Opinion Sort of happily ever after

Indeed,a look through Hollywood’s upcoming offerings reveals a whole new trend: take a classic old fairy story and reinterpret it so it makes lots of money. Last year we had Red Riding Hood re-imagined as a medieval costume drama,complete with a scenery-chewing Gary Oldman as an anti-lycan priest and earnest metaphors about desire,sexuality and the moon,along with a modern-day update of Beauty and the Beast,imaginatively titled Beastly. Neither film was a critical or commercial success,but that hasn’t stopped studio executives from running with the idea. They might have drawn heart from Grimm and Once Upon A Time,television shows that premièred last fall and went on to become modest hits. Because sometimes the straw does turn into gold,and you don’t even need to give up your first-born.

So there’s yet another Snow White in production,this time with Chinese monks as the seven dwarves. There’s a couple of Sleeping Beautys,one starring Angelina Jolie as a presumably misunderstood evil queen. And although it could be argued that Cinderella stories are Hollywood’s stock-in-trade,the original ultimate rags-to-riches story will get two adaptations. There are also multiple Peter Pans in the offing,a live-action Little Mermaid,and new versions of Jack and the Beanstalk and Hansel and Gretel,where the latter are all grown-up and on the road hunting down others like their childhood tormentors. What’s bringing this turn to la-la land? Why are Hollywood executives suddenly so enthused by bedtime stories about Prince Charmings and evil sorceresses who deserve all the terrible things that happen to them?

Of course it’s money-related. The preoccupation with fairy tales is easily explained when one realises that,with these stories in the public domain,there are no expensive rights to be secured. Then there’s what,for the movie industry,most resembles magic: audience recall. Fairy stories are familiar,we’ve all heard them growing up. Studios don’t have to work terribly hard to make the audience recognise and remember a movie based on a story they’ve read,or been told,several times.

That can,of course,pose its own challenges. As the surfeit of fairy-tale movies suggests,studios do have to work harder to distinguish their movie from the pack,and then again to challenge audience expectations of the story just enough to get them curious — but not enough that they reject the new adaptation outright. The Rashomon approach is relatively safe and looks like it’s going to be popular,with many of the aforementioned films taking the “let’s look at this from another person’s perspective” angle. There are also attempts to push a modern sensibility onto some of these stories (one of the versions of Peter Pan,for instance,imagines the eponymous boy who never grew up as a sadistic abductor of children),which is not always successful,especially when it comes to inflicting a supposedly feminist version of a previously wimpy heroine. Mirror,Mirror,for instance,gives its Snow a sword and assumes it has challenged the gender roles coded into most fairy tales,but what it really does is create yet another self-actualised Disney princess.

But there’s also the feeling that in times of economic hardship,audiences a) tend to go to the movies more often because it’s a relatively cheap form of entertainment,and b) they’re looking for escapist fantasies that are far removed from their banal lives. The massive successes of,say,Twilight and Avatar seem to have proven the theory right. The explosion of films based on creative properties previously considered the province of geeks living in basements,such as comics and science fiction and fantasy novels,not to mention their tremendous popularity,suggests that the fantasies that audiences are looking for involve a whole lot of world-building and,preferably,a side of the supernatural. And if this brave new world is as messed up as our own,well,there better be a hero or three to fix it,superpowered or otherwise. Fairy tales are the most comforting of all; for the most part,we know how they’ll end. In a fairy tale,all we need is true love’s kiss or the wave of a wand and voila! the good guys win,god’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. There is really no better deus ex machina than fairyland magic.

yamini.lohia@expressindia.com