“Hit Disney songs whose messages outshone and subsequently undermined the messages of the films they’re in” – a playlist about freedom

Last week I wrote a blog about dancing and freedom, and this week I couldn’t resist a few thoughts on the catchiest, most-popularest song about freedom I’ve ever heard.

‘Let it Go’ has now got 1.7 billion views on YouTube. People like what it has to say about freedom it seems. 

Here’s a few of the key lines on the subject:

The snow glows white on the mountain tonight

Not a footprint to be seen

A kingdom of isolation,

And it looks like I'm the queen.

… It's time to see what I can do

To test the limits and break through

No right, no wrong, no rules for me: I'm free!

It’s actually a brilliantly captured snapshot of how our culture thinks about freedom! Let’s see what I can do – no right no wrong no rules – nothing to hold me back or tell me what to do, I’m just going to be myself – let it go! And there is something really beautiful about that: no constraints, no restrictions, just pure freedom to express ourselves and fulfil our potential.

But then, you actually watch the film…

And if you have seen the film you’ll have noticed the problem with this song. Because when Elsa sings this, what’s actually happening? She’s running away from home, from her kingdom, and from her sister Anna to live in an ice palace all by herself. So, is she free? Is she free because there’s now no one to get in her way or stop her doing what she wants?

Well here’s a question, imagine that was the end of the film: “Let it go! The cold never bothered me anyway” - she flicks her hair and walks into her ice palace and the credits roll. 

How would we feel? Would that be an uplifting story about liberation? Or actually would it be a depressing story about isolation?

A mate of mine tweeted ages ago with this playlist that he’d made:

And as you can see, this song was top of his list.

Do you see his point? It’s the hit single because we love that message, but the actual story of the film says something completely different – what makes us happy at the end, what feels meaningful and beautiful to us as a story, is the two sisters being reconciled and coming back together! It’s Elsa saving her people and becoming their queen rather than living for herself and by herself. And ultimately the powerful ending – ***SPOILER ALERT*** - is about Anna sacrificing herself to save her sister, not about Elsa sacrificing her relationship with her sister to save herself.

And I think it’s really important to notice that! The message about freedom and individuality that we hear a lot in our culture and we love in theory – when it comes to real life or even just a full length film, deep down we know it doesn’t work! If all freedom means is me being at the centre, and no one getting in my way, then it’s not necessarily what we actually want or need.  

And this isn’t just something we sense in storylines, it’s something actual psychologists have studied – there’s a psychologist called Jean Twenge who expresses this so perfectly just in the title of her book that you don’t even need to read it:

“Generation Me: Why Today’s Young American’s Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before”

And that’s surely just as true in the UK as in America – self-confidence and assertiveness is drilled into us at school and in films and songs from the minute we’re born, and yet with all our confidence that “this is me”, with all our belief in ourselves, Generation Me is not enjoying life very much.

Why? There’s a New York Times columnist called David Brooks who wrote an article recently which argued that if we believe what most inspirational speakers say about being “true to yourself” we end up with 

“a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self”

and that leads us gradually to 

“an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys.”

Or we get the same thing in a bit more depth in a mind-blowing speech written by the late David Foster Wallace, a fascinating author and thinker. He says that

“[The] world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.”

So however anxious or frustrated it makes us the marketing executives are very keen to sell us a particular kind of freedom, the ‘Let it Go’ kind of freedom:

“The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.”

But he says there are different kinds of freedom that are actually more important, and

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

Interesting idea, isn’t it? And in many ways, although none of those three writers are Christians, they’re drawing on the insight of one of the strangest teachings of Jesus:

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.” (Mark 8:35)

I think there’s a deep paradox here. It’s there in Frozen, in all these writers and then it’s there put vividly by Jesus himself: if we try to live for ourselves, to “save our lives”, grasp hold of them, we end up losing our lives, wasting our lives, miserable and stressed and bored. But if we give our lives away – if we live for someone else, if we truly care about someone more than ourselves and we’re willing to sacrifice things for them – that’s when we come properly alive! That sets us truly free. We have to choose: either we lose control of our life by giving it away, or we just lose it altogether. We can give our life away and find that we get it back transformed, or we can try to cling on to it and watch it slip through our fingers like sand. 

And Jesus is saying that’s true on a deeper level than Foster Wallace or Brooks or Disney even realise – that it’s true not just in our relationships with each other but, underneath that, it’s true in our relationship with him. Real freedom isn’t just no one getting in our way, it’s not just God not getting in our way. And It’s not letting go of everyone else like Elsa does – real freedom comes when we’re able to let go of ourselves.

Dancing Lessons for Life: musings on freedom

Is there a word that, whenever you hear it, strikes fear into your heart? A word that pierces you like an icy knife of dread? There is for me. Perhaps you feel the same. It’s the word, “Freestyle!”

OK, I’m exaggerating, but let’s be honest, how do you feel about the command to ‘freestyle’ in a public dancing context? I’m sure there are many people out there and even some reading this blog who enjoy a casual boogie with friends considerably more than me, and have a great deal more competence in that area – but I’m also pretty sure a lot of people will understand what I mean about the fear of publicly facing the demand to improvise. Soren Kierkegaard famously said that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”, and when I imagine being shoved into the centre of a dance circle and being told to do whatever I want, I know exactly what he means.

On the other hand, last summer I was helping run a student camp in Eastern Europe, and the UK team were asked to perform some of our ‘cultural dances’ for an international evening of entertainment. This led to a bit of cultural soul-searching, and eventually the conclusion that we should do an easy-to-copy dance routine to ‘Reach For the Stars’! We did a bit of practice, decided what we were doing, and then in front of 50 or so students, we went for it!

 

Now that experience felt weirdly like freedom. I was doing exactly what I had been told to do by the more competent and enthusiastic members of the group – and I was doing exactly what everyone else was doing – but, contrary to what some of the most fundamental principles of postmodern Western consumerism would tell you, that actually set me free! Free to go for it, hurling my limbs into various moves, circling round with everyone else, singing my heart out whenever I had a clue what the words were! All the people watching and joining in filled my body and brain with adrenaline, but not with anxiety. Why? Because freedom is not actually being allowed to do whatever I feel like. Freedom does not equal unrestricted choice. That is a woefully inadequate idea of freedom, because it’s based on a cruelly oversimplified idea of how humans work.

I wish I’d grown up where my mate Innes did in Scotland where they understand this and so they learnt the moves to ceilidh dances in school until they didn’t need anyone to tell them what to do they could just announce the dance and everyone stepped and jumped and whirled each other round in unison, to the rhythm of the music. That’s what dancing is meant to be like. And it’s a lot closer to what being human is meant to be like than taking turns to be shoved into the middle of the circle and trying to be funny or do the worm. (Don’t hear me wrong – there’s a lot that’s great fun about non-organised dancing, we did a lot of it at our wedding and it was EPIC. But aren’t the best moments the ones where you’re dancing with other people and you realise you kind of know what you’re all doing together? Or a song comes on that you know and you can all sing along to every word?)

So dancing lesson for life number one is this: is it possible that freedom is more than ‘freestyling’? Is it even possible that the deepest kind of freedom comes from knowing the moves?

But what got me onto this idea in the first place was actually something a bit deeper than that, which I’ve massively learnt by experience in the last couple of years – so I’ll write about that soon as well.

Chew your food: why I’m taking up blogging for Lent

Have you ever wondered why giving stuff up for Lent is still a thing? In our largely non-religious culture when faced with the choice of going big or going home on parts of the ecclesiastical calendar we have, on the whole, gone home. In our deeply consumerist culture we would usually say that to be asked to give something up is to be deprived of some vague sort of human right. But we still quite fancy giving something up for 40 days before Easter. Odd, isn’t it? Surely, if we’d be happier and healthier without something during Lent, we’d be happier and healthier without it all year – so why do we not just give it up full stop? And if giving it up doesn’t make us happier or healthier, why are we doing it?

But then I guess we all know that in real life things are messier than that. There’s all kinds of stuff we know we’d be better off without, but we keep wanting it anyway, and we keep giving in. And there’s all kinds of stuff we know we’d be much better off doing which we just never quite find the energy to get up and do. When you think about it, it’s almost like whatever is actually in control of what we do does not entirely have our best interests at heart! Which is quite a troubling thought…

And this is why Lent is useful for us, basically as a cunning way for the bit of ourselves that does want the best for us to negotiate with the less benevolent bit that seems to actually be calling the shots, and say, ‘Well come on I’m not asking for forever, how about just 40 days?’ And we do indeed get temporary permission. But even that permission turns out to be an ingenious counter strategy! You can have 27 days but then on day 28 you’ll cave and you will know for certain who’s in charge around here. Or perhaps even more devious, Go on – take the full 40. Enjoy yourself. And when you’re done you’ll feel so proud of your self-control that you’ll run back into my arms all flushed and pleased with yourself, and you’ll joyfully give me back control and let me ruin your life for the rest of the year!

I realise it all sounds a bit over the top there, but if you think about it, unless there’s some kind of conflict inside us doing something for Lent makes no sense at all – and it clearly does make quite a lot of sense because so many people still do it.

Including me.

And what I’m going to do for Lent this year is take blogging back up. Because I actually love writing, but the less-than-benevolent bit of me that doesn’t have my best interests at heart but tries to run my life anyway (I call it ‘Sin’), has this infuriating tendency to always offer me something a bit easier to do, a bit lazier, and a lot less satisfying.

And the more I think about it, the more it seems a very appropriate thing to do for Lent. Because traditionally, the whole point of giving things up for Lent was this: use a focused period of time to exercise the power Jesus has given you to overcome that inward drag towards stuff that’s a bit easier and a lot less satisfying, and in doing so make more space in your life to enjoy Him – which is a bit less easy but a lot more satisfying. And actually I have always found that writing about Jesus is one of the best ways I know of making more space in my life for me to enjoy him! To mix my metaphors horribly, it’s like the act of trying to share with other people how delicious he is motivates me to chew on it properly, and not just gulp it down like a microwave dinner in front of the TV hardly even noticing the taste.

And I was reminded of that the other day by a brilliant talk I heard about why God wants us to praise him. It’s not that he’s got a fragile ego and he needs us to give him some self-esteem. It’s not that he’s a narcissistic despot who demands that his subjects cringe and fawn before him. It’s that we humans love to praise what we enjoy – when we come across The Good Place on Netflix, or the Lake District, or a peanut butter and honey and banana sandwich, we want to tell people about them! We want to communicate and express their astonishing brilliance! (I’m serious about the sandwich, try it.) As CS Lewis once put it,

“I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.” 

Praise is the consummation of delight. And Jesus it utterly and ultimately delightful. So I’m looking forward to the next 40 days.