How to Talk about Ariel and 'The Little Mermaid' Without Being Terrible
Photo by reza hoque on Unsplash
The moment it was announced that Disney cast the talented singer Halle Bailey in the role of Ariel, the hate from the conservative commentator circuit was disproportionate and unending. The mere fact that she was a Black woman, never mind her years of singing experience, was enough for many to claim that "their childhoods were ruined" and cry "wokeism."
When this racism happens (and it is racism), there is a tendency for some people to want to defend such products by "voting with their dollars" and sharing positive reviews. Some even go so far as to say that we shouldn't criticize the movie at all because that will play into the hands of online reactionaries.
While the movie has earned a hefty penny (over $500 million), The Little Mermaid remake, unfortunately, is just okay: not good, not bad, just okay. You may disagree (and that's fine), but to me, the pacing was uneven, the new songs were atrocious, and a lot of unnecessary padding was added to solve plot holes that never needed to be addressed. You are allowed to talk about how bad some of the elements in the film are, as well as to discuss some of its other more problematic parts — in other words, to criticize it like you would any other work — and doing so doesn't make you problematic or add to existing hatred.
In fact, not being honest about this movie's undeniable flaws adds to a paternalistic relationship that is not helpful when talking about art that is attempting to be inclusive.
Popping the bubble
Before we get into the specifics of this movie, yes, Ariel being Black has become a wedge issue in the culture wars. Not only are men like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro throwing all sorts of dog whistles out there, but Halle Bailey has been unfairly harassed for the "sin" of being in a movie. It doesn't behoove anyone to ignore this reality, even if it's uncomfortable and frustrating.
Again, there is a type of thinking in the wake of such racism and misogyny to want to rally behind the targeted cultural product to stick it to these terrible people. When the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot came out, which featured an all-female cast, there was a desire from people to defend not only actors like Leslie Jones who were being doxxed but also the movie itself. As Jen Stayrook argued in The Work Print: "…even if the movie had received bad reviews, I still would have gone to see it opening night. I still would have supported a female-led film because that's how we make things better. There's a reason why women voted in droves to improve Ghostbusters' abysmal IMDB score. We want to see heroes in movies we can relate to."
We could say the same for Barbie, Captain Marvel, and any movie or cultural product that decided to cast a nonwhite person, or even a nonwhite man, in a role that "originally" had one, and we are seeing the same thing with this movie. The desire to "defend" this film not only applies to right-leaning criticism but criticism on "the left" as well. In her essay “I'm begging people to be normal about The Little Mermaid,” Nylah Burton not only takes to task the racist men and women engaging in the harassment we have talked about (rightly so, in my opinion) but also Marcus Ryder, a man who has committed his career to increasing diversity in media, for his criticism of the movie not mentioning slavery. For context, the film appears to be set in the 18th century in the Caribbean during the height of chattel slavery. As she writes in her criticism of his review:
“…what would possess someone to think that just because Bailey is Black, that this movie must include slavery? That is profoundly unfair to all the little Black kids going to see the film, thinking they can get the same uncomplicated plot and instead being faced with generational trauma. It’s especially gross of Ryder to say this knowing all the racist abuse Bailey has suffered, to imply that the movie shouldn’t have just been a light romance, but a story exploring slavery.”
Yet, this criticism feels disingenuous. It bears mentioning that Marcus Ryder is correct, as a Caribbean monarch like the Queen in this movie (played by the peerless Noma Dumezweni) would have most likely been instrumental in the slave trade or, at the very least, impacted by it. And so, it's strange that Disney placed so much emphasis on its setting while ignoring this instrumental part of that history. It is also problematic for Burton to paternalistically ask us to sidestep such criticism for an imagined concept of fairness. People have always criticized the simplistic nature of Disney fairytales (including The Princess and the Frog for its colorblind handling of Jim Crow), and that shouldn't stop now just because a bunch of other people hate the movie for having a Black lead.
In truth, there is a lot to criticize here with this film. Being less serious for a moment, there is an entire scene where Awkwafina raps (see The Scuttlebutt), and it's frankly not a good song, even by "so good its bad" standards. When Ariel threw a blanket over Awkwafina's character's head, I was incredibly thankful for the song's end. This movie had so many profound problems: the CGI hair felt wrong; the introduction of Ariel's sisters felt unnecessary from a plot perspective and purely toy-driven; and yes, they decided to include a Caribbean setting without mentioning slavery.
There is a world where the live-action remake was a critical darling that managed to thread the needle on modern sensibilities and tell a fantastic story, and we could all feel cathartic in its success. It has some of the ingredients. Halle Bailey's singing talent is transcendent in the song Part of Your World, and Melissa McCarthy's Ursula is delightfully wicked. I am saddened that the rest of the movie doesn't match their energy, not only because it's unfair to their craft but because, in the wake of the cultural backlash surrounding it, I am not inclined to "defend it" with either my dollars or time.
Yet I wonder if I would be even if the film were fantastic. After all, we are talking about the success of a mega-conglomerate that holds billions of dollars and a stranglehold on the popular imagination. It also has a racist and sexist history of its own; it needs to account for. This is the same company that attempted to trademark phrases such as dias los Muertos and Hakuna Matata. It doesn't need our support here.
A "voiceless" conclusion
This entire framing to defend The Little Mermaid is one that benefits Disney's bottom line more than it is one that meaningfully advances racial equity. We are talking about a movie here — not reparations or prison abolition. At best, The Little Mermaid can make marginalized people feel seen and cause privileged people to analyze their biases, which is why criticizing a movie's failures is so crucial because complacent media can sometimes be just as damaging as bad or ignorant media. As Marcus Ryder writes in their review:
“I do not need every story and movie that my 6-year-old consumes to be historically accurate….But the total erasure and rewriting of one of the most painful and important parts of African diasporic history, is borderline dangerous, especially when it is consumed unquestioningly by children. I do not want my child to think that the Caribbean in the 18th century was a time of racial harmony, any more than I suspect a Jewish father wants his child to think 1940 Germany was a time of religious tolerance, however much we might both wish they were.”
In this case, I would argue that refusing to state honestly how "middle-of-the-road" and sometimes even "problematic" this product can be is a problem in and of itself. There is something quite insidious in stripping Halle Bailey's personhood and defending the idea of her blackness without analyzing the context at play. We need to engage with the text. The BIPOC people in this film deserve honest criticism for their efforts, not paternalism, from people who are so invested in defending a product that they have lost sight of the material ways we can build a multiracial, working-class coalition.
A movie, racial justice, is not.