Utopia, dystopia, and cultural controversy in 'Ever After' and 'The Grimm Brothers' Snow White'

Two film retellings of fairy tales from the 1990s exemplify how familiar fairy tales can be reshaped to address major cultural preoccupations. On the one hand, the utopian narrative 'Ever After' affirms neohumanistic values such as deep memory, knowable origins, and teleology in narrative and culture. In contrast, 'The Grimm Brothers' Snow White' is postmodernist and dystopian, hybridizing apocalyptic and Gothic narrative structures and themes, and drawing on modern phenomena such as 'the beauty myth,' to present characters playing out an old story to an outcome which resists both teleology and closure.13 page(s