Disney’s Frozen Has a Secretly Ominous Ending

I saw Disney’s Frozen recently, and it’s a really good movie for the most part. It does exist a bit in a Catch-22 though.

The most interesting character is by far Elsa, the only one who actually goes through a proper character arc. The other people in the movie largely are the same person at the end as when they’re introduced (one of the trolls even sings that “people don’t really change”). It could be a stronger movie if it focused more on Elsa, but it’d be a darker movie for it and probably too dark to be a children’s movie. They also couldn’t just go for it and jettison the children’s movie aspect, as so much of it relies on the viewer not overanalyzing it thanks to it being a children’s movie.

Anyway, keeping in mind that this is just a fantasy children’s movie, it’s notable that it’s the most business-focused Disney movie yet. The Duke of Weselton is obsessed with international trade, shopkeeper Oaken gives a quick lesson on supply and demand, and concern for Kristoff’s ice business is a running theme throughout.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

On that note, the ending of the movie is actually pretty ominous from a business perspective.

Elsa’s unintentional winter spell in the middle of summer would have disrupted the economy of Arendelle considerably. What little crops there are in the area would have largely died from the deep freeze, some of the livestock could have died too from exposure thanks to farmers being caught off guard, the frozen fjord would be awful for the fishing industry, and the logging of the area certainly would be set back a bit. From that alone, Arendelle is probably headed for at least a sharp recession as a result of the movie’s events. We know from the Year Without a Summer that winter-like conditions in the summer would be devastating to an early-to-mid 1800s European state like Arendelle.

However, that’s not all. Just before the end, Elsa issues a decree that Arendelle will no longer do business with Weselton, it’s largest trading partner. That’s understandable given that the Duke of Weselton sent people to assassinate her, and this preindustrial fantasy land wouldn’t have some kind of UN to settle the dispute.

It’s also the last thing the kingdom needs. With the local agriculture and industry severely stunted, Arendelle needs trade now more than ever. Cutting off relations with the kingdom’s largest trading partner will only make the recession that much deeper.

Some of the downturn might get offset by an increase of government spending. When the king shut off the castle from outsiders to protect Elsa early on, he reduced the staff. With Elsa’s new open-gate policy, government employment will rise. There also will be more social functions, of which there’s been one (the coronation) in the last 10-15 years, which will lead to more spending in the local area. The royal treasury likely can sustain this deficit spending for a while since it would have built up considerably during the decade plus of reduced staff and few expenditures. Having a few more castle servants and some fancy parties wouldn’t come close to offsetting the entire consequences of the week of winter, though.

Elsa would need to act quickly to repair the situation. She would need to send someone, perhaps the regent who ran the kingdom in the three years between her parents’ deaths and her coronation, to find new trading partners. She could also become Europe’s first entrepreneurial monarch. She might be able to bring in tourists from the region’s nobility by doing public demonstrations of her magic powers and setting up tours of her mountain ice palace. She could also travel to nearby kingdoms to create ice art for their special occasions. That money could then go to subsidize the rebuilding of the kingdom’s economy from the damage she unwittingly caused. I don’t know the extent of her powers, which seem considerable, but she might even be able to forestall the year’s coming winter to give her kingdom a chance to produce a few more goods to sell without competition.

Arendelle is probably in a better situation for the long haul with an open and confident monarch ruling it, but in the short run, there will be a struggle to fight off famine. For a seemingly happy movie that is actually the darkest Disney animated feature yet, a seemingly happy ending that is actually quite foreboding is only appropriate.

Addendum

This all assumes that Elsa doesn’t just create automatons from ice and snow to perform all economic tasks. They could work all hours of the day and dramatically expand Arendelle’s economy.

They also would put everyone out of work, creating a one of those utopias where everyone can live a life of leisure that philosophers once dreamed of. That would work, to whatever extent it can given that people generally prefer to work rather than do nothing all day, until Elsa dies. Presumably all of the automatons would then cease to function.

At that point, Arendelle would plunge into a dystopian situation where the entire infrastructure of the economy fell apart all at once. It would be a long, slow slog out of the depression as the populace would have lost all experience with actually running agriculture and industry.

It would be tempting to go the automaton route given the immediate economic crisis that is coming to the land not long after the credits roll. However if Elsa allowed her automatons to take over the whole economy, it would be far worse in the long run than accidentally plunging the kingdom into winter ever was.

A Few Good Years Have Passed

Last night, my wife and I watched the 1992 classic A Few Good Men. I was of course familiar with the famous courtroom scenes, but it's actually the first time I had seen it all the way through. My wife hadn't seen it either, but she is in the Navy now, so I figured she'd enjoy it for that reason. Her favorite line actually didn't end up being any of the famous ones. Rather, it was Kevin Pollack's Lieutenant Weinberg wryly stating that, "No one likes the whites". This is true; no one she knows likes the Navy's dress white uniforms. It had some inaccuracies that bugged her though, not the least being Tom Cruise's Lieutenant Kaffee treating Demi Moore's Lieutenant Commander Galloway as though he outranked her throughout.

Anyway, I had recorded it off of AMC, and it had little fact boxes popping up at the bottom periodically. It wasn't until one of those boxes appeared some time into it that it really clicked for me why Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup was so intense about being on the wall and so forth. He was the leader at the Guantanamo Bay base, and at the time that Aaron Sorkin wrote the play on which the movie was based, the Cold War was still going on. Not that Cuba is the United States' friend now or anything, but the implications of the island being Communist were far more important then than now.

I was born three years before Sorkin's play first hit the stage. I can remember old maps from elementary school that said USSR and can recall seeing fallout shelter signage here and there, but I have no recollection of the Cold War and its existential threat to the US. I was four when the Berlin Wall fell; I was six when the Soviet Union dissolved. Even if I had learned about Russian nukes being pointed at my country at the time, I wasn't old enough to really understand the implications.

For my generation, Guantanamo Bay has a very different connotation. It's not an outpost of democracy on the edge of Communist territory; it's a holding cell for War on Terror suspects. The incident that started everything for the plot in A Few Good Men was a Marine shooting a single bullet outward across the fence unprovoked. While that's never something you want to see happen, it probably would be more or less a nonevent these days beyond whatever punishment a Marine gets for unnecessarily discharging a weapon. It wouldn't be an event that could potentially cost lives. Cuba isn't a battlefield anymore. Guantanamo is a very different part of the wall that keeps America safe now.

The climactic scene with Kaffee haranguing Jessup on the stand is still as intense as ever, but it has lost a little something because of the way the film takes for granted that the audience understands the Cold War subtext of the film. I am pretty well versed in history and probably would have put it all together eventually, but it's not something that people in the Millennial generation and beyond will get instinctively. I certainly understand it in an intellectual sense, but I don't feel it viscerally. A young person could make it through the whole thing and think that Jessup is just really cranky because he thinks every member of the military who isn't in an office in D.C. plays a part in guarding the wall that protects the homeland. The latent yet very specific threat of nuclear war will be lost in that scenario.

If Hollywood ever decides to remake this film, it will definitely hammer (probably excessively so) on that element of it during the first couple of acts. The future Jessup will throw around terms like "the Red Menace" to make sure it's clear (crystal, even) that the stakes here are related to the Cold War. For him and his generation, "Cuba" probably primarily conjures feelings surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Bay of Pigs; for me, it conjures Elian Gonzalez well before any of JFK's incidents down there. It's still a really good movie if you don't have that in the forefront of your mind, but it's not as good as it can be without it.

One of the other popup fact boxes said that Rob Reiner had hoped to make A Few Good Men be a timeless movie and that, aside from Cruise's civilian wardrobe, it is. We must add one other caveat besides loud shirts: it's timeless except for its inherent assumption that Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will always have Cold War connotations for its audience. It certainly does not for most anyone younger than 30, and it might not for those older than that anymore either given its prominence in the last decade's news cycle.

To watch A Few Good Men again: