Society's Shattered Mirror of Story

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who is most beautiful of all?" --- The Queen, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

The verdict is in.  Disney’s Snow White is a box office flop. But with a 74% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, the question is: Why?

If you’ve followed our blog posts over the years, you know that I am a Disney fan.  I remember as a kid driving into the Gulf gas station and getting a Wonderful World of Disney comic book with a fill up.  The family gathered around the TV together to watch the Wonderful World on Sunday (and later on Saturday) nights.  One of my earliest movie memories was Mary Poppins, which must mean my parents took me to the theatre when I was just two. Or maybe it was just from the VHS tapes of Disney films that we would play and replay until they wore out. The magic is still with me. 

Disney has never been shy of maximizing profit, with sequels and plush toys a standard business practice.   And for decades it helped America develop a “shared narrative”, reinforced with intention in moments like America’s Bicentennial, when American On Parade was not limited to its parks. 

Disney's American on Parade (1976)—celebrating the United States' 200th birthday in grand style.

However, rather than lead, Disney may be following the path journalism has taken—fragmenting content, appealing to smaller audiences, and reinforcing tribal perspectives rather than creating shared narratives.

This is a dangerous trend that entertainment as a whole appears to be taking.

I discussed this concern with Ann Reidy of Bridge Entertainment Labs, which works with the creative industry to explore how storytelling can help depolarize.  The right has accused Hollywood of promoting a left agenda for decades, and with the recent rise of right-leaning storytelling, notably out of Ben Shapiro's shop The Daily Wire, there is competition for the first time.  

To some degree the polarization around storytelling isn’t primarily about content, but about how content is positioned by the opinion press.  This is further reinforced through review bombing by activists on the right and the left who perceive a story’s content as unacceptable, which can affect the commercial viability of a story, and certainly the perception of it.

Turris Babel, 1679

In his seminal essay in the Atlantic, Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, Jonathan Haidt wrote “It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.”

Although he focuses on social media’s impact, he notes that “social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.”

The increased loss of what is called the monoculture (a shared narrative) was certainly facilitated by the rise of social media, but as Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst observes in a Vox interview: “The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.”

Back to Snow White.  It is a product of Covid-era conflict.  Unlike new media, or even corporate advertising, the pipeline for creative, sculpted content spans years, not months. Principal filming for Snow White, for example, took place from March to July 2022, meaning scripts and casting were approved in 2021. The right has charged that it is an agenda film, replacing the universally appealing elements of the original with woke politics. Just as our staff at Clapham took a trip to Disney World in 2023 to form our own opinion amidst previous criticisms, we decided to do the same with Snow White. Aside from one couple, we were the only ones in the theater. So, was the remake about a message or an agenda? Both.

I’ve been having a conversation with several friends in the entertainment industry regarding the difference between a message and an agenda. To some degree, whether a film has an agenda is in the eyes of the beholder.  We actually appreciate a story with a “good message”, but we tend to resist films that we feel have an agenda. Why? If the film reinforces your values and worldview, you most likely perceive it as having a message. If it embodies or promotes a point of view that conflicts with yours, it has an agenda.  This is not universally the case, but a good rule of thumb. There is no doubt that the ends of the ideological spectrum have both expanded and grown further apart. This divide in worldviews is most pronounced among the elites in the creative, entertainment, and academic sectors.

There is also no denying that DEI efforts in some studios have elevated stories that can seem hostile, and therefore agenda-driven, to others.  This is certainly the case with Disney’s decision to cast non-white actors in live-action remakes of films like The Little Mermaid and Snow White.

Competition for audience share can drive this as well. Journalism has led this shift. CNN and Fox represented the left and right, then competition arose from MSNBC and Newsmax, stealing audiences and pushing the ideological poles further apart. As audiences shrink, tribal dynamics have allowed smaller shares to prop up alternative media outlets. The mirror has shattered.

However, there is hope, as the non-profit More In Common reminds us in its new report: “Most Americans value and are interested in connecting across difference—especially when working toward a shared goal. When asked what challenges stand in the way of forming these connections, Americans most commonly report a “lack of opportunity.” Furthermore, the more people believe others are engaging across differences (and value such engagement), the more interested they are in doing so themselves.”

The desire for common cause and connection is there, and perhaps the correction is underway.  Fox is now considered center-right with even Martin Scorsese feeling comfortable producing content for it, and CNN has made efforts to get back to its news roots.  Emerging media outlets like The Free Press have tried to create “third spaces” where a particular point of view is not rigidly enforced, and the heavy hand of the Trump Administration is causing some outlets like NPR to assess their own bias.

Pixar’s Win or Lose, featuring an openly Christian character

Perhaps our best hope for entertainment lies in Pixar’s monster box office success with Inside Out 2, which in contrast to Snow White’s anemic box office, has brought in $1.7 billion worldwide to date.  More than any other studio in my mind, Pixar has been able to be inclusive in its representation, while universal in its appeal.  Its stories have a message, but don’t feel like they carry an agenda.  To some on the right, the inclusion of a Christian character in Pixar’s recent series “Win or Lose” is a concession.  From my perspective, it is simply consistent with Pixar’s properly contextualized, universally appealing storytelling.  The same can be said for Disney’s Walt Disney World (WDW). After a staff field trip in 2023 to see what the fight between Gov. DeSantis and the Mouse was all about, we concluded that WDW should serve as an exemplar to the rest of the Disney kingdom when it comes to “story telling” that can build social cohesion.   

As I wrote after an earlier family trip to WDW in 2022,  “What stuck out to us the most at the park was that, at a time in which Americans are being pitted against each other, WDW was, at least at a surface level, a place where all races, ethnicities, religions, creeds, gender-identities and social-economic backgrounds could walk, play, eat, wait, laugh and (in our case with exhausted four-year-olds) melt down together. It was a respite from the polarization of Washington, a reminder of our shared humanity, and a unique opportunity to reflect on how we would be better off as a nation if we looked at each other as sojourners together in this great American ride that we are on.”

Just as shared experiences like a trip to WDW, or Busch Gardens for that matter, can help bridge rebuild social capital, so can storytelling.  Our sister production company, More Productions, has worked on several projects intentionally to build empathy, including the scripted rom-com on polarization The Elephant in the Room. Bridge Entertainment Labs connected us to Erik Bork (Band of Brothers) who wrote and directed the film. After its initial community screenings in February, the film was shown, using the Social Cohesion Impact Measurement (SCIM), to have a positive impact on viewers’ respect and understanding, self-efficacy as a “bridger,” and in reducing affective polarization. We have worked with SCIM as a project of Goals & Measures Working Group of the Bridging Movement Alignment Collaborative (BMAC), with support from Listen First Project and Civic Health Project.

For Valentine’s Day I gave my wife the book Jane Austin’s Universal Truths, with chapters such as Sorrow and Joy, as well as Our Moral Duty. It is Austin’s storytelling, grounded in a universally recognizable moral framework, that makes her work remain universally appealing. We need these stories, and our society needs us to share stories.

Karen Armstrong, in her book A Short History of Myth, wrote that “We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value”

Similarly, in his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote that "reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.” As our society searches for a shared vision for shared flourishing, especially as we enter our 250th anniversary next year, shared narratives through story WILL be a key way to rebuild social cohesion.

So why did Snow White flop?  Despite its resonant universal themes, it became a casualty of the culture wars—trying to appeal to special interests demanding diversity, while tribal voices deconstructed it and grotesque CGI, intended to avoid controversy, ended up inviting it instead. Societies and cultures are defined by the stories they tell about themselves, and as universal as some of Snow White’s messaging is, it was not able to escape the polarization drag on it.

A pastor friend of mine calls theatres the "sanctuaries" and “temples” for our storytelling. The loss of a shared set of facts does not allow for the electorate to navigate democracy easily.  Empty theatres and the loss of shared stories will not, either.

“Society has claims on us all.”  – From Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice