One of these things has ruined Aladdin for me forever. The thing I noticed is this: The genie mis-grants one of Aladdin’s wishes! Aladdin wishes to be a prince, so that he can impress and marry Jasmine, but the genie only makes Aladdin appear to be a prince! He gets the trappings but not the juice. Obviously, this is important, as it provides the story’s main conflict…but it’s a HUGE plot hole. When Jafar controls the genie, and wishes to be Sultan, he is made the ACTUAL Sultan. When he wishes to be an all-powerful genie, he is made an ACTUAL genie. In neither case does Jafar’s wish only grant him the APPEARANCE of his wished-for state.
Therefore, dear reader, I submit to you that Aladdin got gypped.
If we can liken our omnipotent God to Aladdin’s all-powerful genie, we need to make sure we don’t get gypped. When we’re promised righteousness and salvation as a free gift (a granted wish) we need to make sure it’s real. Not a shadow or a trick. It can’t be something we’re called to account for later, as Aladdin is. And, in fact, our righteousness is precisely the opposite of Aladdin’s prince-hood. Aladdin appears to be a prince, but isn’t. All the genie’s power went into the robes, menagerie, coterie, and theme song. And it’s a catchy song. But there’s no magic left to make Aladdin an ACTUAL prince, which is all that really matters. We, on the other hand, appear to be unchanged in the slightest. We are beset by the same selfishness, the same mercurial nature, the same everything. None of God’s power has gone to changing our exteriors. What HAS happened, though, is a total renovation of our nature. We have become the princes that we wished to be, looks be damned.
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6 responses to “Aladdin Makes No Sense: Mockingbird at the Movies”
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OUTSTANDING!
Great post, Nick!
The Genie in Aladdin isn't all-powerful. For instance, he is conspicuously unable to make people fall in love. (He also can't kill anyone, which is nice.) Essentially, the Genie can't really get to the core of who a person really is, which is part of the message Disney was trying to convey: be true to yourself, because what's on the outside doesn't define you.
Disney movies rarely, if ever, deal with the idea of total transformation. In the end, it's mostly about being true to some essential part of yourself which is already basically good.
I really liked this, Nick. The theological reflection was just so touching, fresh and good to hear.
But I also was delighted to hear somebody treat "children's movies" as simply "movies", with the same standards for quality.
I haven't seen ALADDIN, so I can't speak to it, but gigantic plot holes are a simply a problem — full stop. Whether they are in a fantasy for adults, a fantasy for kids, a science fiction movie, a comedy, whatever. Anything that makes you stop believing in the world being created, anything that distances you from it and makes you aware of "the man behind the curtain", is bad; because it steals from the viewer the lovely experience of being immersed in a story and, for a brief while, "forgetting in its contemplation all the egotism that mars him." (Oscar Wilde)
Aladdin has one redeeming quality, though, and that is Robin Williams' great impresion of the one and only William F. Buckly, Jr.
awesome post