Said Peter Dinklage, on the Marc Maron podcast, quoted in "Peter Dinklage slams Disney’s plans for ‘Snow White’ remake: ‘Backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave’" (WaPo).
From the comments over there: "I listened to the podcast before reading this article. The editors that picked the title should ask themselves whether they deliberately feed th[e] media hyperventilation. Dinklage didn’t 'slam' anything. He calmly discussed the issue and critiqued it in a thoughtful way. Stop ginning up controversy where there need be none."
In any event, Disney responded: "To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community. We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period."
It seems to me that the original animated film made a big point of giving each dwarf an individualized characteristic — Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy, etc. — so isn't that the opposite of stereotyping? Or is it stereotyping to say that in this category people have one and only one outstanding characteristic — these are a one-dimensional — or 2-dimensional, if you count dwarfism — kind of person.
Posts
55 comments:
"I remember a times when saying "dwarf" and "dwarfism" was considered politically incorrect and one had to use a euphemism, and I'd happily — not grumpily — do that if I were not taking the lead from The Washington Post and Disney. I don't know exactly when that changed."
I would say you would sleepily do it, if not sheepily (but he was left out!).
Will some of the dwarfs be female this time? How about Snow Black and the Six Small People and One Furry of Non-Binary Orientation? It will be a huge hit!
Disney not only gave each dwarf an individual characteristic, but an individual look. Doc was clearly Doc, Sleepy clearly Sleepy, etc. Since our betters recently declared individualism, along with reason, a one of the characteristics of the hated Old White Guy culture, can see why they might want to make the Seven Dwarves more "woke."
Dinklage is correct. Dwarves have no place in entertainment. We should just pretend they don't exist. It should be Snow White and the 7 Normies.
And what exactly is meant by "Hi Ho"?
Life is so complicated for leftists. How to keep up with the latest pronoun ?
Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There's nothing like having a midget for a butler. - W. C. Fields
From a stronger time.
1) Since they were animations, the original seven dwarves were literally two-dimensional characters.
2)I remember a times when saying "dwarf" and "dwarfism" was considered politically incorrect and one had to use a euphemism,
Dwarf and dwarfism are scientific terms that describe actual human beings. It's very similar to retarded. Retarded is a scientific term used to describe humans that had previously been called imbeciles and morons. (Which were themselves originally scientific terms) Today these kids are labeled as "special" (as in special ed) so the kids use the term special in a derogatory way.
A similar thing has happened with Black people in America. Negro became colored, colored became Black, Black became African-American, African-American is become person of color.
may be will ferrell can be trans-dwarf / trans-elf
Casting a latina as Snow White isn't brave; it's pandering to the racial colonizers of European cultures. And while Dinklages critique might be calming expressed, it's hardly thoughtful. Theres nothing wrong with Disneys fantasy dwarf race.
I first read about this story on Buzzfeed where I was a little surprised to see people defending Disney and saying things like “dwarves are mythical creatures” in the comments.
A lot of other commenters were suggesting that Disney, or whoever else, should just write original roles for poc, rather than rehash old ones. Can’t say I disagree.
There's a very nice rewrite of Snow White by Donald Barthelme. It includes a 15-question quiz halfway in
Quiz
3. Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-figure?
4. That Jane is the wicked step-mother?
Oh for f***'s sake.
The story of Snow White is not about a woman hanging out with a bunch of midgets.
It's about another f***ing species entirely.
Snow White is a fairytale.
noun: fairytale,
a children's story about magical and imaginary beings and lands.
So, these days fairytales are considered real, and they MUST reflect today's reality.
Come SMOD, come soon.
Fuck Peter Dinklage and the pony he rode in on.
"happily" and "grumpily" - love it!
Dwarfs in literature are their own race. Think Hobbit and Lord of the Rings where they are proud and strong. I never thought of the Disney dwarfs as humans with a growth issue. Let them be! Or maybe for Disney, it should be sung:
Let it go, let it go!
Why is Disney so hell bent on ruining themselves?
They could always make a movie that hits all the beats and plot points of the original tale while modernized and call it, "Brown Coffee Story". Should be easy for the lead actress, who recently played Juliet... I mean Maria.
The "dwarves" in the original cartoon seem to be what we would now call gnomes, not actual dwarves. Maybe they should make them gnomes.
Forget it Jake, it's Prog-town.
I’m gonna toss this story right out of my head…
Disney has bigger problems to consider than casting. The story is all wrong.
Snow White cooks & cleans the home while the Seven Patriarchs are mining. Do these bourgeois pigs ever pay her for her labor?
SW falls asleep after eating a poisoned apple. Better not to put the idea of poison in the tots heads. Make it a GMO non-organic apple.
And of course, SW should awake only when kissed by a Princess.
I believe the old idea was that the forest, just past the edge of town, was a dangerous place. Small people like dwarfs, Hansel and Gretel, and even women as compared to men, were at more of a disadvantage then bigger people. It would be wise to stay together as a group, and possibly hide in a cave (always checking for big cats). Going off to work in a mine every day is one indication that you are good people. I don't know who they send the ore to.
Does this mean everyone who tells this story is revealing that they despise people of small stature, or coal miners, and want them to stay hidden in squalor in our cities? Do the woke want to ensure that coal miners, whether employed or unemployed, don't get to vote?
It is funny to think about who is permitted to wake up this sleeping lady. Is a male of color better than a white male? Not Bill Cosby, I guess, especially if he's the one who gave the poisoned apple. Is groping OK if done by a woman of color, especially if SW then says (like Jane Fonda expressing appreciation to Jon Voight in a wheelchair): that's never happened to me before?
So why do we have a Latino girl as "Snow White?"
Isn't her very name a description? She has raven black hair, lips of ruby red, and skin as white as snow?
I have nothing against latin girls--very beautiful indeed; exotic, etc. But for "Snow White?"
Why not ask Tom Hanks to play Martin Luther King, Jr? If that's not acceptable, then why is a Latin girl for Snow White acceptable?
A Latin girl would NEVER be named Snow White.
Still, it's likely better than trying to put Beyonce in as Snow White..... Disney probably tried to figure that one out.
All this PC fretting sounds a lot like how socially-conscious people used to fret about manners: which fork to use, when to wear white gloves, etc.
Why is Dinklage objecting to Disney giving acting work to dwarfs? Seems like something he'd be in favor of. Is it because none of them were taken seriously as a potential love interest for Snow White?
Zegler family tree half Polish, I believe. No one says Slavic Snow White?
Watched Dinklage recently in Brit film, Death at a Funeral, as gay lover of married deceased. Very funny. Snow White and the 7 queens? Or was that a third dimension of the originals?
effinayright wins the internet. Don Pardo tell him what he's won!
So, Disney is just redoing what was already done before. There's zero reason to remake the the classic movie version except to (1) make $$$, and (2) make a crappy "diverse" movie that will erase the European roots of the story.
The attitude of Americans toward culture is always fascinating. You wonder if they hate western Civilization or just are indifferent to anything that's not "fashionable" or ins't stupid.
"He's an angry elf."
Why not consider fairy tales real? If you can buy into "liberal" economics, you might as well re-classify Grimm's Fairy Tales as history.
The woke version would be Menstruator of No Particular Color and the Seven Inseminators of No Particular Height.
So how will Disney account for the name Snow White (originally given by the Brothers Grimm as Sneewittchen) a name that directly refers to the maiden's complexion? By standard bullshitting, of course.
The Seven Dwarves should be no problem since the Lord of the Rings franchise has blazed the path. However, if Disney wanted to be true to the source material, the only obligation they would need to address is making it clear that the Dwarves aren't human. Dwarves were an important race of beings in Norse and Germanic mythology. Known in Old Norse as the dvergr, they were a sub-race of the elves who lived underground where they mined precious metals and gems. They weren't necessarily short-statured, and some passages of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda imply the dvergr were invisible or had a magical power of hiding from the eyes of men. Nevertheless, some dwarves lived in close association with humans, such as the dwarven smith Reginn, the foster father and teacher of the Völsung hero, Sigurd. According to the Völsungsaga, Reginn rears the orphaned Sigurd in order to kill his brother Fafnir and thus obtain the magic ring Andvaranaut.
Sigurd figures in another story, the Thidrekssaga, which has him raised by the dwarf Mimir -- the origin of Wagner's treacherous dwarven smith, Mime.
The story of Sigurd and Reginn was immensely popular in medieval Scandanavia and was illustrated numerous times in wood and stone, most famously in decorative carvings in the 12th-century church of Hylestad, Norway. Several panels relate the story of Sigurd killing the dragon Fafnir, then roasting the monster's heart. Sigurd burns his thumb on the heart and reflexively shoves the seared digit into his mouth, thereby tasting its blood and gaining knowledge of the language of the birds, who warn him that Reginn plans to murder Sigurd in his sleep. The final panel show Sigurd remorselessly running the sword Gram through Reginn's chest. In every carving, Reginn is shown to be just as tall as his human foster son.
well, looks like the have Grumpy already cast.
Does being Spanish count as being Latino? Because I heard a podcast the other day that suggested the story of Snow White was based on a woman from Spain with whom Philip, husband of Bloody Mary, was in love. The story is she was poisoned so that he would give in and marry Mary of England, as his family wished him to do.
BUMBLE BEE said...
effinayright wins the internet. Don Pardo tell him what he's won!
**************
Thank you. But Althouse took it down! I'll try again. If you don't see it, you'll know why.
Also, is Peter Dinklage the only dwarf working in Hollywood? Sure seems like it.
Like BarrySanders20 said, in fables and fantasy literature, dwarves are a separate race (in these stories, there are fairy godmothers and elves and other mythical beings), not human beings with a particular non-standard genetic configuration. So I, at least, never in the slightest bit equated the dwarfs in Snow White (or in Tolkien's stories for that matter) with people who have similar physical stature to Peter Dinklage.
The dwarves in European stories are not midget humans. They are a different race like fairies or trolls. Europe had a long history of dwarves as mythological creatures who mined gold and gems.
PM said...
And what exactly is meant by "Hi Ho"?
*********
I replied: A way of greeting Kamala?"
>>>>>>>>>This was taken down. But not before Bumble Bee liked it.
So...people can post any gawddamn thing they want here about Trump or any Republican, but
apparently dissing Kamala is uncivil and must be censored.
Utter hypocrisy. Civility Bullshit personified.
Per AA herself:
"Civility bullshit" is my longstanding tag for calls for civility that are bullshit because they're not really about the value of civility, the neutral principle. People are seeking a partisan advantage, and these calls come when the harsh speech is helping the other side and they want their opponents to tone it done (sic)."
QE EFFING D
The conflation of humans with Achondroplasia and the mythical race of stout, short, gold&jewel loving, mining experts is a problem here. That problem that can be multiplied many times by asking about the race of the Queen with the mirror and poison apple, gender of the speaking mirror on the wall, or what diversity Goblins, Orcs and Trolls have in terms of their races. Because arguing about the skin tone of a myth rests right up next to calculating angels per square foor atop pinheads. We will ignore all issues with the dragon because Benadryl Cucumberpatch isn't available to answer questions right now.
But there will be black dwarves and gay dwarves and trans dwarves and even a tall dwarf.
Sounds like Dinklage is being short-sighted...
Dear Penthouse Forum,
I can't believe this really happened to me. I was in the forest one day and...
Among the many different versions of the "Snow White" story in European folklore, the heroine is helped by a group of thieves, giants, or small, gnome-like or leprechaun-like creatures. The Brothers Grimm codified these characters as "dwarves," but there's no reason to think what they meant was adult human men with a genetic or medical condition.
By the way, Peter Dinklage has recently been starring in a musical version of "Cyrano de Bergerac" (both on stage and in a movie). While most actors playing Cyrano uglify themselves with stage makeup and a fake nose (like Steve Martin in "Roxanne"), Dinklage just appears as himself. Since he is, by any standards, a handsome man, in this version it's his short stature that makes the character feel unworthy of courting his beautiful love interest. But is that really the image he should be projecting? Of course, he gets the girl in the end... but I'm not sure how this entire production fits in with Dinklage's interest in protecting the dignity of people with his condition.
What? "Roxanne"? You mean Hollywood retold a famous story with same plot and tempo but with a different name and ethnicity for the main character. Nah, forget it. It is Disney, and they must completely destroy the original IP, even if it is theirs.
Wait! Schneewittchen is now Hispanic? (There’s no such thing as “Latino.”) The original name of “die Schönste im ganzen Land” certainly looks German to me.
Real American said...
Dinklage is correct. Dwarves have no place in entertainment. We should just pretend they don't exist. It should be Snow White and the 7 Normies.
1/26/22, 11:29 AM
"Nobody tosses a dwarf aside!" - Gimli son of Gloin
A Latin girl would NEVER be named Snow White.
In plenty of countries, she would. "Skin as white as snow" would have to be relative concept, unless Snow White was an albino.
The dwarfs were asexual, weren't they? Otherwise the story would be very creepy. That absence of sexuality was a sign that the world the tale took place in wasn't the real world.
Asexuality doesn't quite make the LGBTQQ+ alphabet soup. Rather than being seen as another intersectional minority that needs to be heard from and catered to, asexuals are supposed to be shunned and ignored nowadays.
Maybe some of Dinklage's grumpiness has to do with the long-standing assumption that a dwarf pretty much by definition couldn't be a handsome prince.
Real American said...
Dinklage is correct. Dwarves have no place in entertainment. We should just pretend they don't exist. It should be Snow White and the 7 Normies.
1/26/22, 11:29 AM
"Nobody tosses a dwarf aside!" - Gimli son of Gloin
If he doesn't like the story, let him invent a different one.
This story, though, has dwarves in caves (like the trolls they are - just kidding!).
you're still making that ... backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave
Oh, grow up!
Unless they can work Spiderman into the plot somehow, it's gonna be a flop.
There is a difference in reality between races and species, primarily the ability to crossbreed or not. In the Shrek universe, Donkey can and does mate with a Dragon. In Tolkein's LOTR, human Aragorn and Elf Eowyn have a son - but not an immortal son, because Eowyn had renounced her own immortality. We won't discuss the origins or reproduction of Orcs, because yuck.
Tolkein's and Pratchett's Dwarf females look a lot like males, including beards, so let's take that as the rule for all dwarf fiction, even though Disney did not beard all his Dwarves. So in Snow White there is no mating reported between dwarves and humans, but who knows what the short folk are up to after working hours, with this consideration. Hi Ho, Hi Ho, indeed.
It seems kind of ironic considering that before he was cast in A Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage played a fantasy dwarf (Trumpkin) in a Disney film (Prince Caspian). I’d be curious if he was asked about that role by the host and what he thought of that.
The good old days when there were midgets and dwarves, and there was a medically defined difference? I worked with a "little person"; he was one cool dude. Technically, he was a dwarf. And yes, he did get tossed!
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