Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hold on, how many kids do you have? I
Speaker 1: have two boys. Okay, so your kids are how old
Speaker 1: at this point? Oh? They were young. I mean this
Speaker 1: is before you know, you can call up anything on
Speaker 1: all of Disney Plus or whatever. I'm speaking with Laura
Speaker 1: Beth Nielsen, law professor, social scientist, chair of the Northwestern
Speaker 1: University Sociology Department. You know, they were VHS tapes and
Speaker 1: they wanted to watch them, and at some point, you know,
Speaker 1: as the adult, you just didn't get mine numbingly bored,
Speaker 1: and I started thinking about what else they represented. Were
Speaker 1: there particular movies that got you thinking along these lines?
Speaker 1: It was The Little Mermaid. It was a Little Mermaid.
Speaker 1: I want to be where the people are. I want
Speaker 1: to see want to see him dancing walking on. The
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid came out in nineteen eighty nine. It's based
Speaker 1: on the hands Christian Andersen children's story of the same name,
Speaker 1: an animated musical from Walt Disney Pictures, written and directed
Speaker 1: by the team of Ron Clemens and John Musker, about
Speaker 1: an adolescent mermaid named Ariel who wants to leave the
Speaker 1: sea and trade in her fins for feet because she's
Speaker 1: fallen in love with a handsome prince. She rescued him
Speaker 1: from a shipwreck, and now she can't stop thinking about him.
Speaker 1: What would I pay to stay here beside you? What
Speaker 1: would I do to see smiling at? The Little Mermaid
Speaker 1: is for kids, specifically, and especially little girls. It's a
Speaker 1: princess movie. When it came out, it rejuvenated Disney's animated
Speaker 1: film business, setting off a spectacular run Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin,
Speaker 1: The Lion King, Pocahontas. But it isn't just kids who
Speaker 1: watched Disney movies. It's their parents. Parents like Laura Beth Nielsen,
Speaker 1: the lead author, with Nahal Patel and Jacob Brasner, of
Speaker 1: a two thousand and seventeen Law Journal article called a
Speaker 1: Head of the Lawmen, Law and Morality in Disney Animated
Speaker 1: Films nineteen sixty to nineteen ninety eight. If you have
Speaker 1: a young child, I recommend you read this article before
Speaker 1: it's too late. I read the paper and I rolled
Speaker 1: my eyes and I like, I was like, seems to
Speaker 1: be like And then you know, I'd never seen a
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid. So then I watched Little Mermaid and I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, you're so right. Yeah, you heard that correctly.
Speaker 1: I had never seen The Little Mermaid. I was the
Speaker 1: only person in the English speaking world who could not
Speaker 1: sing the lyrics to under the Sea. In fact, I
Speaker 1: don't think i'd seen a Disney animated movie at all.
Speaker 1: And then one day, deep into my adult ears, I
Speaker 1: discovered Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid. It's very dramatic, but
Speaker 1: it's not just that that's a hugely We're gonna come
Speaker 1: back to this, but that is a hugely problematic movie. Oh,
Speaker 1: for a million reasons, for a million reasons. Ultimately, this
Speaker 1: episode is about whether it can be fixed. Wait did
Speaker 1: I say this episode? I meant three episodes were spending
Speaker 1: the next three weeks on The Little Mermaid. Revisionist History's
Speaker 1: take on The Little Mermaid is going to go on
Speaker 1: longer than The Little Mermaid itself. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. Sometime, as we go high at Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: sometimes we go sideways. This time we're going deep, deep, deep, underwater,
Speaker 1: to the ocean floor, to the mir world where men
Speaker 1: and women and children with fins for feet present the
Speaker 1: rest of us with a series of vexing moral conundrums.
Speaker 1: You know, some people say, oh, you're too rough on Disney.
Speaker 1: I'm not rough on Disney at all. I mean I
Speaker 1: love that movie, but it's wait, you love that movie?
Speaker 1: Are you talking about The Little Mermaid? Yeah? You still
Speaker 1: maintain that you love it. Oh, nobody's ever asked me
Speaker 1: this before. For I'm thinking, Um, I think I do.
Speaker 1: I mean yes, I think these are opportunities to talk
Speaker 1: to your children. Oh, I see you like it because
Speaker 1: it gave you a chance to instruct your son's Right,
Speaker 1: if I really hated it, I wouldn't have had it
Speaker 1: in my house, right You mean no, you didn't know
Speaker 1: until you washed it with them. You hadn't washed yourself
Speaker 1: before you showed it to him, had you? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh you had? Yes. Would you like me to sing
Speaker 1: the whole star? I assure you the answer is no.
Speaker 1: She sat on the couch with her kids and watched
Speaker 1: it again and again and again, first with love and
Speaker 1: only then with alarm. You have to watch it unwillingly
Speaker 1: many times to get to this level of analysis. I
Speaker 1: think when do children first encounter fairy tales at the
Speaker 1: most crucial of moments, when they start to form their
Speaker 1: earliest notions of legality and morality. As Laura Beth Nielsen
Speaker 1: points out, when you ask a two year old to
Speaker 1: share a toy, he'll say, no, it's mine. Ask a
Speaker 1: four or five year old and they'll say, why do
Speaker 1: I have to share? They suddenly want a framework to
Speaker 1: help them understand that request. And what do fairy tales do?
Speaker 1: They supply that framework. So this is what I want
Speaker 1: to do in these episodes about The Little Mermaid. I
Speaker 1: want to fix the frame set askew by Disney a
Speaker 1: generation ago. Now as I lead you on this journey
Speaker 1: of aquatic discovery? Am I a little worried? Of course,
Speaker 1: I'm worried because this is Disney. We're talking about the
Speaker 1: magic Kingdom, the litigious magic Kingdom. I hinted at this
Speaker 1: worry of mine in the least helpful place possible on
Speaker 1: The Jimmy Kimmel Show, which runs on ABC, owned by Disney.
Speaker 1: I know you're part of the Disney Empire. Jimmy, you are.
Speaker 1: They're upstairs watching this right now. They're probably trying to
Speaker 1: cut me off. You'll be your fingers on the button.
Speaker 1: I'll be lucky to be alive by morning. That's for sure.
Speaker 1: Jimmy sounds like he's kidding. He's not kidding. Have you
Speaker 1: ever heard of the infamous case Walt Disney Productions versus
Speaker 1: the Air Pirates. An underground cartoonist named Dan O'Neill got
Speaker 1: together with a group of his hippie friends in San
Speaker 1: Francisco in nineteen seventy one and wrote two issues of
Speaker 1: a Mickey and Minnie Mouse parody. Their first cover showed
Speaker 1: Mickey flying a prop plane with two bags of dope
Speaker 1: hanging from the fuselage. We're talking about most forty thousand
Speaker 1: copies of an indie comic book written by some counterculture cartoonist.
Speaker 1: Did Disney laugh? Ignore it? No? Disney sued. They brought
Speaker 1: in up Italian of high priced legal talent and reigned
Speaker 1: fire on little Dan O'Neill. The case dracked on for
Speaker 1: over nine years. Let me just quote to you from
Speaker 1: the completely nuts account of the saga from the writer
Speaker 1: Bob Levin. In nineteen seventy nine, O'Neill stood before the bar,
Speaker 1: thirty eight years old, unemployed, with total assets of seven dollars,
Speaker 1: a nineteen sixty three Mercury convertible, a banjo, and the
Speaker 1: baggy gray suit. He was wearing. Disney, which already had
Speaker 1: a hundred and ninety thousand dollars judgment against him, sought
Speaker 1: to have him find another ten thousand dollars and imprisoned
Speaker 1: for six months. You read a line like that and
Speaker 1: you think, there, but for the grace of God, go I,
Speaker 1: that could be me up there, standing before the court,
Speaker 1: broken and forlorn, besieged by Disney's pack of legal attack jackals.
Speaker 1: But are we at Revisioni's history afraid to give the
Speaker 1: story of Ariel a makeover. No, we're not, because somewhere
Speaker 1: out there is a little mermaid imprisoned in a script
Speaker 1: that does not do her justice. And Disney, if you're
Speaker 1: listening before the preliminary injunctions start flying around, be advised
Speaker 1: that although we will be critical of certain sea creatures
Speaker 1: within the Magic Kingdom, this is criticism that comes from
Speaker 1: a place of affection. Why have not we an immortal soul,
Speaker 1: asked the little Mermaid mournfully, I would gladly give all
Speaker 1: the hundreds of years that I have to live to
Speaker 1: be a human being only for one day, and to
Speaker 1: have the hope of knowing the happiness of that glorious
Speaker 1: world above the stars, The Little Mermaid began as a
Speaker 1: short story by the great Danish storyteller Hans Christian Anderson.
Speaker 1: You probably know some hands Christian andersen tales The Princess
Speaker 1: and the Pea, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling,
Speaker 1: the Snow Queen. Anderson was born into poverty in the
Speaker 1: early nineteenth century. He was desperately insecure, here, self absorbed,
Speaker 1: probably a virgin his entire life. There's some evidence that
Speaker 1: he might have been gay or bisexual at a time
Speaker 1: and place in history when making public either of those
Speaker 1: preferences could land you in prison. What Anderson had was
Speaker 1: his talent, which was immeasurable. He also had a beautiful
Speaker 1: singing voice, which he used to gain entree into the
Speaker 1: homes of the wealthy. He was the ugly duckling. In fact,
Speaker 1: when Anderson was once asked whether he would ever write
Speaker 1: his autobiography, his response was, I already have almost every
Speaker 1: tale he wrote. They were grounded in the reality of
Speaker 1: his life. That was a dirt or uncultivated, ugly young
Speaker 1: boy became sort of a swan. That's Jack Zips, one
Speaker 1: of the leading experts on fairy tales. Anderson's stories are
Speaker 1: about transformation, about outsiders longing to be insiders, about the
Speaker 1: struggle for acceptance. And the Little Mermaid is quintessential Anderson.
Speaker 1: A mermaid saves a handsome prince from drowning and decides
Speaker 1: that she wants to be human too, because, as her
Speaker 1: grandmother tells her, human beings have immortal souls. You must
Speaker 1: not think of that, said the old woman. We feel
Speaker 1: ourselves to be much happier and much better off than
Speaker 1: human beings. So I shall die, said the little mermaid,
Speaker 1: And as the foam of the sea, I shall be
Speaker 1: driven about, never again to hear the music of the waves,
Speaker 1: or to see the pretty flowers, nor the red sun?
Speaker 1: Is there anything I can do to win an immortal soul?
Speaker 1: The Mermaid's desire to leave the water becomes overwhelming, so
Speaker 1: she goes to a sea witch, who gives her a
Speaker 1: potion and tells her that when she drinks it, her
Speaker 1: fins will turn into legs. All who see you will
Speaker 1: say that you are the prettiest little human they ever saw.
Speaker 1: But every step she takes will be filled with pain,
Speaker 1: as if she were treading upon sharp knives. If the
Speaker 1: prince marries her, she can stay a human If she
Speaker 1: fails to win his heart, she will die. Oh, and
Speaker 1: the witch extracts the most horrible down payment. When at
Speaker 1: last the magic draft was ready, it looked like the
Speaker 1: clearest water. There it is for you, said the witch.
Speaker 1: Then she cut off the Mermaid's tongue so that she
Speaker 1: would become dumb and would never again speak or sing. Oh. Man.
Speaker 1: And yet does Anderson's mermaid get to marry the prince. No,
Speaker 1: she doesn't. The prince ends up marrying another woman, and
Speaker 1: the mermaid melts into foam. Classic Anderson, As Jack Zips
Speaker 1: puts it, most of Anderson's characters wind up his metaphors
Speaker 1: for his own suffering. He never felt, at least for him,
Speaker 1: what he would consider true happiness, and that was the
Speaker 1: motor of all of his tales. The frustration he felt
Speaker 1: comes out in most of the tales that he wrote.
Speaker 1: A lot of the scholarship on Hans Christian Anderson dwells
Speaker 1: on this point about the connection between his fairy tales
Speaker 1: and his own life. There's a wonderful essay by Gabrielle
Speaker 1: Bellot where she points out that just before Anderson wrote
Speaker 1: The Little Mermaid, he'd been embroiled in a passionate completely
Speaker 1: unrequited romance with a handsome young Dane. Let me just
Speaker 1: read to you from Bellot's essay, where she cites a
Speaker 1: poem that Anderson wrote about his love. It goes, rosebud,
Speaker 1: so firm and round, lovely as a young girl's mouth.
Speaker 1: I kiss you as my bride. The amateur poem continues
Speaker 1: with further kisses and an exhortation into feel my fire.
Speaker 1: What does the object of Anderson's love do? He rejects
Speaker 1: Anderson for a woman. The author is plunged into despair
Speaker 1: and writes The Little Mermaid, a story about a creature
Speaker 1: from another world who must give up her beautiful voice,
Speaker 1: her identity to be accepted by the greater world, only
Speaker 1: to be rejected for a woman. And there The Little
Speaker 1: Mermaid remained a sad story from a tortured soul until
Speaker 1: one day she got a new life. A century passes
Speaker 1: and along comes Disney. In the nineteen eighties. The Disney
Speaker 1: animated franchise was in trouble. Its greatest hits, Snow White,
Speaker 1: p Kyo, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty were all in the past.
Speaker 1: They wanted AsSalt and go out and find new ideas.
Speaker 1: This is Ron Clements, longtime writer and director at Disney,
Speaker 1: speaking a few years ago at the Big Animation Conference
Speaker 1: Industry Giants. I read The Hands Christian Anderson's story in
Speaker 1: a bookstore, and as I was reading it, I thought
Speaker 1: it seemed like this is great, this is so cool.
Speaker 1: But as I continue to read it, it's very very sad.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, it is very very sad, all the way
Speaker 1: to the bitter end, where the Little Mermaid is reduced
Speaker 1: to a clump of sea foam. The little girls of
Speaker 1: America are not yet ready. Clements feels for an aquatic
Speaker 1: allegory of unrequired homosexual longing. It gets sadder and sadder
Speaker 1: and sadder, and then she dies in the end. So
Speaker 1: it was almost depressing in a way, but I thought
Speaker 1: it had a lot of potential, so I'd made it
Speaker 1: a little more of a good against evil's story in
Speaker 1: a love triumphs solve story. Clements and his co director
Speaker 1: John Musker gave the Little made a name. Ariel the
Speaker 1: Sea Witch became Ursula, a campy octopus based on the
Speaker 1: legendary drag queen divine and Joan Collins, villainess of a
Speaker 1: hundred nineteen seventies b movies. Ariel's father, the leader of
Speaker 1: the Mirror World, is a big, white haired giant named
Speaker 1: King Triton, who looks a little like Santa Claus. If
Speaker 1: Santa Claus has spent the off season lifting weights, an
Speaker 1: Ariel gets a few sidekicks. Sebastian, a crab with a
Speaker 1: Jamaican accent and love of Calypso, is a fish named Flounder,
Speaker 1: and a dizzy seagull named Scuttle. The prince Ariel falls
Speaker 1: in love with is named Prince Eric. He's a dashingly
Speaker 1: handsome aristocrat with a sheep dog. Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin,
Speaker 1: the creators of Little Shop of Horrors, were brought in
Speaker 1: to write the music. Everyone loved the result. John Muska
Speaker 1: remembers opening his front door on Halloween night after the
Speaker 1: movie came out and seeing a little girl dressed as Aeriel,
Speaker 1: and he realized, we made it. We're in the culture.
Speaker 1: Clemens and Musker would go on to do some of
Speaker 1: Disney's most memorable animated movies, Aladdin, Princess and the Frog Moanna.
Speaker 1: They're now the grandfathers of Hollywood animation. John and Ron
Speaker 1: should be proud, but let's keep listening. To Ron Clements
Speaker 1: as he talks about The Little Mermaid. I never really
Speaker 1: felt any guilt so much about changing the sad ending
Speaker 1: to a happy Indy. H Where did that come from?
Speaker 1: Who said anything about guilt? Is there something here weighing
Speaker 1: on Ron Clemens's conscience. I never felt any guilt until
Speaker 1: I was doing publicity in Copenhagen for the European premiere
Speaker 1: of the film, and that's where hence Christian Anderson lived,
Speaker 1: and that's where the statue of the Little Mermaid is.
Speaker 1: They were not so happy about it. They were giving
Speaker 1: me a hard time about changing the Indian and even
Speaker 1: one interview said it would be as if we took
Speaker 1: one with the wind and we changed the ending. So
Speaker 1: a Scarlett O'Haras stayed with Red Buttler in the end.
Speaker 1: So not all Danes appreciated what Disney did with a
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid. But my beef is not Danish. My beef
Speaker 1: comes from the scholar Laura beth Nielsen. Do you remember
Speaker 1: what specific thing in that movie got you thinking, Wait
Speaker 1: a minute, Oh, it's that moment where Triton shoots his
Speaker 1: trident at Ursula to try to save his daughter from
Speaker 1: this what every viewer knows is an extremely immoral arrangement.
Speaker 1: The extremely immoral arrangement she's talking about, it's the contract
Speaker 1: Aerial signs with Ursula. In the original Fairytale version of
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid, the Mermaid made a handshake deal with the
Speaker 1: Sea Witch. She got the potion that made her a human.
Speaker 1: In exchange, the sea Witch cut off her tongue. In
Speaker 1: the Disney version, they bring in lawyers. Of course they do. Ursula,
Speaker 1: the Disney diva, won't make any magic deals without a
Speaker 1: signed contract. Ariel signs the scroll. She now has three
Speaker 1: days to get Eric to kiss her. If she fails,
Speaker 1: she has to return underwater and become Ursula's slave. Now,
Speaker 1: if you've watched the movie, you know what happens next.
Speaker 1: Ariel comes close to kissing Eric but gets foiled. Ursula
Speaker 1: acquires Ariel's voice, transforms herself into a beautiful young woman,
Speaker 1: and steals Eric away, whereupon King Triton confronts Ursula to
Speaker 1: get his daughter back. Let her go, Not a chance, Triton,
Speaker 1: She's mine now, really immediate deal. That's when Triton tries
Speaker 1: to destroy the contract with his tritent. It doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Then Ursula says, and this is the key phrase. You
Speaker 1: see the contracts legal, biding and completely unbreakable even for you,
Speaker 1: and she holds up the contract it's gold. And it
Speaker 1: was that unbreakable golden contract that was ruling this whole situation.
Speaker 1: And it was, I mean, from you know, a law
Speaker 1: professor perspective, clearly illegal under the law. I mean it's
Speaker 1: a contract involving a minor and the sale of body parts.
Speaker 1: I believe in law. I mean, I'm skeptical about a
Speaker 1: lot of claims, and I think we need to empirically
Speaker 1: study them and all of those sorts of things. But fundamentally,
Speaker 1: I want my students and my children to understand that
Speaker 1: law embodies or should embody, and we have to strive
Speaker 1: to make it always be so true justice and a
Speaker 1: piece of paper or in this case gold, whatever it is,
Speaker 1: doesn't win out over adjust outcome. That's the argument of
Speaker 1: Nielsen's paper, the one published in twenty seventeen. When I
Speaker 1: ran across it, I'll admit my first thought was, this
Speaker 1: is some academic with way too much time on her hands.
Speaker 1: Do we really need to overthink animated movies of fairy tales?
Speaker 1: But then I realized, actually we do. There are lots
Speaker 1: of things we overthink in our society. I overthink everything
Speaker 1: all the time, and most of the things I overthink
Speaker 1: are not nearly as important as the narratives we tell children.
Speaker 1: And finally we get to sit down and have this
Speaker 1: conversation out. Did you watch Oprah's famous interview with Megan Markle?
Speaker 1: A young woman marries a prince and finds herself thwarted
Speaker 1: by the royal family, suppressed, silenced. And what did Megan
Speaker 1: Markle reference as a parallel for her predicament? Not a
Speaker 1: theory of justice by John Rawls. No, the Little Mermaid,
Speaker 1: who is an adult really watches The Little Mermaid. But
Speaker 1: it came on. I was like, well, I'm just here
Speaker 1: all the times, I may as well watch this, and
Speaker 1: I went, oh my god. She falls in love with
Speaker 1: the prince, and because of that she has to lose
Speaker 1: her voice. But by the end she gets her voice back,
Speaker 1: gets her voice by it, and this is what happened here.
Speaker 1: You feel like you've got your voice back. When Oprah
Speaker 1: said that, did we all roll our eyes? No? We said,
Speaker 1: oh my god, she's so right. Perhaps the most famous
Speaker 1: book ever written about children's stories is The Uses of
Speaker 1: Enchantment by Bruno Bedelheim. He says that fairy tales teach
Speaker 1: children that quote a struggle against severe difficulties in life
Speaker 1: is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence. But
Speaker 1: that if one does not shy away but steadfastly meets
Speaker 1: unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and
Speaker 1: at the end emerges victorious. End quote. Fairy tales matter.
Speaker 1: But who tells most of our fairy tales? Now? Disney?
Speaker 1: And what's the problem with Disney? They've gotten sloppy. If
Speaker 1: I were prosecuting Disney for moral sloppiness, here is where
Speaker 1: I would begin. I ain't talking rabbit, and ain't nothing
Speaker 1: you can do to meet me. I exhibit a Disney's Zutopia,
Speaker 1: pig rating family comedy from twenty sixteen. Zutopia is all
Speaker 1: about a world of animals starring a rabbit. Police officer
Speaker 1: Judy Hobbs couldn't be cute or right except for this
Speaker 1: moment near the end of that movie, where Hops needs
Speaker 1: to find out a crucial bit of information about a
Speaker 1: criminal conspiracy. She is a shrew named mister big Use,
Speaker 1: one of his enforcers, a polar bear to interrogate a
Speaker 1: weasel named Duke. The polar Bear holds Duke over an
Speaker 1: icy pit and threatens to throw him down the hole
Speaker 1: to his death if he doesn't confess. I stace weasel
Speaker 1: right directly. Act. That's torture right. Even worse, the weasel
Speaker 1: gives up the info right away. So the movie is
Speaker 1: modeling something that isn't even true in the real world.
Speaker 1: There is no empirical support for the notion that the
Speaker 1: application of coercive force is the most efficient way to
Speaker 1: get a confession out of her reluctant party, even if
Speaker 1: that reluctant party is a weasel. Okay. Exhibit B Toy
Speaker 1: Story three Family Comedy g Rating twenty ten, another Disney
Speaker 1: movie which is full of all sorts of excruciating scenes
Speaker 1: of one sort or another, like when mister potato Head
Speaker 1: gets locked in a sandbox, or another scene where a
Speaker 1: plastic rotary phone is viciously beaten to the point where
Speaker 1: he divulges critical information to the evil lots of you
Speaker 1: lost Little Doggie. Well, well luck us back. I'm sorry, cowboy.
Speaker 1: They broke me. They broke me. It's a g rating.
Speaker 1: It isn't just Disney. By the way, there's a kind
Speaker 1: of moral sloppiness everywhere in children's entertainment. One thing I
Speaker 1: didn't expect was how often torture we would be played
Speaker 1: for humor, which I thought was kind of particularly fascinating.
Speaker 1: That's the social scientist Casey Delahunty, who with Aaron Karnes,
Speaker 1: actually made a list of every torture scene that occurs
Speaker 1: in Hollywood's top grossing movies between two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: and twenty seventeen. The SpongeBob movie has some really good
Speaker 1: examples of this, where like they have a whole scene
Speaker 1: where they torture a tire, and like, it's meant to
Speaker 1: be played for humor, what do we have here? They
Speaker 1: got a hurry. Those guys really hate tires, so you
Speaker 1: won't talk. Let's samar out of him. And then later
Speaker 1: they find that they've actually tortured the anthropomorphic computer. But
Speaker 1: even that scene is all just jokes, like what would
Speaker 1: it be like to torture a computer? And it's legitimately
Speaker 1: funny but also disconcerting, you think. So back to Laura
Speaker 1: Beth Nielsen one more time. Her field of study is
Speaker 1: lay perceptions of the law. How do ordinary people come
Speaker 1: to understand the law. So not just law like a
Speaker 1: statute that Congress passes or Supreme Court decision, but in general,
Speaker 1: you know, what do you mean by liberty? Whose concept
Speaker 1: of liberty? You know, ordinary people don't say, oh well,
Speaker 1: it's a combination of John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Franklin's writings,
Speaker 1: and they have these sort of lay conceptions which aren't
Speaker 1: right or wrong, but they motivate action, and they make
Speaker 1: up what we think of as fair and just and
Speaker 1: what the appropriate role of the state should be, which
Speaker 1: is I mean, that's the whole question of law. This
Speaker 1: is what she studies. And then one day she's sitting
Speaker 1: on a couch with her boys, at the moment that
Speaker 1: they are in that critical window of moral develop she
Speaker 1: watches for the millionth time as Aerial signs the scroll,
Speaker 1: and Nielsen says, wait a minute. The point of the
Speaker 1: law is that it's supposed to avoid conflict. It's supposed
Speaker 1: to embody a sense of what's right, not enshrine an
Speaker 1: outrageously exploitative deal in which a minor gives up a
Speaker 1: body part, makes themselves liable for a lifetime of underwater slavery,
Speaker 1: and needs to be bailed out by an armed posse,
Speaker 1: Did you intervene? Did you stop the tape and say, look, boys,
Speaker 1: just so clear you didn't, Well wait a minute, why not?
Speaker 1: Oh well, we've talked about it since I wouldn't stop
Speaker 1: it right then they would do you have gifts? They
Speaker 1: would have a meltdown. The point is, if you're Laura
Speaker 1: Beth Nielsen and worry about these sorts of things, Disney
Speaker 1: films are tricky. How quickly after they watched the movie
Speaker 1: did you discuss the movie as a as a problematic
Speaker 1: narrative with him? But did you wait for years or
Speaker 1: did you? Oh? No, I know, well no, I talk
Speaker 1: to them at an age appropriate level at various points
Speaker 1: in time. I probably said it's too bad that they
Speaker 1: couldn't work this out another way. I didn't say that's
Speaker 1: an unconscionable contract. Don't you remember Botsakis v. Demosis and
Speaker 1: from Laws? You know? But I you know, something like that.
Speaker 1: And then in that moment you describe what the movie
Speaker 1: is telling the viewer is that the Law is is
Speaker 1: all powerful, not even Triton, who later in the movie
Speaker 1: can transform his own daughter from a moment into a
Speaker 1: human being. That's how powerful. He's basically God. He is God.
Speaker 1: But can you overturn any moral contract? Not a chance, right,
Speaker 1: not a chance. Remember, at the end of the movie,
Speaker 1: Aeriel and Triton and Prince Eric don't Ursula. They don't
Speaker 1: initiate some kind of formal proceedings against her, They don't
Speaker 1: try her in court, they don't make use of the
Speaker 1: same legal mechanisms that Ursula did. In the internal logic
Speaker 1: of the film, the reason why Triton can't break the
Speaker 1: contract is that Triton doesn't control the law. The law
Speaker 1: is entirely controlled by this mobster Ursula, and he's outmaneuvered. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, the evil people can take the law
Speaker 1: and do these things with it, and maybe you could
Speaker 1: have fought it at some point or another. But once
Speaker 1: the deal is done, it's unbreakable. How does this whole
Speaker 1: thing ultimately get resolved? Eric pursues Ursula with his ship
Speaker 1: and kills her. The Little Mermaid is a vigilante picture.
Speaker 1: It's an animated, dirty, hairy movie. They might as well
Speaker 1: have had Clint Eastwood played Prince Eric. Law is often
Speaker 1: presented as they're you know, ineffective, completely irrelevant, or negget
Speaker 1: right or bad. Something that the bad guys use. And
Speaker 1: then what tends to solve the problem is violence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: either mob violence or in this case, you know it's
Speaker 1: Ursula gets killed by a ship really yeah, impaled, Yes,
Speaker 1: she gets impaled by the bow of it all. The
Speaker 1: Freudian scholars writing about Little Mermaid refer to it as
Speaker 1: a phallic impalement. Oh my gosh, the gender stuff on
Speaker 1: this movie. Read it forever, and we will. In upcoming episodes,
Speaker 1: you'll hear from a neuroscientist turned literary theorist who will
Speaker 1: help us to code the hidden meaning of a Little
Speaker 1: Mermaid narrative. A big name Hollywood casting agent will stop
Speaker 1: by to sort to the show's characters, and best of all,
Speaker 1: in an act of massive revisionist history, I prevail upon
Speaker 1: a high end Hollywood screenwriter to reimagine the movie Welcome.
Speaker 1: I used to tie my ankles with like sweat socks
Speaker 1: and then jump into the pool so that I could,
Speaker 1: you know, swim with my feet tied together like the
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid. Coming up next week, Brent Marlin dives deep,
Speaker 1: deep into the underworld. The Origion's History is produced by
Speaker 1: Emila Belle, Leeman Gistu and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Lindon
Speaker 1: and on a name. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original
Speaker 1: scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by Flawn Williams, and engineering
Speaker 1: by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Our voice
Speaker 1: actor in this episode was Melina Rose. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: the Pushkin Crew head of Fane, Carly Mgleori Maya Kanig,
Speaker 1: Dan Yellow, Lacan, Maggie Teller, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrel,
Speaker 1: and of course Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcain Babba. Don't forget
Speaker 1: my latest book, The Bomber Mafia, which is an expansion
Speaker 1: of several episodes from the last season of Provisionist History.
Speaker 1: You can find it wherever books are sold, but by
Speaker 1: the audiobook at Bomber Mafia dot com and you'll get
Speaker 1: a bonus listeners guide, and you can listen in the
Speaker 1: podcast app you're using now