You could almost read Andersen’s story as a demented romantic comedy. While a typical rom-com puts its heroine through a gauntlet of public embarrassments before finally giving them their reward—true love—The Little Mermaid replaces embarrassment with actual pain. In Andersen’s version, the mermaid is a girl of 15 (most of Coppola’s heroines are adolescent girls) who willingly suffers many painful rites of passage for the chance to be with the prince she has fallen for. A sea witch cuts out “her little tongue” as payment for the potion that will turn her human. After she gets her wish, she remains in constant pain, with each step on her new legs feeling like “treading upon sharp knives.”

None of these pains, however, compare though to the one that accompanies her transformation. As the witch closes the deal for which the mermaid gives up her voice, she explains to her what will happen after she drinks the potion:

Your tail will then disappear, and shrink up into what mankind calls legs, and you will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you. But all who see you will say that you are the prettiest little human being they ever saw. You will still have the same floating gracefulness of movement, and no dancer will ever tread so lightly; but at every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow. If you will bear all this, I will help you.

The language Andersen is using here seems vaguely sexual. To accompany the mermaid’s transformation, the phallic “sword” must pass through her and cause her pain, so that “the blood must flow.” Andersen is depicting a girl’s transformation into a woman, but it involves a horrible ordeal and lasting pain. The mermaid will be beautiful by man’s standards, but she will have no voice and be in constant discomfort. For every woman who has worn a corset or six-inch heels, or had plastic surgery, this trade-off may sound achingly familiar, and it applies in particular to some of Coppola’s heroines. Marie Antoinette and Charlotte from Lost in Translation suffered not pain but ennui (the upper-class version of pain) from being objectified—and they also essentially had their voices muted.

Why do women suffer in this way? In the mermaid’s case, it’s not just for the prince; he is really just a front for her deeper fears and desires. It’s only when the mermaid learns that humans have eternal souls (while mermaids have no afterlife) that she decides to transform. An old woman tells her that her death will be permanent unless “a man were to love you so much that you were more to him than his father or mother, and if all his thoughts and all his love were fixed upon you, and the priest placed his right hand in yours, and he promised to be true to you here and hereafter.” In this world, romantic love is a virtue powerful enough to stave off one’s own mortality.