Michael Knowles is Both Wrong and Right About Disney’s “Snow White”

Recently, there was a wave of backlash against two journalists’ criticism of the “Snow White” ride at Disneyland. The journalists had complained about the inclusion in the ride of the non-consensual kiss which the Prince gives Snow White in the 1937 film. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Michael Knowles weighed in, calling the criticism a “ridiculous gripe”. Mr. Knowles correctly concluded that the kiss was unproblematic, but for the wrong reasons. In this post, I set out to correct him.

The thumbnail to Mr. Knowles’s video about the contrversy surrounding Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.

Mr. Knowles remarks:

I think, given the choice between “remain permanently under an evil spell” and “get kissed by a hot guy”, I’m pretty sure Snow White would choose the latter.

This is, unfortunately, not a valid defence of the kiss. In the film, the prince does not know that true love’s kiss is what can revive Snow White, so his decision to kiss her cannot be defended on these grounds.

However, the kiss is unproblematic. Why? Because, firstly, Snow White is presumed dead when it happens, so it could not possibly scar her mentally and, more importantly, because Snow White and the Prince are, at this point in the film, a couple. There seems to be a widespread misperception that the Prince meets Snow White for the first time in this scene, maybe because that is how it was in the Grimm Brothers’ version. Yet in the film, these two characters have already shared a romantic scene together.

By the scene with the kiss, the Prince has been searching “far and wide” for Snow White, who had inexplicably gone missing. Imagine what he must have been feeling. He then finds her, and she appears to be dead. The kiss, in this context, feels like an act of desperation, a final tribute to a loving relationship which was not fated to be. It is visibly a very light kiss, and not erotic at all, and is followed by the Prince’s kneeling by her side. It is all gut-wrenching symbolism and no assault.

The kiss. Source.

In conclusion, I can do little more than restate my thesis: Michael Knowles is both wrong and right about “Snow White”.