Forget Woke Snow White. Disney’s Remake Is More Like Socialist Snow White

“…The problem isn’t that it’s woke. It’s that it’s awful—and lamely, bluntly socialist.

The remake’s big idea was to twist the idea of the word “fair.” See, in earlier versions of Snow White, an evil queen asks a magic mirror, “Who is the fairest of them all?” It’s always the queen, until one day the mirror responds that it’s actually her stepdaughter, the Princess Snow White. The question, “who is the fairest,” in other words, has always been a question about beauty. But in the remake, there’s something else going on. The movie goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the queen isn’t fair because she’s not a socialist. I am not kidding.

The film doesn’t quite use that word. But early in the film, Snow White encounters a handsome thief named Jonathan in the castle. Jonathan is the leader of a group of bandits who live in the woods and survive by stealing food. He feels justified in stealing because he and other ordinary people have very little while the queen has a lot and she won’t share.

This isn’t just a generic lesson in being kind. Later, after Snow White takes up with seven computer-animated dwarfs in the forest, one of the dwarfs explains that the bandits in the woods are “only there because of the queen’s greedy economic policies, which forced them there into a liminal space where ethics are harder to define.” This might not be a precise word-for-word quote—the line gets spat out so fast I am not certain I transcribed it exactly right—but it’s pretty close. This is a movie about how stealing is justified because of the evil queen’s economic policies. She’s not fair, you see, because her privilege and selfishness have impoverished ordinary people. It’s Snow White by way of Occupy Wall Street…”