My favorite of the classic Disney princess movies is, without a doubt, Sleeping Beauty. I like it very much for several reasons. In fact I like it for almost the exact reasons why it probably is disliked by many today. I like it because it has a love at first sight story. I like it because it has a manly hero who slays the dragon and gets the girl. I like it because there is no confusion about what is good and what is evil.
As to the first point, it has become in vogue to knock the idea of love at first sight. We do not believe in such nonsense now. In fact many have come to even ridicule the idea of ‘true love’ itself. We live in a culture that mocks the idea of committed monogamous love. Divorce is always an option when a young couple goes into marriage and even the idea of marriage itself seems rather old fashioned and outmoded to many.
I am a fan of Disney’s hit movie Frozen as well. I think it does send some pretty good messages itself. I think it is great that the act of true love in that movie which ‘thaws a frozen heart’ is an act of love which is given rather than received (and indeed the heart that was truly frozen was Elsa’s and not Anna’s). There is some great gospel analogies that can be drawn from Frozen but they do something that is I think more hurtful than helpful also.
We are all shocked when prince Hans turns out to be a scoundrel who never loved Anna at all. He has played her using the love at first sight motif to take her for all she is worth. It is great writing on the story-maker’s part in my opinion. I surely agree with the sentiment that we need not get too carried away by mere emotions and marry a person whom we do not even know. And it is all too true that there are boys out there who are looking to take advantage of young women who just want to be loved.
That being said, however, this reflects a real shift in our culture’s thinking about love. True love, love at first sight, that is just the fairy tale. That is the thing which you cannot find in the real world. ‘Here is a dose of reality’, says Disney, ‘that kind of thing isn’t real’.
We don’t believe in that kind of love anymore.
Well you had better not tell that story to me. I fell in love with my wife practically overnight and we are going strong 12 years later. And while we asked each other important questions, talked about our beliefs and hopes and dreams, we got to know one another, it wasn’t but two weeks after I met her that I was buying a ring to ask her to marry me. So maybe love at first sight is a bit of a hyperbolic idea, but it is not so far off in my case and I’ve known others the same. True love is real and I think it dangerous to suggest to this generation that it is not and that they ought not to hope to experience it and to give it in return.
As to my second point, we need men who act like men. Can I just say ‘to Hell with feminism?’ I say that not crassly but with seriousness. It is a doctrine from Hell and to Hell let it return. We are in a time where everything is permissible except to act like a real man. We applaud males acting like women, we applaud male adults (in the chronological sense) acting like little boys, we applaud females who attempt to be men, but we deplore men who act like men.
Perish the thought that a man act like a man. The idea of men who believe that part of their purpose in life is to be committed to one woman for life, to pull out chairs for her, to open car doors and, if necessary, to slay a dragon for her, is the last thing that our culture wants to celebrate. But let’s be honest, deep inside the heart of every young woman (at least before that desire is crushed or shattered by some boy or whatever age) is a desire for a real man. Even the self professed lesbian has desired a real man at one time in her life (probably her father) but has more often than not only met boys. They have met boys who hurt them and abused them and engendered feelings of hate for all things that have both an X and a Y chromosome. All they really needed was a man.
No, I don’t mean a ‘man’ like our foolish culture thinks of. I mean a man who loved them unconditionally, who put their needs first, who protected them from boys, who slayed dragons for them. Every girl needs a man. They need a daddy who loves them more than life itself and then when they grow up they need a husband who carries that torch passed on to him from her father.
Oh I know that any feminist who reads this will think ‘How dare he say that! How wrong he is!’ but I know better. I know that you have simply missed out on being loved as you should have. On behalf of all of the real men in this world I want to tell you that I am sorry for the boys who have been in your life and who have hurt you. I want to tell you that you matter and you are valuable and you are precious in the sight of God your true Father who does love you unconditionally.
As to my final point, we need clarity on good and evil. There may be some ‘gray areas’ in this world but that is a far cry different from saying that ‘there is no black and white’. We have reached a point as a culture where we have stopped believing in categories like good and evil. We have traded them in for ideas like ‘evil is just misunderstood’. This may have no better reflection than another modern Disney story like Maleficent. It is in fact a turning on its head of the original story of Sleeping Beauty which I have been praising.
In the movie Maleficent we see the ‘untold true story’ of Sleeping Beauty. The evil Maleficent is not evil at all she has just made some bad decisions. The real evil lies in the King who betrayed her. You can watch the story for yourself, if you like, although I would argue that it is bad CGI and even worse acting. But the main thing I want to point out is that it is representative of this idea that what we once called evil we now call good and what we once called good we call evil (Isaiah 5:20). Furthermore we find that prince Phillip’s kiss is actually powerless to wake the sleeping princess. It is the Maleficent herself, who cursed the girl to begin with, that must wake her by loving her.
It is not that there is no beauty in this story or that there is not some message of redemption that could be mined out and applauded, but it is the fact that we have had to ruin a good story to make a mediocre one. We have taken the moral of the story and destroyed it to write a new moral. The new moral has no place for an honorable prince who truly loves the girl and sacrifices himself for her good. We must, we are told, find true love somewhere else because it does not exist in love at first sight.
The dragon may be the hero, the prince may be the villain or at least the impotent wannabe hero, and you may find yourself without hope of finding what your heart truly longs for in this world. In conclusion my point is the following:
While we need to caution our young people about getting carried away with their passions and marrying strangers I think it may be that there is at least an equal danger in telling them they ought not to have passions, hopes and dreams. It is both good and right that a young woman should be looking for a prince to sweep her off her feet and it is both good and right that a young man should aspire to be that prince. We need dragon slaying men who love their wives and daughters, who serve them and honor them as princesses. We need to keep the dream and belief alive in the hearts of young people that they can slay dragons and love dragon slayers. We need to know that there is truth, goodness and beauty in an objective sense and it is not all relative or simply a certain point of view. What young people need is not to stop believing in fairy tales but, rather, to be the kind of people that the classic fairy tales portray.
Believe in love, believe in dragon slayers, believe that goodness is there to be claimed as your own.
