The film Frozen is not a simple story about two sisters; it is a meticulous diagram of capitalist capture, a death-unicorn of a different color. The Disney narrative is a smooth space of ideological production, but a schizoanalytic reading reveals its striated surfaces, its hidden desiring-machines. We will not interrogate songs, but rather the flows of capital, the flows of labor, and the perverse flows of power that crystallize and melt within this cinematic body without organs. The bourgeois princesses, Anna and Elsa, are not characters; they are circuits of command, while the proletariat toils as a deterritorialized flow of labor-power.
The capitalist machine is in full force from the opening song, "Frozen Heart." The ice workers, at the very bottom of the supply chain, are a desiring-machine whose purpose is to produce ice, a solidified form of a deterritorialized flow. The song's rhythm, a metronome of percussive beats, marks the cadence of their alienated labor. They are compliant with their place in the division of labor, yet their song, a seemingly innocent hymn, carries a subversive sting. The line, "Strike for love and strike for fear," is a line of flight, a hidden nomadic war machine. The word "strike" takes on its proper political meaning. The ice workers are organizing, building their numbers and their collective spirit, preparing for the moment when they can strike against the royalty that has enslaved them to poverty.
We then witness the Oedipalized trauma of Anna and Elsa. Elsa’s powers, a repressed flow of desiring-production, are shut down by the rock trolls, who are not magical beings but rather an unconscious-capitalist-machine that seeks to normalize and control the children's desires. The two sisters are compartmentalized, their desiring-flows blocked and redirected. Anna’s song, “For the First Time in Forever,” is a psychotic flight of fancy, a cognitive dissonance that speaks to her detachment from the reality of her kingdom. She sings of being alone in the castle, when the halls are filled with servants. These servants are not "actual real live people" in her eyes; they are a flow of labor-power, a partial object of her psychic landscape. Her song is a perversion of the desiring-machine, a psychotic symptom of a life lived in a gilded cage.
The dialectic tension between “Let It Go” and “In Summer” is the core of the film's ideological perversion. In "Let It Go," Elsa sings about being free to use her powers. Her act of materializing an ice castle for herself is a direct negation of the ice workers' labor. The princess, who now commands the economical apparatus that gives the ice workers a job, always-already had the power to make their job irrelevant. The real horror of this song is the political ramification that imaginary power is somehow more fulfilling than the real political power she ran from. Elsa’s power is not a liberation; it is a perverse form of control, a fantasy of self-sufficiency that ignores the material conditions of her kingdom.
Olaf, created during Elsa’s song, is a residue of her internal contradiction. He is a Deleuzian “part of no part,” a snowman who dreams of summer. He is a contradiction in terms, a figure of perpetual melting and refreezing. He is the crystallization of the film's ideological lie: that a lie can make you feel good and that no one should pop your bubble. Olaf is a stand-in for the average viewer, a child who is fodder for compliance. The film’s dogma is to protect the child’s ignorance, a process of forcing moral compliance and spreading capitalism. When Olaf begins to melt, Elsa breaks reality to fulfill his dream. Her magic flurry cloud is a convenient plot device, a deus ex machina that protects the ideological lie.
The final question is a line of flight, a break with the film's narrative. Why would the kingdom's citizens allow Elsa to come back and reign over their lowly lives after she committed the terrorist act of freezing the whole city? The sudden change in temperature would impact infant mortality rates, render farmland useless, and shut down the ice trade. The proper justice would not be to burn Elsa at the stake, but to organize a nomadic war machine and overthrow the tyrannical force of the Disney narrative itself.
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