll puff." Everyone knows the story of the three little pigs. Bruno Bettelheim's question was, what works in a fairytale? The three Little pigs works and what doesn't work? The fable of the ants and the grasshopper. Do you even remember it? I don't think you do. Here's the story.
The ants spend a summer working nonstop, preparing for winter. Meanwhile, the grasshopper fritters away his summer entertaining himself, and now he's hungry.
Voice Actor 1 (reading)
"What?" Cried the ants in surprise. "Haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?" "I didn't have time to store up any food," wined the grasshopper. "I was so busy making music that before I knew it, the summer was gone." The ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust, "Making music, were you?" They cried. "Very well, now dance." And they turned their backs on the grasshopper and went on with their work.
Malcolm Gladwell
That's it. That's the end of the story. Now this one has the same basic lesson as Three Little Pigs. Life favors the hardworking and the prepared. Both stories have cute animals who just want to have fun. Little pigs, grasshoppers playing music, and the story of the ants and the grasshopper should be lodged in our memories because it was written by Aesop of Aesop's Fables, the same legend who brought us, The Tortoise and the Hair.
Pedigreed storytelling, but we don't remember it. Why? Because we love the grasshopper and Aesop just throws him to the ants. Deep into my investigation of the Little Mermaid, I realized that we make Aesop's mistake all the time. We don't understand how seriously children take their fairy tales. We think we can satisfy them with a few sternly worded lessons, but we can't. Think of the Three Little Pigs. There's a chase scene, some trash talking, "Not by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin." No fewer than three home invasions, and a brilliant plot twist with the vat of boiling water at the bottom of the chimney, just waiting for the impetuous wolf.
Voice Actor 1 (reading)
So the little piggy puts on the cover again, boiled the wolf up and the three little piggies ate him for supper.
Malcolm Gladwell
You swing at the pigs, you best not miss. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part two of my three part forensic analysis of the blockbuster princess movie, The Little Mermaid.
In part one, we heard from a law professor who argues that the Disney company fumbled the tale of the young mermaid who wanted to trade her fins for feet. In this episode, I want to talk about the theory of fairy tales. Why they matter, why they work, and why sometimes they don't work at all? The closest modern equivalent we have to Bruno Bettelheim, is a literary scholar named Angus Fletcher. Fletcher is not a psychoanalyst like Bettelheim was. He trained as a neuroscientist.
Are you the first person in history to leave neuroscience to get a PhD in English?
Angus Fletcher
Yes, tragically I went in exactly the opposite direction from everybody else, and this is why I am bankrupt. Everyone sane went from English to neuroscience, and yes, I like the fool that I am-
Malcolm Gladwell
Somewhere your parents are just crying. This is devastating.
Angus Fletcher
It's just humiliating. Well, it's even worse, you can't tell because I've lost my accent, but I'm an immigrant, and so all immigrant families, my parents are just obsessed with science and they wanted me to be a doctor and they were disappointed when I only went into science. But they're like, "Well, I guess that's okay." And then poetry, it's humiliating for them, they've disowned me.
Malcolm Gladwell
I wanted to talk to Fletcher because of a book he wrote called, Wonderworks, the 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. Which is this strange and captivating work full of twists and turns and fascinating asides. It's the kind of book that makes you want to talk to the author just to make sure there aren't more bits of wisdom out there to be had. Anyway, I'm on the phone with Angus, struggling to understand what went wrong with The Little Mermaid and Angus, since he's Angus, says, "Oh, the thing you have to understand is that there's actually two categories of fairy tales. The original kind and the modern kind."
And then Angus starts talking about some of the earliest recorded fairy tales, like the stories collected by the 16th century Italian writer, Giovanni Straparola. Straparola, published a two volume set known as The Facetious Knights, Puss in Boots is a Straparola, story.
Angus Fletcher
So yeah. There are these two amazing things that we start to see in Straparola's, fairy tales, which again are the most ancient ones we have written down. The first is that good luck happens to people who are fools. So a fool might find a lucky fish, and by a fool, I mean an actual fool. Somebody who is so dense in the story that he says terrible, rude things to everybody he meets, is an inept fisher person, has no apparent positive qualities whatsoever, and then ends up a prince. And it can go even further than that. It can happen to people who are bad.
Malcolm Gladwell
A classic example of this kind of story is an ancient fairytale about a girl named, Adamantina. Adamantina's family is starving and she's sent by her older sister to buy food at the market.
Angus Fletcher
Adamantina, goes to the market with the family's last money and does she buy food? No. She makes a whimsical purchase of a doll that she sees because she happens to like this doll. And she takes this doll home with her, and her older sister is so distraught that she has this breakdown is, "Oh, my goodness, this is the end of the family. You have ruined the family. It's all over." And lo and behold, the doll turns out to be a magic doll and it spits forth money.
And this is the beginning of a series of just bizarre improbable happenings that occur in the story. And Adam and Tina does not deserve them at all. She's not virtuous. She's not smart. She's not nice. She's not kind.
Malcolm Gladwell
The doll is a lottery ticket.
Angus Fletcher
The doll is a lottery ticket. That's exactly right. Yes.
Malcolm Gladwell
Fletcher, calls these kinds of stories, Fairytale Twist Stories. If you look at all the stories collected by Straparola, they almost always end with fairytale twists. For thousands of years, people sat around the fire and listened to storytellers and what are the narratives that survived the evolution of centuries? Stories in which heroes did not deserve their fate.
Angus Fletcher
Audiences wanted to believe that life could suddenly go from bad to good.
Malcolm Gladwell
It's not simply that life could suddenly go from... There could be a sudden twist. It's that the twist would be unrelated to the disposition and character of the protagonist that, "I didn't have to meet a certain qualification to be eligible for this good fortune. It was bestowed on anyone."
But then in the 17th century, fairy tales took a dramatic turn. The key figure was the French writer, Charles Perrault. He read the fairy tales that had been collected by earlier writers and loved them, wanted to share them with the world, but Perrault, thought they needed a little tweaking.
Angus Fletcher
He said, "You know what? These tales are so primitive. They were written before the age of reason. They were written before the enlightenment. And reason tells us that all these instances in which good things are coming from bad, it can't happen because life follows this logic that's been created by God. And I want these stories to instill that. So I'm just going to make these changes. I'm going to change it so that good things only happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. And so there's no more good happening to bad. There's only good happening to good."
Malcolm Gladwell
Fletcher, calls these kinds of fairy tales, Poetic Justice Stories. The classic example of this second type of story is Cinderella, an ancient tale which Charles Perrault, revised. Later The Brothers Grimm, did their own version of the Tale in Germany. Here's how it begins, with our introduction to Cinderella.
Voice Actor 2 (reading)
The wife of a rich man fell sick, and when she felt that her end drew neigh, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, "Always be a good girl, and I will look down from heaven and watch over you." Soon afterwards, she shut her eyes and died and was buried in the garden. And the little girl went every day to her grave and wept and was always good and kind to honor her mother.
Malcolm Gladwell
Cinderella's father remarries. Cinderella, gets an evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters, but no matter what they do to her, Cinderella remains pious and good.
Voice Actor 2 (reading)
It happened once that her father was going to the fair and asked his wife's daughters what he should bring to them, "Fine clothes," said the first. "Pearls and diamonds," said the second. "Now, child," said he to his own daughter, "What will you have?" "The first twig, dear Father, that rubs against your hat on your way home," said she.
Malcolm Gladwell
So the father brings the evil stepdaughters all manner of refinery and Cinderella, gets as requested, a twig.
Voice Actor 2 (reading)
He gave it to his daughter. Then she took it and went to her mother's grave and planted it there and cried so much that it was watered with her tears and there it grew and became a fine tree.
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, come on. Cinderella is an angel. And what happens to this angel? You know the story. A magic bird gives her a beautiful dress, and off she goes to the ball. The handsome prince falls in love with this mysterious unknown beauty. She leaves behind her slipper. The prince says, "Whosoever fits into the slipper will be his queen." Her evil stepsisters try to fit and fail. Cinderella tries it on and it fits perfectly, and she lives happily ever after. Virtue is rewarded. Meanwhile, what happens to her evil stepsisters?
Voice Actor 2 (reading)
When the wedding with the Prince was to be held, the two false sisters came wanting to gain favor with Cinderella and to share her good fortune.
Malcolm Gladwell
But they get attacked by pigeons that peck out their eyes.
Voice Actor 2 (reading)
And thus for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.
Malcolm Gladwell
That's poetic justice. Thus, for their wickedness, they were punished. The Cinderella story gets adapted for the screen by Walt Disney in maybe the most famous of all of his animated movies.
Disney's Cinderella (singing)
A dream that you wish will come true.
Malcolm Gladwell
But it's only the dreams and wishes of the beautiful angelic Cinderella that come true. With Cinderella, Disney went all in on poetic justice.
Angus Fletcher
The famous movie that so many of us saw as children, Cinderella, that rescued the Magic Kingdom from bankruptcy and became the logo of Disney. And ever since then, all of Disney's fairy tales have had that same story model of good coming from good, or virtue rewarded, or poetic justice. It's this inheritance of the enlightenment.
Malcolm Gladwell
A few years ago Angus Fletcher, was approached to do a project on measuring children's emotional reactions to the stories they heard.
Angus Fletcher
We actually have a technology here which can track how interested kids as young as four are in things. If we have 10 or 12 or 14 kids, enough of a range, we can actually tell you very specifically whether kids like the ending or not and how much they like it. But the overall thing is-
Malcolm Gladwell
Is this eye tracking stuff? How are you doing that?
Angus Fletcher
It's a secret, and I'm not kidding.
Malcolm Gladwell
So Fletcher, does his top secret analysis of little kids watching Disney movies. And he thinks he knows what he's going to find. That kids prefer Cinderella, they don't want the moral anarchy of the fairytale twist. And sure enough, the kids squeal with delight. They love the songs, but then it all falls apart. There's a kind of post Disney hangover.
Angus Fletcher
There's been this whole history of condemning Disney fairy tales because they're not realistic or because they advance stereotypes or unrealistic expectations about what princesses should be and so on and so forth. But it turned out it really wasn't any of those things that was going on. It was the narrative structure.
Malcolm Gladwell
The kids liked the characters, the adventure, the humor, the idea that mice and other animals could do all manner of cool things. But they struggled with the idea that good always comes from good and bad from bad. Why? Because your child is perfectly capable of extrapolating what all this means.
Angus Fletcher
What your brain processes is. "Well, bad things are happening to me. Why are bad things happening to me? They're happened to me clearly because I'm bad. And if bad things happen to bad people and I'm bad, then worse things are going to start to happen because there's no way for me to turn this train around."
And what we see is that these stories generate what's called catastrophizing. And catastrophizing is when you become convinced that there's no way to break the cycle of bad feeling. And this is masked in Disney fairy tales because the immediate emotional effect of watching a Disney story is to feel good, is to feel happy because the ending is so sentimental and so positive. But over time, it has this corrosive negative effect.
Malcolm Gladwell
Now, by contrast, what happens when a child hears a fairytale twist story? Those kinds of stories defeat catastrophizing.
Angus Fletcher
They short circuit that and they say, "No, no, no, no, no. Bad doesn't always come from bad. Good can come from bad. Just relax. Life is not logical."
Malcolm Gladwell
Kids prefer fairytale twists to poetic justice. They prefer Adamantina to Cinderella. Now, why does this matter to our discussion of The Little Mermaid film? Because The Little Mermaid, is poetic justice on steroids. Good things happen not just to good people, but to rich and powerful and beautiful people. And bad things happen not just to bad people, but ugly bad people.
When Prince Eric, wanted to claim his beautiful bride, he got to take the law into his own hands, become a vigilante, kill Ursula in cold blood with no legal consequences whatsoever because he's a handsome prince. No other reason. Handsome, entitled Eric gets away with Murder. And Ariel, our beautiful spirited mermaid who wants to marry a prince, she gets to marry a prince without really having to lift a finger by the way. In the end, daddy does everything.
King Triton
Oh, then I guess there's just one problem left.
Sebastian
And what's that Your Majesty?
King Triton
How much I'm going to miss her.
Malcolm Gladwell
Daddy gets out his golden trident and turns Ariel into a female human in a sparkly dress. This is unearned poetic justice. It's 1% poetic justice. I'm still waiting for the Disney sequel where Ariel gets into Stanford as a legacy admission after her dad Endows the King Triton Institute of Aquatic Governance.
One of the things I realized in talking to Angus Fletcher, was how difficult it was to make the transition from poetic justice thinking back to fairytale twist thinking, it doesn't feel right, bad must be met with bad, so that good can be met with good.
Angus Fletcher
It feels awfully rote. When you watch the movie you just feel from the beginning like you know what's going to happen.
Malcolm Gladwell
So Ursula, has great power under the sea and decides at the end of the movie that what she wants to do is to disguise herself as Ariel and/or as a beautiful princess and marry Eric, right? The Prince. But what if Eric, is revealed to be actually kind of dull and nasty? And so Ariel realizes, "Oh, let her marry him if that's what you want. It turns out the guy's a bit of a jerk."
I wanted to give Angus, my ideas for fixing the Little Mermaid, but I was struggling. Or what if the idea of outside of the water, she loses her power? So she becomes Eric's bride, but she's now just a normal person who's stripped of all of the... because she's chosen the terrestrial world over the underwater world. She's now just an ordinary hapless citizen. Now, I suppose what we're doing there is we are, we're giving a bad ending to a bad person, but at least it's a more interesting, bad ending, I suppose.
Angus Fletcher
Yes, it's more creative.
Malcolm Gladwell
I hear a distinct lack of enthusiasm in Angus's voice. I don't know if there's any way not to... We do have to put Ursula, in her place.
Angus Fletcher
No, you do not.
Malcolm Gladwell
I still couldn't get it out of my head. That bad had to come from bad. It was as if everything Fletcher, had tried to tell me had sailed right over my head. That's how deeply embedded poetic justice is. It's in our bones.
Angus Fletcher
We have this obsession in the modern world that somehow if you do something bad, you have to be punished for it. No, if you do something bad, we just have to make sure you don't do that bad thing again, it's rehabilitation. It's medicine. We don't punish diseases. Once we've removed cancer from the body, we don't then send it to jail and punish it. It's just like we-
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, so you think we should fix Ursula?
Angus Fletcher
Well, I think we should just stop her from doing whatever she's doing. We should have a conversation with her about maybe why this isn't helpful.
Malcolm Gladwell
Fletcher's point was that making Ursula, bad and then punishing her for her badness is what you do if you don't care about the story you're telling. You don't think about the audience, the little girl who's trying to understand the way life really works. No, you've turned into Aesop, who says, "There's a boring ant out there and a grasshopper who wants to make music, and I'm sorry, but that means the grasshopper has to starve to death." If he were alive today Aesop, would have a bungalow on the Disney lot. He'd be their rewrite man.
Angus Fletcher
It's not just that I think that Disney has sent a lot of fairy tales in the world, which have overall made us less happy. I think it's also that they are a force against innovation, and change, and growth in storytelling as a whole. And they're destroying our capacity as a people to think of new directions and new paths and new plots. My kids love Disney+. I'm not going to pretend like I've someone managed to keep it out of my own house. But I really think that we have reached a point in our society where we're repeating the error of the Enlightenments, and we're allowing this one institution that thinks it knows the right way to do things, to crush out the basis of our nature, which is creativity, change, spontaneity, and like you said, possibility.
Malcolm Gladwell
So I went back and watched The Little Mermaid again. Only this time with Angus Fletcher's words ringing in my ears, and I began to realize, "I think we can rescue this movie."
How old were you when you first saw Little Mermaid? You saw this as a kid?
Brit Marling
Oh, yeah. I saw it as a kid, and it was my favorite of all, the princess-
Malcolm Gladwell
It was?
Brit Marling
Oh, yeah.
Malcolm Gladwell
I needed a screenwriter, a good one to try their hand at fixing the dumpster fire that was Disney's, The Little Mermaid. And I thought, why not Brit Marling, the co-creator with Zal Batmanglij, of one of my favorite TV shows ever, the OA on Netflix. Brit Marling, struck me as the kind of person who could live inside the imagination of young Ariel, our Little Mermaid who longs for a better life.
Brit Marling
I remember as a little girl, I used to... not only was the only song I still to this day know on the piano is, Under the Sea.
Malcolm Gladwell
Really?
Brit Marling
So I can play that. I used to play that and sing that and charge people money to watch it. But also, Malcolm, I used to tie my ankles with sweat socks and then jump into the pool so that I could swim with my feet tied together like The Little Mermaid.
Malcolm Gladwell
Wait. You would sing this song and give performances, but it was even to the point where you thought there was something particularly alluring about the idea of being limited in the way that The Little Mermaid was, being legless.
Brit Marling
Being legless. But I think it was what I was attracted to was how they positioned her in the first fourth of the film, which is she was bold and fearless.
Malcolm Gladwell
The first fourth of the film, let's be clear, none of us have any issues with the first fourth of the film.
Brit Marling
There was a shipwreck and she's just jumping amongst the flaming, falling logs. It was like there was no other little princess being portrayed like that. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty weren't performing those kinds of acts of heroism. But then it's interesting that when I would play Ariel, as a little girl, in my mind, it was only the phase in which she was a fish. Because the moment she got legs, she loses all her agency. She's just sitting around waiting to be kissed.
Malcolm Gladwell
You're absolutely right. I never saw it as a kid. I only saw it two weeks ago as an adult, and I have to say mortified by what happened to her. I'm flabbergasted, she disappears.
Brit Marling
She disappears.
Malcolm Gladwell
She just disappears. And all she does is bat her eyelashes at this dumb-
Brit Marling
Prince!
Malcolm Gladwell
Disney entranced the young Brit Marling. They owned her imagination. She was in love with Ariel. She was tying her legs together with tube socks and singing, Under The Sea, at the piano. And then what did Disney do? They gave up on her. They lost her. They abandoned her with a plot that doesn't even do poetic justice, justice.
We are supposed to believe this is a girl who is a young girl who is openly defying her father's wishes, and what is the nature of her defiance?
Pursuing and marrying a prince, which is exactly what her father, a king, wanted for his daughter. It's as if one of the Kardashians daughters was so angry at her parents that she went out and started a reality show. No, it's not teenage defiance.
Brit Marling
That is 100%-
Malcolm Gladwell
That is joining the family business. Joining the family business.
Brit Marling
100%. Because you know Triton, would be down in his palace under the sea, rubbing his hands together and be like, "Now I can broker a deal with the men on land, and we can consolidate our resources and extract even more and take over more of the world together." Come on.
Malcolm Gladwell
We went back and forth, Brit and I, up and down. The movie just felt so slap-dash. As if its creators thought that six year old girls just wouldn't care about whether the narrative made any sense.
What has Triton, done about the hundreds of souls entrapped by Ursula? Nothing. Nothing until his daughter gets captured and then all of a sudden he's like-
Brit Marling
That's a good point.
Malcolm Gladwell
And then all of a sudden he's like, "Oh, this can't stand. Oh, I got to go do battle with Ursula." Wait, what kind of model of leadership is this?
Brit Marling
That's good because there you're bringing the classism in again, right?
Malcolm Gladwell
Totally.
Brit Marling
Because he doesn't care about everybody else who perished in Ursula's Garden. He only cares if his princess ends up there.
Malcolm Gladwell
This is the most appalling king behavior that I've ever seen. There's no aspect of him in any way fulfilling the functions of his office here.
Brit Marling
You could also ask yourself this too, Malcolm. "Why are so many people leaving Tritons Kingdom and going to Ursula in the first place?"
Malcolm Gladwell
Yes.
Brit Marling
Why are there so many dissatisfied citizens who are seeking out the help of the old wise woman, traditionally in the woods, but here, deeper within the sea.
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, yeah. No, actually, that's-
Brit Marling
What's rotten at the center of Tritons Kingdom that he has so many unsatisfied mer-people?
Malcolm Gladwell
A thousand of his subjects are enslaved half a mile away.
Brit Marling
Living as ghost algae stuck to the forest floor, scrambling for bits of human flesh. It's sad.
Malcolm Gladwell
The man is appalling.
Brit Marling
Yeah.
Malcolm Gladwell
I could talk to Brit Marling, forever. But I had to find out, would she join me? Would she lend her magic to fixing the Little Mermaid with the promise of nothing except the kind of random, minor celebrity that comes from being a participant in a Revisionist History episode? No money, no swag, not even legal indemnification if the Walt Disney Company comes after us.
So let's talk about your homework. I hope it's not too onerous. I have sent you, emailed you a copy of the script.
Brit Marling
Oh, wow. Nice.
Malcolm Gladwell
And all I want is not even a scene, a piece of a scene. You don't have to resolve all these issues. I just want you to take a moment in the script where there is an opportunity to do something different.
Brit Marling
Do you know that this is literally my favorite thing? Honestly, I can't even accept this as a homework assignment because this is just like pure pleasure, unbridled pleasure for me.
Malcolm Gladwell
She was all in. I would not walk alone on this journey, this road of trials.
Brit Marling
We're trying to give the feeling of what is possible.
Malcolm Gladwell
And then, I'd like to see whether we can create a ground swell, public ground swell among nine-year-old girls in this country for a better version of Little Mermaid.
Brit Marling
A retelling.
Malcolm Gladwell
The real one.
Brit Marling
Yes.
Malcolm Gladwell
Next time on Revisionist History, The Little Mermaid done right.
Revisionist History's Prince Eric
Ariel? It was you! Ha! It was you all along.
Revisionist History's Ariel
[scoffs] Duh.
Malcolm Gladwell
Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel, Lee Mengistu and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Lynton, and Anna Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flawn Williams and engineering by Martín Gonzalez. Fact Checking by Amy Gaines. Our voice actors are Paris Glasgow, and Melina Rose. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew: Heather Fain, Carly Migliori, Maya Koenig, Daniella Lakhan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
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