Kimberly Steele

As a privileged, upper-middle class child, I was taken to see the Nutcracker ballet more than once. The Nutcracker ballet is one of those annual bits of culture that aptly represents the frenzy of the holidays: when you are caught in a materialist web as I was, it becomes more about dressing up and going into the city than the actual music or performance. I did not appreciate the magnificence of a live orchestra playing Tchaikovsky back then, despite him being (IMO) the most underrated composer in all of Western music. The music of the Nutcracker is transcendent in that it reaches across gulfs of time, space, and circumstance to evoke both the era from whence it came as well as unique, divinely-inspired genius. If you've ever been lucky enough to witness live music played by the best of professional musicians, you know that it is a mind-blowing experience. There is no comparison between hearing a recording and being in the same room as an orchestra or band. The effect of the live music experience is electrifying and addictive. I personally became so addicted to listening to live music in the perfect acoustic environment of the Auditorium Theater, I did a stint as an usher in college. I wonder if Andy Frain is still only paying their employees seven dollars an hour? I am going to bet it is still in the same ballpark.

Despite being treated to the live music and ballet Nutcracker as a child, one of the first truly inspiring experiences I had with Tchaikovsky's score was not at the ballet but parked in front of a Betamax tape-recording of a 1973 animation from the USSR simply entitled The Nutcracker. Maybe my limited attention span had something to do with my enjoyment, but the weird gravity of that little 25 minute cartoon has always stood out in my mind as more magical as the "real" experience of seeing the Nutcracker as a live ballet.

Once Upon a Time in Pre-Revolutionary France

In the original Nutcracker ballet, the story follows Marie, a young, rich girl. Marie's family throws the Christmas party to end all Christmas parties in what seems like end-of-empire France, like right before the bloody beheading phase for royals and their sympathizers. Marie and her brother, Fritz, are the pampered subjects of an extravaganza of gifts and entertainments in the great parlor. At the center of the parlor is the magical Christmas tree. A brief aside -- as a child, the kids down the block had the most amazing birthday parties. Their mom would hire a magician and if it was summer, there was always an ice cream cake, meaning a cake in which ice cream was essentially built in. It was delicious. At any rate, Marie's parents' party put my suburban neighbors' fete to shame. Marie is gifted with a Nutcracker. She falls in love with the toy. Her bratty brother grabs it and starts cracking nuts in its mouth. One nut is so large, it breaks the Nutcracker's jaw. Marie bandages her toy. When the party ends and everyone goes to bed, she sneaks out to see her toy and falls asleep with it under the Christmas tree.

Meanwhile in Czarist Russia...

In the 1973 Russian animation, an unnamed girl protagonist I will call Tatyana is not the daughter of the master of the house. Instead, she is a humble servant who is clearly not invited to partake in the Christmas party at all. Her role at the party is to clean up the messes left behind by the rich people. Nobody notices or cares she exists when she appears late at night with her broom to clean up under the Christmas tree. (If you'll forgive another aside, as a daughter of privilege myself, I can attest that real Christmas trees shed a terrific amount of needles no matter how well they are watered and humidified. My Dad used to insist on getting a real tree from a Christmas tree farm every year throughout my childhood and young adulthood.) Tatyana sweeps those pesky needles and other detritus and her broom becomes enchanted and dances with her. She finds a nutcracker on the floor with a giant nut stuck in its maw, the result of some brutal rich kid who tried to crack a nut, got bored, and threw it on the floor. Tatyana dislodges the nut and kisses the toy. The toy's eyes light up. It has been brought to life by her kiss.

I will let Wikipedia take the wheel from here:

When she kisses him, he comes to life and is devastated when he sees what he has become. It is then and when the Nutcracker decides to tell the girl his story of how he came to be:

A long time ago, there was a party at a royal castle to celebrate the prince's birthday, which was interrupted by the arrival of the three-headed mouse queen and her spoiled brat son, who both behaved very rudely and refused to leave or improve their manners. In exasperation, the king entered a secret chamber to obtain a poison against the mouse queen, but was locked in by the mouse prince. The mouse prince then started harassing the queen and the baby prince, and when the prince hit the mouse prince, its tail got stuck under the cradle and was hurt. In retaliation, the vengeful mouse queen had cursed the baby prince, turning him into a nutcracker, just before she was vanquished by the king. The king and queen were devastated, and the entire hall was petrified while the mouse prince escaped, taking his mother's crown with him. Now the Mouse King, he declared revenge on the Nutcracker. Eventually, the Nutcracker came to be hanged as an ornament on the Christmas tree within this house.

Just after the Nutcracker has finished his story, mice soldiers begin to appear in the hall, followed by the King of Mice. The soldiers try to get the Nutcracker, but the girl stops them, leading the Mouse King to shrink and capture her. The Nutcracker brings the toys around the Christmas tree to life, and a war is fought between the toys and mice. The Nutcracker is captured, bound and about to be whipped to pieces by the Mouse King when the girl throws her wooden clog at him, knocking off and smashing the iron crown, the source of the Mouse King's powers. The Mouse King's magic backfires, making him vanish in a puff of green smoke which also decimates his army the moment they inhale it and start sneezing.

The clog transforms into a glittering shoe. When the Nutcracker takes up the shoe, his shell falls away and he is restored to his human (and now young adult) self. He puts the shoe on the girl's foot, and her maid's uniform is transformed into a princess gown. The two dance to the royal castle to the music of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy; the king and queen are brought back to life through the Waltz of the Flowers, and the girl and the prince pass into the realm. All that is left behind of them in the human world are the girl's wooden clogs and the crumbled remains of the Nutcracker's shell lying before the Christmas tree.

In the Nutcracker ballet as well as the original E.T.A. Hoffmann short story it was based upon, the rich, young female protagonist rescues the Nutcracker by bandaging its broken jaw. In the Hoffmann version, a seven-headed mouse king wages war on the Nutcracker and his ornament gang because the nephew of the hired magician/entertainer at the party, Drosselmeyer, once pissed off the Queen of Mice. The backstory in the E.T.A. Hoffmann is frankly quite boring: it's a soap opera and not a compelling one. The King gets mad because the mice have eaten the fat from his royal sausages. He enlists his court mage, Drosselmeyer, to make traps which kill the mice. The Mouse Queen gets (understandably) mad and hexes the King's daughter, Princess Pirlipat, making her into a nutcracker. The desperate king promises Princess Pirlipat in marriage to whoever can break the enchantment. Drosselmeyer's nephew ends up being the one to break the enchantment via a convoluted fairy tale arrangement by which he accidentally kills the mouse queen by stepping on her tail. He breaks the enchantment, but upon becoming her gorgeous self again, she rejects Drosselmeyer's nephew and the nutcracker curse falls upon the young suitor, turning him into a nutcracker toy until Marie finds him. The Mouse Queen's son is the one who takes up his mother's crown and continues to wage war on the Nutcracker.

The Nutcracker ballet skips all of the Mouse backstory and cuts directly to the war, which basically happens for no reason as far as we the audience are concerned. The war goes the same way, with all seeming lost until the girl protagonist hurls her shoe at the last scion of Mouse and kills him. The Nutcracker then whisks Marie off to a magical land where she enjoys even more exotic entertainments from Russia, China, Arabia, etc. in Sugarplum fairyland. Tchaikovsky himself considered the Nutcracker the most boring and worst of his ballets, remarking to a friend in a letter that he thought of it as "infinitely worse than Sleeping Beauty."

An Almost-Lost Letter from Tchaikovsky

Yet for a child of the 1980s, the Nutcracker was the only window to the world of Western art music besides Looney Toons and the occasional school trip to the symphony orchestra. I doubt Tchaikovsky knew how very lost the Western art music scene would become, descending into atonalism and the stuntlord, non-musical nonsense of John Cage with his infamous 4'33. He could not have foreseen Autotune, a music-editing software that came from submarine technology that now dominates and curses every song it touches with the buzzsaw sound of bogus proficiency in singing. He had no idea that it would be a sad, grainy cartoon from the former USSR that lifted his own beauty out of obscurity for a depressed eight year old. His music has shaped many a composer's life, including this composer's life. Without him, there would be no Orphic hymns, and even the silly tunes I make up for my cats would be worse for the wear.

Let's get back to the story of the Nutcracker though, shall we? The 1973 animation is a much better story than the byzantine soap opera of the E.T.A Hoffmann or the edited claptrap of the Nutcracker ballet. For one, the protagonist as a poor maidservant instead of the already-rich daughter of decadence makes the animated story several orders more special.

Disney has a Mary Sue Problem

As we speak, Disney is losing millions and millions of dollars with each new release. Disney, for those not in the know, owns the entire Star Wars franchise as well as the Marvel Universe. Not only was Disney's latest animated feature, Wish, a total flop; its most recent disaster, The Marvels, has basically ended any former legitimacy the brand possessed. The trouble with Disney is not just its woke, Bud Lite-ish, creepily-sexualized agenda. Disney no longer tells stories of any substance. Like the Hoffmann and Nutcracker ballet stories, the young, female protagonists have no challenges in their lives. They earn nothing via any sort of hardship, yet we are supposed to love them because they exist. They are Mary Sues. They are Bella Swan in Twilight -- though to Stephenie Meyer's credit, at least she gave Bella a few issues to deal with, including dueling boyfriends and a difficult pregnancy later on. Nobody cares about Mary Sue. She is dull.

Adversity and Meatworld

One of the main reasons Meatworld (my pet name for the physical plane) sucks so hard is that nothing can be built without work. The "magical" computer I type upon was produced by elements probably brought out of the earth by enslaved children in Congo. It was probably put together by Chinese slaves. It was probably sold by some dullard milling away in the Apple store, hoping for a lucky creative break as an influencer or an entertainer. It did not just appear here in front of me because that is not the way Meatworld works.

Every morning, I do about 50-65 jumping jacks, between 30-50 squats, and anywhere between 20-40 military style push ups. I have no desire to do this routine. It leaves me huffing and puffing. At the end of the pushup routine especially, my shoulders and arms threaten to quit a bitch and drop me on my face. Yet if I don't want my belly and hips to grow well beyond their current proportions and if I want all the other benefits such as a mental boost, improved breathing, digestion, I had better jump and plank without fail every morning. When we exercise, we literally rip our muscles, which causes the body's energy to heal them and make them larger. If we don't use it, we lose it. When I am on those last three pushups, I imagine what kind of spaghetti my arms would become without them.

The Mary Sue/Marie Sue of the Nutcracker and other stories doesn't have to suffer pushups, squats, and jumping jacks in order to have buff arms and a flat stomach. In her badly-written fantasy, all she has to do is exist and kinda sorta choose the right thing and she will be blessed with magical riches and a beautiful life.

Compare Grimm's fairytale Mother Hulda, a story about a maltreated young girl who falls down a magical well and lands in the world of the elderly snow queen. The young girl makes the best of her circumstances, working hard and helping Mother Hulda shake her featherbed, which causes it to snow in regular old Meatworld. At the end of her tenure, Mother Hulda gifts her with gold for all her diligent labor and helpful demeanor. The girl returns with her gold. Her jealous, mean mother sends her ugly, fat sister down the same well. The sister also encounters Mother Hulda, but instead of working, sits on her giant behind and complains that she is bored. The ugly sister fails to help Mother Hulda, so the crone is left to shake out her own featherbeds. At the end of her tenure with Mother Hulda, the ugly sister expects gold simply for existing. Mother Hulda gives the girl the gift she earned, which is to coat her with tar and send her back where she must dwell in personal filth and poverty for the rest of her life.

Brie "Captain Marvel" Larson is a plain Jane who got extraordinarily lucky, as is the current Disney incarnation of Snow White, Rachel "Weird, weird, WEIRD!" Zegler. They are privileged, ugly (mostly on the inside) sisters who go down the well expecting a prize for nothing. They are finding out that Meatworld can be extremely harsh, despite their past lucky streaks. Their movies do not have the beautiful music of Tchaikovsky to redeem them, so my guess is that those movies will sink into obscurity almost as quickly as they were created.

The moral of the story is not that Meatworld is fair: clearly it is not, or at least it is not fair in any way we humans can hope to understand. The moral is also that for whatever reason, expressing an archetype via a story can only happen by including dark along with light, pain with reward, struggle along with triumph. Like Tchaikovsky's music, there must be an interplay of light and dark, of major and minor, of dissonance and consonance. The key to uplifting the human spirit via a story seems to involve being honest about how difficult it is to suffer at Getting Better at a Thing, including becoming a better person. And if you are going to tell a good story, it does not help to have the gorgeous music of Tchaikovsky as your musical score.

New Substack!

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