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ESSAYS & REVIEWS
Just Another Princess MovieBy LILI LOOFBOUROW JULY 12, 2012
THE NEW INQUIRY SUBSCRIBE
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I suppose most girls remember when they became aware of themselves as
speci!cally female viewers. Growing up in the eighties, I watched movies
about boys and girls with equal relish, empathizing with the protagonists and
getting totally absorbed in story without my parts getting consciously in the
way. When I realized the boys in my classes didn’t do the same thing — they
refused to see themselves in female protagonists and found the prospect
humiliating to contemplate — I felt I had overstepped my bounds. Feeling
simultaneously embarrassed at being so pro"igate with my sympathy and
spiteful towards those who weren’t, I started watching movies the way I was
supposed to: as a girl, speci!cally.
Boy, was it bleak.
If you don’t get to be Indiana Jones and have to think about how he is with
girls, if you have to wonder, while watching Treasure Island, whether any of the
characters you loved would even talk to you, movies become kind of painful.
You do !nd ways around it. For one thing, you start actively seeking out
stories where people don’t rule you out quite so much. You look for “girl
movies.” Barring some truly wonderful exceptions, you get used to eating the
same three meals over and over, forever. Without thinking about it too hard
I’ll approximate them as spunkiness, pathos, and transformation. Working Girl,
He’s Just Not That Into You, Grease. Again, some of these are great. Most are
derivative.
Given the sameness of the "avors on o#er, you become a sort of expert at
spotting slight variations. You watch not so much for the arc (that’s almost
always disappointing) but for certain arresting moments. When you !nd
these, you treasure them. You dissect their context away and relish them —
sometimes for themselves, sometimes for the endings they didn’t have.
I don’t claim this is universal, but many female viewers I’ve had conversations
with over the years have expressed similar, if not identical, practices. We have
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watered-down expectations when it comes to women in !lm. Most movies,
even the great ones, we watch for their perfect middles. Sometimes we edit
the !lms post post-production and pretend the end never happened at all.
***
I would never have guessed, either from the title or the movie poster, that
Brave would end with mother and daughter riding o# together in importantly
modi!ed hairdos. Subtle touches like this speak to the quiet rede!nitions
Brave makes possible—and it’s a kind of subtlety most reviewers are missing.
Faced with a princess story, the reaction has been a sort of kind
disappointment. We’ve heard all that! the reviewers say, and it’s a bit, well,
boring. “What’s happening to Pixar, it seems, is what’s happened to everything
the Mouse Factory has bought, from beloved children’s books to funky Times
Square: It’s being Disney!ed,” says Stephen Whitty of the Star-Ledger. “This
one !nds Pixar poaching on traditional territory of Disney, its corporate
partner,” says Rober Ebert. “We get a spunky princess; her mum, the queen;
her dad, the gru# king, an old witch who lives in the woods, and so on.”
And so on.
A stranger to our !lm industry might reasonably suppose, reading those
sentences, that the American cinemascape is littered with “spunky princess
movies” that center around the main character and her mother.
“Brave,” writes Christopher Orr, “is a rather conventional tale, with echoes of
Mulan, The Little Mermaid, How to Train Your Dragon, and countless others. Like
the "ight of an arrow, its arc is swi$ but not hard to anticipate.” It’s a well-worn
genre, the Spunky-Princess-Who-Doesn’t-Get-Married-(Or-Experience-Any-
Attraction-To-Anyone)-And-Her-Mother story.
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I wonder, though, whether any of the foregoing critics who’ve tolerantly
yawned at Pixar’s latest e#ort could name a Disney princess besides Mulan
whose mother is alive, let alone named.
And yet, in Brave, there is a live mother, named and all. And then a
remarkably boring thing happens: this interloping mother who has no place
in this ordinary, predictable princess story suddenly becomes central to it. She
gets turned into something that keeps on getting misread as a monster,
something her loving and well-meaning husband has dedicated his life to
tracking down and killing for the sake of his own story, which is built around
victory and revenge.
It’s a bit as if, having heard the word “princess,” the reviewers all stopped
listening and missed Brave’s real project, which is to quietly but determinedly
recuperate the “princess story” from some of the qualities for which it’s been
so universally condemned.
***
Movies featuring women protagonists tend to have messages. Brave has one
too: there’s a voiceover at the beginning and the end that goes on about
changing your fate and your destiny living within you and whatnot. And that’s
!ne, and it’s true in complicated ways, but it’s also a classic case of
misdirection. By supplying an apparently easy message you barely listen to,
the !lm actually gives the more complex one room to breathe. You might
leave unconvinced by the explicit sermon on fate, but quite converted to the
quiet rede!nition of bravery, barely aware that you’ve been worked on.
Virtually everyone in the !lm (except poor screaming Maudie) is Princess
Story brave. Everyone jumps eagerly into a !ght and reacts courageously to
physical danger. In fact, its very ubiquity seems to dilute its !ctional value: If
everyone is brave, why are we making a big deal of it?
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Its sheer abundance makes us stumble over our own expectations of what
bravery is supposed to do. Bravery is good! is our default position. We need
more of that for our girls! But too much bravery sucks, it turns out: it costs
people legs. It turns political summits for nascent kingdoms into childish free-
for-alls. And for our hero, Merida, courage doesn’t achieve the victories we
expect !ctional bravery to produce. She doesn’t slay Mor-du. She’s no Mulan;
her archery, despite her skill, is unhelpful. All this, in a story featuring a
warrior princess, should make the mind boggle: Why would a studio create
such a character in order to make her real crisis be her relationship with her
mother?
If fairytale princesses are motherless, warrior princesses are even more so.
They’re motherless because it’s di%cult—still, in 2012—to imagine a woman
warrior who enjoys a relationship of mutual love and respect with her family
generally and her mother speci!cally. “I don’t know any women like that,”
Maxine Hong Kingston writes in The Woman Warrior, “or men either. Unless I
see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help.” Kingston is
referring to a suicide in that particular passage, but the point holds: Brave
gives us a woman like that. The !lm is about revolution, innovation and
compromise, but it’s just as much about parents (who become ancestors),
children (who become powerful) and their good and bad decisions, the
weights of which increase exponentially as they recede into history. Brave, in
other words, is about seeing a family’s story as a heroic journey. “We are a
young kingdom,” says Merida, as much about her family as about the Scottish
alliance, “and we are still writing our own legends.”
That moment, incidentally, is Merida and Elinor’s breakthrough, politically as
well as personally. Faced with four enraged clans and the imminent collapse
of the kingdom, Merida steps into Elinor’s shoes and becomes the politician
and diplomat her mother has always been—which is precisely what she
thought she’d never do. A$er badly misreading each other for so long (“I wish
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you would LISTEN!” they both say to each other’s respective stand-ins),
Merida does, and Elinor has. Elinor mimes anxiously to Merida, who seems to
be about to capitulate to the clans and to the fate she’s been !ghting. Merida
reads, understands, and translates her mother’s charades into her own words.
It’s a remarkable scene. If it had been “dictated” by Elinor, it wouldn’t have
worked — Merida would have e#ectively been a ventriloquist’s dummy (which
is in one sense what Elinor has been trying to make her). If Merida had broken
tradition without the bene!t of mother’s political experience and diplomacy,
the kingdom would have collapsed into war. It took the combination of their
two best selves to compromise with each other and to simultaneously convert
a bellicose crowd. The message they jointly write is gorgeously consensual,
and it’s all the more moving since it comes about through a game of charades,
calling to mind the joy Elinor and Merida took in each other at the !lm’s
opening, during their game of hide-and-go-seek.
The other noteworthy thing about that scene is that we see Merida willing to
lay down her life for her kingdom. She’s about to announce her willingness to
marry one of the suitors when her mother interrupts (waving her arms in a
room full of maniacal bear hunters) and rescues her.
If these actions are brave, it’s certainly not the kind of bravery we were
expecting.
If it weren’t already obvious, this isn’t a !lm that fetishizes courage in its
ordinary sense. Fergus’ bravery when he attacks Mor-du the bear at the
beginning is admirable but ine#ective. He was already the Bear King, but a$er
that encounter it’s all too much: he falls prey to an overdetermined belief in
his own story. The loss of his leg turns him into a cheery Ahab who —
whenever he’s reminded of his Story — bores all rehearsing the tale of the
revenge to come. His throne room is littered with trophies celebrating his
eventual victory.
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***
It’s risky to tell a woman’s story, which is why Pixar hasn’t done it until now.
Riskier still to tell a princess’s story, which, as reviewers note, has been done
and redone and parodied and remixed from every conceivable angle. Why,
many moan, did the !rst girl Pixar movie have to be a princess movie?
The answer, it seems to me, is obvious. Of course it had to be a princess story.
Rightly praised for creating beautiful, poignant and original stories, Pixar
understood that its !rst e#ort featuring a female protagonist had to sidestep
both the traditional romance plot and the shallow triumphalism o$en seen in
!lms with plucky “role models”. Pixar knows its !lm conventions. It has heard
of the Bechdel test.
It knows Disney because it is Disney. It knows Shrek and Tangled and G.I. Jane.
With Brave, they wanted to be better than all that, and the studio opted to
meet the enemy on its own terms, using its own weapons. It had to be a
princess.
From the creators’ point of view, Merida’s biggest battle — the !ght she really
has to win in this !lm — is against her predecessors. She has to cover the same
ground and give it new depth. She has to wallow in princess tropes before she
can change a fate that feels massively overdetermined.
Maybe the creative team named the movie a$er themselves. They were brave;
reckless, even, ostentatiously fording a swamp of crocodilian movie tropes,
any of which could swallow the story whole. Merida, remember, isn’t just a
princess. She’s a redhead and a teenage rebel who loves to explore and !nds
her role as princess constraining and dull. The Little Mermaid’s Ariel has been
conjured and is waiting in the wings, spoiling for a !ght. (“Echoes of The Little
Mermaid,” certain critics wrote, as if this were an oversight, or an accident.)
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Like Ariel, Merida avoids her duties as royal daughter. Like Ariel, Merida
chases an impulsive wish which is granted at too high a price. No one who
imprinted on The Little Mermaid as a child could miss the echoes of Ursula the
Sea-Witch while the wood-carving witch mixes up the potion.
As genealogies go, Ariel is Merida’s main ancestor with Shrek’s Fiona following
close behind. But there are others, of course: Merida has Mulan’s physical
ability and Pocahontas’ know-how and love of nature. To these she adds
Beauty’s essential insight that natural “monsters” are actually man-made.
None of this was accidental, of course, though I didn’t know it at the time. I
fell into exactly the same trap as the aforementioned reviewers and watched,
nursing pangs of disappointment, as it seemed the !lm would take a princess
amalgam and stage as its crisis that old chestnut: arranged marriage. Merida
must marry! Whom will she choose? Or rather, who shall be chosen for her?
There was a time when such a story was brave, back when arranged marriages
were the norm. These days, it’s about as polemical as suggesting that
polygamy has problems. Most people will agree, but it’s kind of a weird point
to build your crisis around.
So I watched the way anyone familiar with The Merchant of Venice, its
antecedents, or its thousand heirs might watch: a little tiredly, but hopeful that
this particular version of the story would take some interesting detours en
route to its fated end. The perfect man would of course suddenly appear.
Something would be wrong with him. He might be low-class (Aladdin, Robin
Hood), he might be a gru# and unpleasant bachelor consumed with self-hatred
(Jane Eyre, Beauty and the Beast), or he might seem at !rst too proud, too sti#,
too unwilling to accommodate the heroine’s spontaneity and wit (Pride and
Prejudice). But he was coming. Everyone in the audience feels it. Even as the
camera stops on each of the three clan leaders and their unappealing sons, we
were all trying to spot the real hero. Once he showed up, he’d take over most
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of the story.
Then came the twist: Merida, bound (literally) by the accoutrements of o%cial
princesshood, broke out of her constraining dress and represented herself in
the contest for her hand! On the grounds that she is a !rst-born, and therefore
eligible to compete, she shames her suitors by beating them handily! The
crowd goes wild.
That last part’s a lie — there is a crowd in that scene, all gasping ecstatically as
each silly prince takes his shot, but that crowd does not go wild when Merida
wins. This proves not to be the triumphant moment of female empowerment
Hollywood likes to deliver when it remembers that women are watching.
The crowd instead does something much more likely: it goes weird.
Things get awkward.
This was the point at which I began to suspect that Pixar was outsmarting me.
Brave was retelling many familiar stories (the splitting-the-winner’s-arrow
business rips o# Robin Hood, Disney’s other archer, also a redhead), but it was
stripping them of their attendant auras of victory. Like the legend of the four
brothers (one of many stories that “ring with truth,” a point Brave dwells on at
some length), the legends that last tend not to contain happily-ever-a$ers.
There’s darkness even (and especially) in fairy tales — the “real” Little
Mermaid killed herself — and Brave is reviving that tradition. Brenda
Chapman, the director and story writer, said Brave was meant to be a fairy tale
“in the style of Hans Christen Andersen or the Brothers Grimm.” That
clari!cation tells; among other things, Chapman tacitly refutes our
contemporary understanding of the fairy tale as a charming morality play
more or less stripped of ambiguity.
It’s bold to frame your story as a forced marriage plot (there’s one
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convention), to then destabilize the convention with a hackneyed plot twist in
which the heroine rescues herself (there’s another convention, almost as
tired), and then to dwell on that plot twist’s failure to launch.
***
Given the extent to which Brave has been read as having capitulated to the fate
it expressly avoided, it’s !tting that Brave’s beginning is obsessed with Fate —
the pre-existing ending that you can somehow change.
This, by the way, this idea of changing your fate, is the “message” I mentioned
earlier, the Disneyish sermon that lets us listen for other things. But I want to
take it more seriously than I did a few paragraphs earlier. It’s not a great line, it
could have been done better, but the quixotic notion of altering an inevitable
outcome is what Pixar itself set out to do. Jaclyn Friedman laments in The
Guardian that Pixar capitulated and made yet another princess story. “If Pixar
can’t imagine itself out of the princess paradigm,” she writes, “how can we
expect girls to?” But that’s in some sense exactly what Pixar does: it takes a
phenomenon so tired we’ve named it, and imagines its way out of it.
Fate, in the Greek sense, is !xed: you can !ght it, but any such step will lead
back to that which has already been predestined. By these lights, a changeable
fate is no fate at all; we might as well call it probability or free will. But Brave
builds an entire movie around the notion that fate can be changed, and it’s
worth asking why. What’s to be gained from this insistence that things would
have gone one way inevitably if enormous e#ort (and bravery) hadn’t derailed
a set course and produced a di#erent outcome?
Taken on its own terms, it’s a message we need these days. Politically,
American fatalism is at an all-time high. Sure, there’s rancor, yes, there’s
acrimony, bitterness, disagreement, even !ghting, but there’s also a desperate
sense of inertia, a feeling that we’re on a set course. It’s true for the
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environment, it’s true for economics, it’s even true for elections. The Occupy
movement and the Tea Party are both manifestations of a Brave-like
determination to change outcomes that seem unchangeable — what if the
country wants neither of its suitors? What if it wants to marry no one? Is that
possible? Would our refusal spell political disaster or a liberating break with
tradition?
Brave isn’t charting a new course for American politics, but (and this is one
more way it isn’t Just Another Princess Story) it is tracking the formation of a
powerful but youngish state torn apart by internal dissent. Any parallels to
America end there, however; the idea that young people’s futures should be
sacri!ced (or at least mortgaged) to patch up an untenable system is obviously
outmoded.
In any case, the main con"ict — a mother-daughter !ght — is a function of
the fact that Merida’s fate is unfairly but by de!nition neither hers nor her
mother’s; it’s bound up with the fate of a new state.
There again, Brave is charting new territory in an area everyone thought was
over-mapped. Amanda Marcotte points out the real radicalism it took to
expose the political underpinnings of a mother-daughter !ght. Too o$en
consigned to a feminine sphere that is considered “private,” “domestic,” and,
ahem, “predictable,” Brave stages the con"ict and its stakes for society at large
without making the mother a caricature of villainous domestication:
Many patriarchal societies leave the stressful job of
forcing girls to comply with degrading social norms to
women, especially mothers. Unlike other movies such
as Real Women Have Curves, where sexism-enforcing
mothers are painted as villains, Merida’s mother,
Elinor, pushes her daughter to perform femininity out
of love. As with mothers throughout history who have
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done everything from put young girls on diets to hold
them down to have their clitorises removed at
puberty, they are acting not out of hatred but out of a
love that leads them to protect their daughters from
the price of rebellion. In real life, that price is o$en
exile; in this movie, it’s war. With stakes this high, it’s
hard not to feel for a mother in such a bind.
There’s no way out of this, of course. That’s the point. As Marcotte argues in
that piece, Brave, like Wall-E, doesn’t exactly o#er any solutions to the
problem of Merida’s marriage or non-marriage. What it does do, however, is
say (rather like the Occupy movement) Not This. Not the prince, not the
forced marriage for the sake of political stability, not even the turn in the story
where — in an amazing coincidence — she turns out to actually like one of the
princes, so no di%cult choice must be made.
It also says Not That, and points to Mor-du. If the !lm rejects total submission,
that is, sacri!cing the individual for the sake of the group, it also exposes the
perils of a radical and self-serving individualism. Mor-du is a monster not
because he’s a bear, but because he has the strength of ten men and is acting in
the interests of one.
I’m belaboring the political aspect because one of the criticisms leveled
against Brave was that it lacked the “deeper metaphors” that inform other
Pixar !lms. This is nonsense, perhaps born out of the average male viewer’s
lack of practice when it comes to reading female-centric narratives for
geopolitical content. Still, however potent, Brave’s public and political
metaphors are ultimately less moving than its private and archetypal ones. It’s
in its exploration of the relationship between mother and daughter that the
!lm really shines.
***
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The paradoxical “changeable fate” is probably a familiar fantasy to most
parents. That it stumped me for as long as it did I attribute partly my lack of
imagination and partly to the fact that I haven’t had to think about the
archetypal patterns parenthood introduces. It’s a parent’s destiny to nurture a
child at considerable expense and personal sacri!ce until that child becomes
an adolescent and despises him or her (hopefully brie"y). Every parent hopes
they can change that charted course. Very few parents succeed.
Brave’s !rst beginning, so to speak, tells a beautifully-shot story of familial
harmony. Parents and child are entirely united. Even when con"ict comes, it
comes from the outside, in the shape of a monster bear.
The second opening is both less idyllic and less mythic. Fergus is as cheerful
as ever in his throne room full of dead bears. Queen Elinor has aged almost
imperceptibly and given birth to triplet sons. As for Merida, she is a little too
perfect, in the way Princess Story heroines tend to be. She’s an incredible
shot,a fearless rock-climber,a masterful equestrian. She’s a tomboy whose
unladylike tendencies are tempered by the ultra-feminine tresses which she
refuses to discipline. She isn’t a devastating beauty in quite the way other
Disney princesses are — her cheekbones aren’t as sharp, her eyes as
hypnotically eye-lashed, her !gure as persistently Barbi!ed—but her hair is a
distracting wonder. (Pixar was obviously in a game of one-upmanship on hair-
animation with the makers of Tangled.) And she is being shoe-horned into a
very speci!c type of femininity by her exacting and intolerant mother.
The stage is set: we have the slightly henpecked but hypermasculine husband
who understands his daughter’s plight. The misguided mother whose
unwelcome instruction marks her as unpleasant and wrong, if not evil.
Domesticity is (as ever) oppressive, unrewarding, and reactionary. Still, the
kingdom is in need of a marriage alliance. There’s a quiverfull of
unsatisfactory suitors. As for our protagonist, she wants nothing to do with
any of it. In her father’s words, she just wants to wear her hair wild and be
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free! Bears are everywhere in this universe, but they’re dead and stu#ed, and
the only dangerous one is outside.
If the story was an arrow and we shot it now, we’d know where to !nd it when
it landed. “I’ve been doing comedy for 25 years,” says Louis CK in Episode 2 of
Season 3 of Louie. “I know every joke. Even if I haven’t heard it, you start
telling me a joke, I know how it’s going to work.” It’s sort of like that.
But if you heard Pixar was doing a fairy tale about a family consisting of a
mother, a rebellious teenager, and a Bear King, and it turns out one of them
turns into a bear, how much money would you have put on it being the
mother? In Season 3 of Arrested Development, Lucille Bluth says something
unexpectedly profound: “First they turn you into a monster, and then they
call you one.” Queen Elinor is the civilizing force in the kingdom. She is the
disciplinarian. She is the educator. She is the one busily engaged in turning
the family’s stories into historical documents — into tapestries. If history and
politics are going to make it to the next generation, it’s because she’s taking
the trouble to ensure their transmission.
This is not the stu# of feminized domestication, though the fact that two
women are engaged in the foregoing activities makes it astonishingly easy to
read it that way. Elinor is training a Renaissance prince. Taken as a whole,
Merida’s education (if we include Fergus’ share in it, which we should) is
straight out of the Mirrors for Princes.
Elinor is wise and dedicated to furthering the cause of her kingdom and
family, but she’s also overzealous and insensitive to her daughter’s needs as a
person (as opposed to a prince-in-the-making). There’s a hint that she sees
this when Merida is corseted up and looking pathetically at her mother, but
she lets the moment go. All their former playfulness is gone; where once they
played hide-and-go-seek, they’ve become humorless and impatient with each
other. In fact, mother and daughter are engaged in a process familiar to many
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people who have been adolescents or had one: they’re turning each other into
monsters. The transformation is complete when Merida slices through her
mother’s tapestry and Elinor burns her bow. Elinor realizes it instantly. Her
question — “what I have I done?” — is one she asks many more times in her
incarnation as a bear, when her humanity starts slipping away with increasing
frequency.
And so Merida turns her mother into a monster. There’s much one could say
about the transformation itself, but Dana Stevens sums it up :
The transformation brought about by the witch’s spell
isn’t a Freaky Friday-style body switch, but it unseats
both Merida’s and her mother’s identities just as
completely, forcing the two of them to leave the castle
and take refuge together in the woods, where they
must hunt and forage for their meals. At once, all of
the issues they were battling over—power, femininity,
!nding the right balance between the realization of
one’s own desires and conformation to social values—
are made literal, sometimes to comic e#ect.
The question that strikes any mother and teenage daughter who have gone
through this together — this shocking moment when you see yourself turned
into something you could never have imagined becoming — is this: what
happens next?
And this is where Brave’s message about a changeable fate makes sense. There
really are two fates for mothers and daughters. If Elinor doesn’t learn to
depend on her daughter, if she doesn’t value Merida for her “unprincessy”
skills and accept her help, she’ll remain a bear. If Merida doesn’t learn to see
her mother not merely as an imperious authority but as a complex but loving
person trying to prepare her daughter for a "awed and patriarchal world — a
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woman who, far from being invulnerable, is a#ected and even transformed by
her daughter’s actions, she’ll be stuck.
That’s Fate #1. Plenty of mothers and daughters have gotten stuck here. As
fairytale fates go, this one is uncomfortably real.
If Merida and Elinor succeed, Fate #1 will be demoted to a phase.
What Brave describes, then, is the black box a parent-child relationship
becomes in adolescence. Like Queen Elinor’s legends, it rings with truth: a
daughter acquires the power to turn her mother into a monster and
accidentally does so. Their futures depend on their mutual rescue: how they
work with each other to negotiate their new and unfamiliar roles will
determine whether or not they remain monstrous to each other for the rest of
their lives.
In the language of fate, of omens and prognostications, it’s !tting that
Merida’s !rst time shooting leads her away from her family and into the
woods. Her taking up arms in one sense endangers her family: mother and
daughter exit pursued by a bear while her father stays to !ght and loses his leg.
It’s equally !tting that, immediately a$er hearing a growl in the woods, she
!nds will o’ the wisps. But instead of leading her away from her family and
into trouble, as every will o’ the wisp should, these take her back to her family.
This is Merida’s paradox: the very qualities that make her an appealing target
to Mor-du — who seems to sense in her another spirit capable of being
corrupted into breaking with family and kingdom for the sake of personal
gain — emerged organically from her own family. Her skill as an archer isn’t
simply a manifestation of teenage rebellion. Quite the contrary: she’s the
product of her upbringing. She’s a master archer because her father taught her
to be.
Neither her archery nor her father can save her. Upsetting yet another fate
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that seemed !xed, it turns out to be Elinor, not Fergus, who defeats Mor-du.
And this shows what we’ve always suspected: Mor-du isn’t the wild creature of
the woods Fergus thought he was hunting. He’s human ambition and
untrammeled self-interest. He’s what the new state could easily become
without education, without history, without storytelling, and without love.
***
By the end it’s clear that one form of bravery the !lm celebrates is a#ective:
It’s the bravery to see and name our mistakes, to apologize, and to help each
other unbecome the monsters we’ve created, and to do all of this without
submitting to an unreasonable or unjust authority.
This is important.
Far be it from me to say that the !lm is perfect, or that there aren’t real
critiques to be made of it. The pacing is sometimes o# and there are stretches
that are less compelling than others. But there are three things Brave
absolutely isn’t, and there’s something pernicious about the fact that reviews
repeatedly refer to it as precisely those three things. Whatever Brave is, it’s not
predictable, it’s not Just Another Princess Movie, and it’s not — my God! —
lacking for deeper layers.
Insofar as Pixar is a teenager !ghting its ancestor, this story needed to be
written. They needed this story in order to be able to write a di#erent kind of
story. Having fought through the strangling thicket of princesses, it’ll be easier
to !ll the space on the other side with many more female characters, most of
them commoners. We need them, badly, and it’ll be interesting to see what
they do now that they can start work on a less exhaustively populated canvas.
I said earlier that a certain kind of female viewer learns to watch movies
without paying too much attention to their endings for fear of discovering
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herself outside them. The nicest thing I can say about Brave’s open-ended
ending, in which mother and daughter ride companionably into the sunset
with the big questions still before them, is that I missed their new hairdos the
!rst time round. When I watched the second time, no longer fearing the false
happily-ever-a$ering, there was a reward.
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