Critics rank Brave as lesser Pixar: better than the Cars films (and frankly what isn’t?) but far below the profound and witty masterpieces of the past few years. I agree. The film’s visual universe is a banal emerald isle worthy of DreamWorks or Enya. The signature song sounds like an American Idol finale number. And the plotting moves too quickly with few of the quiet moments of visual and narrative brilliance that define Pixar’s best work. Nevertheless, the film’s strongest thread—Merida’s complicated, even violent, relationship with her mother—must be celebrated as a deconstruction of the traditional mother-daughter narrative popularized in fairy tales.
Mothers are usually long dead before a fairy tale begins. In their place, we find vain, brutal stepmothers and witches who sometimes try to eat you. There is a simple reason for this. Fairy tales were written by men in decidedly patriarchal societies who imagined women to be in perpetual competition for men. Once a woman bowed out of this competition, she became a crone. Fairy tales, and later Freud, consequently conceived of mothers as continuously warring with their daughters for male attention—especially the father’s. Because of the incest taboo, fairy tales couldn’t portray biological mothers and daughters at war for paternal affection, so unrelated stepmothers were introduced as proxies. Consequently, you always find older women tormenting younger women out of jealousy before the younger women kill their pseudo-mother figures. And then someone gets married. Lovely story.
I’ve never connected with this view of femininity because it paints women of all ages as petty victims. It’s also inaccurate. Women form intense bonds with other women that have nothing to do with men. Shocking, I know. Despite what male authors have been telling us for hundreds of years, we actually kind of like each other. Brave is an intelligent deconstruction of the typical fairy tale not because of the absence of romance but because of the preeminence of a female bond—the knotty, multifaceted bond between a teenage girl and her mother. Continue reading “Mommie Dearest”