It’s been a minute since I’ve written about Good Art, although there is a lot of it to be had. You can read previous installments of this series here.
My daughter (11) is the perfect age for The Descendants, but I love it too. It’s over-the-top, primary-colored fun, with sweet, barely-even-kissing teenage romance. Because I’m in my 40s, it reminds me of High School Musical, although sharing that anecdote about the Days of Yore invoked a sigh from Addy.
The Descendants story centers around the offspring of fairy tales we know and love. We meet Prince Ben, the so-perfect-he-seems-unreal son of Beauty and the Beast, Audrey, the pretty pink-and-blue-haired daughter of Aurora and Prince Phillip, and even a son of one of Snow White’s dwarfs. It’s campy and silly and very musical-theater, the sets are honest-to-goodness sets for the first three movies, as though you’re supposed to think you’re watching a stage show.
The premise is that villains have been banished to the “Isle of the Lost” since Beauty and the Beast came to power and made everyone safe. Auradon, the hero-land, is predictably well-behaved, clean and kind storybook perfection. (Fairy Godmother teaches a “remedial goodness” class, a detail which made Addy laugh out loud.) And the Isle of the Lost is indeed lost - the villains are crazy-eyed and batty, their outfits are steampunk bad boy, lots of eyeliner and extra belts. When Prince Ben decides to let four Villian Kids (affectionately referred to as VKs) to the land of heroes, this is where our story starts.
Of course it’s tween fun. The bad guys are ridiculous but not actually all that dark, although keeping them locked up on the Isle doesn’t seem like a terrible idea. There’s a lot of inside jokes, like the Evil Queen constantly asking everyone how she looks and Jafar’s penchant for robbery. The music is Disney perfection - wholesome and fun and well-produced, with obvious nods to my generation - it’s hard to find a song that’s not inspired by either MJ or an early-aughts boy band or both.
But what I noticed most about the series (Addy and I blissfully binged the first four movies over the weekend and have been obsessively listening to the music) is the commentary it makes on… wait for it… modern geopolitics.
No, I’m not kidding.
The kids, both hero kids and VKs, are living in the world their parents and grandparents built. Audrey’s grandmother tearfully reminds her that she lost her motherhood to Malificent. Faeries had to raise Aurora, and so the Queen was robbed of years of her child’s life, by a truly malevolent force. To Audrey, this is the war stories we grew up on - nazis, communists, oh my! - and it’s relatable that she doesn’t understand her grandmother’s fear or pain.
To the kids, both heroes and villains, victory looks like opening up your heart and not bullying, making friends and seeing past silly differences. Which makes sense. This is a kids’ movie, made by the Disney channel with spontaneous break-dancing for crying out loud. There’s a talking dog.
But to their parents, and to me as a parent, it’s a sort of sweet and sad commentary on our modern age, one told with a lot of compassion for us inheritors of relative peace. I was born in the 80s, raised in the peace and prosperity of the 90s. Sure, I graduated college in a recession and my generation does not have the Boomers’ luck with investments and housing prices. But geopolitically, we’ve been doing pretty good, by historical standards. America’s might and power is still pre-eminent on the world stage, and even destabilizing tragic events like 9/11 were met with strength and perseverance, our political fights have been mostly about funding and taxes, not the security of the homeland. So is it any wonder that my peers and those younger than me have a hard time grasping the gravity of world events like October 7th or Russia’s incursion on Ukraine; the Taliban’s re-takeover of Afghanistan or unrest in South America? We struggle to reconcile our relative peace and prosperity with the desperation of much of the world, and so, like the hero kids, we feel blindly about for good answers, struggling to make sense of a new reality. Are open borders a necessary moral good or a deeply disturbing floodgate of evil? Can the land of heroes absorb all of the bad behavior, poverty and criminality of the Isle, or will it just turn both places into a wasteland?
When Captain Hook’s hilariously unhinged Cockney-voiced son Harry threatens to gut Prince Ben with a hook, we’re informed that villains didn’t receive enough love as children. Which, honestly, is a very generous way to think about second chances. It always could have been otherwise, and we forget our own graces at our peril. But at the same time, the VKs who won the lottery and move to the clean, safe, not-terrible land of heroes are the ones who are most nervous about opening the bridge to the Isle, much like recent immigrants who often advocate most strongly for immigration reform. They know first-hand why they left, and they’d very much like to protect what they have now.
Reality lurks behind bad guys in eyeliner. What do you do about actual evil, evil that can’t be fixed with inclusion and cupcakes? What do you do with real tough choices about rights and prosperity, wars and dictators? Grownups have to make tough decisions about safety and protection, which is why Maleficent (despite being hilariously overplayed by Kristin Chenoweth) is shrunk into a lizard and put in a terrarium at the end. Because this universe needs funny retribution that makes my 11-year-old laugh, as it should be, but Maleficent is evil enough that she needs to be resolved in some way, not just used as punchline.
In the real world, there is evil that doesn’t care about your dreams or your hopes, what you deserve or what you want. There’s evil that can’t be put in a box or mocked into obscurity or even locked up on an island. The Descendants is a sweet, teenage version of this perennial truth: evil has to be dealt with, one way or another.
Like our heroes and anti-heroes of pop music, we get to choose who to be, hero or villain. We get to decide if we want more VKs in our country or not, if war is ever justified, if there is such a thing as right and wrong. One thing we cannot do is pretend these hard questions don’t exist.
In every world, evil poses a question, and in every world, good has to answer.
Good Art: The Descendants movies and soundtracks. Best enjoyed with enthusiastic kids who will laugh at all the jokes, swoon at the teenage love story and try out the dance moves on the living-room floor.
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