Some thoughts on modern fairy tales

The history of fairy tales helps understand the sometimes disturbing elements in several of the films made by children in Rio de Janeiro.  We might be tempted to see it as a result of the violence around them (and in some cases, it clearly is: Kevin's story that the Barata Yazmin lives in a dark place full of bullets), but when we look at the way that fairy tales developed at the end of the middle ages, we see that the brutality and yuckiness we see in many of these films only expresses a post-modern version of a much older tradition.

Robert Darnton, for instance, traces the history of the redaction of Little Red Riding Hood, which in the earliest written forms we have (from the folklorist Perrault in the 17th century) was a deeply disturbing and nihilist tragedy.  When the girl (no red riding hood is mentioned) arrives at her grandmother's house, the wolf demands that she take off all of her clothes, burn them in the fire, and then climb naked into be with him before he devours her.  Darnton criticizes Bettleheim's famous interpretation that the story contains hidden symbols of sexuality, insisting that people of the late middle ages had no hang ups to force them to express lessons about sex in code.  They could do it in plain language.  Nor is there a woodsman to cut her from the wolf's belly at the end of the story; that was an addition made by the Brother's Grimm much later, adding an unrelated German fairy tale.

When Beatriz tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood in The Incredible Story of Granny and the Big Bad Wolf, she hews closely to the orthodox version until the end, when she cuts the added-on story of the woodsman.  In fact, her "erroneous" reading of the text is more honest to the original than the pablum added by the Brother's Grimm to make a disturbing story more palatable to the nascent bourgeoisie.  One of Liberation Theology's most interesting insights about hermeneutics was that the poor, more similar to the original writers and readers of the Bible, had a certain epistemological privilege in reading and interpreting the Bible.  One might ask if the same is not true of kids from the favela reading old fairy tales.  Their lives are much closer to the abject poverty and stateless violence that characterized the late middle ages than is the life of any middle class intellectual.

It's worth while looking carefully at the way Beatriz concludes the story, the joy with which she presents the tragedy.  Her faked scream and quick exit from the camera may show more about medieval and favela subjectivity than hundreds of anthropological essays:


I'll add to these reflections soon, thinking through the other movies made by the pre-school kids in Rio de Janeiro.