Snow White Revisited

Snow White and the huntsmen is not the classic brother Grimm fairy tale. This modern interpretation depicts the protagonist as an active participant in her own liberation. This is not the classic damsel in distress tale that the brothers Grimm left us rather this piece takes the old story and gives it a modern and some might even say feminist twist.

Well lets not get carried away…First of all we cannot ignore the classic tale of envy, the wicked Queen Raveena (Charlize Theron) is a woman scorned by love, her heart has been broken which has left her believing her only value is her beauty. This tragic tale of older women envying younger women is portrayed by the evil Queen actually consuming the beauty of youth from young women leaving them dead or elder looking when she is finished with them. This type of competition for the power that youthful beauty brings devours the Queens attention, she is so obsessed with the way she looks that she lets her entire kingdom die of starvation around her.

Juxtaposed to this evil death loving Queen is the life giving Snow White (Kristen Stewart) portrayed as life itself/the healer of the land. Snow White is a change agent in this version of the story, at no point in the film does a man save her, her first escape depicts her fighting off the Queens evil brother and jumping into a sewer to escape the kingdom! Second when she is captured by the dwarves, at no point does she become their domestic servant (as in the Grimm version) rather they become united in the fight against the evil Queen when she learns of their struggle as unemployed miners.

I think this new version of Snow White is important to see with a critical eye because it is significant that what some have classified as the classic tale of a “damsel in distress” is being told at this moment in history in an entirely new light. Despite it’s flaws and the apparent celebration of the cult of youthful beauty as a form of actual power, I think this piece could be archived as a bench mark of how far we have come