Frozen - "Let it go"; or, The Perils of Purely Individualistic Freedom

To begin with, I’ll admit that there was a lot of cultural overexposure to Frozen and “Let it go” in particular (and apparently “Do you want to build a snowman?” whenever it was snowing), so I can imagine it can be difficult to separate the song from all of that. It must be even more difficult to do so given that most of the attention that the song has received and most of the ways it has been understood are largely misguided or at that very least incomplete, and that not enough attention has been paid to how the song’s message fits into the movie as a whole. That being said, I think that Disney’s Frozen is a great movie in general and that it possesses a great speculative truth that is worth examining. 

(I include a link because, while I doubt there are many people left who aren't familiar with this song, it will be worthwhile to review it as we go since, as Hegel says, what is familiar and well-known is often not well known precisely because it is familiar.)

Ok, by far the most common way of treating the song is as an anthem of liberation. In a sense this is correct: in the movie it does represent Elsa’s liberation from the deeply repressive circumstances in which she was living (and to which she was resigned), as well as the liberation of her powers and her own self-identity from those circumstances. But the fact remains that Elsa is only partially (or perhaps only outwardly) free from these things: Elsa is not really socially free insofar as she is still forced to avoid all contact with people, including those she loves; she is not really free to exercise her powers as she doesn’t really have control over them; and she is not really free to be who she wants to be insofar as she is still ruled by fear and doubt. This is the reason why “Let it go” actually comes quite early in the film, basically capping the first act (the second act is probably the adventure to get to Elsa’s castle and the rest is the third act) by encapsulating all of the problems/issues Elsa and Anna will have to overcome in order to be really free. It is easy to miss all of these things—and miss how the song plays into them—however, because of how rousing and powerful the song is. (The impressiveness of the accompanying visuals also contribute, although as we shall see even they don’t send as clear-cut a message as they might seem to.) 

So to begin, “Let it go” is an anthem of liberation, but it is an incomplete or at least largely negative form of freedom, and the way that this form of freedom is valorized misses what is problematic about it and what is precisely at issue in Frozen as whole. The first part of the song is fairly straightforward in presenting the initial liberation going here: Elsa goes over the details of her emotional struggle to repress her feelings and hide her powers for the sake of everyone else, and the newfound sense of release that has come from letting all of that go. This is a positive development compared to the emotional catatonia Elsa has been shown suffering from (particularly the scene of Elsa at the end of “Do you want to build a snowman?” which is completely brutal). But the next part of the song is where the limits of Elsa’s freedom become clear:

It's funny how some distance makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all
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

It is fitting that this part of the song introduces some up-tempo strings since, as the lyrics make clear, it is all about the self-affirmation that comes after getting free from the hold of external pressures and expectations. But the fact that Elsa’s newfound freedom leads her to recognize “No right, no wrong, no rules for me” means that this freedom and self-affirmation are also dangerously ungrounded. 

The visuals during this part represent this very clearly: as Elsa comes up to an enormous chasm in the mountains she uses her powers to create a stairway of ice across it. Significantly, the bridge doesn’t initially span the chasm, it only extends a little ways over it, and only goes further as Elsa crosses it. I think that this image speaks to the seemingly ungrounded or boot-strapping quality of freedom when viewed in purely individual terms. Elsa’s freedom is a precarious achievement hovering over the abyss: unchecked by and indeed unrelated to anything outside of the self, is likely to end up being at best merely empty, and at worst self-destructive. What follows this song bears witness to this—the emptiness and sterility of Elsa’s ice palace reflects the quality of her life totally on her own, and the events that follow Anna’s encounter with her shows its self- (and other-) destructiveness.

We can also include Elsa’s striking costume change in this category of telling images: the dramatic nature of the change along with its placement at the end of the song, gives the impression that Elsa’s transformation is complete. However, the ease and speed (and, perhaps too obviously, the sheer externality) of this transformation speak to its superficiality—changing what’s outside may be important, but its not nearly as difficult or as important as changing what’s inside. That this is the case here is particularly obvious given the extent to which it sexualizes a character whose emotional development is way too stunted to really have any sexual component. The ending of the movie—affirming the liberating and positive power of sisterly love rather than focusing on the romantic—confirms that Elsa is still at the beginning of her development arc during “Let it go.” The rest of Elsa’s development in the movie will be learning that freedom does not come from separating herself from everyone (and from her own feelings), but from learning to live with them and with herself, i.e., love. That is something she can only do by not just letting go of her fears (because they will come back) but by working through them.

Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #4: Madonna--"Papa Don't Preach"

Now we're talking unintended pregnancies with Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach"!

As with Ace of Base's "All That She Wants," I guess there could be some potential ambiguity about the "baby" she's worried about (I've had discussions of this song with people who didn't think it was about a pregnancy), but it seems pretty clear to me that the baby in question is an as yet unborn child, not her lover (although keeping the former is tied up with the latter).

Now some “technical” details. As far as "unintended pregnancies" go, this one was definitely unintended by both parties given that the speaker/singer is clearly young enough to still need to clear this with her father and not just as a kind of formality—clearly much depends upon his blessing (plus her friends tell her she’s too young and that she ought to give it up). Maybe unwanted is a little strong given how she has (apparently) decided to “keep [her] baby,” but given the issue of age in the song, the “unexpected and unprepared for” side of “unintended” is definitely there.

The interesting twist on the “genre” that this song presents is that, rather than working from a perspective divorced from the pregnancy itself--either forecasting it like Ace of Base or looking back on it like Heart, this song's perspective is planted firmly in the middle of the pregnancy. It is less a warning or a story as it is a plea understanding and approval, and the combination of “Papa” and “preach” here highlights the religious (read: Catholic) background to it. This background also leads me to assume that the alternative to "keeping the baby" is giving it up for adoption, but it doesn't explicitly rule out abortion so there's something to chew on next time you hear it.

Lastly, the bassline running through the song has some serious groove to it.

Cold War Kids - "First"

Ok, so speaking about the difficulty of changing oneself and all of the factors outside of our conscious control in the previous post leads me to the next song I want to discuss, “First” by the Cold War Kids. (I specifically write “conscious control” in order to indicate that not everything that poses such a problem is outside of ourselves—at least not as long as what counts as ourselves is fairly broadly construed a la what Daniel Dennett captures with the ironic statement “If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything” and his endorsement of its opposite, “You’d be surprised how much you can internalize, if you make yourself large.”)

Anyway, the general theme of the song is expressed in the chorus:

First you get hurt, then you feel sorry.

Flying like a cannonball, falling to the earth
Heavy as a feather, when you hit the dirt
How am I the lucky one?
I did not deserve

To wait around forever, when you were there first.

First you get hurt, then you feel sorry.

Structure-wise it’s a little ambiguous whether the “First you get hurt, then you feel sorry” (and its variations like “First you lose trust, then you get worried,” and “First you get close, then you get worried”) belong to the chorus or not, but they certainly do thematically. Just as the “First….then….” clause denotes a sequence governed by cause and effect, the images of falling objects (cannonballs and feathers) likewise indicate a kind of mechanistic trajectory. The idea is that there can be a certain kind of causal determinism to our emotional lives that can be incredibly difficult to escape from once it starts. That is, I think, the tragedy of “first,” not just in the sense of the “First…then….” where once it starts you can’t stop it, but also what it is like”To wait around forever, when you were there first.” Being first is also a mark of the dyssynchrony that comes from such a lack of control over’s ones emotional life: there is always the possibility that one person is lost to the other in being swept up and away.

Indeed, the first lines of the song outline just such a situation and the powerlessness of ours attempts to do something about it: “Cheated and lied, broken so bad / you made a vow, never get mad.” While the song doesn’t indicate who cheated and lied, whether it is the “you” who everything happens to or the person they are in love with, I’m not sure if that matters. After all, the important thing is that the situation is one of broken trust, and the implications of that inevitably weigh upon cheater and cheated upon in ways that neither can necessarily control or repair, no matter how much they would like to. In fact, the whole drama of the song is focused on how broken trust has a causal power of its own above and beyond what we might try to do about it (“You made a vow, never get mad”—we shall see that this vow won’t hold up). The rest of the first verse details some of the self-destructive ways that we react to this kind of betrayal: cynical rationalization (“You play the game, though its unfair. / They’re all the same, who can compare?”); and being driven to distraction/forgetfulness/oblivion (“Night after night, Bar after club, / Dropping like flies, who woke you up / On the front lawn, sprinklers turned on / it’s not your house, where’d you go wrong?”). It is this aspect of the song that ties into my previous post about choosing what to worship. At issue here is the impossibility (or at least difficulty) of choosing to trust—you can go through all of motions and want it ever so badly without ever being able to bring yourself to it, or without being able to resist the force of mistrust.

After the chorus we get a short section that just confirms the seeming irreversibility of the course of the broken relationship in the very attempt to repair it through forgiveness, attempting to begin again by rewriting the old problems as a “dark night of the soul”:

There comes a time, in a short life
Turn it around, get a rewrite
Call it a dark night of the soul
Ticking of clocks, gravity’s pull
First you get close, then you get worried

What interests me is the alignment of the “dark night of the soul” with the “Ticking of clocks, gravity’s pull.” As the embodiment of time and space, the latter are the embodiment of the mechanism and determinism already suggested by the cannonball and the feather—we’re talking about a kind of psychological law of gravity here. (Incidentally, I wonder if the pairing of cannonball and feather is meant to hearken to Galileo’s famous contention that a cannonball and a feather would both fall at the same rate in a vacuum—or maybe its just that we are unstoppable in our falling, but then unlikely to just remain where we fall.)