When I went down the Tiptoes rabbit hole of “how the fuck did this happen in 2003” the Dinklage quotes I found were running along the lines of “I got to work with Gary Oldman, I didn’t care about the script.” Which the obsessive movie nerd in me 100% respects.
But it also points to whatever clusterfuck that Disney is going do in relation to a live action Snow White is going to do the same thing. It will move forward because no matter what Disney decides, there will be people who will say “I get to work with Disney, I don’t care about the script.”
And that’s thing, if you’re doing a live action remake of Snow White, it’s very nature makes it an exploitation movie. Not realizing that and stumbling ahead is one problem for Disney. The other is going to be focus grouping it to death and presenting the image of “we did our best to make sure there was nothing offensive.” Disney is never going to be honest about the exploitation aspects of a live action remake, when have they ever been honest about stuff like this. So any attempt they make will be fundamentally dishonest. Go watch Steamboat Willie and try to tell me with a straight face that their corporate mascot, Mickey Mouse didn’t start as an animated minstrel show.
And before I rant to much about this, just listen to the You Must Remember This series on Song of the South. Karina Longworth does a much better job of laying out what a trash ass company Disney is then I ever could.
And now that I’m actually ready to send this comment I see that we are all kind of in agreement about this, but I’m going to hit send anyway because you should all listen to the You Must Remember This series, and fuck Disney.
Fantasy dwarves are not the same thing as human dwarves, regardless of who gets hired to play them. The issue with Snow White is the non-consensual sexual assault played off as fine and good.
People who have anchondronplasia disagree with you, as people have said in this thread over and over again. Peter Dinklage, who is directly impacted by the bigotry that can be ginned up by such negative depictions (which if you’d actually read any of the things he’s said about this, does not include NOT having mythical dwarves depicted at all, but having less stereotypical, bigoted and more humane depictions of them), might know a thing or two about it, given that he’s an actor who has both played those sorts of stereotypical roles AND many other roles that are not such.
Norse mythology does associate the mythical race of dwarves with metalsmithing, which is at least related to mining… but those early Norse sources make no mention of dwarves being short. On the contrary, the Prose Edda says that four dwarves (whose names were the Old Norse words for North, South, East and West) hold up the sky. So the Norse people probably weren’t picturing anyone resembling the seven guys who Snow White moved in with.
Right? And it’s not the kind of depiction that Dinklage was even talking about, obviously, if people would bother to actual read what the man said here and what he has said over the years on this issue!
Tolkien, who has more to do with our modern idea of fantasy dwarves than anyone, deeply disliked Disney’s take on them in Snow White as frivolous and inaccurate. People are mentioning them as if they were some fixed tradition but we update and change our stories all the time.
“Inaccurate” is a kind of funny criticism given the subject matter (it’s like saying “that’s not what dragons look like!”) but it definitely does underline how our mythologies are constantly being revised and remixed.
I suspect that if you compared various depictions of dwarves in mythology prior to Tolkein they’d all be vastly different. I suspect that most of us have the post-Tolkein version in our heads by default, given how influential that’s been in shaping modern fantasy (at least euro-centric fantasy).
But yeah, that’s a major point that some seem to be missing…
Except he wasn’t an unknown starving for roles when he made Prince Caspian. Looking at IMDB, he’d not only been a Sundance star by then, he had a serious recurring part on Nip/Tuck, played himself on Entourage, and been cast as Liz Lemon’s boyfriend on 30 Rock, among many others.
The 19th century is when it ended. The depictions go back as far as the Merovingian era, as Alberich the Smith was originally recorded as a story from the Alps. See also legends of the Gnomes of Zurich.
But this is still a sidetrack from the main issue, that Disney is trying to claim canon over what dwarfs are. There simply are too many roots to the tales.
If they had a number of little people attached to the project already, they could defend the film against Dinklage. But they don’t, so I might as well assume that the film is indefensible.
I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Just because he achieved any measure of success doesn’t mean he didn’t have significant difficulties getting there. It’s hard for any actor to “make it,” and those who don’t fit the Hollywood ideal of beauty/marketability have an even rougher time of it. Many actors have complained about their ethnicity or physical characteristics getting them typecast to the point where every role they’re offered is essentially the same thing, over and over again.
