I finally went to see
Brave. My expectations were
complex: I'd been salivating for Pixar's first female protagonist
since the film was called The Bear and the Bow,
but the criticism had been mixed.
Some praised the movie for its heroine's nonconformity to traditional
princess behavior; others critiqued the same thing as further
denigration of conventional femininity. It's the same old same old
that you get every time there's a Lone
Female: she has to be all things to all people, and is doomed to
failure from the start.
(Easy
solution: have more than one female character.)
Initially
I hoped to love the film. Then I realized that, with a hope this
strong, disappointment was inevitable. Then I began to think that
expecting disappointment might result in satisfaction after all.
(This is why you shouldn't think too hard about these things.) I
hoped that Pixar's
first female protagonist would be awesome; I expected to
be disappointed.
What
I did not expect was
that this would turn out not to be Pixar's first female protagonist
at all.
On
my reading, Merida is a boy. This film is about a trans boy and his
relationship with his mother.
Every
use of the word “princess” makes Merida cringe. Why? Because he
is a prince. The
threat of betrothal sends Merida into a flat panic. Why? Because
marriage codifies the enforcement of compulsory cissexuality and
heterosexuality.
Merida
has no real role model of masculinity. Although his father jokes with
him about the useless suitors, and provides him with the bow he longs
for (which becomes, along with his gorgeous mess of unruly hair, a
totem of his freedom and his true identity unencumbered by the
pressures of coercive gender assignment), ultimately the king, like
all the other male characters, is a figure of comical ineptitude.
Queen Elinor is the primary figure shaping Merida's life, both
because of her general competence and because Merida is the
first-born (and the only AFAB) child.
Thus
Merida's mother is the focus of all his fears and anger. After all,
his father is surely just as responsible for the insistence on
marriage, but the queen alone draws Merida's rage. She is both the
person he wants to be (competent, in control, confident in her
identity) and a person he would rather die than become (a woman).
Merida
externalizes his desire for the world to see him differently, and
projects it onto his mother. Thanks to his actions, his mother and
brothers are all physically changed, forced to undergo the trans*
experience of being seen by the world as something different than
what you truly are. It is this profoundly painful experience of
dysphoria – and the fear of becoming something you know you are
not, simply because of how you look to those around you – that
finally causes Queen Elinor to understand her oldest child's
perspective, and to grant him the freedom to break with tradition and
be who he truly is.
There
is a constant thematic drumbeat throughout this film of fate and how
it can be changed. Fate be changed: look inside...
It reminds me irresistibly of the feminist mantra: biology is not
destiny. Merida does not have to
be the princess he was assigned to be at birth; it will take a lot of
courage to defy traditional, societal, and familial expectations, but
he is brave enough to
do it.
I
need this reading. I need this reading because there are no
mainstream pop-culture narratives of how to be a trans*masculine
person without
a femme sister, of how to be a trans*masculine person relating to
the mother who loves you but wants you to be her daughter. (Of
course, I'm not sure what this narrative has to offer in terms of
practical advice. How do you de-allegorize turning your mother into a
bear?)
