David Hand and others | Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs / 1937

into the woods

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank and Webb Smith (writers, based on the story by the Grimm Brothers), David Hand (supervisor), Eilliam Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen (directors) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs / 1937

 

I recently revisited Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs after reading that it was the gay computer inventor Alan Turing’s favorite movie. Evidently he was fascinated by the poison apple, some speculating that his own ingesting of the chemicals that probably killed him having played a similar role to the apple, with perhaps also the possibility of being awakened by a beautiful Prince, the dream man he never was able to find in the homophobic Britain of his day.

     This film remained in my imagination throughout my own childhood, and I attempted to determine when I might first have seen this great animated film. I supposed it must have been in 1958, at the age of 11. Although the film also was re-released in 1952, when I was five, I wondered whether it would be possible at such an early age for it to have made such a lasting impression upon me. But it quickly dawned on me that at 11, a year in which I was intellectually ingesting Hitchcock’s Vertigo, it seemed highly unlikely that I had suddenly become so enthused with what was obviously a children’s picture, so it must have been in 1952 when I first saw the work, just two years before Turing himself ate of the poisoned apple.

    What also struck me, this time around, is that although I have always declared that my only early film musical experiences had been Oklahoma! of 1955 and Carousel of one-year later, it is apparent that Snow White, which was something near to an old-fashioned operetta (there are fewer spoken lines in this picture than musical ones), may also have contributed to my love of the American musical comedy genre.

     I have always thought of Snow White as being entangled in the same branches, so to speak, of German and Nordic tales such as Sleeping Beauty; how else to explain the “little men,” whose forest home Snow White invades who are obviously connected to Wagner’s Nibelungs, working in their own private diamond mine instead of creating gold? And the Disney animators, so influenced by German Expressionism in the nighttime forest scenes, help to tie this work to its German roots. Moreover, this story, in its focus on a young girl who is treated by her step-mother as a scullery maid in her own home, has similarities to another Grimm Brother’s tale, Aschenputtel.  

    Yet even as a child, I am certain, I was more enchanted by the evil Queen and her monstrously honest mirror (performed by the voice of Moroni Olsen) than I was with the silly girl passively waiting out her time for her Prince Charming to come. The Queen (voiced by Lucille La Verne), like my mother, was not only forceful, but was willing to go into action herself when others, such as the Huntsman, had failed her. And her willingness, despite her insufferable vanity, to transform herself outwardly as she was within, awed me. If Snow White lived in a world of Bambi and little, messy forest gnomes, the Queen proudly hunkered down with spiders, toads, crows and those magnificently snouted vultures, who, after the witch the Queen has become falls off the cliff to her death, slowly spiral down for the feast!

 

     Underneath the seeming innocence of this film, accordingly, lies not only issues of neurotic vanity, false imprisonment and torture (in an earlier version of the Disney film, the evil Queen imprisons the Prince and entertains him with visions of dancing skeletons), but homosexuality—what else are we supposed to imagine those little men did to relieve their sexual energy before Snow White arrived (no wonder they whistle while they work!)—and hints of pederasty; after all, the young girl actually slept in the beds of seven men, although we might be able to delete that possibility if we simply imagine that they saw her more as a mother than a sexual object. By film’s end, it further gives evidence of attempted child-murder and necrophilia—so say nothing of the misogynistic remarks of Grumpy and the complete idiocy of Dopey.

     And then, there are all of those unanswered questions: for whom are the dwarfs mining their diamonds, and how do they obtain all those foodstuffs that go into the soup and gooseberry pies Snow White cooks up? And how do they seem to know so much about the evil Queen and her tricks of which they warn Snow White on their way to work? Why doesn’t she, in turn, listen to them? Is she so stupid that she cannot see beyond the old crone’s nose? In contemporary times, we teach even the most innocent of young girls to stay out of the houses of little old men and never, never invite in any women offering up apples or other foodstuffs! 

        Finally, what to make of the relationship that this young girl has to deer, chipmunks, turtles and robins? If it’s further evidence of Snow White’s purity and innocence, it also smacks of a kind of human enslavement of wild beasts: the animals certainly seem willing to do most of her work without even a peck upon their heads. 

     In the end one even wonders a bit about the vitality and good health of Snow White. Throughout most of this splendid operetta she dreams and sleeps her life away. Even while scrubbing the stairs outside the castle, she spends her time dreaming of her Prince (“Some Day My Prince Will Come”) and her very scary night in the forest—where she encounters a memorable surrealist-like landscape of open eyes—ends with in her again in the prone position, her own eyes drenched in tears. The minute she gets the dwarfs’ house all spiffed up, she’s tired again and lays down for a nap. After dinner and just a little partying, she’s ready once more to rush off to bed. One gets the feeling, just perhaps, that Snow White suffers, like Sleepy, a bit from narcolepsy.

     And hardly do the little men get out the door before she’s laid flat again by that poisoned apple. It just may be that our sweetheart may subconsciously have preferred to sleep and dream after out her dreary days cleaning up for the Queen and then, even worse, working for seven messy little men! But did she really imagine that a Prince might find her by that thatched cottage hidden in the middle of the forest?   

     Had Turing, like Snow White, simply worn himself out with all of his mental efforts to save and protect the evil Queen of the British Empire who, equally jealous of his intellectual prowess, had been willing to symbolically lock him up?  In some respects, unlike the fate of the lovely Snow White, the dwarfs of post-war world had already attempted to bury him even while he was living. Certainly, it must have seemed to him, in many instances, that he was living in a never-ending night resembling Snow White’s frightful flight, with all eyes upon him. It might have seemed wonderful to have a long night’s sleep at last.

     Upon Turing’s death, which is believed to have been caused by cyanide poisoning, authorities found a half-eaten apple on the table beside his body.