Because I am a girl - A response to "Christianity in the Princess and the Frog"

This is a response to Doreen’s recent post “Christianity in the Princess and the Frog”:

Doreen’s post:

http://op-doreen.blogspot.ca/2012/04/christianity-in-princess-and-frog.html

Disney fairy tales had always been my favorite when I was a little girl, all the things such as love, prince, happiness, ultimate victory of goodness, and fairy godmothers. They once made me believe that all girls will eventually have a dream coming true and have a forever-lasting happy life. Disney is a kind of selling a series of dreams to every little girl all around the world, no matter where you are, no matter what language you speak.

In the lecture last week, Professor Harris talked about teenager girls being targeted in the fashion market, merchandise with sexy elements being designed for them. In a lot of posters and photographs, young girls with makeup as well as dressing-up like sexy adults are showing as models to attract their peer groups. It makes me think about the Disney fairy tales as similar to it, female protagonists are portrayed as living in an unfortunate life, struggle with it and eventually defeat it. Females have always been set as the weak group, the soft target and the sympathetic figures.

As the society develops, the Disney fairy tales also innovates as Doreen said, “the protagonist is set as a black girl which break the stereotype of princess in Disney films”. As I see, I cannot really tell if this innovation is good or not, we can see that Disney is trying hard to do something new, and to do something updated which could fit the social topic in nowadays, but it also points out the issues directly such as the gender issues, the social status of girls in society, the racial issues, etc. Portraying this black princess has nothing to do with the theme or the storyline, but instead, bringing out those social issues without responding to any of them. And also as Doreen mentioned, it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test！

Left behind – the fear of death and apocalypse

Apocalypse is the last topic in the course, it seems like an ending, but also a start, it leads me my way to further explore the interaction between Christianity and popular culture in contemporary society. 

I never watched the movie “left behind” before, or read the novel only until after the lecture this week, it is an interesting movie, and perfectly matches the topic for this week. This film received a lot of negative feedback, when I researched it in Google, I found some comments like “The more this movie tries, the worse it gets.” The interpretation of apocalypse in this film upsets some people, but in my opinion, it quite resonates. The anti-Christian causes the doomsday and people with pure soul were raptured, the rest are left behind to face the Ends Day. What makes me interested is not the idea “it will ultimately ends” but “anxiety”, the “anxiety” of characters in the movie and also my anxious feeling when I watch it. The idea of doomsday has been existed in our culture since ancient time, but before twentieth century, the fear of it only appears during certain period such as during the Black Death, but after twentieth century, people began to lose hope even during the normal life, the more we know about the world and ourselves, the less we look back into our religion, and this is where the anxiety comes from. Popular culture such as film spread the anxiety, creates the fear, and drive us to think about ourselves and our believes.

“It is not reading, it’s believing”. The movie conveys the idea: “don’t be the ones left behind”, it is really a strong way to communicate the Christian idea through film, and it did make both positive and negative impacts on Christians. “Left behind” resonates people while the resonation is due to the fear of death.