*/****
starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, Daveed Diggs, Melissa McCarthy
screenplay by David Magee
directed by Rob Marshall
by Walter Chaw I have long, disquieting thoughts about Ursula the Sea Witch’s anatomy in the live-action version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. As I understand it, with octopi, the centre of their body cavity, ringed by tentacles, is a beak. Ursula is a mermaid whose top half is human and whose bottom half is octopus–but her face doesn’t emerge from the centre of her ring of tentacles. Rather, the tentacles function as an expressive, sentient dress–like Dr. Strange’s cloak, I suppose, if we’re keeping it in the Disney family. This didn’t bother me when Ursula was a cartoon of a drag queen, but it’s bothering me now because it’s Melissa McCarthy, and what the hell is happening down there? Nightmare fuel is what’s happening down there. There’s a moment during her big number where she, like Bruce Springsteen during his Super Bowl halftime show, teabags the camera–and, friends, I was craning to catch a glimpse. What did I imagine? A chthonic, Lovecraftian horror of luminous tentacles and vagina dentata in a horror film’s ink-murk deep of shipwrecks and sharks. The scene where the title heroine, Ariel (Halle Bailey), goes to sell her voice to Ursula even begins with a hall of grasping pink “hands” springing from the walls. It’s insinuating like one of the post-rape hallucinations from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Is The Little Mermaid good? I have no idea how to answer that question.
I mean, of course it’s not good. It’s awful. Yet it’s so deep into its wrongness that it possesses a certain usefulness as an object for examination. It’s like excavating a fully-intact Iron Maiden torture coffin, complete with falsely-accused witch corpse mouldering inside. Is The Little Mermaid good? Of course not, what are you even talking about? But it delivers some insight into the sickness of a culture that would have created such a thing. Roland Barthes would’ve had a field day with it. I have a lot of affection for the animated The Little Mermaid (1989), the first salvo of Disney clawing itself back into relevance after decades in the wilderness. It was cheerfully and beautifully drawn, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s music is clever and catchy, and if its message is abhorrent, at least it’s got a tearjerker of a father/daughter resolution to help the medicine go down. It made a mint in theatres, doubled that on video, and spawned a six-times-platinum soundtrack album, as well as a live show, a concert, and a run of animated blockbusters that followed its template (Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994)) to the kind of glory that essentially doomed us to this dreary timeline by itself. Nominated for three Oscars and winning two, The Little Mermaid was preceded by three false starts at salvaging the studio’s brand (Oliver & Company, The Great Mouse Detective, and The Black Cauldron); the ’89 The Little Mermaid is to Disney what Michael Jordan is to Nike.
Which is to say, a glossy telling of the domestication of a spirited young woman who modifies her body and sells her voice for the chance to marry royalty is gold, baby, now and forever: the ultimate makeover fantasy that also presents a loving father as, disastrously, a synecdoche for the patriarchy. The message sours further in Beauty and the Beast, gets racist in Aladdin, and all comes together in a perfect storm of profitable fascism in The Lion King. Disney had found a turnip that bleeds and has been squeezing the poor thing for 34 years and counting. As long as it keeps hemorrhaging, why in the world would you stop? In that spirit, I present the live-action The Little Mermaid in all its shambolic glory, featuring non-human creations like those sophisticated, photorealistic 3-D renderings of children’s doodles and human creations who are arbitrarily assigned a race without any sort of consideration given to history, sociology, or politics. It is “inclusion” in the sense that George H.W. Bush’s “I don’t see colour” or the “yellow, Black, purple polka dots” thing well-intentioned racists do is inclusion. It’s not about honouring race and identity, it’s about pretending that race and identity aren’t a thing. But my race, you see, is not a scar I hope you won’t comment upon, even if you find it distasteful and uncomfortable to behold. It’s hard to learn you’re the anointed when you’re the dominant monoculture this system is designed to favour, but it’s easy to pretend nothing’s wrong. If you continue to present exactly the same material with cut-and-pasted players without attempting to alter the text at all, you get Will Smith as an enslaved being in the live-action Aladdin, weeping when his chains are cast from him by his master after he’s been used for his gifts, and rapturously telling the story of this largesse to his children. It’s possible to remake Roots with only white actors. You’d have to be a fucking idiot to do it, but you could.
What I’m saying is there’s a specific history of European colonization of the Caribbean, where The Little Mermaid takes place. I’m guessing it’s set there because Eric talks about following a Spanish treasure galleon, and there’s an extended scene where Ariel runs around an open-air market, eats a flower (after eating soap–forget the three days Ariel has to get kissed, she’d be too busy riding Prince Brass Chamber Pot to have the chance), and ends up dancing to some live calypso music. Because Ariel is Black, and many of the vendors and musicians in this scene are Black, there are strong I Walked with a Zombie vibes when good Prince Eric (sleepy-eyed Jonah Hauer-King), who is white as a mayonnaise sandwich, joins in the celebration. In other words, making Ariel Black and having her dance to regionally-coded music in a part of the world exploited by England, Spain, Portugal, and France during this period has thorny implications. The power dynamics between Eric and Ariel are more pronounced in this iteration, too. In addition to Ariel having traded her voice (!) and mutilated her body to gain the attention of the boy she has a crush on, the boy she has a crush on is part of the ruling class of a foreign nation in the process of sucking the resources out of this place like a giant, swollen, fishbelly-grotesque parasite.
This region is notable for its sugar plantations and its geographic advantage as a waypoint to an estimated 40% of the transatlantic slave trade. Moreover, it’s the place where the “Slave Code” originated, defining Africans as “brutes” and bestial chattel defined as property to be owned and sold at the mercy of their Christian masters. The Little Mermaid has no interest in exploring the history it’s representing–and whatever, I don’t want Rob Marshall, of all people, telling a slave narrative anyway. But what’s uniquely perverse about this film is it goes there and pretends there’s no weight to it. Ariel’s dad is “King of the Sea”–not Charlie Tuna, but King Triton (Javier Bardem), who has seven daughters, one for each of the “Seven Seas” and racially coded as such. In terms of racial sensitivity and representation, it’s not unlike Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man.” Making a list is not doing what you think it’s doing. Triton disapproves of Ariel’s crush on Eric for all the obvious reasons, but in this incarnation, a landlubber also killed his wife. “But not all of them!” protests Ariel. Since we’re making lists, why not do a drinking game where you take a shot every time there’s a dog whistle in The Little Mermaid? King Triton is racist against white people, I guess, although that’s not a real thing. And Ariel says not all white people, because has anyone taken a good look at the racial makeup of Disney’s board of directors lately?
There’s a term for putting a Black face on a white character for purposes of profit. There’s a term for exploiting the illusion of inclusivity for those same purposes of profit. You can do both without taking a single minute to explore issues pertinent to, or what’s beautiful and unique about, each individual culture in the world. The Little Mermaid is Appropriation: The Movie, which is the only thing Disney is good at. It’s the Leatherface of Hollywood Studios, peeling the faces off its victims to wear while dancing around with a chainsaw. Erasing colonization of these islands is not that different from the erasure being attempted by Disney’s arch-enemy Ron DeSantis on their shared Christo-fascist battleground dystopia of Florida. That Disney is the clear lesser of two evils in this Thunderdome says a lot about how fucked we are. For complainers wanting more coverage of the film without politics, fuck you–but here you go: The Little Mermaid improves on nothing from its source while distending it to almost twice its length. Lin-Manuel Miranda contributes a new rap for an Awkwafina-voiced bird and a Daveed Diggs-voiced crab to replace the “Les Poisson” number and it’s ear-stabbingly awful in that special toomanywordsforthephrase-A-YO! Lin-Manuel Miranda way. And when the picture’s not murky and drab, it’s garish and ugly. More? It’s terrifying. It’s a horror film from beginning to end–which wouldn’t be a problem for me, except that it’s simultaneously super boring and listless. I did like Ursula, with her carnivorous, devouring Sarlaac Pit of a core, surrounded by grasping, glowing tentacles in a crushing, fathomless, Freudian trench. If they ever put Mickey out to pasture, I think I have a new mascot for the House of Mouse.
