Reactions to The Little Mermaid teaser trailer says nothing about the film, just how polarized society has become

Before I get into what is on my mind at the moment, there were a few news items on my phone that I want to get out of the way. First, we are told by the mainstream media acting like salivating dogs again that the new Discovery+ documentary on the Depp trial is going to dig up such “tasty” pro-Heard morsels like claiming that the media-shy Kate Moss had to be “persuaded” to testify on Johnny Depp’s behalf, and that Ben Chew was afraid that some of Heard’s testimony might sound “credible”—which of course he needn’t have worried about once Camille Vasquez got behind the lectern. One really wonders if this documentary is going to give Vasquez the credit she deserves for destroying Heard’s credibility and exposing her lies.

There was also pro-Heard Newsweek accusing the YouTube channel Just In of re-victimizing Heard because it simply wanted to “hire” people who could research for credible sources backing up some of the claims against Heard, and this “violated” YouTube policy. YouTube issued a statement denying that the channel violated their anti-hate speech policy. By the way, I have to confess that I don’t take Just In seriously because it is just clickbait and its content rarely has anything to do with the attached headline on their numerous videos.  

Naturally, the mainstream media is not reporting that “Hollywood insiders” interviewed by The Pop Topic claimed that “There’s been a lot of talk about Amber Heard. The hills have been singing her song since before the divorce drama started, it’s just a different tune now. Anybody who is anybody in Hollywood has heard of Amber’s wild orgies, and sadly that means Depp knew too. He knew, and it was slowly killing him. He didn’t want to confront Heard, he just ran away, went on benders to try and kill his emotions and thoughts with drugs and alcohol.”

OK enough of that. But staying on the “entertainment” track, we are told that YouTube has disabled the “dislike” button for the “teaser” trailer for the upcoming live-action Disney film The Little Mermaid, after it reached 1.5 million. I don’t why they would disable it, since it isn’t like everyone hates what they see; currently there are over 800,000 “likes,” and personally I think it is denying people their freedom of speech rights. Let’s be honest, “likes” and “dislikes” based on just a teaser trailer (or just a trailer period) are just a knee-jerk, superficial reaction that tells us nothing about whether a film is actually worth seeing or not. Reading the positive comments on the trailer’s YouTube page are as unhelpful as the negative ones, and just as personal politics-based.

Frank Valchiria discusses the issue here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36wawExpLG8&t=565s noting the history of race relations in the U.S. and the ways that people, such as those at Disney, are trying to do the politically-correct thing and be “inclusive” However, he noted that The Little Mermaid is not an “American” fairy tale, but a European one, written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. We can surmise that many of those dislikes are coming from European fans who are offended by the fact that an American film company sees fit to make a “political” statement with a “beloved” fairy tale that isn’t necessary and is self-serving.

The black actress playing the title character (Halle Bailey) may be fine, although all we know for certain is that she can sing, not necessarily act, at the moment. I suspect that it will make money even if it does have awful reviews, because as they say, if a person of a particular “victim” class is at issue (in this case both racial and gender), then even “bad” publicity is “good,” because people will see the film just to make a political statement to support her.

Personally, I don’t really give a shit because I don’t have any desire to see the movie anyways. I have to admit that I might have subsequently purchased the video disc release if a “real”—not fake—redhead was in the lead role, but I doubt it (who was that fake redhead in Aquaman anyways?). I have the animated version and I’m not sure I have ever actually watched it. One thing I will say is that this has been Disney’s MO of late: they take old classics and “reimagine” them to fit the current political and social climate.

For example, they have done this in recent films with characters like Maleficent and Cruella, both evil and conniving white women in the original films that featured them, but now adding new story lines to change how viewers perceive them. These politically-correct changes turned these “evil” women into “sympathetic” characters who either had a “backstory” to “justify” their actions, or as in the Cruella character, created an “alter-ego” that wasn’t in any of the previous iterations, and actually “rewarded” her in the end.

Of course, this kind of “revisionism” came on the heels of the play Wicked, where the Wicked Witch of the West was transformed into an object of “sympathy” because other witches made fun of her green skin—which of course people who are real victims of skin color discrimination should find offensive when white women hypocritically try to coopt their issues in society. That is not to say that there is a lot of “honesty” about the other problems of, say, the black community (like having three times the crime rate in relation to their percent of the population), but as we learned from the Depp saga, truth for the mainstream media is less important than avoiding it.

Still, one should remember that these are still fictional tales, although as mentioned these revisionist story lines are meant to “correct” the “perception” that women can be “evil,” and even the worst of them are somehow “victims” themselves. And “revision” doesn’t have to mean politically-correct BS. In the original Grimm fairy tale of Snow White, the stepmother dies when after trying to kill Snow White yet again, the prince has her put in red-hot iron slippers and forced to dance until she succumbs. It’s easy to understand why that hasn’t been incorporated in the various film iterations, since it’s a bit hard to “visualize.”

In Disney’s 1937 animated film, the stepmother is struck by lightning and falls off a cliff with a boulder falling on top of her. In the 2001 television film with Miranda Richardson as the stepmother (and in my opinion the best version), she is reverted back to an old hag after the destruction of the mirror, which frees the dwarfs who she had turned into garden gnomes, and she is done away with when they gather and surround her…

 

…in a scene reminiscent of Tod Browning’s 1932 horror classic Freaks:

 

Which is how I suspect that many people see their opposition on either side of Depp/Heard case, although some are more justified in this view than others.