SHOW YOURSELF

Something disturbing happened, I admit to my husband.

He does not look up from his espresso grinding, for he is very, very used to me.

I take a breath and wait for the machine to stop screaming.

I found myself… listening to the Frozen soundtrack in the car.

He tamps the grind and puts the portafilter in the machine.

Without any kids in it.

He puts down all implements and turns to face me, the concern on his face very quickly flashing towards a ripely annoyed hopelessness.

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There are a few things you should know before I do what I’m about to do: 1) I am at least partially deranged on even a good day; 2) I have never actually seen either of the Frozen movies in more than random 1-minute chunks; 3) I spend sometimes upwards of an hour or two in a day, inside my car, with the Frozen and/or Frozen II soundtracks playing on repeat for my children, whose moods are so visibly improved by exposure to the music and narrative and themes that I continuously consent—so frankly I’m up to my eyeballs in it, sipping CBD soda, nursing a corpse-level stiff neck, and dreaming of North Atlantic vacations to find my Viking roots while I wait to turn left in a town where the timing of the traffic lights was orchestrated by a comedy writer.

two comedy writers / fierce princesses

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Those of us who have developed a severe allergy to sentimentality, cliché, & pop culture in general, by choice or training or both, may wish to consider what has been rattling around in my skull-bucket for a few weeks: that a healthy distrust of any shorthand for emotion can be a necessary and smart adaptation in a predatory capitalist society—BUT when that aversion becomes so severe and automatic as to preclude outright a genre that one’s children persist in loving with all their little, infinite hearts… then that aversion may belie a near-pathological need to avoid the direct emotional hit.

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I want to begin with the voice behind the character of Elsa. It’s really different, folks—the timbre, for a Disney princess. To be sure, the Frozen franchise sisters on screen are disappointingly white and boring-pretty and absurd-skinny etc. However. Idina Menzel, who voices Queen Elsa, possesses a haunting scrubbiness around the edges of her insanely powerful natural instrument that really gets to me. There’s this whiff of soulful huskiness that at first had me irritated by its contrast to the sparkling Kristen Bell (who voices the other sister, Anna) & kind of wondering what Disney was up to. Idina Menzel’s tinge of glowing friction is why I started paying real attention.

Plus, when she hurls her giant sound higher than a human being has any business going in chest voice (it really feels biologically redlined to me), I get the sense that she’s doing it not so much as a form of ersatz vocal showmanship—but rather, that she miraculously, somehow, can, and therefore, somehow, must, because this is what capacity is about: doing what you are able to do in order to meet the emotional demands of the moment.

Maybe Menzel’s Russian Jewish emigrant grandparents gifted her with her uncanny textural gravitas, or maybe she figured out in the dark, otherwise locked auditorium of her high school how to put the fullness of personhood into sound from her throat instead of attending her European History class. I don’t know.

But I defy any other Disney princess, or indeed any singer at all, to show up as vulnerably as Menzel does when she sings the first occurrence of the words “show yourself” and the phrase that follows it, “I’m dying to meet you” in the song of the same title (this happens around 0:59. For those of you who haven’t unsubscribed yet, give it a whirl. If you’ve made it this far, you’re likely the type to hear what I mean.)

I can’t get over what I hear there, because it’s a distinct combination— something like one part grief to two parts desire. This is not a standard Disney cocktail, nor a state we generally allow women in our culture, especially if we’re going to let them be leaders.

[By the by, when she sings “I’m dying to meet you,” it’s not giddy, uptalking fare— there has already been a great deal of death and loss in the prehistory and unfolding of the film, and she’s embarking on a journey that’s quite dangerous to her and has already separated her from her most beloved—HER SISTER (not some dude).]

Let’s take just that: “Show yourself / I’m dying to meet you.” This is a very powerful grown woman singing to another very powerful & mysterious female —with these two’s ability to connect being the thing on which the fate of a nation depends—in the pinnacle song of one of the top-grossing animated films of all time. Here’s a woman getting to be freakishly strong and exquisitely exposed at the same time. This alone is enough to make me choke on my granola bar and vote for a screenwriter for president.

Now add that the other female, to whom Elsa is singing is, roughly speaking (remember I haven’t actually seen this thing— just fragments of it while mopping up ketchup from the floor with a dirty shirt because I don’t want to go get a damp cloth), actually the spirit of her dead mother, whose thematic and visual content overlaps with & is partly derivative of the film’s forest/earth spirit representations as well as the energetic & historical imprint of a native people who were tricked and came to ruin by Elsa’s ancestors’ hands…

Essentially, this is not Disneyland. It’s not what those around the elder millennial mark and above have been taught to expect from pop culture. This smells to me like some very smart people behind the scenes actually letting women do powerful, complex, and even haunting things.

[I return, now, to my refrain that kids know things.]

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OK, so I will admit my first take on the overall sound/orchestration was “can’t Disney afford better than low-budget rock opera?” But then I heard the sort of wild, driving piano, and I’m a sucker for a string section, and the dead mother voice, performed by Evan Rachel Wood, is high and plain and clear and ethereal, in contrast to Menzel’s gutsy heat.

And after the choral interlude, when the brass have made their entrance and the dead mother and her daughter begin to actively duet… well, we could talk about the tears to snot ratio, or we could talk about how in the car as I sang along, no children in sight, I found that I took the lower part, the mother’s part*, and that adds even more depth and gratitude to my deeply embarrassing undoing at all the stop lights in my winter-bound town.

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*A great deal went into confirming this hunch, for reasons that remained elusive to me (why it mattered so much) until my own sister saved the day. So: the following Brief Behind the Scenes is brought to you by the never-profit Nerd-dom Has No Bounds.

I listened on repeat for ten minutes and could NOT figure out which voice was which in the duet, which really bothered me. So I lunch-time-emergency-texted my social worker sister, who is also a consummate singer with a doctorate in musical arts (natch) and the following ensued:

Identity is what’s at play and they’re doing it vocally.

This is why I was so caught up on who was singing what, never even having seen the dang film.

Consider the lyrics at this point, with two molten female voices really quite seriously pouring out together:

Show yourself

step into the power

Grow yourself

into something new

In the end (and I suppose this is why I’ve been hung up on this song for so many weeks that it wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to write a different Substack, one that decidedly did not require me to tangle with a Disney film), Elsa’s search for meaning, as expressed in her refrain “you are the one I’ve been waiting for” to her dead mother’s mysterious voice, suddenly changes in a subtle, profound, and surprisingly slippery way.

When the two voices have woven around each other long enough and fluidly enough that one can hardly tell who’s who anymore, the mother spirit finally sings it, in reply and invocation, a summoning and a confirmation, of what must have been true all along:

“You are the one you’ve been waiting for,” sings the mother. And soon after, the song comes to completion in a great, glittering explosion—whereupon life, one feels, can begin.