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. Bonus: Sign up this week for a 7-week online Life Worth Living Course (limited space!)
Enroll now for our 7-week Life Worth Living Course through Grace Farms: http://gracefarms.org/life-worth-living. The course runs from May 4 to June 15, and we expect it to fill up quickly, so don’t wait to sign up!
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
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more information, visit faith.yale.edu.
Matthew Croasmun: This is a sort of vision of life that says that the most important thing about your life is discovering that way of being human that is your way—that's particular to you, to who you are. And so these questions about authenticity end up being absolutely essential. Who is my most authentic self? What is the shape of that self? And then how can I actualize that person? How do I become who I most truly am? That's the quest of my life. And so many of these Disney films are centering this quest, the quest for the authentic self.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with a Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
Friends, before we jump into this week's episode, I wanted to highlight an opportunity and invitation for you, our listeners. As you may know, the Yale Center for Faith & Culture teaches a Yale college undergraduate course called Life Worth Living. It's over-enrolled every semester it's offered. It's the most popular course in Yale's humanities program. And now a version of that course is available to the public. Director of the Life Worth Living program, Matt Crossman, is teaching a seven week online course from May 4th to June 15th.
The course will cover seven questions. What does it mean to belong? To whom are we responsible? How does a good life feel? What does it mean for a life to go well? How should we live? What role does suffering play in a good life? And finally, what should we do when we fail?
You can apply and register over at gracefarms.org/life-worth-living, and the link is at the top of this episode's show notes. To give you a teaser of the kind of conversations that are happening in the Life Worth Living approach, today we're airing an episode about authenticity, individualism, and the self as portrayed in the Disney films Frozen and Moana. I asked Matt Crossman to say a little bit about this spring's Life Worth Living online course. I'll queue up that conversation.
Matt, thanks for coming on too talk a little bit about the course that you're going to be teaching, Life Worth Living at Grace Farms.
Matthew Croasmun: Yeah, I'm excited. It's going to be a good experience.
Evan Rosa: This is a course that is normally taught to Yale undergrads. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how this course is being applied from the Yale context to the public.
Matthew Croasmun: These community courses are really exciting opportunities for us to slice our material a different way. So with the undergraduates, we're talking about a bunch of series of traditions and looking at those ways of life. In the community courses we begin with those questions. And so on any given week, then, we're asking a question, what does it mean to belong? Or, what should we hope for? Or, what's the role of suffering in a good life? And we read a range of different authors coming from a range of different traditions and different perspectives.
And so it's really exciting. You get, you know, Confucius in conversation with Alice Walker, or Tony Morrison in dialogue with the rabbis. And it just makes for really rich conversations each week. And what it allows is each participant, then, spends the week following our discussions, you know, hopefully they carve out some time to do their own writing and answering this question for themselves.
And so by the end, you've got seven little short pieces of personal writing that are your provisional working sort of answers to some of life's most important questions.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. That reminds me of one of the most poignant questions that I've heard come out of the Life Worth Living context. And that's the author that you're reading, if that idea were true, how would your life have to change?
Matthew Croasmun: That's the pivotal question, right? If we don't ask that question, then we're just doing religious studies or something like that, which is just fine. It's a good question, right. It's a fine thing to try to understand how other people see the world.
But what makes this unique is actually asking that next question. Saying, Oh boy, what if this perspective were true? What if it is true? Now, what do I do with my life? You know, Robin Kimmerer, a member of a North American indigenous nation, and also, you know, PhD botanist, proposes that maybe what it means to lead your life well is to aim to become indigenous to a place. It's this like really compelling picture of what it might mean to be a human being. But on the one hand you could stand at a distance from it and say, Oh wow, that's really compelling. I'm so glad there's a group of people who sort of see life that way. But that's not why she's writing. She's inviting you to consider that your life find its meaning precisely in figuring out what it might mean to become indigenous to the place where you live. And so yeah, turning that corner makes all the difference.
Evan Rosa: So in this episode, you and our friend, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, discuss one of those visions of flourishing life that is out there in the broader culture and is particularly represented in Disney films. And so I wonder if you'd give us a little bit of a teaser for that conversation and what visions of the good life do you see emerging from the Disney films, Frozen and Moana.
Matthew Croasmun: So in the Life Worth Living course at Yale, we actually spend a unit on what we call expressive individualism.
And most of the people who we read, you know, we read Oscar Wilde, we read Charles Taylor... this is a sort of a vision of life that says that the most important thing about your life is discovering that way of being human that is your way, that is particular to you, to who you are.
And so these questions about authenticity end up being absolutely essential, right. Who is my most authentic self? What is the shape of that self? And then how can I actualize that person? How do I become who I most truly am? That's the quest of my life. And so many of these Disney films, right, are centering this quest, right, the quest for the authentic self.
We actually encounter this idea in one of the first sessions in the course that we'll be doing at Grace Farms, where we read Charles Taylor, who lays out exactly this idea, and he calls it the Ethics of Authenticity, this sense that among all of our responsibilities, our most essential responsibility is our responsibility to ourselves to become our most authentic selves.
And this is just one of these like fundamental sort of visions that, until you hear it articulated as a vision, you don't realize just how much it's in the water that we swim in. And that's just like one of the really important things that we do in the Yale course, and then we do in these community courses as well. It's just give ourselves a little bit of like critical leverage to think about maybe a lot of the ideas that are so present and so like in our faces all the time that we never really considered them. So it's one of the things that, yeah, I'm excited to start out with in that course. And always is just a really meaningful interaction.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, that sounds amazing. So listeners, you can sign up for this at gracefarms.org/life-worth-living. And we expect spots to fill up rather quickly. There's not a ton of space. So if this is something you're interested in, we'd recommend that you get going on that this week. The course runs from May 4th to June 15th. And Matt, anything else before we run today's episode?
Matthew Croasmun: Thanks, Evan, you know, we're excited. It's pandemic times. We can't be together in person, but the exciting thing is we're able to offer these sorts of experiences to a broad audience from all across the country and around the world. So I look forward to meeting some of our audience and some of our extended community online in the course these coming months.
Evan Rosa: Thanks, Matt. And now today's episode, You Do You: Learning the Ethics of Authenticity from Disney's Frozen and Moana.
Matthew Croasmun: So every semester when we teach Life With Living, one of the sort of big visions of the good life that seems to be lurking around the edges all the time is this, like, what we sometimes call the you do you vision of life. Students come in and there's just a sort of assumption that whatever my vision of a life worth living is, it has something fundamentally to do with who I am, my particular story, where I come from. And we've had some fun sometimes talking about what that might have to do with... where we see this in some of our.... in some of the cultural touchpoints. We've been going back and forth a bit in fact about a couple of Disney films.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, so I, for one thing, I have a young daughter who was watching Frozen a lot.
Matthew Croasmun: I also have a young daughter.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And then I was watching Frozen a lot. And I felt like I needed to redeem this time in my life. So I started paying attention and found like this really surprisingly, surprisingly robust version of the you do you vision of the good life.
But that vision of the good life comes in more and less robust, like shallower and deeper versions. And all, a lot of what happens is when we think about it, we think, Oh, if I have that reflex, that's a shallow reflex. Right? You do you: that's kind of like, oh, blah. That's the culture.
If I'm really thinking about the good life, I got to do something different than that. And we don't consider the possibility that there might be like a deep ethical ideal there. And that's where I think like reading Charles Taylor's so helpful, because he gives that account of how that came to be.
Matthew Croasmun: Right. So Charles Taylor is at a different cultural moment. He describes a sort of early version of the you do you ethic. What Taylor identifies is that there are these young people who are saying the way of life that's really significant is a way of life that is unique to me. Only I can live this sort of life. And that makes them say some... potentially some things that Taylor wishes they wouldn't. But he also thinks that when the sort of pearl clutching response comes, "but if to be you is to somehow have a sort of unique moral horizon that's particular to you, then what happens to any sort of sense of universal human values?"
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: "Ahh relativism!" It's that, it's that kind of... this is an early nineties book, right, and that was when this was like first starting to be a really big thing.
Matthew Croasmun: Right. So Allan Bloom has written about the closing of the American mind. Some like folks on the Pearl clutching side of the spectrum are saying, yes, this indeed is the big problem.
And Taylor walks in to try to say, "Hold on. The thinnest version of this, of the you do you slogan, it's got some serious downsides. Yeah, if it's really going to just slide into moral relativism that's a) philosophically incoherent, and b) you know, probably culturally disappointing because it would mean that all we could ever do is give ourselves over to moral parallel play where you do your thing, I do my thing, and hopefully we don't harm one another along the way. All there is a sort of a procedural..."
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And when we do we have no resources for hashing it out. It's just completely end of the conversation.
Matthew Croasmun: And this is what, you know... and you can see it is... this is a...
Yeah, there's a moral ideal here of authenticity mixed together with adolescent you know, "get out of my way, man." You know, so anyway... and so Taylor is able to critique that side, but at the same time, try to say, "Hold on. There's actually a deep ideal." And that has become for us I think not only just an insight about this particular way of life, but even like a way of relating to culture that we talk about quite a lot around the office is, oh, this is a really compelling way to engage in culture. Can we look at things that are... that maybe are ideas that are not being expressed, ideas that haven't become their best selves that we can help describe or articulate a little bit, even more charitably?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. And so I'm watching Frozen and I'm actually seeing the same sort of thing happened with the reception of Frozen.
Right. Let It Go is everywhere. It's just astonishing looking at it, right? And it is really easy to read it as an anthem of you do you, of this ethic of authenticity in a kind of shallower version.
Disney's "Frozen": Snow glows white on the mountain tonight, not a footprint to be seen. A kingdom of isolation, and it looks like I'm the queen.
Evan Rosa: Before I let this go any further, it can be helpful at this point to back things up a bit. Clearly one can only assume Disney was not intentionally writing Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's ethics of authenticity into the script, nor was Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the songwriters for Frozen, just trying to bait theologians and ethicists into reacting to the movie.
Or were they?
The point here is Taylor theorizes and expounds the historically and culturally sensitive approach to understanding what matters to us as people in the world today, what values are there, and they run so deep in our entertainment and stories and mythology, that of course they can be even seen in the movies we show our children. And I'm right there with Ryan and Matt; the Frozen soundtrack is still ringing in my ears. So here's a bit of a step back to contextualize Taylor's ethics of authenticity and find it even in Elsa's Let It Go lyrics.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It may be necessary to back up here and say a little bit of where Taylor thinks that that ethic comes from.
So he charts this kind of centuries long process where in Western Europe, mostly, there's this kind of new... increasingly common new way of understanding the human self. He calls it the disengaged self. So this is roughly like the 16th through the 18th centuries, you start to get this picture of the human being as a kind of imposing through its rational will an order on an unruly nature, an unruly self, an unruly body, unruly emotions, all that sort of stuff. And that sounds a lot like what happens with Elsa at the beginning of Frozen. Right? She's got her powers. They seem to be dangerous. And what did her parents say? You've got to control it.
Got to control it. Conceal. What does...
Matthew Croasmun: Conceal. Don't feel.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Conceal don't feel. Be the good girl you always have to be.
Disney's "Frozen": Don't let them in. Don't let them see. Be the good girl you always have to be. Conceal. Don't feel. Don't let them know. Well now they know. Let it go!
Matthew Croasmun: Disciplined, buffered self.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. This is the kind of self that Taylor sees coming onto the scene. And just as, I don't know about you, but I have this kind of like cringing reaction to that, watching Elsa. That can't be the right way to deal with this, right.
Matthew Croasmun: Yeah, this can't be, yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And that's an impulse that comes from the same sort of expressive individualist reaction to the disengaged itself that Taylor charts. Right. So people like the early 19th century romantics are thinking, we need to raise up nature, feeling, and this is the kind of soil from which the ethic of authenticity comes from.
Matthew Croasmun: That's what's going on inside us when we see Elsa, or we hear Elsa saying "conceal, don't feel." we're supposed to be able to recognize that as, Oh, that's the wrong response.
Which is maybe what sets up Let It Go.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Exactly. And that's why Let It Go, that's why the shift from the minor key to the major key in Let It Go is satisfying, right, because you've had this kind of brooding tension, and suddenly it's released because she has this realization, "I don't have to deal with that crap. Like I can be me." And she lets it all out. And the whole song is just like a point by point anthem for the ethic of authenticity.
Disney's "Frozen": It's time to see what I can do, to test the limits and break through. No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I'm free. Let it go! Let it go! I'm one with the wind and sky! Let it go! Let it go! You'll never see me cry. Here I stand and here I stay. Let the sun rage on.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And the, gosh, animation too, the animation is so good on this, right? She just totally transforms. Her bodily way of being goes from this kind of staid, her hair is all like, curled up in very... and she's wearing these dark colors, and suddenly the hair unfurls, and she makes herself this new dress and it's both form fitting and flowing and you're like, this is how she's supposed to be. Right. There's freedom here, there's release. And she's singing all along the way, these lyrics that are all about being herself.
Matthew Croasmun: And even the ice castle appears. And it's a context that comes from the text. She has a context that is itself just an expression of her individuality. Right? So the individual doesn't have a given, any sort of givens that are constraints, rather, even though the place that she lives in is purely just an expression of her individuality and particularities.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And she says "I don't care what they're going to say." Right. It's time to see what I can do, to test the limits, break through.
And that all feels really great. But, I think if we read carefully, Let It Go is actually an anthem of the like shallow version of this ethic of authenticity.
Matthew Croasmun: So Conceal Don't Feel is thesis, Let It Go is antithesis.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's not where the real resolution of the movie is. And I think we're supposed to be able to see that because it undoes it over time.
Right. There's no recognition that who you truly are has anything to do with your interactions with, or relations with the people around you in Let It Go. Right. Her isolation from society is portrayed as part of what it means for her to be her now.
Right. Yes, I'm alone. I'm alone in free. And she goes... she over-corrects. She gets to maybe the relativist place, right? No right. No wrong, no rules for me. I'm free. Freedom is like rulelessness. Not any sort of relation to society.
And what I was seeing, looking around in our culture was mostly people receiving Frozen were only receiving that step and not noticing the ways that that's all undercut. Elsa can't actually break off her dependence on the relationships and the place that she comes from. She can't keep it from mattering that by her storming off like this, she's turned summer into winter.
Arendelle's in deep, deep, deep, deep snow.
Disney's "Frozen": Arendelle's in deep, deep, deep, deep snow.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And she can't keep it from the fact that she's going to hurt Ana again. Right. Like, hurting Ana at the beginning was the thing that started the disciplined self, and then swinging all the way over to this end also hurts Ana.
Right? And, well, she can't keep Ana from mattering to her.
Disney's "Frozen": Elsa?
Ana!
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Right. This relationship is significant, and it matters, and it's part of who she is.
Matthew Croasmun: And her authentic self is fundamentally a problem for that relationship.
Disney's "Frozen": Woah, Elsa, you look different. It's a good different.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It is, and yet there is a potential resolution which involves Ana's recognizing it. So not concealing it from Ana, but also not just imperiously casting Ana off as a necessary precondition of having it.
Disney's "Frozen": You should probably go. Please.
But I just got here.
You belong down in Arendelle.
So do you.
No, Ana, I belong here, alone, where I can be who I am without hurting anybody.
Elsa, we were so close. We can be like that again.
No, we can't. Goodbye, Ana.
Elsa, wait.
No, I'm just trying to protect you.
You don't have to protect me. I'm not afraid.
Matthew Croasmun: She can only be her true self if Elsa is honest with Ana about who Elsa is, but also expresses who Elsa is in a way that is inclusive and considerate of Ana and who Ana is and who Elsa is for Ana.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, and this is why Ana is the hero of the movie. Right. And it really is a movie kind of about their relationship. It's not a movie about Elsa. Because Ana is constantly going and saying, we can fix this together, but we just gotta be together.
Disney's "Frozen": Please don't shut me out again. Please, don't slam the door. You don't have to keep your distance anymore. Cause for the first time in forever, I finally understand. For the first time in forever, we can fix this hand in hand. We can head down this mountain together. You don't have to live in fear. Cause for the first time in forever, I will be right here.
Ana, please go back.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: But Elsa is saved by Ana's love for her. Right. And then it's precisely that love and the kind of recognizing acceptance of who she is, that allows her to have her powers without them kind of being the dangerous thing that they were thought to be. Right. And then we get this nice resolution where you get... it's not an ice castle, all alone. It's love and the open gates of Arendelle.
Matthew Croasmun: So what's so striking is, and I think you slightly alluded to this already, is that our culture seems to completely miss this, right. The movie comes out and everybody's just belting out of the top of their lungs, "let it go!" Right. And without any sense that that is only the sort of like half-truth, or that that is the over-correction.
That becomes, actually, the sort of takeaway of the movie, is just be yourself, other people be damned, just realize your most authentic self. And that's really, really telling. If you're right about what's actually happening in the movie then it's really, really notable to say that our culture broadly just misses it completely.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I worried about that. And my poor daughter has gotten like a concerted indoctrination campaign never to interpret Frozen in that way.
Matthew Croasmun: So your daughter is not allowed to just watch movies as they are. She needs to also conceptualize on the right sorts of ways, right.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Maybe.
Matthew Croasmun: Yeah, I wonder also if there isn't something here, actually, in the history of where this film comes from, right?
In certain ways, Frozen is like the animated version of Wicked. Right. Which is to say it's another... it stands in a sort of venerable line of sort of post-modern reinterpretations of classic moralistic fables in ways that actually celebrate the villain, right? This is supposed to be, this is supposed to be the ice queen, snow queen.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And Elsa was going to be the villain and the original version of the script.
Matthew Croasmun: Exactly.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And it was precisely writing Let It Go... and the creative team, if I got the story right, seeing just how amazingly humanizing Let It Go was, that they're like, no, this can't, she can't be the villain.
Matthew Croasmun: They can't let her be, can't let her be the villain. That actually reminds me of a sort of Nietzschean impulse here. Right. Which is to see the funda- that the moral frame itself is problematic in its sort of repressing the life of the human being. Right. He's trying to like accomplish something, really do something in the world. Elsa was like... Elsa is expressing her will to power in a way that like she never has been able to before, and it's because she got re... Because it is that " No wrong. No right," right. She's been able to get beyond the moral. She's been able to get beyond good and evil. And in fact, that's what the writers have done. They have pushed beyond good and evil in order to recover this sort of expressive individualist hero.
And then it's striking that the expressive individualist hero, one sort of sub-genre of the expressive individualist hero is precisely the recovered pre-modern anti-hero, or, right, so moralist anti-hero, or moralist, rather, villain.
Disney's "Frozen": So how exactly are you planning to stop this weather?
Oh, I am going to talk to my sister.
That's your plan?
Yep.
So you're not at all afraid of her.
Why would I be?
Yeah, I bet she's the nicest, gentlest, warmest person ever. Oh, look at that. I've been impaled.
Matthew Croasmun: All right. So Ryan, if I'm getting you right, if we read Frozen in the very subtle, and, I think we'd have to say, if we take your sort of minority report on what Frozen means and we read against the sort of Let It Go being the anthem, we read against the impulses of our small children...
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Which is to say, if we read it right.
Matthew Croasmun: Oh, alright. Then we might be able to recover something here. I actually, I think you're maybe working harder than you need to, and instead you might be able to just turn to a different, and I think superior, film from this genre, which would be Moana.
Disney's "Moana": Moana, make way! Make way! Moana, it's time you knew, the village of Motunui is all you need.
Matthew Croasmun: I think that in Moana, we actually see you bunch of the sort of concerns that Taylor raises, which I think, not all of them, I don't think, are solved even with your very subtle reading of Frozen. Right. Moana, just to set the scene, maybe a slightly less well-known film. But for Moana, you get... there are so many moments that are very, very similar, right. Moana is also a princess, as one has to be in these movies. But who's trying... but she's discovering her true self and she's discovering that her true self is in some substantial tension with the sort of established way of life of her people. And as a princess, she's supposed to be able to, you know, her responsibility is in fact, to champion that, precisely that way of life that she's finding herself at odds with.
But the crucial, I think the crucial difference to me with Moana, is that Moana is in fact... even as she's drawn out to the sea, right? This is the big problem. It is a Polynesian Island culture, and this is the culture that she's grown up in is all about the Island. Stay on the Island. Be on the Island. The Island gives us what we need is this sort of scene setting song.
Disney's "Moana": The island gives us what we need. That's right we stay. We're safe and were well-provided. And when we look to the future there you are. You'll be okay. In time you'll learn just as I did. You must find hapiness right where you are.
Matthew Croasmun: And yet Moana is struggling with this call of the ocean. But she only listens to that call after having discovered, before she leaves her Island, she discovered something about her people. It's not just about who she is as an individual. That is always going to be a problem for her relatedness to these people.
In fact, as it turns out, she discovers, "Oh. We were, we are Voyagers," right? There've been ships hidden away on this Island from generations before. We can worry about the cultural essentialism later. But, but the point is that there's an insight, and this in part comes from Moana's being drawn out to the sea. While it's puts her in conflict with her father, the chief, it puts her... draws her deeper and deeper into relationship with her grandmother.
Disney's "Moana": You are your father's daughter. Stubbornness and pride. Mind what he says, but remember, you may hear a voice inside. And if the voice starts to whisper to follow the farthest star, Moana that voice inside is who you are...
Matthew Croasmun: And for what it's worth, that sort of set of relationships I actually think is highly relatable. And when I think about our undergraduates, that's actually often what's happening, right? There's a substantial, sort of... there's a necessary adolescent sort of posture that's doing a sort of differentiation of the self away from the parents. But in this sort of postmodern ancient future sort of mode, that negotiation is often precisely through a recovery of the grandparents. Right? So if you dress looking like your... you know, mom jeans... I guess mom's jeans are back in now... but dressing like your parents...
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's because moms don't wear them anymore.
Matthew Croasmun: There you go. Right. Dressing like your parents is a bad thing. Dressing like your grandparents can sometimes be hip. Right.
Anyway, so she has this connection with grandma and it's because she's discovered Moana has discovered, we're Voyagers. And sure, there's that, there's still the I've been standing at the edge of the water...
Disney's "Moana": I've been staring at the edge of the water long as I can remember, never really knowing why.
Matthew Croasmun: How Far I'll Go, I guess, is the name is of the song, which is basically the Let It Go anthem for Moana
Disney's "Moana": I wish I could be the perfect daughter. But I come back to the water, no matter how hard I try.
Matthew Croasmun: And Moana's... the climax of the film ultimately for Moana, is just as it is... just as it might seem to be a sort of penultimate climax for Frozen, is a discovery for Moana, discovering who she is, but there's this moment where she says, and my daughter recognized it immediately, she knew what the moment was, she belted out of the top of her lungs, "I am Moana."
Be we only know what "I am Moana" means because she has already realized "we are voyagers." And that, I take it, is the instance of what Charles Taylor calls the horizon of significance. Right? So Taylor's very, very concerned. Taylor wants to celebrate this sort of particularity and the possibility that your own individual particularity could have moral significance. He's concerned that that not become a celebration of difference as such.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And I think also particularly importantly, that it not be a matter of choice, right? It's not like the arbitrary selection of what matters to me matters to me. Right. He uses this example, like, I can't just decide that squishing my toes in the mud is the most meaningful activity.
Matthew Croasmun: Or that the most meaningful thing about me is the number of hairs, is the particular number of hairs that I have.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You have to give some sort of account of why that matters. And what I think what I hear you saying is that Moana is able to give an account of why her call to the ocean matters. It matters because it's connected to the kind of history and vitality of her people.
Matthew Croasmun: Her particularity has a horizon of significance against which that difference becomes more than merely arbitrary, which I think gives you just a much, much richer sort of sense of how this actually gets worked out.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I dunno, one of my... I think I take your reading , I like what you're, what you're seeing there. One of my quibbles with Moana has to do with where... I find it's mythology of it a little bit under motivated as well. Why the people have to be Voyagers, right? Why does that matter anymore?
It all feels a little like this thing has happened elsewhere and they... I don't want to get into it...
Matthew Croasmun: Well, yeah. It's a sort of like origins-as-essence sort of fallacy, because this is what we once were this is essentially who we are.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And in the movie, right, the island stops giving them what they need, but it doesn't stop giving them what they need because, for example, the Island can only give them what they need if they continue to voyage and to kind of like send the population out so that they don't crash the economic... the kind of environmental system, right. The Island stopped giving them what they need, because Demi-god did something for some reason.
Matthew Croasmun: The heart of Tafiti has been, yeah, has been misplaced.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: There's a cool little thing there. It's great... trying to take the power of creation from nature and give it to humans... but it's all under-motivated.
Matthew Croasmun: Look at the end of the day, though, at least we have a cosmology, right? With Moana, which I think is another sort of point to mention here, which I think is... you know, putting our hats back on as Christian theologians, not just us as Disney critics...
I think for us as Christian theologians, it's significant that the horizon of significance can be supplied by precisely a cosmology, a sort of story of everything, right. In the Christian frame, this would be the story of creation, fall redemption, consummation. And I think that's just part of what's richer in Moana, I think just for me, points to the thought that even as we, as modern, post-modern, expressive individualists are trying to express our most authentic self, it can seem at first blush that divorcing ourselves from those meta narratives is precisely the way to capture our particularity. But in the end, I think the claim that we would make as Christian theologians is that in fact your own particularity is able to be most fully expressed and to have the most profound meaning that it can have if it's set against the sort of horizon of significance of, I think, the story of God and the people of God, or the story of God and all that is not God.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: This is the, kind of, the most striking difference between Moana and Frozen is that Moana starts with a grandmother giving kind of a cosmological myth.
And Frozen starts with, "Hmm. There's magic."
Matthew Croasmun: Right. So Elsa is able to like manipulate ice. Like why? What on earth is the significance of that? How is that not exactly what Taylor's saying and worried about in terms of just arbitrary difference?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. And I think this is the way a lot of us experience ourselves as merely given. Right. Just like a kind of a brute fact. I am this way. And Moana is trying to give some sort of big account of how that makes sense or matters.
Matthew Croasmun: So the final takeaway, then, I think even taking the two films together, might be a sort of lesson for us as people embedded in an expressive individualist you do you sort of culture, that in order to most fully actualize ourselves, even taking that which has given to us already, even taking that as a reasonable goal to pursue, we may be able to most powerfully do that precisely in dialogue with tradition that comes before us and stands outside of us and is able to...
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And makes claims about what matters apart from who we are and how we feel and what we want.
Matthew Croasmun: Such that our choices can actually... free as though we may want them to be... our choices can be free, but also meaningful.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I grant you, and you'll be happy to hear this, Frozen's kind of lack of a big story and that being a default when compared to Moana. But I think, I think the Christian big story is one that underwrites and at some level gives sense to the profound value of ordinary life. So when Frozen ends with basically a return to ordinary life and an integration of Elsa back into Arendelle, and things just seem like they're going to go on as they go on, right, there's no big change except now there's magic ice. I think that...
Matthew Croasmun: I find that deeply dissatisfying.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, I know. And I think if we're going to talk about everlasting life, like we might need to be able to see that as deeply good. I was just kind of like, given the ordinariness of createdness as a good.
Matthew Croasmun: So you'd say... you heard it here first... Ryan's vision of the consummated kingdom of God is just ordinary life with maybe a little bit of magic ice. Is that... Sorry, that's not fair, but my concern is normally I... whereas I am much happier, right, with the way that Moana ends, right, where the nature of life itself has been fundamentally transformed and the people are out with adventures... and we've talked about this sometimes before, you and I, that I am drawn more to the heroic life. You are drawn more to the sort of finding the dignity in ordinary life, but it is interesting that you suggest that the difference might be the way that we actually read the Christian big story.
Right? So for me, I have this place of sort of the role of the human being within the creation. Not necessarily as heroic, but the thought that like...wow... but the thought that we all just like finish and go back to... it's such an English idea. Such a, I don't know... back to Hobbiton, you know, or back to... is that the goal? Has Frodo had...
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It's a transfigured Hobbiton.
Matthew Croasmun: Yeah, maybe that's right.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And I'm not saying that...
Matthew Croasmun: and I want the transfig... I want to make sure the transfiguration is like that there is... the sort of... to be truly human is to be aiming at something which is like, sort of beyond the human. I want more than just ordinary life.
Evan Rosa: In ordinary life as we watch movies and TV, read books and hear stories, we often do so with our kids. How can we make more space for this kind of reading of culture? Even in the midst of enjoying art and culture, it can be enlightening and impactful to step back and see what these stories deep in our bones do to us, see how these stories charm and influence us in the context of seeking the life that is truly worthy of our humanity, worth waking up for, worth our effort, worth striving and trying, worth doing together, in short, seeking a life worth living.
Our theology must include these kinds of critical and constructive observations about the cultural movements and artifacts that we're so very attached to, including Disney films and the songs that end up stuck in your head for better or worse. That's what makes our work at YCFC important to us. So we close this conversation thinking about why this sort of thing is even worth doing.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So this was a lot of fun. I really like having these conversations and I could do it all day. But, you do have to ask the question of what... is there anything deeper to this than it being a humanizing example we can use in lecture or anything like that.
Matthew Croasmun: This is the heart of what we have to do as Christian theologians. Any sort of... if theology is, as we argue around here, about discerning, articulating, and commending visions of flourishing life, then to be a theologian involves necessarily being a careful reader of those visions that are already out there. Right. We, none of us are, are blank slates and we're not just asking in a vacuum, you know, what is it? What is a flourishing life? We're asked... we're constantly cross pressured by any number of cultural factors, and I think like in many ways, film is the most powerful medium these days in which we can really see what is the sort of vision of life that already has grabbed ahold of our hearts?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. So there's no constructing like a Christian horizon of significance in isolation from the sort of streams of meaning that we're already swimming in. Right. And, I don't know, I also have the sense that if we go out and look in these sort of ways, we can find things that can give us kind of new eyes to see Christian faith and can actually contribute constructively to our own visions of a good life.
Matthew Croasmun: Because at the end of the day, you do you may actually be a way of beginning to... thin way of finding our way into a thicker conversation about vocation, about what it is to be me as called by God and to put it in Kierkegaard terms like what is my eternal responsibility before God to live as an individual, that is to live as the individual whom God created.
As we read culture, maybe one of the most important things to do is precisely what Ryan you did early on in reading Frozen, which is to look for those moments in which we sort of can see, oh, that vision sort of has a pull on me. Conceal. Don't feel. They don't even have to tell... they don't even have to use a minor cord. They don't even have to tell me that that's the wrong way to go. I'd have a deep intuition, I think given to me by my culture, that's not quite right. We can be careful cultural readers that way. I think we can start to see the ways that our loves, our desires, our visions of the good have already been formed.
Evan Rosa: That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening friends. And if you're interested in conversations like this beyond the podcast, then we invite and encourage you to register for the Life Worth Living online course. You can do that by visiting gracefarms.org/life-worth-living. You can find that link in today's episode show notes, and please let us know what you think of the course. If you have any questions, you can email us at faith@yale.edu.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Matt Croasumn and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. I'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. We produce a new episode every Saturday and you can subscribe through any podcast app.
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