New Snow White Hit by Avalanche of Controversy
CAS professor says Disney remake is a predictable target in our divided age
The casting of Rachel Zegler, who is of Colombian and Polish heritage, is just one of the many controversies dogging the new Snow White film. Photo courtesy of Disney
New Snow White Hit by Avalanche of Controversy
CAS professor says Disney remake is a predictable target in our divided age
Disney’s Snow White remake is having anything but a fairy tale launch.
Opening Friday in theaters across America, the live-action-with-lots-of-CGI remake of 1937’s animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has been battered over casting, representation, gender roles, and the off-screen politics of its two stars.
“It’s a perfect storm,” says Jonathan Foltz, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of English and director of the CAS Cinema & Media Studies program. “The idea that a reboot of Snow White could be controversial in so many different ways is kind of a miracle.”
First there was the racist backlash against the casting of Rachel Zegler, who is of Colombian and Polish descent, as “the fairest of them all.” Disney swerved by changing the backstory of Snow White’s name—now the moniker was issued because she survived a blizzard as a baby.
Zegler, for her part, has spoken candidly of her dismay with the “extremely dated” gender politics of the original film, where Snow White is merely waiting for true love to arrive via a handsome prince.
Prominent actor Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones), who has a form of dwarfism, went on a podcast some months ago and ranted against the idea that after all these years, Disney was still depicting dwarfs as “seven guys who live in a cave.” In line with the modern take on people with differences? Not so much. Reportedly, the D-word has been excised from this new version of the story, because that fixes it, right?
Meanwhile, Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), cast as the Evil Queen, turned out to have been a member of the Israeli Defense Forces when she was younger and to strongly support Israel against criticism of that country’s war in Gaza. Zegler, of course, tweeted her support for the Palestinians…
One has to assume at this point the mood was anything but a cheery heigh-ho-heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go for the publicity staff at Disney, who scheduled mostly press-free premiere events over the past couple of weeks, hardly the norm for a $250 million movie. (The film is expected to take in about $50 million at the domestic box office this weekend, down from original estimates.)
BU Today asked Foltz to provide a little perspective.
Q&A
with Jonathan Foltz
BU Today: Updating movies from the 1930s to today’s standards turns out to be a really fraught effort, doesn’t it?
Foltz: As nostalgic as watching those great classic animations can make you, you don’t want 1937 in 2025. There’s so much that used to go completely unquestioned, and now we’re accustomed to noticing these things, from the representation of dwarfism to the sort of regressive sexual politics. You can’t imagine who thought this was going to be a fantastic idea.
As soon as you get into questions of casting, you’re dealing with the messiness of embodied history. You’re dealing with the opinions of the person you cast. You’re dealing with the race, the ethnicity, the background of the person you cast, the gender, the sexuality of the person you cast. And so, I mean, it seems to me quite, quite obvious that these are going to be questions that start to come up.
BU Today: And yet, there was money to be made, or so they thought.
It’s totally in line with the strategy that Disney’s been employing for the past 15 years or so. Since The Lion King, they’ve been updating their back catalog, their intellectual property. This is a very concerted business strategy, and so you have to imagine that Disney is aware of all these issues.
There are films in their catalog that I’m sure they won’t be rebooting, like Song of the South, for example. They’ve pulled it from distribution, rightfully so, given the racist stereotypes; they refuse to put it up on their streaming platforms. Many of the films, even those that are still regarded as classics, like Dumbo and Peter Pan, have little episodes that contain racist stereotypes.
I know this because I have two daughters. And we have Disney Plus. When you try and watch one of these movies, it’ll have a kind of a written disclaimer. They’re aware of the disconnect between the politics of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s and the contemporary moment.
So you can’t imagine that they’re surprised by these problems, by these issues, and yet it does feel that in this instance, Disney’s been caught a little bit flat-footed in their response.
What’s really causing all this schadenfreude is the idea that Disney thinks that it’s creating something that’s going to appeal to everybody, when it just leaves everybody dissatisfied. But I don’t know, maybe the movie is fantastic and charming. Who knows?
BU Today: What’s happening actually feels in line with a lot of other things that are going on in society right now…
There’s nothing terribly unique about the basic structure of what we’re talking about. You have a movie that’s come out, and for reasons of casting or past social media posts, has become embroiled in controversy. That is perfectly typical of this kind of bitter and divided social media landscape which we find ourselves in, and it is reflective also of contemporary politics and just the political landscape of the country.
What’s really interesting about this example, and anything involving Disney in the last 15 years, is that you see this kind of social media activism/politics coming into direct contact with what you might have thought would be a successful business strategy. It’s the business strategy of all successful Hollywood blockbuster films, which are marketed for everybody and for nobody at the same time. They want to design films that are kind of strategically empty of any kind of ideological inflection.
I wouldn’t say that Disney’s particularly unique in this regard. Or that they’re interested in diversity or multiculturalism in any kind of authentic way. They’re interested in multinational demographic audiences for their product, and so you have these films that are released, which are designed to be ideologically hollow, capable of being appreciated in Los Angeles and Kentucky, but also Beijing and Mumbai. Anywhere that people can purchase a Disney Plus subscription.
What they’re trying to do is to create a kind of quasi-universalism. But that’s not where we are right now. The media landscape is incredibly divided, divisive. There’s a rise in cultural nationalism, identitarian politics, and so you see playing out in front of you here a kind of a car crash in slow motion between a corporate logic and a political reality.
You see playing out in front of you here a kind of a car crash in slow motion between a corporate logic and a political reality.
BU Today: Disney has been one of the more progressive entertainment giants, though, encouraging diversity.
You’re right that it’s not as though they are absent any political investment, but when your first priority is the ideology of money, what you end up with is some kind of quasi-politics. And so here the casting of Rachel Zegler, a Latina, in the role of Snow White, can be read both as a gesture towards a kind of representational diversity and towards ‘Let’s open up those Latin American markets!’ The diversity effort is in the service of a kind of global marketing strategy.
BU Today: How do the outside political comments of the stars play into it?
We see this kind of deep dive anytime someone who was previously unknown enters into the public sphere. I mean, Gal Gadot’s positions and beliefs are very well known, much publicized already because of when she became Wonder Woman and all of that stuff happened to her for the first time. But in Rachel Zegler’s case, here’s this new face, and there are going to be dozens of people out there plumbing the depths of all the old social media posts.
This does give expression to a new kind of political sensibility. People in the age of social media are not content to be passive spectators to the commodities that the studios churn out to us. People are able to speak back directly to celebrities who are on social media. In the past, instead of this kind of dynamic friction between celebrity culture and fan culture, usually there was a lot more of a buffer between the two. The studios were better at [keeping scandal and politics hidden].
And now the distinctions are so porous. In the Harvey Weinstein, Me Too era, you see celebrities much more up close than ever before. Celebrity culture’s becoming closer to a reality show. So in a way, it’s a genuine political conflict, but it’s also kind of a new form of political theater.
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