Wish (Buck and Veerasunthorn, 2023)

I am not positive that Wish is that much worse than the average Disney fare, but I can say with confidence that it is the least I’ve enjoyed a Disney film since…Brother Bear maybe? Typically, even if I think a Disney (or Pixar) film is being overpraised, I recognize some elements that I find endearing, and I am happy to call b.s. on criticisms that I think are more culturally based than actually about the film itself.

I wish (no pun intended) that I could read this film as something other than an anti-religious allegory. Just about anyone who is marginally aware of social media (especially YouTube) knows there is a concentrated effort to bash all things Disney that correlates more or less with efforts of political conservatives to vilify the Mouse (and by subsidiary extension all things Star Wars and all things MCU). Whether this is an actual grassroots campaign (I doubt it) or the social media equivalent of busing in the same chanters to every political rally doesn’t concern me much. Many of the criticisms are risible or ridiculous, and for the most part, having a few characters who (gasp) might actually be gay or a few princesses who aren’t caucasian adds more to some stale formulations than it takes away from them.

But…

As anyone who has ever had an encounter with trolls could probably tell you, the first rule is: don’t feed them. For people making such arguments, engagement is a win. And if a studio starts building whole films around demonizing its studio’s political opponents, audiences may then start seeing two parties arguing about culture war issues rather than one side up on a soapbox shouting hate into the public square.

The story here is that Magnifico (Chris Pine) is a sorcerer who has discovered the magical formula to grant wishes. He and his wife settle in a paradise where all are welcome (give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, wishing to breathe free) so long as they turn over their wishes to Magnifico and let him decide which will be granted. When Asha (Ariana DeBose) dares to question the patriarch, he turns ugly, and when she discovers an alternate, more egalitarian entity (a star that people can wish upon) with the same power to grant wishes, the patriarchal power tries alternately to destroy it or put it under his control. He alone can use its magic for his own purposes rather than, you know, to make people happy.

The most depressing part of the whole story, for me, is that even if it was meant to be an examination or critique of religious zealotry, it still could have been a good or interesting or thought-provoking critique, if it had taken its own premise seriously and granted that Magnifico was initially motivated by positive intentions. Instead, it makes him into a garden-variety conman who leverages his discoveries as a tool for lying his way into political power. Of course, following the prologue’s premise would have called for some explanation of his turn to the dark side more credible than a sincere question from a sincere disciple who uncovers his secret. The question of why God might answer some prayers and not others is a legitimate one. I’m just hard-pressed to believe that it has no other answer than that God is the cosmic equivalent of Eva and Juan Peron, snatching an occasional dream from a ticket to keep the masses appeased in their miserable state.

One consequence of such a tedious framework is that villains can never be rescued or redeemed, only destroyed. If the story took its premise seriously, the good characters might have had some opportunity to show him the errors of his ways and try to keep his fire from going out (to use the Biblical metaphor). Not that every villain must be redeemed. But the variety of motivations for villainy is part of what distinguishes different stories. Names like Cruella DeVil and Maleficent suggest the incarnation of pure evil. And it’s either ironic or telling that female Disney monsters tend to get deconstructions where they are shown to be more complex psychological constructions and not just absolutely evil.

More important than the gender divide here is the fact that good storytelling recognizes that there can be different kinds of antagonists besides just the evil-because-he-is-evil villain. Films like Brave, Wreck-It-Ralph, Encanto, Coco, Luca, or Inside Out are allowed to have antagonists who are misguided or wrong rather than malevolent.

The person who actually first pointed this out to me was none other than…my mother, who, when I took her to see Beauty and the Beast expressed diffidence towards the film because she didn’t understand why Gaston had to die. Sure he was an ass and an idiot, but the film could have marched off into its happy ending with him disarmed and defeated. But that would be less satisfying to an audience that wanted to see the other side not just defeated but destroyed. And it is easier to justify the death or destruction of another person if you make them relentlessly and unrepentantly evil. It is easier to deal with the cognitive dissonance created by hating people for hating other people if you posit that they are so evil and so beyond redemption that there is no choice but to kill them. . .besides we didn’t kill Gaston, he died slipping and falling while trying to kill us.

That looks like casuistry to me, a way of consistently manufacturing narratives so that we can delight in the death or annihilation or punishment of another without having to justify it or our role in it. Again–and this is really important so please don’t misunderstand me–I am not saying that there are no actions or people so evil that their punishment cannot be justified. I am saying that the pattern of fantasizing about their destruction in such a way that our point of view is vindicated but we are absolved of any responsibility for making an argument and justifying the punishment is itself a sign of a different kind of ideological (even religious) zealotry.

The increasingly easy division of people into binary categories where the good are always pure and right and totally good and the evil are always self-aware and wrong and totally evil bothers me more than the fact that in the Disney version of that division, the first category seems consistently populated by areligious (or alternative religious) females and the second by religious males.

So, as always, your mileage may vary. If you want to say this review isn’t about the movie, I won’t argue the point too vociferously other than to maybe say that the movie isn’t about the movie, so it is hard to simply review it as a movie.