Disney’s Female Empowerment Flick

When I was in seventh grade in prepschool everyone except me delivered a book report on “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeline L’Engle. It also won a LOT of awards, so I decided it needed to be avoided at all costs because anything that was so popular had to be bad.

I knew that it was some kind of science fiction, something I believed to be a degenerate form of literature until my beloved husband turned me on to the writings of Robert Heinlein some years later.  I read a few days ago the (would-you-believe) Wikipedia article on the book.

I should have recognized it then, but a posteriori its publication seems to have become a feminist cause celebre, for the author had great trouble getting it published, probably because there was a female protagonist.  Now it is a hit movie from Disney — although a controversial movie with mixed reviews.

Seems to me Disney has already done a pretty good job with lots of female protagonists. The girl whose father has been missing for four years finds him, even though she is a bit of a school discipline problem, and is somehow convinced she has the wrong hair.

She proves she has True Grit (or the space-time equivalent), by submitting her adolescent angst to the judgment, advice, and consummate wisdom of three “witches,” who send her off to her Herculean task with Shakespearean rhetoric:

1st Witch:
“When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

Macbeth (I, i, 1-2)

The shrieking and howling Weird Sisters set about the chain of events that makes Macbeth headed for a downfall. How can our heroine, Meg, do anything but triumph with such nifty witches at Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kalick, and Oprah Winfrey? Of course, they represent the three supreme races of the earth (order of importance 3-2-1) namely, Caucasian (Euro-American — and a redhead to boot — hooray for us!), American of East-Indian descent (we have their most elite brains, you know), and the triumphant African-American (confer the movie Black Panther for details).

All races can be proud — even this little Jewish girl “kvelled” (puffed up with pride). It is still a pain in the neck to be born female in any race, for discrimination abounds. After all, Oprah Winfrey belongs to all races, and little girl could do a lot worse when picking, well, and idol.

I sincerely hope, however, they don’t copy those amber jewels she uses for eyeshadow. They gotta be toxic — could regress civilization back to Cleopatra.

I was rooting for Meg and her little Brother Charles Wallace because being a gifted child is rather like being exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the universe. Despite teetering at the brink, they are vindicated as having space-time “true grit.” They reunite the family — ever so “Disney Flick.”

But more important to me, the gifted children finish by knowing they are gifted. This is the best possible resolution to adolescent angst.

The truth is that nobody quite knows what to do with gifted children, who generally are lost, as are the benefits of their talents, to society at large.

Is the world opening up to the validation of individual gifts?

We can only hope.