Death of a Fairy Tale

I write today to mourn the passing of an old friend, the fairy tale. She lived a long and vibrant life, but died a gradual death. The world will miss her - if it ever notices her absence.

What makes me so sure we are witnessing the last of a dying breed? Exhibit A: the new Cinderella movie from Disney, a beautifully made picture that in the end, isn't much of a fairy tale. And that's too bad. Christian families should embrace fairy tales, and here's why.

Fairy tales force us into "What If...?" thinking. Because of the presence of magic, we know that this isn't history, either recent or distant. It's make-believe. "Once upon a time..." clues us in to that. When we read them, then, we aren't looking for life lessons. But we are enticed to think "What If...?" the magic was real in our world?

And, mind you, that's not their primary purpose. Fairy tales are not stories about us and what could happen to us. They happened "a long time ago, in a kingdom far, far away" precisely to highlight their other-worldliness. If we see ourselves in a particular character, it's our own doing; these are stories about someone else, and we get to hear about the amazing thing that happened to them.

Which brings us back to Cinderella. Everyone knows the story of Cinderella. She lived with her wicked stepmother and her ugly step-sisters, and after her father's death, the stepmother regarded her as nothing more than a servant. She washed, cooked, cleaned, and did all of the dirty work (hence, "Ella of the cinders"). Then the prince throws a ball in hopes of finding a wife, and invites all of the eligible young women to come. Cinderella fixes up an old dress of her mother's, but is humiliated by her step-sisters, who ruin it. Alone and sad, Cinderella receives a visit from her Fairy Godmother, who conjures a beautiful dress for Cinderella and turns a pumpkin into a carriage that will take her to the ball. She meets the prince, who is smitten, but at midnight the spell is to end, so Cinderella races away before her true state can be known. In doing so, she leaves behind a glass slipper. The prince travels throughout the kingdom in search of the girl, and when the slipper fits Cinderella, he marries her and they live happily ever after.

It's not meant to be real, and everyone who has ever heard or seen that story knows that. Yet Disney, in the live-action remake, manages to weave character education into the story. As Cinderella's real mother lays dying, she reminds her daughter to always, "Have courage, and be kind". This mantra arises at various points of tension in the movie. Whenever Cinderella faces something dangerous or hard, she remembers to "Have courage, and be kind". That soft moralizing is obvious enough, but then, sure enough you reach the end of the movie, where the omniscient narrator assures us that what happened to Cinderella could happen to you, "With courage, kindness...and a little bit of magic."

Um, what? A little bit of magic? No - in the time-honored version, it's all magic that makes the difference for Cinderella. Yes, I'll allow that folk and fairy tales morph over time - but they remain folk and fairy tales. Disney made this story a fable. And in doing so, they robbed Cinderella of its essence.

The difference between a fable and a fairy tale is important. Fables are teaching stories. "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" represents every child who exaggerates and lies, and in so doing teaches us to tell the truth and guard our integrity. "The Tortoise and the Hare" teaches us to be persistent, and perhaps that those with giftedness should not presume success. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are not overtly meant to teach. They mirror life, but they do so in a way that defies direct correlation. So the Wicked Stepmother is truly Wicked - she's evil incarnate. We will probably never meet someone as thoroughly wicked as her, but that doesn't make her characterization useless; it's a deliberate device meant to help us recognize evil. Prince Charming (in Snow White) is flawless and, well, charming. Does anyone like that really exist? No - only in fairy tales. But as the embodiment of the hero who is the dream come true, he is useful.

But the Wicked Stepmother in the new Cinderella isn't even called that, and while she's occasionally cruel, she's not intractably wicked. The step-sisters also show some redeeming qualities. It's as if Disney felt bound to make these characters as relateable as possible. Although, for a generation being raised on reality TV shows, it's probably no surprise that fictional characters in modern storytelling look more and more like us, and less like those in traditional fairy tales. Today what makes for a good story is plausibility: "It could happen to you." That's what makes reality shows work. We really believe we are watching people pretty much like ourselves - or we marvel at the stupidity and callousness of people who could be our neighbors.

Disney didn't make Cinderella pedestrian on its own. It had help. Over time, a "Cinderella story" has come to mean not something fantastical and in fact impossible, but merely something improbable. There's a big difference. We call a sports team who emerges from obscurity during the playoffs or triumphs against the odds a "Cinderella team", or a surreal, picture-perfect wedding a "Cinderella wedding". But there's no real magic. All of the difference is due to caterers and decorators and athletes and perhaps a little luck.

A little more than a year ago, Luke Epplin, writing in The Atlantic, decried the predictable tendency of every made-for-kids animated film to be about the same thing: believing in one's self and overcoming obstacles to achieve some unlikely goal. Epplin rightly points out that these films, in paying homage to the cult of self-esteem, fail to give kids a realistic picture of life. He points to the 1969 A Boy Named Charlie Brown as an example of a movie that tells the real truth, which is that life also contains failures and setbacks - but that in the midst of that, life goes on. Such a movie would never be made today, and that says a lot about our culture's misplaced trust in ourselves.

Of course, if we are the key to everything, then failure is as real a possibility as success, but by the new way of thinking, it is a failure to dream big, to believe in ourselves, and to exercise character. Thus Cinderella, had she not shown courage and kindness, may not have ended up living happily ever after with the prince.

That, however, is not the moral of the story of Cinderella. In fact, there is no moral to that story, because fairy tales don't work that way. But when believing in ourselves is the paramount element of success, then it becomes imperative that we should use every opportunity to teach kids about character and pursuing their dreams (provided, of course, that those dreams reinforce the narrative we've been peddling).

And boy have we. The latter-day Cinderella is just the latest harbinger of this trend. And unfortunately, even churches have been complicit. (See this and this and this and this.) And what happens when dreams aren't fulfilled (because not every team can win the tournament, not every kid can win the spelling bee, and not every audition lands you the leading role)? Well, at least you tried. Good intentions, apart from having actually made a difference, emerge as the real goal. This might betray something deeper: maybe all we desire for our children is that they grow up to be people who we like, who are pleasant, who don't frighten us.

This is taking "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game" to a ridiculous extreme. Of course it matters some whether you win or lose, or it would be pointless to practice and pointless for kids to learn new skills or to keep score. And it matters how you play the game, because cheating is unfair and being a sore loser won't help you improve, it'll just make you bitter.

But let me suggest also that pro-social character traits are not the most important things we can instill in them. The world is a place with great challenges, big problems that call for courageous kids to grow into courageous adults and confront those problems, not compliant kids who grow into merely kind adults who grimace at the world's troubles and then distract themselves.

So here's why you should want your kid to believe in fairy tales - the real kind, not the watered-down ones where all the power resides in a character's ability to believe in themselves. Fairy tales are about the impossible happening. They battle evil. They involve unseen forces. They call on us to believe. Whereas modern-day morality tales imply that "If it's going to be, it's up to me" and lie to kids about the real condition of the world ("Just have courage, and be kind"), fairy tales rightly subordinate the main character's virtues to the larger fantasy themes of the story.

Likewise, Bible stories are not so much stories about people overcoming obstacles and achieving great things as they are stories about God acting - sometimes through people, sometimes apart from them, sometimes in spite of them - to achieve his will in the world. The Bible is not a natural book, about things we clever humans could replicate by our own strength; it is a supernatural book, filled with miracles and under-girded by a spiritual realm that we don't fully grasp. To the degree that God uses humans, he effects their transformation - a re-creation that was not only unlikely, but wholly impossible without God acting. God does magic, and you want your kids to believe in that kind of magic. Call it "super-powers" if "magic" makes you unsettled.

The Bible is also real when it comes to evil. Cain killing Abel - endangering the very survival of the human race that God had created - was an act of treachery. So was the sale of Joseph to slave traders. And idolatry that led to child sacrifice. And David sending Uriah to the front lines so he could have Bathsheba. And the crucifixion of Jesus. Kids need to know that the genesis of evil is the Fall of mankind, not that someone got up on the wrong side of the bed, and that the antidote to evil is the triumph of the cross, not a chipper spirit and random acts of kindness.

Fairy tales, while casting characters in ways that are quite un-believeable, end up giving us a truer picture of ourselves than we want to admit. The new Cinderella movie, in an effort to relate to us, fudges the truth. Kids need exposure to the kinds of stories that depict miraculous things, or they grow up lacking the ability to imagine that the world can truly be changed.