Tinkerbell and the Lost Opportunity

So this weekend, we took our 17-month-old daughter to see the new Tinkerbell movie. Now, the first two Tinkerbell movies are pretty decent fare. They take a character that’s been mired in gendered bullshit and do some interesting things with her. My favorite bit is that they make her a “tinker-fairy,” and she builds stuff. So on the whole, they’re approved for the impressionable child to watch.

This most recent installment, though, does not live up to the first two. It’s not the disjointed and bifurcated plotline, it’s not the shallow characterization, it’s not the reductive themes. I mean, it’s a kid’s movie. These things come with the territory. The whole movie, in fact, builds towards a great climax… and then totally drops the ball.

The movie features a young girl and her single father (which is pretty cool in and of itself), the latter of which is a scientist. For the whole of the movie, they manage to avoid the most common scientists-are-stupid pitfalls that plague, well, everything that comes out of Hollywood. The girl believes in fairies; the father points out that she has no proof of their existence. And without proof, all they are is a fairy tale. There are a few bits where he slips from perfect empiricism, but these are moments where he’s being a concerned and slightly harried single parent, and the parents in the audience feel for him. It’s alright if he strays just slightly, since it’s only because he cares.

As one might expect, the girl meets Tinkerbell and all of Act Two is a “fairies are real!” / “you have no proof of this!” back-and-forth. It culminates when the father shouts, “I don’t believe in fairies!” and Tinkerbell angrily reveals herself to the father. (Importantly, note that no fairy dies at this pronouncement; not only is this a deviation from the mythology, but it’s significant later.) The father promptly catches Tinkerbell in a jar and concludes she’s some sort of “evolutionary mutation” of a bug (hey, it’s Victorian science, let it go). He then races off to London to show off his captured fairy, er, mutated butterfly and win scientific acclaim. The girl and the other fairies fly after him and confront him on the steps of the (never quite explicitly named) Royal Society. And then this exchange happens:

The fairies all fly out, showing the father that they’re not just bugs but minuscule thinking people with wings. The father, who throughout the entire movie has insisted on facts to prove propositions, stammers, “I don’t understand.”

And his daughter says, “You don’t have to understand, Father, you just have to believe.” And the father agrees with her, promises to never doubt her again, and they all fly off happily ever after. They have a tea party.

And in the audience, I desperately wanted to shoot myself in the head.

The father, all throughout the movie, has been insisting, “Proof! Facts! Back up your wild assertions with empirical data!” He gave his daughter a field journal for her to fill, and she filled it with facts about fairies, delivered to her from her first-hand witness, Tinkerbell. He wants, above all else, for his daughter to — stunning proposition, here — know what she’s talking about before she opens her mouth. And in the finale, he is presented with exactly what he has been insisting on and he… decides to abandon everything he stands for and “just believe.”

If this movie had been about the old Hollywood saw of the power of belief (AKA the leading cause of violent death worldwide), then they could have capitalized on the father shouting his disbelief of fairies and having one fall deathly ill. Only enthusiastic clapping of the audience would save her, presumably while the father wasn’t looking, and then they could proceed to the insipid conclusion fully stocked and charged up with that momentum. But they set up the “don’t believe in fairies” pitch and then balked.

If this movie had intended to deride science and empiricism as insufficient, the father could have been a much worse “scientist,” insisting on the fallacy that fairies did not exist because there was no proof for them. Then, when confronted with proof, he might have come to a stunning realization to the tune of, “I never would have thought! What happened to me, what made me stop imagining and believing? Why did I insist that the only things in the world were what I could put my hands on? Oh, I’ve been so wrong!” Such an ending would, of course, run full-tilt into the hypocrisy of Tinkerbell leading what amounts to an industrial revolution in the first movie, somehow proposing that science is morally bankrupt but engineering is just fine despite being, you know, based on science.

But no — the whole of the movie, the father is a pretty straightforward scientist. He wants his daughter to learn about the world around her by observing it and forming her own conclusions. And this is a good thing, in my opinion: a frankly noble hope that I think most responsible parents share for their own children. For most of the movie, he just doesn’t have access to the same data as his daughter, and so comes to a different conclusion. And then their data sets are merged, for lack of a better way to put it, and he sees what she’s seen. And then the movie goes to shit.

How fantastic would it have been if, instead of stampeding off into the moronic wilds of “just believe!” territory, the movie had let the father say, “I don’t understand… I thought they were just insects. But they’re real people, aren’t they? I see that now!” And then instead of the fancy-free tea party that serves as the movie’s denouement, father and daughter could be studying the fairies together, interviewing them and coming to appreciate their fascinating world. They could share something, something concrete and real, something that would help both of them become better people more in touch with their world, solidifying their father-daughter bond and capping the movie with and ending that was not just happy but also looking forward.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the movie had two “Story By” credits and four writing credits. It has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood chop-job. One wonders what the original script might have looked like: was it the “belief uber alles” theme, and later writers softened the stupid scientist father? Or the opposite, where the father is well-meaning but short-sighted, and the events of the movie correct that deficiency? We will of course never know.

And my daughter won’t be seeing this movie again.