Mirror, Mirror – Caroline Breashears

Disney’s Snow White (2025) is among the company’s recent missteps, receiving an IMDB equivalent of poisoned apples—a rating of 2.1—and earning $205.5 million globally despite a budget of $269.4 million. The computer-generated dwarfs didn’t help, nor did the lead actress’s propensity to insult Disney’s original 1937 film. Yet this movie is significant in reflecting current debates about elitism and the development of our youth. It is particularly instructive to compare it to its source material. 

Disney’s groundbreaking 1937 film traces a young woman’s development as she makes sense of her attempted murder, negotiates for shelter in exchange for work, wins the love of strangers, and marries. But in screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson’s hands, the twenty-first-century Snow White’s growth is political. She lectures her subjects on fairness, gives voice to the silenced, and leads a rebellion against the Wicked Queen. Snow White then restores the kingdom to the monarcho-socialist system of her father. 

Disney’s Snow White (2025) suggests that, given enough power, a young ruler from the intellectual elite can overthrow the greedy to create a paradise of “fairness.” The film’s low rating reflects public resistance to such fallacies along with disgust at the hubris of the filmmakers: the elitist of them all.

“A Beautiful Abundance We Share” 

The film’s opening scene depicts a utopia under the rule of Snow White’s father. Everyone in the kingdom dances in colorful garb, happily gathering the harvest while singing about the “beautiful abundance” of the land and the mines. “Everyone” includes the royal family. As the protagonist grew, “the king and queen taught Snow White that the bounty of the land belonged to all who tended it.” Moreover, “they taught her how to rule with love.” 

This world reflects the ideals of writers such as John Last, whose “A King for the People” insists that “the dream of radical redistribution under hereditary rule has never been more important than in an age of rampant capitalism and dysfunctional populism.” The opening of Snow White depicts shared work, not the supposed evils of trade. It shows the rulers helping to spread the wealth, or at least the apples. 

Yet this idyllic scene raises questions. First, is it really a good use of the king’s time to pick apples rather than manage the kingdom? Has the king never heard of the division of labor? Second, does the entire economy really consist of people farming and mining? Where are the bankers, sewage workers, and doctors? The latter might have been helpful when the queen fell ill and died. Her death rendered the king vulnerable to the seductions of a new beauty, whom he made his second queen.

A Tale of Two Elites 

While both “fair” in the sense of being beautiful, the two queens are not equally “fair” in their willingness to distribute resources equitably. They exemplify the two types of elites that Joel Stein defines in his book In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You Are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book. The first queen was what Stein terms the “intellectual elite,” who know how things work and how to plan: she was beautiful and spread the wealth around. The second wicked queen is among those Stein terms the “boat elite”: rich people who focus on acquiring stuff. She hoards gems, which she wears with all the finesse of a six-year-old given a cache of costume jewelry. 

Conversely, the younger Snow White represents the “intellectual elite”: she knows the right thing to do, which is to restore “fairness.” In fact, after seeing the bandit Jonathan steal potatoes from the castle, she immediately goes to the iconic well, where Disney’s 1937 heroine wished that the one she loves would find her. Our modern heroine’s request, however, is not romance or a free market but getting the queen to “share.” 

The controversy over Disney’s Snow White offers a mirror for the “Intellectual Elite.” We see their contempt for the general population, who they believe need them literally to help us put our houses in order.

While Snow White rightly objects to starving the kingdom’s subjects, she also reveals delusions in imagining that equality can be achieved through central planning. Like her father, she represents a positive vision of Adam Smith’s Man of System, who falsely believes he can move the kingdom’s subjects like pieces on a chessboard (TMS VI.ii.2.17). As Smith observes, however, often those chess pieces assume a life of their own, and then the game goes awry. 

It is a point denied by Intellectual Elitists like Stein, who dismisses F. A. Hayek’s critique of the “fatal conceit” of central planning. Instead, Stein believes that the “Intellectual Elite” should run everything because they are educated, a point he supports by inventing what he terms the “Meterological Fallacy.” The “experts,” he says, occasionally have a bad forecast, but mostly they are right. 

In this context, the battle between the Evil Queen and Snow White is not simply over the kingdom but between two caricatures of rulers (greedy tyrants/boat elites vs. idyllic socialist kings/intellectual elites). Having gestured toward these competing visions, the film retreats from substantive arguments, and the focus becomes the conflict between the two women. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Dopey

The wicked queen, of course, sends the huntsman to kill her rival. He lets Snow White go, and she heads to the dwarfs’ cottage. Disney’s original heroine (1937) acts with grace and kindness when the animals guide her to the dwarfs’ cottage, which she assumes is the home of seven “untidy little children.” When a doe confirms that the children “have no mother,” she leaps into action: “I know. We’ll clean the house and surprise them. Then maybe they’ll let me stay.” She believes she should offer something to her hosts, not demand their hospitality. She launches into the song “Whistle While You Work,” cleans with the animals, and finally falls asleep in the dwarfs’ beds. When the dwarfs arrive home, she bargains with them to let her stay by promising to clean and bake gooseberry pie. 

The Snow White of 2025 shows no such consideration. The animals guide her to the dwarf’s house, and she goes upstairs to sleep in the dwarf’s beds. The next morning, she rises and does eventually sing “Whistle While You Work,” but she wields her broom mainly as a prop. Her focus is on directing the dwarfs in cleaning up their own house and lecturing them on mistreating Dopey, who has been silenced for centuries.

This shift is described by the screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson, who decided that “Whistle While You Work” “had to have a purpose—to get Dopey and his friends to stop being disorganized and stop hating one another and to get them in a peaceful place where they learn to clean up and fall in love with each other again—and fall in love with Snow White.” To make this point work, Wilson reimagines the dwarfs as violent and cruel, particularly to Dopey. In fact, she sees Dopey as “disenfranchised the same way Snow White is,” so she makes their “relationship core to the story.” 

Given Wilson’s agenda, we should not be surprised to see Snow White exhibit what I dub the Intellectual Elitist Mindset at “work”: I know best and will come into your home and tell you how to put it in order. And you will not only thank me but follow me. 

“We Will Inherit What Was Meant for All of Us”

Snow White next seeks another group—bandits—to help her find her father, who never returned from the war. (If you are confused about why there are bandits, you are not alone.) Doc explains that the bandits (former actors) are “only there because of the queen’s greedy economic policies, which forced them into a liminal space where ethics are harder to define.” This comical line not only justifies the bandits but also evokes the rhetoric about riots and even looting pushed by Intellectual Elitists. 

Certainly, the first person Snow White encounters, Jonathan (of the stolen potatoes), is self-righteous and critical of her “princess problems.” The actor playing the role of Jonathan, Andrew Burnap, observes, “Jonathan finds himself quite disillusioned with the power structures of the world he lives in and is part of a certain resistance to those power structures.” He wants hope.

When a soldier hits Jonathan with an arrow, Snow White guides the bandits to the dwarf’s house. Doc hesitates to heal him, but she rallies the groups against their common enemy: 

This is exactly how the queen would want us to behave. Fighting with each other, distrusting each other. This is how she wins. She’s poisoned everyone into believing that it’s everyone for themselves. But if we can give up our meager scraps, we will inherit what was meant for all of us. 

Disney’s new Snow White provides a sense of purpose in uniting disparate groups. Her development into an activist replaces the earlier plot of Snow White’s progression through traditional stages of life. In so doing, it narrows the film’s lesson to activism against the rich. 

Again, this is a driving agenda for people such as John Last, who observes that the ideal of monarcho-socialism is all the more important in an age where the tyranny of fascism has been replaced by the unlimited power of international capital. “One of the great things about having a hereditary system is that you can’t buy it,” Elliot Ritzema said. “And actually, in a world where we have lots of Bezoses and Thiels, I think having some things that can’t be bought under any circumstances is probably a precondition to having a functioning democracy.” 

Snow White’s task is to claim her inheritance as socialist queen.

Mirror, Mirror

Snow White is gullible enough to fall for the Queen’s eat-the-apple trick, but she is awakened by a kiss from Jonathan. Yet rather than riding into the sunset on a white horse, Snow White tells Jonathan and the dwarfs that “it’s time” for her to take back her kingdom: it’s her “destiny.” This speech not only rallies the dwarfs but inspires the previously silenced Dopey to speak—”Let her”—thereby affirming her role as the people’s champion. 

Moreover, Snow White restores her subjects to themselves when she returns to the castle. She persuades soldiers to resist the queen’s order to kill her by sharing memories of them: one was a farmer who used to share his cherries; another was a baker who gave bread to the penniless. Under Snow White’s rule, these lucky men can once again give away their food. 

At the end of the movie, the mirror tells the queen that her beauty “goes no further than the skin. For Snow White, beauty comes from deep within.” As a result, Snow White “will always be more fair than thee.” It would have been handy if the mirror had developed this moral standard sooner. Nevertheless, the queen’s response—shrieking “You lie!” and smashing the mirror—leads to her death when shards fly. Snow White, now queen, accepts her subjects’ bows and, in the final scene, dances with everyone in the suddenly prosperous society. 

The controversy over Disney’s Snow White offers a mirror for the “Intellectual Elite.” Here we see their contempt for the general population, who they believe need them literally to help us put our houses in order, and their loathing of the “Boat Elite,” depicted as the Wicked Queen with bad taste. The Intellectual Elite—those willing to look—will discover that the public sees neither them nor their socialistic ideals as “the fairest.” In fact, all we see are the delusions of the Elitist of them All.