The Cinderella syndrome

2004.06.02 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Analysis | by Andrew Cole

There is a strange trend going on at the movies today. It's happened before: disaster films, monster movies, sword-and-sandal epics, body-switch flicks. But this time around it's all about becoming a princess.

Cinderella is a timeless fairy tale that deserves to be such. It teaches that any peasant girl can aspire to the very heights of success... becoming the wife of a successful man. That's not very politically correct, of course, but it was pretty heartening for a long time. That dream kind of died in the 1970s, when women decided that a royal consort wasn't really what they wanted to be. So why the resurgence?

Other trends in movies can be attributed to a simple formula: a new and innovative film hits the theaters and takes big grosses, then copycats and sequels follow, lacking in quality and quickly diluting the memory of the first. Trend dies; no one cares. After a decade or so, someone picks up the pieces and tries to revive it; now it's a "sub-genre."

Airport hit big in 1970 and was followed by sequels and and other disaster pictures, like Towering Inferno. But then it began to be parodied in Airplane and its sequels. And it continues to spawn copies (sorry: sub-genre movies) like Volcano and The Day After Tomorrow.

Jaws spawned lousy sequels and pathetic copycats like The Deep, Piranha and Killer Bees (and continues to inspire films like Deep Blue Sea).

Alien, oddly, was an update of the classic space monster story popular in the 1950s, making it a sub-genre, but which itself gave rise to Leviathan, DeepStar 6 and The Abyss as well as lackluster sequels.

Freaky Friday in 1976 gave birth to Vice Versa, and Like Father Like Son, and of course the 2003 remake of the original.

The concept isn't new, of course. In the 1920s and early 30s, gangster films became so popular that family advocate groups (AKA "busybodies") agitated in Hollywood against them. The Ten Commandments led a string of big-budget bible stories in the 1950s that included Bur-Hur and Masada... and a bunch of crappy hangers-on.

But where was the big hit that primed the industry for a series of lesser Cinderella clones? The Princess Diaries was successful, but successful enough for others to pile on? It's been followed now by What a Girl Wants, Ella Enchanted, The Prince and Me, and now The Princess Diaries 2 and A Cinderella Story. Good grief. How many princess stories can a 12-year-old girl need?

The Cinderella syndrome isn't limited to tweens, tho. In Love Actually, Hugh Grant plays the British prime minister who falls for his assistant, a rather Cinderellesque affair. And Meg Ryan's Kate & Leopold mined territory even closer to the Cinderella fable, since Hugh Jackman's Leopold was the Duke of New York or some-such.

In a similar vein, there have been several movies that exploited the popularity of Pretty Woman, a film inpired more by Shaw's Pygmalion (My Fair Lady) than by Cinderella. There are elements of the Pygmalion myth (the 'made' woman) in the tween stories too. It's the obligatory scenes in which the girl is trained to be a proper lady, then gets to shine in the role (Miss Congeniality, anyone?). The Cinderella story (the peasant-turned-princess) didn't have that; she just dressed up and went to the ball, then ran off again to her old life until the prince caught up with her.

Plum Sykes, author of Bergdorf Blondes, says:

Inside every American girl is a princess dying to get out.

Perhaps together, Pygmalion and Cinderella amount to a kind of archetypal empowerment myth for girls. They are taken out of their simple, drudgery-filled lives and educated in the ways of palace life. It's not exactly Joseph Campbell's hero myth, but perhaps it's good enough for twelve-year-old-girls.

I just wish twelve-year-old girls weren't so... anti-feminist.

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