Much ado about the swan that didn't die
posted 1-15-2009 - 6:30 am

I hate artistic revisionism. At least in ballet. And I blame the post-Walt-Disney Disney Company for it.

What started this rant, you ask? I attended a performance last Sunday of the Russian National Ballet Theater, and they performed Swan Lake. Theirs is a relatively new company, having been founded during the late 1980s, and, by the caliber of dancing that I saw, clearly second tier: fine, but certainly no threat to either the Bolshoi or the Kirov. I wouldn't put them on the same level as the New York City Ballet or the American Ballet Theater, either, but those two are also world class, so no surprise there. But I love Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky's score, so I really didn't mind.

Despite some lack of precision now and then among the corps de ballet, I was enjoying the production, for the most part. Particularly the performance of the prima ballerina portraying Odette/Odile, whose performance was clearly on a higher level than the rest of the company but whose name I don't know because the program listed four names for that role (this is a traveling company, and this role is obviously rotated, as are several others). In fact, I eagerly anticipated watching that particular Odette do the dying swan scene.

Now, if you've never seen Swan Lake, you may or may not know that there's a famous scene near the end where the heroine dies brokenhearted because her lover the prince has been duped by a double and has proposed to the impostor instead, thus dooming the heroine to be a swan forever — whereas staying true to Odette would have freed her from a sorcerer's curse and let the lovers unite. Having been betrayed, she kills herself as the evening reaches midnight, living only long enough for the grieving prince to scoop her up in his arms as she dies.

If you're a professional ballerina, it's a big deal to dance the lead in Swan Lake and an even bigger deal to do the dying swan scene. Reputations have been gained or lost based on the performance of the dying swan scene. It's really a measure of a ballerina's acting as well as her dancing skills and body language. The dying swan is a killer role (forgive the pun) for a prima ballerina, just as much as playing Juliet is for an actress.

So you can imagine my shock when the dying swan suddenly gets up and doesn't die. Say WHAT??? You got it: they rewrote the ending.

Blasphemy! Philistines!! How DARE they!?!

You see, this change is problematic for many reasons. If you've never seen Swan Lake before and don't know the real ending, you'll still be confused. As was my culture-partner for the afternoon. The reason? First, Tchaikovsky's music itself provides for a death — and because the score in a ballet is shorthand for not only what's going on at the moment but the whole mood and subtext as well, there's just no way to pull off the heroine being saved at the last moment. The music's setting you up for one thing, but you're seeing something else, and you're confused: cognitive dissonance is unavoidable. You feel like you've missed something when you blinked for a nanosecond but you just can't figure out what happened, when, or how you missed it.

Second, the whole breaking the curse thing is dependent not really on the prince showing up that night while the swans are still young women (they're only swans during the day, until the curse is made permanent) but on his remaining true to Odette. The moment he proposes to Odile at the ball, having mistaken her for Odette, he has betrayed his swan-girl and the jig is up. Game over. There's no way to justify the ending, then, and my partner's confusion at the finale is testimony to this impossibility. Besides, it means changing the Marius Petipa choreography, and frankly, that's just something that shouldn't be messed with unless you're going to do an entirely new staging with new choreography.

But the other reason the not-dying swan is problematic is that it means the Disneyfication of fairy tales has now begun affecting the world of ballet, not just cinema. This is a corporate response to focus groups, which should NEVER be allowed to influence the arts!@!#! It all started when the Disney folks reworked The Little Mermaid and then got a script for Pretty Woman and changed the ending for that, too, to make it a happy one. They were pretty desperate for a hit at the time, having had a few flops in a row, so perhaps that's how they justified it to themselves. In the original script of Pretty Woman, the hooker with a heart of gold doesn't get her guy: he goes home without her, and she has to make a decision on her own to get out of the business and make something better of herself. Bleaker, sure, but truer to life. But the Disney folks were afraid it would be poison at the box office, and cowardice won out. Same for The Little Mermaid.

That led to Disney having happy endings for all of its later animated films. But it's a BIG problem when you decide to drastically rewrite well-known stories like those by Hans Christian Andersen. Fairy tales were never mere entertainment when they were written. Most were cautionary tales, not unlike Aesop's fables: they provided warnings, morals, lessons to be learned. They warned you about the harsh realities and inequities of life, starting with step-parents who'd rather have you gone so that their own kids can inherit the estate, and ending with dire warnings about what happens when you make shady deals with ugly characters like Rumpelstiltskin.

Andersen's Little Mermaid, like so many Andersen characters, loses in the end; hers is another one of those tales about what happens when you make a bad bargain. Having traded her beautiful voice for legs instead of a tail, she loses the prince she gave up her voice for — precisely because she can no longer speak up for herself (moral: never silence your own voice for any reason, or you won't be able to defend or save yourself when you really need to). Yet the Disney people did a 180 and had her getting both the prince and her voice back, which required substantial rewriting of the entire story. Idiots!!! Nobody's that lucky in real life. Where's the lesson? Let's not even go into what they did to Pocahontas.

Fairy tales and fables are a way to introduce children to the notion that life isn't all sugar and spice, as nice or fair as we'd like it to be, but without scaring the kids too much (time enough for that later). We'd all like a happy ending exactly because life is so capricious, unpredictable, and often disappointing or unfair. But as adults, we know when we're being humored with a happy ending and know the difference between that and day-to-day reality.

Young children don't know that yet; thus, the utility of fairy tales. Stories about how the kind brother or generous sister gets the help of strangers easier than the mean, selfish siblings. Tales about not taking things for granted, like the hare who goofs off because he's sure he'll win the race, only to have the slow and steady tortoise beat him. And so on. You get the drift.

Which means that when you mess with the endings of long-treasured fairy tales, you're completely removing their value. Instead of being a well-balanced metaphorical meal, they become junk food. The dying swan provides a much more memorable lesson than one who is incomprehensibly 'saved' at the end, contrary to all expectations raised by the terms of the story, let alone the music. Would anybody remember Romeo and Juliet if they'd just run off after marrying and never returned, living happily ever after? No: no point to all that drama that came beforehand, not to mention that it wouldn't seem authentic.

Walt Disney himself knew the value of injecting some realism for the sake of dramatic storytelling. Remember, he killed off Bambi's mother, yet Bambi still remains a popular animated film. Contemporary parents who are tempted to avoid showing Bambi to their kids would do better to simply talk to them afterward about the doe's death and how things work in nature. That's a much more valuable lesson than the false one of trying to avoid all pain and grief, for their children won't be able to do that in real life — and any attempt to do so will simply make them neurotic and dysfunctional.

Uncle Walt wrote some happy endings, too, but he didn't flinch from using realism now and then. And he knew better than to mess significantly with the classics; instead of changing endings, he changed side characters or streamlined plots, as he did with Cinderella and Snow White. And he barely tampered with Sleeping Beauty. The same cannot be said of the folks running the firm he left behind: those dopes are way too timid to keep from changing endings.

By now, American films have a truly global reach and influence the arts elsewhere. Wikipedia tells us that there have been several different endings to Swan Lake over the years — yet in all but one of them, the swan still dies. It seems that a version danced by the Mariinsky Ballet in 2006 has the prince saving Odette and killing the sorcerer by breaking one of the latter's swan wings, though why the sorcerer is a swan himself at that moment isn't explained. It may be this version that the performance I saw alluded to. But consider: Disney's abomination on The Little Mermaid was released in 1989, and Pretty Woman came out in 1990. That was a fast one-two punch at the box office, and the lesson the company erroneously took away was that happy endings are better, no matter that you've removed reality. So by the time the Mariinsky Ballet got around to altering Swan Lake, changing sad endings had already become 'fashionable,' thanks to Disney.

Perhaps reality is grim enough today that we want our equivalent of Fred and Ginger movies. That's fine, so long as you're making those daydreams for adults. For kids, the occasional unhappy ending with a lesson behind it is much more useful. Kids have more than enough fantasy as it is. Anything that gives them some grounding in reality, even if it comes in the form of a fairy tale, is of greater value than absurdity or throwaway escapism — they already get enough of that with video games. Proper fairy tales, authentically told, can actually provide an antidote to the unreality that video games foster.

Besides, it's a good encouragement for them to pick up a book now and then, if only to learn more fairy tales or fables. No harm in that, so long as the morals of the stories aren't diluted. And what a painless way for parents to pass along some good values.