by Ton van der Kroon
The remake of Disney’s Snow White was recently released. It caused quite a stir on social media. Never before has a children’s film caused so much controversy, anger and resentment. A complete online hate campaign was waged against the Latino lead actress, Rene Zegler. How dare they let her play the role? She is not even pure white in terms of race! Her father is Polish and her mother is Colombian. The young actress – she is 23 years old – has a list of awards to her name, including for her role as Maria in West Side Story, Evita and The Hunger Games. But she was thoroughly dragged through the mud in her role as Snow White. Apparently this young woman and the role she plays represent something we would rather not hear or see.
Disney had trouble with the seven dwarfs. They did not want to make the mistake of re-stereotyping dwarves, and therefore only talked about seven ‘magical creatures’. They did not have real actors play the parts of the dwarves, but created CGI – computer generated image – dwarves. Several real dwarf actors complained that a role that was literally written for them was thus snatched from under their noses.
Apparently the story triggers us collectively and touches on old fears, anger, being misunderstood and pain. Even before anyone had seen the film, there were already hundreds of outraged responses to it. All our rage and aversion was vented on a children’s film with seven dwarfs. And the children? They just thought it was a fun film.
So let’s take a look at the deeper meaning of the fairy tale. What does the story actually want to tell, beyond the controversy or social discussion? Just like in dreams, fairy tale characters have a spiritual meaning. By interpreting them, we understand a psychological aspect, a forgotten part or unconscious layer of ourselves. The story encourages us to reintegrate this forgotten part of ourselves, making us whole.
SNOW WHITE
The story centres around Snow White, who is so named because she has skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony and lips as red as roses. She represents the innocence of the soul. She is snow white, untainted, pure. She is our own inner child’s soul, which has not yet suffered pain, guilt, shame or wounds from the harsh outside world. Perhaps that is why the story touches us all so deeply. It is just as our child’s soul was touched with the Black Pete discussion in the Netherlands: We have been lied to by our leaders – read parents – and now the whole story turns out to be untrue! As soon as this betrayal is reactivated, we are filled with anger and indignation. They are all lies! We no longer trust any authority, and now they want to take away our childhood stories as well. It is the child’s soul that is finally, or once again, rebelling against the authority of the parents. But also against the hypocrisy and falseness of the world. We will no longer put up with it.
It shows that in a sense we are still immature and naïve, and live in a protected child’s world. Robert Bly, the author of the book ‘Iron John’, once wrote another book called ‘The Sibbling Society’. In it, he explained that in terms of development, we are still in the phase of adolescence. Everything revolves around us. ‘Make America Great Again’. It is the adolescent who wants everything to happen his or her way. We react ‘childishly’ when life does not go our way and cannot yet cope with the fact that the world does not revolve around us.
But perhaps the most important theme in the fairy tale is the fact that the princess is kissed awake. In various fairy tales, the motif is that ‘the feminine’ has fallen asleep, is in a state of death, has been forgotten or is enchanted. Think of Cinderella, Belle, Little Red Riding Hood or the Little Mermaid. All these stories are about the feminine element in society that has been forgotten or neglected. We live in a patriarchal, masculine world. Conflicts are resolved with war and fighting. The role of emotions, intuition, spirituality and mysticism are seen as feminine and therefore inferior. In Europe, the war drum is currently beating and 800 billion is being spent on defence, simply because we know no alternative. As long as we choose the masculine over the feminine, the kingdom will remain asleep, and its inhabitants stay enchanted and cursed. The return of the goddess – and thus of Mother Earth – is one of the greatest and most necessary themes of our time.
THE WICKED STEPMOM
In the story of Snow White, the world is ruled by the wicked stepmother, who has a magic mirror. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who is the fairest of them all?’ She is obsessed with her self-image, her beauty, her ‘image’. Could it be that we all live in this world, completely preoccupied with how we look, taking endless selfies, checking over and over again to see if we come across well, pumping ourselves full of botox, fillers and supplements in the hope that we are still the most beautiful? In this story it is not the shadow side of the masculine, but the shadow side of the feminine that shows her face. The dark side of the mother, the negative anima. The father is absent and Snow White’s real mother is dead. The true feminine, the good nurturing and loving mother, the great mother goddess, mother earth; she is forgotten a long time ago. In her place, the hateful and intensely jealous stepmother has appeared on the scene. Where the good mother gives life, the stepmother tries to stifle it. They are essentially two sides of the mother archetype.
Given the intense online reactions to the Disney remake, we could say that we are indeed living in the realm of the stepmother. We react exactly like her. We want to see our own ‘white image’ reflected, and cannot bear the fact that it is a Latino princess who gets the lead role and that she spoeaks out. We must get rid of her at all costs, defame her, sully her, or publicly silence her.
DE SPIEGEL
The (social) media is our ‘magic mirror’. It reflects our ‘Self’, and with the current use of AI, our self-image is becoming more and more distorted, deformed, unreal, untrue. The internet, AI, games, the mobile phone; they are all substitutes for the ‘real’ world. We are replacing our true mother – mother earth – with a completely fake world, with plastic plants, air-conditioned air, screen reality, and we look at our mobile phones instead of the real world. We are obsessed, cursed, under the spell of artificial reality, the world of the magic mirror. Boys are enchanted by games and YouTube videos and become swallowed up by the manosphere of men like Andrew Tate, who present themselves as real princes. Girls become completely entangled in the world of selfies and Instagram. How do I look? From a young age, immense emphasis is placed on physical appearance instead of the psychological development of the soul. We are constantly looking in the mirror. We have forgotten our true spiritual essence.
WHITE SUPREMACY
We are missing the healthy, masculine energy of distinction, differentiation between good and evil, true and false. In postmodern society, ‘everyone has their own truth’. Lies become ‘alternative facts’. The number of videos and messages containing disinformation is countless, and it is almost impossible to tell the difference between real and fake. Even the American president is obsessed with his self-image. His blonde hair, his tanned (read: white) skin, his painted portraits, the size of the turnouts at his public appearances. Trump hates Mexicans, Muslims, black people and other people of colour and clings to a culture of ‘white supremacy’, just like many far-right parties. The idea of diversity, colourfulness and multi-ethnicity has recently been drastically scaled back. America first.
Since Disney wants to emphasise the other – woke – side of the spectrum, with coloured princesses and lots of diversity, they are subject to the wrath of angry white men in particular. Perhaps we are all under the spell of the wicked stepmother. Once again, the father is absent and the only man in the story is the hunter, who is supposed to kill Snow White in the forest. He still has some goodness in him and leaves her behind in the great forest.
THE FOREST
The forest is the place of the subconscious, the world of the soul, the place of true magic that brings us into contact with the unknown part of ourselves that we have forgotten. It is our wild self, like in the fairy tale of Iron John, the prince who connects with the wild man. He encounters his raw, unpolished, true masculinity that initiates him to become a grown man, detached from the socially desired, political correct world of his parents.
In the forest Snowwhite meets the seven dwarfs. They work underground in the mines during the day; they do the inner work. The number seven often appears in fairy tales: the seven giants, the seven little goats, the seven swans, the seven colours of the rainbow. Seven stands for completeness, wisdom and spirituality and for the seven chakras. It connects the number four of the earth with the number three of the heavens. It stands for being fully human. The seven dwarfs symbolise seven different characteristics of every human being, which are still underdeveloped but present in nature.
The seventh card of the major arcana of the tarot is the Chariot, which is pulled by a white sphinx and a black sphinx or lion. The dark and light sides of existence are united. Yin and yang, male and female, light and dark are in balance. After the cycle that began with the fool, we are starting the next cycle in our development. The charioteer, the healthy and conscious ego, is ready to drive the chariot of the soul and take on his spiritual task. We are ready for the next round. Snow White represents the innocence of the new, the uninhibited, the beginning of a cycle. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Disney film was launched in the week that spring also began: the start of the new year.
THE POISONED APPLE
Snow White is poisoned by the wicked queen with an apple. She dresses up as an old woman and goes to the cottage of the seven dwarfs to give the apple to Snow White. The moment she takes a bite, Snow White falls into an endless sleep. The image of the poisoned apple brings to mind two biblical stories. The first is, of course, the creationstory in which Eve is given an apple by the devil. As soon as she, and later Adam, has taken a bite from the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, they are overcome by sin and shame. Adam and Eve are cursed and sent away from paradise. The apple could have something to do with tasting sexuality, or reaching out for divine knowledge.
A second story that comes to mind is the story of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the desert. The devil offers Jesus three things: money, sex and power. All three are powerful temptations to distract him from his true path of divinity. Apparently, on our path through life, we are all tested and tempted by attractive side roads that look wonderful on the outside, but in reality only poison us.
THE PRINCE
The new, healthy male in the story of Snow White is represented by the prince. He is the one who kisses Snow White awake. As long as we consider this story from a feminist perspective, we see a passive princess who must be saved by the man. How old-fashioned and outdated! But that is not what the fairy tale is about.
The prince can be seen as the consciousness, the spirit, that kisses the still young soul awake, causing it to mature and thereby connect with the male part within itself. The prince is her male counter-image, the conscious ego that connects with the soul. This meeting between pysche and soul lifts the curse. The story ends with a large wedding party where the masculine and feminine connect fully with each other. The wicked stepmother dies and the mirror’s power has been broken.
MIRROR, MIRROR
Back to the real world, in which reality and illusion sometimes seem to become inextricably mixed in this day and age. A strange coincidence in the film is the fact that the role of the wicked stepmother is played by the Israeli Gal Gadot, and that Rene Zegler – Snow White – stands up for the Palestinian cause. In October 2023, Zegler became a member of Artists4ceasefire and signed a letter in which she urged President Biden to call for a ceasefire and to end the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip. She later tweeted: ‘And remember, Free Palestine’.
In November 2024, Zegler criticised Donald Trump and his supporters, entirely in keeping with her new role, by claiming that there is a ‘deep, deep sickness’ in the United States and by accusing Trump of ‘threatening our democracy’. As is apparent, this Latina actress is no passive princess, but a modern, emancipated Snow White. She has integrated her masculine side and has become combative as a result.
Films and fairy tales are collective dreams. They use archetypal images to tell us what is going on in society. In that sense, Disney has once again given a new start with the remake of their first major film: the feminine has been kissed awake and is ready to conquer the world.
Ton van der Kroon, 25 March 2025
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