I love this show, I really do, but there’s some hella problematic things in it. Here's one example. Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods deals more explicitly with the wolf in Red Riding Hood being a metaphor for predatory sexual exploitation than most modern versions, and Johnny Depp made it even more creeptastic in the recent Disney version.
And it is so very, very clear, in "Hello, Little Girl," that Red doesn't want anything to do with the wolf.
She's pleasant enough when he first says hello, then he spends a song literally yanking her around to get her to pay attention to him, and telling her what she should be doing (that she doesn't want to do and is actively trying to get away from.) In the end, she smiles and says Okay! and picks some flowers that he showed her, at which point he stops hassling her. (And, of course, this shows why appeasing the creep is a dangerous course to take, because he uses her delay to go find her granny, eat her, and set up to eat Red Riding Hood too.)
Here's the video so you can watch the whole creeptastic scene:
So far, it's not problematic at all. The wolf is a creep, and everyone knows it. Yay!
Here's the problem. Later on, when Red describes the whole thing to the Baker in “I Know Things Now,” she describes the wolf like this: “But he seemed so nice.”
I ask you, did the wolf seem “nice”? NO. He was not nice. He was, in fact, the creepiest creep to ever creep. And she knew it! She didn’t like his attention, she didn’t want his attention, she spends the entire song trying to get away from his attention! But a man is giving attention to a girl, she should be pleased, right? He's trying to give her things--flowers even--so she should appreciate it, right? The only way the wolf is "nice" is if you assume that any male attention to a female automatically is "nice" regardless of what kind of attention or whether she wants it or not.
But it's actually worse than that. Here's some context to that line: "Mother said straight ahead not to delay or be misled I should have heeded her advice but he seemed so nice.”
She tried to do the right thing. She did everything she possibly could to do what her mother told her and keep the wolf from misleading her. And now she’s blaming herself for the fact that he literally yanked her off the path. And the show just kind of accepts this version, in which Red bears some of the blame for the wolf's "seduction" of her. When, really, no, that's not what happened at all.
There’s actually some good and empowering stuff in the song, too, and I love it, but at the same time, eeeep!
If it actually reflected what had happened--if the wolf had been ambiguous and kinda nice, if Red had responded to him and chosen to go off the path with him, it would be a great song. As it is, it's pretty failtastic.
I'm confused about what's problematic with this, since the wolf is a villain who gets defeated? The fairytale has always been about rape. I feel like there isn't an inherent evil in portraying something, if the entire point of it is that it's not a good thing.
The first scene by itself doesn't buy into rape culture. The creep is shown to be a creep.
But that's not the way the story is retold. That's not the moral--that a creep is going to be a creep. Her first instincts are ignored. He wasn't a creep, he was a nice, exciting guy who turned out to be evil! Like, yeah, he's the villain, but at the same time it's like we're supposed to think that he was nice to start with. He never was! And Red certainly never saw him as nice. But she talks about him as if he was. It's like, okay, the show takes the first step and admits he's a creep. Good. But at the same time, they undercut that by how Red talks about him. He's nice! He's exciting! No, he's not, but that's what creepy dudes want you to think they are. It very heavily romanticizes things after the fact.
And I have been fighting with the HTML on the post trying to put it behind a cut and it has borked itself in so many different ways I am GIVING UP.
I edited my post on tumblr to make my point clearer, but since I've spent like half an hour fighting with the html and saving and editing and saving this post on DW, I'm just going to post the change in a comment here:
She tried to do the right thing. She did everything she possibly could to do what her mother told her and keep the wolf from mislaying her. And now she’s blaming herself for the fact that he literally yanked her off the path. And that’s part of the moral of the song. The fact that he was a creep from the beginning is ignored, and he retroactively becomes “nice” and “exciting” and Red should have been able to see past that to protect herself. But she always did. Her judgment was spot-on. That was never the problem. The problem was the wolf being bigger and stronger and in her way. And, you know, it’s great that she learned from the experience, and it’s great that surviving it has given her strength, but you know what would be even better? If she wasn’t blamed for it in the first place!
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Date: 2015-03-14 01:01 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-03-14 01:11 am (UTC)From:But that's not the way the story is retold. That's not the moral--that a creep is going to be a creep. Her first instincts are ignored. He wasn't a creep, he was a nice, exciting guy who turned out to be evil! Like, yeah, he's the villain, but at the same time it's like we're supposed to think that he was nice to start with. He never was! And Red certainly never saw him as nice. But she talks about him as if he was. It's like, okay, the show takes the first step and admits he's a creep. Good. But at the same time, they undercut that by how Red talks about him. He's nice! He's exciting! No, he's not, but that's what creepy dudes want you to think they are. It very heavily romanticizes things after the fact.
And I have been fighting with the HTML on the post trying to put it behind a cut and it has borked itself in so many different ways I am GIVING UP.
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Date: 2015-03-14 01:20 am (UTC)From:She tried to do the right thing. She did everything she possibly could to do what her mother told her and keep the wolf from mislaying her. And now she’s blaming herself for the fact that he literally yanked her off the path. And that’s part of the moral of the song. The fact that he was a creep from the beginning is ignored, and he retroactively becomes “nice” and “exciting” and Red should have been able to see past that to protect herself. But she always did. Her judgment was spot-on. That was never the problem. The problem was the wolf being bigger and stronger and in her way. And, you know, it’s great that she learned from the experience, and it’s great that surviving it has given her strength, but you know what would be even better? If she wasn’t blamed for it in the first place!