Snow White remake enters middle stages of inevitable wokeness backlash cycle

Okay, let’s wade into this. The other week, a couple of photos from the set of Disney’s upcoming remake of Snow White were leaked in The Daily Mail, which published them under the headline, “Snow White and the Seven… Politically-Correct Companions?”

So already we’re in hell. The photos show what has since been identified as a stand-in for Rachel Zegler, who plays Snow White, standing alongside several actors who will purportedly play the seven dwarves: Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy and Doc. They are played by a variety of actors of different genders and ethnicities, which in the eyes of The Daily Mail means war.

If you’ve been online for one of these blowups in the past, you can probably guess what happened next: conservatives clutched their pearls and acted aghast — aghast, I tell you — that non-white and non-male people could be in yet another lazy cash-in remake of an old Disney movie. “Disney’s live-action Snow White takes wokeness to absurd new low,” wrote the thoroughly scandalized New York Post. The most histrionic reactions occurred, obviously, on Twitter, where one person literally wrote, without irony, “They want to traumatize children.”

Disney wants to “traumatize children” with Snow White remake, says ordinary person with perspective on the situation

I can actually envision a scenario where this movie traumatizes children: if they’re trying to enjoy the goofy fantasy movie and their parents hiss at them the entire time that it’s impossible for fictional dwarves with names like Happy and Dopey to be Black, that having a Latina princess is antithetical to the spirit of a 200-year-old fairy tale they’ve never read, and that the whole thing is part of a woke plot to raise the minimum wage or whatever.

You want to ask these people: is the original Snow White movie so enduring and beloved because the characters were white, or was it because of some other reason? Although that’s a fruitless question, because the objections have little to do with the movie itself. We’re all familiar with the anti-woke backlash cycle by now; the publications furious about this are furious because anger means views, and the laypeople because outrage is its own reward.

And it all misses what, in my opinion, is the real issue here: Disney has been on a tear remaking its classic stock of animated movies in live-action form since at least 2015’s Cinderella, and for the most part each movie has been more bland and uninspired than the last. If only these movies were worth this much upset. So I wish we could skip to the end of the story, where Snow White comes out and makes a ton of money despite the backlash and its own mediocrity, and everyone can get mad because The Emperor’s New Groove remake has a nonbinary animal companion, or whatever comes next.

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h/t The A.V. Club