Some days I feel like a poser

Maybe I shouldn't admit that in a public place. It might be that no one but the family is reading this now, but it is still public. I don't think it's entirely bad to admit though. I signed up for the screenwriting class because I knew it would force me to stretch and grow, so it's not that unexpected for me to admit that I'm slightly out of my depth.

Today we were analyzing The Little Mermaid. We had all read the original HC Anderson story this week and everyone had at some point seen the film. I hadn't seen it since it came out (24 years ago), but I remembered it enough for these purposes. And we watched a couple of clips to make comparisons. We were talking about very writerly stuff: structure, and voice, and character and stuff. Ideas that most of them have used to pick apart works for at least a year and probably as undergrads too. For me talking about things that way is new. I like it and it was very interesting, but I found it very difficult to contribute more than, "Oh, neat, yeah, what she said."

When I was 8 we stood in the harbor in Copenhagen and looked at the statue of the Little Mermaid and I imagine at that point someone told me the story. This was well before the Disney version came out, so it wasn't that version of the story I would have been told. But apart from the very broad strokes, it wasn't the Anderson version either. Because the original was rather dark, very violent, and at its heart, a lot of Christian propaganda. I didn't remember any of that. It makes me wonder if anyone had actually read the story, or if it was more of an oral tradition I was hearing. Disney, of course, took out all of the religious themes and most of the violence. They almost did a good job of taking a nameless, quiet, passive character and giving her agency and interesting qualities. Sadly they caved at the end and in the climax turned her into a damsel in distress who needed to be rescued by her boyfriend and father. So even though the time of the story didn't really change, the 1989 version is wildly modernized from the 1837 version, yet if we were to do it again now we would have to update it even more.