There are only so many languages, as I quickly found out in the last 10 years. Your capacity to learn new languages diminishes over time, so my childhood ambitions of learning every language possible have now been shattered. But this shift to the global, I think, is really important in terms of showing also how we are all connected. That there is something at our core, something fundamental there that links us to every other person on the planet.
And so, I love the fact that we have this golden network of stories that tells us, you know, we can really communicate to each other, we can talk to each other. We are not all that different. CC: Mm-hmm, yeah. A need to go back to basics in a way. Even in some cases to return to our own childhoods and see how we process these stories.
But I think it also has to do with a kind of sea change. And you as parents need to read them and think about their importance and think about how they mattered to you.
The husband, a serial murderer, the threatened wife, the imperiled wife. Film noir has it, all the secrets beyond the door, Rebecca — all of these films.
Hitchcock loved the Bluebeard theme and took it up in Spellbound and Suspicion. But suddenly they name the stories. There were all of these Cinderella stories, Pretty Woman , Working Girl , which gave us this trajectory of the young ingenue, the naive woman who then finds her prince and lives happily ever after.
And a slightly different take. We can reinvent it. So, think of something like Frozen. So, Disney now seems to be the expert in reanimating the stories by changing them. CC: Yeah. Perfect segue for my next question. He came upon it, and at first you know, he thought of it as a film really about the Wicked Witch, rather than Snow White — so how did he change it?
So suddenly he introduced this element to which we, being racially sensitive, as we are, see as a kind of red flag. You know, what about this white as snow — why is fairness and beauty connected to white skin?
CC: Yeah, you even said that the movie was celebrated among Nazis at the time as well, that it was sort of a dog whistle for what they were trying to propagate in the country as well. MT: Dog whistle is exactly right.
I mean, imagine Goebbels being completely enamored of this film — with an Aryan figure really, a Nordic princess — a woman who becomes a Nordic princess. So, Goebbels loved the film, and he introduced Hitler to it, who was also a huge fan of it. And Goebbels just wished that he could inspire German directors to make films that were as powerful and as lively and as entertaining and as attractive as a Disney film.
CC: Do you know whether or not that anecdote ever made its way back to Walt Disney, and if it did, what his reaction was? MT: That is a fascinating question and — he had to have been aware of it. CC: Yes. So, talk about the mother-daughter theme, and why you think that this theme proved to be as universal as it has been.
MT: One of the reasons many people object to fairy tales today is that women are demonized in them — and in particular, stepmothers. What is at its core? The hatred of a mother for her daughter, rivalry with her, she hates her, and why?
And so, that kind of toxic jealousy — again, as I mentioned earlier, you know, these fairy tales, what fairy tales do is enlarge, they magnify. They exaggerate. So, while there may be a certain amount of mother-daughter rivalry in all families, you know, unconscious.
And the story is about generational renewal, about change and all of those things. Because I told you about my childhood experience. But I must admit that Breaking Bad was my breaking point. And Hunger Games I was startled by, because to me, the idea of a book about children killing children was just going to an extreme.
It was violating a cultural taboo in a way that was difficult for me. But then there, I read the book and I watched the movie and I thought they were sensational and really fascinating. That you know, there seemed to be a real point to that.
But you know, we do have a new culture. And I guess, you know, I do worry that children today they can see anything. And the shadows are rarely banished by comic relief.
Instead of stories about children who struggle to grow up, we have stories about children to struggle to survive. And also we live in a violent world and therefore children should be, should know that, and all of that. Where do we draw it? What responsibilities do we have as adults? And I asked him what it was about?
I mean I heard other people tell me what it was about. And she, you know, she becomes this extraordinary trickster figure, who has to survive in a time of famine and use her wits. And more intentional about understanding how these things shape us. And then you had your own children.
We were just talking about, you know, our responsibilities as adults. And you know, to go back to our own childhoods in a way. I was always finding myself, you know, just remembering. Oh, it was as if these, you know, connections were being made in my brain.
Remembering these stories and the impact they had had on me. But then children use these stories to move forward, to learn more about the world, to become adult. So there you are, you know, together. And having the opportunity sometimes just to read the words on the page and, you know, have this experience together of the beauty of the language. Or, and then you know, to move along with these story —to improvise at times and to create your own story —to laugh about it, to worry about it, to provide comfort.
And then just a, you know, intoxicating, not always though. I mean I admit that there were times when I wanted the one-minute bedtime story. It often wakes them up. It seems in some ways to me like such a strange way to end stories which are often just full of how dark and hard and complex and bizarre life can be and even magnified. And I want to teach my children that everything ends happily ever after. And am I being too serious about this? Lewis told us about what is it, the beating of the heart when he hears the happily ever after.
And I suppose, you know, not all of our stories need to end that way. There, you know, there can be a mix of things. We need to know, yes, things can take a better turn. And none of us is getting out of it alive. TATAR: Which is precisely why I think we need to know, yes, it is worth going on, because there are people who will come after you.
When you had those fireside scenes —my bet is somebody told a story and then there was protest. So you know, we bring our own sensibilities to these stories. You know, what happens? You know, the movie ends, the lights go on. And then suddenly you hear the conversations.
Everyone starts talking. And you know, you have to digest that story. TIPPETT: I had not made the connection in between storytelling by the fire and Kindle as a name for our new reading device —one of our new reading devices. This is new. Is that what they meant in naming it Kindle?
But the fact that when they called it Kindle, I was already astonished, but then when the new version is Kindle Fire. But there was even some fairy dust. We may lose the codex. I hope we never lose that. But the stories will not disappear. Crows are all liars. I know a story about a crow. I could tell you about Ser Duncan the Tall. Those were always your favorites. My favorites were the scary ones. Fear is for the winter when the snows fall a hundred feet deep.
Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides for years and children are born and live and die all in darkness. That is the time for fear my little lord, when the White Walkers moved through the woods. Thousands of years ago there came a night that lasted a generation. Kings froze to death in their castles, same as the shepherds in their huts. And women smothered their babies rather than see them starve, and wept, and felt the tears freeze on their cheeks.
So is this the sort of story that you like? Maria Tatar is John L. And you can always follow everything we do through our weekly email newsletter. Just click the newsletter link on any page at onbeing. Movies delight and inspire and repel. They change our lives and our life together. Get out the popcorn for this show, and immerse yourself in film scores and iconic movie moments — with David Greene on how Star Wars changed him, Ashley C.
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Rushmore: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. This piece is a part of: Library Words Make Worlds. Ford, David Greene, et al. Read Essays Poetry. Home On Being with Krista Tippett. As time passed, the stories were collected and written down. Many were made into movies. And then parents began asking: what is it about fairy tales?
Aren't they too violent and scary for impressionable children? But that was far from the end. No matter how politically incorrect stories about evil stepmothers, damsels in distress, and cannibalistic old women may be, fairy tales are here to stay.
And that's a good thing, say the experts. No matter how violent they are, the protagonist always survives. Indeed, as scary as many of these stories sound to parents, many scholars view them as helping children work through anxieties they can't yet express. The famous writer and child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim believed fairy tales are important to children's development because the main characters — many of them children themselves — demonstrate pluck, and the ability to triumph over adversity in a world of giants and cruel adults.
But, will the gruff world represented in many fairy tales be too scary for your little one? I also recommend that parents read the stories themselves before reading them aloud to their child. Some familiar titles have elements missing in the Disney versions most people are familiar with.
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