Jordan Peterson

Part 1: WTF Did Jordan Peterson Say?

For those unfamiliar with him, Jordan Peterson is a Canadian professor who’s attracted internet fame in recent years for being one of the rare few academics who isn’t a far-left Marxist. He’s also attracted internet hate during that time for…being one of the rare few academics who isn’t a far-left Marxist.



Recently, Peterson was featured in a Time Magazine interview, wherein he not only promoted his new book, 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos, but also argued, much to the article’s title, that “Frozen Is Propaganda, But Sleeping Beauty Is Genius.”



Why does Mr. Peterson believe Sleeping Beauty rules but Frozen drools? Good luck figuring that out! Nowhere in his interview does he elaborate on these points or explain why he believes them to be true.



Mr. Peterson starts by asserting that Frozen was “deeply propagandistic”, so much so that when he initially watched it in theaters, he “could hardly sit through [it].”



“There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge,” he said. “It was the subjugation of art to propaganda.”



When the interviewer asked him why he didn’t simply consider the movie “a lovely story about sisterhood” like most every other moviegoer did, he replied that “you don’t spend tens of millions of dollars on a carefully crafted narrative that’s just a lovely story.”



Why doesn’t he feel the same way about other Disney movies like Sleeping Beauty or Little Mermaid? Because those movies were “based on folktales that…have been traced back 13,000 years.”



So why is Frozen “propaganda” but other fairy tales aren’t? Because unlike “new” stories like Frozen, those stories weren’t written “for political reasons.”

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Setting aside the fact that Frozen was based on The Snow Queen, which, like The Little Mermaid, was a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Anderson, what’s even more ironic is his notion that other fairy tales don’t count as “propaganda” because they’re hundreds upon thousands of years old, when their original intent was to serve as propaganda.



Folklore like fairy tales, by their very nature, are designed to impart its readers and listeners, especially young children, with important morals and values. That makes them propaganda, though not necessarily in the “political” sense.



That’s not a bad thing. In fact, that these fairy tales continue to be told and re-told for hundreds upon thousands of years prove that their morals remain ever relevant even today.



However, even some of the classic fairy tales contain tropes that don’t necessarily hold up in modern times. Such tropes include “love at first sight”, where two people fall in love with each other one fateful evening and decide to get married the very next day.



Most modern adaptations try to address these tropes either by removing them entirely or re-writing them to make them more palatable for a modern audience.



In the case of “love at first sight”, Disney has been doing a great job trying to alleviate this trope in their most recent movies by having it so that their male and female leads either don’t fall in love right away (Tangled) or don’t fall in love at all (Moana).



Frozen especially tackles this trope head on by having characters routinely comment how unrealistic and utterly ridiculous it is for Anna to want to marry someone she just recently met.



Sometimes the best way to address such a problematic trope is to subvert it. Most people would seem to agree, but apparently not Mr. Peterson.



In fact, his biggest gripe with Frozen is how it allegedly subverts such classic stories: “It attempted to write a modern fable that was a counter-narrative to a classic story like, let’s say, Sleeping Beauty — but with no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics.”



Now why is subverting a story like Sleeping Beauty a bad thing? Mr. Peterson explains as much as he explains why Frozen’s “deeply propagandistic” and why its “moral message” is so offensive? Which is to say that he doesn’t explain at all.

Know Your Meme

In fact, his entire interview involve him making several disparate points without properly elaborating on any of them. What results is a 600-word incoherent mess that fails to make a clear point and thus doesn’t make any sense at all.



Seriously, I read and re-read this article several times over and over and I still don’t have the single foggiest clue what in Disney’s holy name Mr. Peterson was blabbering on about.



One moment, he’s talking about how good movies “provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes” (though why this doesn’t apply to Frozen is anyone’s guess). The next moment he’s complaining about how Hans was a bad villain because “there was no indication” of him being one at the beginning.



Honestly, with such an incoherent mess to deal with, it’s no wonder that most people on the internet have simply resorted to pointing and laughing at the “World’s Worst Analysis of Frozen.”



The simplest rebuttal would be to play that one clip from Billy Madison: “What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought.”



But I don’t want to take the easy way out. I actually want to give his argument the shadow of a doubt by giving it a proper rebuttal.



However, to do that, I’m going to have to learn what exactly about Sleeping Beauty he likes and what about Frozen he doesn’t.



Unfortunately, he doesn’t elaborate on either of these points within his interview. But he does in his book…