once you pop, you can’t stop

Yesterday my kids and I watched Frozen as a low-effort celebration of the solstice. The movie has a special place in my daughter’s heart. The solstice has a special place in mine. We made it to the darkest day of the year. The sun is on her way. Frozen is the first movie my daughter saw in the theater at the age of two. Anna and Elsa became her style icons for a few years after that. It was fun to listen to her gasp over all her favorite dresses and songs. There was one funny addition this year—a seething hatred of Hans was palpable.

If you didn’t have young children when the movie came out, Hans is the bad guy. Although you don’t know it for most of the movie. That’s a spoiler, but the movie is over a decade old now, so that’s on you. Hans comes to Arendelle (where Anna and Elsa live) from the Southern Isles where he shares reign with his 12 brothers. He seems like a real nice guy at first. He’s charming and chivalrous. He and Anna fall in love almost instantly, and they spend the evening dancing and singing together before he impulsively asks her to marry him, and she agrees. It’s too good to be true, girl.

Since our family has watched the movie a few times, we knew what was coming. Elsa is struggling under the pressure of being queen and Hans takes advantage of her emotional breakdown. He uses Anna to make a play for power over Arendelle. He sabotages the two sisters at every turn. He even attempts to murder his fiancé by freezing her to death. By the end, there is no question Hans is a bad guy, but you’d never know it at the start. My teenage daughter was onto him this time. She scoured Hans’ initial scenes for signs of the impending betrayal. When could Anna have known that he would screw her over? What was the red flag she missed? She was unsettled. There had to be some action or word choice, some way we could have helped Anna change her fate. Frustrated by the ambiguity of every one of his carefully written lines, she came up short. Hans was evidently a good guy until suddenly he wasn’t. My daughter saw that there was nothing Anna could have done to protect herself except live her life more guarded, more skeptical. Never trust anyone. Then revising to a more realistic: don’t agree to marry someone the day you meet them.

That’s what makes betrayal so painful, I think. It’s the cognitive blur between truth and lie. I knew you as you were before the betrayal, and I know you now after it. There are suddenly two versions of you. You can no longer know which one is the real one. I’ve been betrayed a few times in life. I get caught up, just like my daughter did, looking for the signs that I missed. When were they honest and when were they covering a secret? Which lies did I accept as truths? When did things change from authentic care to manipulation? Was any of it ever genuine? Is my whole life a lie? Am I a naive moron like Anna? Is that how everyone sees me? Am I going to freeze to death in defense of my sister? It’s enough to drive a person mad.

Anna doesn’t die though. Her sister’s love thaws her out. I love Disney for that. The boys aren’t involved in the rescue. It’s the ice queen’s emotional state that saves the day.

I felt for my daughter last night. She old enough now to pick up the more nuanced facets of storytelling. All the stuff you start paying attention to when the main plot line has been memorized. She was looking for the events that led up to disaster (presumably so she could spot a them in real life if a handsome prince shows up to sing with her) and she learned a hard lesson. Sometimes the bad guy isn’t a bad guy when he gets there. Sometimes the bad guy is just an opportunist. A storyline less splashy than the battle between good and evil, but a hell of a lot more common.