You Do You: Ethics of Authenticity in Disney's Frozen and Moana / Matt Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

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One of the most prominent visions of the good life present in Disney films could be called "expressive individualism," perhaps best captured by the phrase "you do you." In this episode Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Matt Croasmun interpret and unpack the ethics of the authentic self, belonging, and the implicit visions of flourishing life in two contemporary classics from Disney: Frozen and Moana.

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Show Notes

• Who is my most authentic self? How can I become who I truly am?
• Matt Croasmun’s course at Grace Farms: http://gracefarms.org/life-worth-living
• How would your life change if the idea you were reading about were true?
• “Aim to become indigenous to a place” Robin Kimmerer
• What way of being human is particular to you?
• Disney and the quest for the self
• Charles Taylor: “Our most essential responsibility is our responsibility to ourselves to become our most authentic self “
• If we strive for uniqueness, what happens to universal values?
• Moral relativity in Charles Taylor
• What if we hurt each other on the way to becoming ourselves?
• ‘Let It Go,’ the anthem that’s everywhere
• Reading the song to mean ‘you do you’ is a shallow reading
• Our values run deep in our culture, entertainment, and mythology
• Elsa’s hidden, dangerous powers: ‘conceal don’t feel’
• The disciplined, buffered self
• “But freedom as ruleless-ness is too shallow a reading”
• In becoming her authentic self, Elsa knows she is at risk of hurting Ana
• Elsa is saved by Ana’s love, which allows her to have her powers without hurting anyone
• Resolution is not isolation
• Every child belting ‘Let It Go’ is missing part of the resolution
• Our society tells the movie: “just be yourself, other people be damned,” missing the emphasis on love and acceptance of each other
• Frozen stands in a line of post-modern reinterpretations of fables that celebrate the villain
• Elsa was supposed to be the villain, but ‘Let it Go’ was so humanizing they changed the story
• The Nietzschean impulse to discard moral framework
• Elsa is expressing her ‘will to power’ when she sings, " No wrong, no right, no rules for me"
• By making the villain the hero, the writers get beyond good and evil
• The recovery of the pre-modern moralist villain
• Turning to Moanna:
• Moanna discovers that her true self is in tension with the way of her people. She wants to travel, but her people say, “The island gives us what we need”
• When she learns that her people are actually voyagers, it draws her into relationship with her grandmother
• We know what she means when she belts, ‘I am Moanna”
• Taylor calls it ‘The Horizon of Significance:’ he wants to celebrate particularity, without an overemphasis on difference
• What matters can’t just be random. You must give an account
• The cosmology of Moanna: taking the power of nature and giving it to humans
• Moanna provides an account for how magic relates to its cosmology, where Frozen’s magic comes out of nowhere
• Our choices should be free and also meaningful
• Frozen highlights the dignity of the return to ordinary life, whereas in Moanna, all of life is transformed into adventure. This is the heroic life. “To be truly human is to aim for something that is beyond the ordinary life” - Matt Croasman
• “But what about the Hobbits!” – Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• How these stories charm and influence our theology must include a critical look at the culture we are inside of
• “None of us are in a vacuum.” Film as a stream of meaning that we’re already swimming in
• “At the end of the day, ‘you do you’, is the thin way of finding our way into a ‘thicker meaning:’ how to live as the individual whom God created”