Frozen: Elsa's Salvation, Part 1

Finally, the posts I've been meaning to write since I first had the idea of starting this blog. I started by trying to get it all into one post, but given that I'm doing an almost scene-by-scene analysis of what each moment among Elsa's story represents, it was getting a bit too long even for my tastes. So I'm breaking it up into three different parts. In this first part, I'll be introducing my thoughts on her and talking about the movie's prologue, including "Frozen Heart," some thoughts on their parents, and "Do You Want to Build a Snowman." So, here we go!

Elsa's character resonated with me profoundly, not only because she was a princess unlike any that Disney has made before, but because she had a much deeper emotional conflict than I feel any other Disney main character has. In fact, she seemed to struggle with a lot of problems that myself and many people I love have struggled with in dealing with mental illness: she could never let herself just be happy, she was always plagued by guilt, she always assumed that the worst would happen, she never had any faith in herself, and in general, she let her life be ruled by fear. How is it possible that someone could find hope and healing after living a life of so much pain? 

The answer, in the movie and in life, is that we need a savior; someone wielding the infinite power of love, which conquers all. Elsa's savior was her younger sister, and my savior is my eldest spiritual brother. I'm not saying that Anna herself represents my Savior, because she's just as human as the rest of us and makes plenty of mistakes, including with Elsa. But the relationship that Elsa has with Anna, particularly in the second half of the movie, is all about the offer of Anna's love as a way to overcome Elsa's fear, guilt, darkness and pain. And Elsa's character arc is about what she goes through before she finally accepts that love; why she initially rejected it, what she went through before realizing how much she needed it, and how she was able to be saved through it. All of these things I find very symbolic of the path towards our own salvation, and the only way by which we are able to achieve it. Even if you're not a Christian, I invite you to stick around, because I think that the message of love conquering all and saving us from our torment is one that applies to everyone. I believe that Christ is the unfailing source of love I need to be saved in my own life, but if you don't believe in Him, I think by believing that someone else in your life can be that source (even if it has to be yourself) you'll get the message I'm trying to put across. 

Before we get started, I want to address Elsa's cryokinesis. First of all, while Elsa is more powerful than almost any superhero you can think of, this isn't a movie about her extraordinary abilities. The magical elements of the story are really just a way to facilitate the story of Elsa and Anna's relationship, in a dramatic fashion. I used to wonder what her abilities represented in our own lives, given that magic isn't real and all, but I've come to realize that that part doesn't really matter. It's just a quality that we have that could be a blessing or curse; something that could bring us either happiness or fear, depending on what we do with it. Something that we struggle to control and harness to use for good. It could be something as general as our minds, our bodies, or our emotions. It's not really important that Elsa had magic power over ice and snow, what's important is that she had an attribute that created both pain and goodness in her life, and the lives of those around her, depending how she controlled and viewed it, and herself because of it. This is something useful about having magic in your story. In a way, it's a placeholder in the message, that we can easily replace with our own personal real-world challenges, which makes the message easier to apply to a greater number of people.


Alright then! Let's go to the beginning then, shall we?

Born of cold and winter air 

And mountain rain combining, 

This icey force both foul and fair

Has a frozen heart worth mining.

You may be saying "What? That song has nothing to do with Elsa!" Well, in a literal sense, no it doesn't. But it's such obvious foreshadowing that I'm not sure if it's even allowed to still be considered foreshadowing. It's a brilliant song (I'm particularly fond of it because it's the only one I can sing along to), and I like how well the lyrics summarize the complexity of Elsa's character. Like I said, the problem with past Disney movies is that the characters seem to always be so... black and white. They were good or bad, this or that. Sure, the heroes had flaws, but generally they were always pointed the right way. But Elsa, during the whole movie, had so many desires and temptations pulling at her, and there are times when it's really not so clear what the "right" thing is for her. Her character, like the ice our men are mining, really had potential for both foulness and fairness in it, which makes her a) a lot more realistic, and b) a lot more interesting, because you get to see her struggle, and how one side of her overcomes the other. Not to say that she was ever really tempted by evil, but  you can't say that she was always pointed in the right direction, partially because sometimes it was so unclear what that direction was. But any way you look at it, she did cause a lot of pain and suffering, no matter how often she wanted to do the right thing. She had so much fear, and as we all know thanks to Yoda, fear leads you down a path that inevitably ends in suffering. She let herself slip down that path far too often. As usual, the diversity in her character was represented through her cryokinesis: while she was able to create beautiful things with her powers, it also caused a whole lot of problems. Like, I dunno, almost causing her entire kingdom to freeze to death. You can really see the difference in the two snowmen, Olaf and Marshmallow, she made while in two very different emotional states. That's one of the things I like about characters with supernatural abilities: you get to see the struggle the they have in their minds and emotions represented by what they do with their powers. It's one of those cases where seeing something in a way that's impossible in our real world actually makes it easier to understand.

I could go through this song pretty much line by line to talk about how it relates to later events in the movie, (I particularly like "strike for love and strike for fear," because the movie is full of actions taken out of both, and the battle between those two feelings really defines Elsa's character, and I'd go so far as to say the movie in general) but the other one I really want to hit on is the phrase "Beware the Frozen Heart." This, again, is one of the themes that Disney did take from the movie's inspiration, but of course, Disney looked at it a different way. In the original story, Kai's heart is the one that's frozen, and as a result, he can't feel love. In the movie, the one who's heart was literally frozen was Anna's, but in her case, it was really just more of a magical illness. The one who I feel like really has a "Frozen Heart" in a metaphorical sense is Elsa, and like the miners were singing, that heart was worth trying to uncover, or "mine," to Anna. Elsa was the one who was cold to those closest to her, and even if she didn't want to be, that was still the choice she made. In fact, the only reason Anna's heart gets frozen to begin with was because Elsa's heart was so frozen in fear. I like to equate having a frozen heart to be hardhearted, because Elsa continually rejected the love of the only person who could save her. And rejecting your savior is exactly what the scriptural definition of hardheartedness is.

This of course brings us to the beginning of Elsa and Anna's story. They used to be heartwarmingly close, but then the accident happens, the Trolls advise the family about Elsa's future, and we get the heartbreaking "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" sequence. Now, before I go further, I want to talk about Elsa's parents. I honestly don't think there's much blame to be placed on them. The Troll Elder did prophesy that a lack of control over her powers would cause people to turn on her, violently. What parent wouldn't take whatever steps seemed prudent to prevent that? Reducing the staff and closing the gates was always meant to be a temporary thing, just until Elsa could have total control over when she did and didn't use her powers. It makes sense: if someone wandering by happened to see her accidentally use her powers destructively, who knows what rumors they might spread? I'm not even sure that the parents were telling her to never use her powers again, but just to only reveal them once she was confident in her control over them, to prove to people she wasn't a threat. "Conceal it, don't feel it," because letting her powers be controlled by emotions seems like exactly what would cause something to go wrong. And through the whole process, they were always very supportive and encouraging of her.

You can totally see the resemblance,

 especially with their mother.

Now, I'm not necessarily arguing that their course of action was the right way to go about it, because obviously, it didn't work too well. The trolls said that fear would be her enemy, and while it's logical that learning to have total control over it would be what would prove to her that she didn't need to be afraid, that's just not the way Elsa worked. Learning to control our emotions and actions takes time and includes plenty of setbacks, but I don't think she ever realized that; she seemed a little perfectionist to me. So, when she did have a stumble or two, it immediately resulted in more guilt and more worry for her. After all, the safety of her family and basically her entire future depended on her getting this down, and that's a lot of pressure to place on a little girl. She fell into her depressed mental state, and while for some people, the way to fix that would be to solve the problem that was making her depressed, for her, the worry and the guilt became completely debilitating. She couldn't allow herself to love anyone, because she was convinced that letting anyone close to her was inherently dangerous, but that only made the whole thing worse. 

You may say "Yeah, and that's the parent's fault, because they're the ones who cut off her human contact!" And it's a valid point, especially where Anna is concerned. I'm not trying to argue that the parents were perfect, but you have to remember that Anna was their child too; one they had almost lost to a magical mishap. Wanting to protect her as well until Elsa had control over herself is a natural response, especially when it was only ever supposed to be a temporary thing. But either way, I'm just about convinced that even if they hadn't put in place Elsa's sanctions, she would have shut herself off anyway. After all, once the parents were gone, she still refused to be close to Anna. In fact, even well before the parents passed away, Elsa closed herself off to them too. In the end, it was a downward spiral that no one intended. They took Elsa away from people temporarily until she could control herself in order to protect everyone, and they tried to encourage her and strengthen her, but Elsa was guilt-ridden and fearful when she kept having trouble with it (again, like anyone would), so she shut herself off, which only ensured she could never feel anything but the depression and the fear, which meant that she had even less control over herself, which only made her even more convinced that she had to be completely alone. There was no way she could win.

But Anna has no idea what's going on this whole time. On one hand, it's hard to imagine how anyone could keep alive a relationship under those conditions. But on the other hand, I wonder how often she stopped to think that maybe Elsa was going through something that Anna couldn't imagine; that their separation hurt Elsa as much as it did Anna, and there really was an understandable reason why Elsa so consistently removed herself. Again, I'm not trying to blame Anna, because it was a terribly difficult situation, and she was given pretty much nothing to work with. But why jump straight to the assumption that Elsa shut her out because she didn't love her? While it's an easy assumption to jump to, I also think that there was plenty of clues that Elsa was dealing with something really horrible. None of us can know what other people are going through. Empathy, or at least trying to be empathetic, certainly would not have gone astray in this situation.

Either way, what we see during "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" is their relationship falling apart, not really because of anyone's fault, but just because life can become messy, and everyone makes mistakes. It's tragic, but it's also realistic. There are so many things that can get in the way of love, and we so often let them, even without meaning too. 

That's one of the reasons that, if you think about it, Frozen could be considered a really depressing movie, which is actually how I felt about it in the days following when I first saw it. After all, to make a movie about how things get better, you have make things really, really awful first. Elsa grew up locked in her room, terrified of herself and consumed by worry and guilt. Anna grew up thinking that her sister didn't love her. Both of them had to endure a very potent feeling of loneliness. And of course, the movie is about how they overcame those feelings and mended their relationship, but there's no way to make up the time that they lost. While the movie was designed so that hopefully, you walk away feeling uplifted by the happy ending, in the end, it's your decision wether to focus on the bright, happy future or the very painful past. Which is interesting, because that's similar to the choice that Elsa herself had to make during the movie, and one of things I really like about it is that it shows what will follow from choosing one or the other.

There is one last key moment from this sequence I'd like to touch on, and that's the last verse of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman," after their parents pass away. While Anna makes plenty of mistakes both before and after this scene, this is a moment when she remembers what really matters (tragedies have a sad way bringing that into focus, as it turns out). She knocks on Elsa's door one more time, singing "I'm right out here for you, just let me in." Love is interesting in that it can't force it's way into your life; you have to make the choice to accept it. This is touched on repeatedly throughout the movie, but I really love the imagery of this scene, with the girls separated by the door. It reminds me of a picture that has our Savior knocking on a locked door. A key component of His offer to us is that He is able and willing to bear our burdens for us, but we have to make the choice to let Him. If Elsa had opened the door at that moment, she might have been able to receive the healing that it took another 3 years and the near loss of her sister and kingdom to gain. But seriously, I know that I keep that door closed way too often. I think we all do, from time to time, usually without realizing what the consequences might be. Remembering that this was a moment of escape from her pain that Elsa lets slip by would be good for us in those circumstances; we don't have to make the same mistake.

Well, that will bring us to where the story really begins, on the day of Elsa's Coronation. My next post will take us from "For the First Time in Forever," through "Let it Go," and to "For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)" As always, let me know your thoughts on what I've said so far! 

09/2/2014 EDIT: I do realize that the door scene has a bit more to it than what I wrote about initially. Sometimes, when I see some sort of spiritual symbolism, I jump straight to that and forget to do a more rounded analysis of the moment in question. Please allow me to do so now, with some added thoughts on the parent's death and the effect that it had.

One of the real tragedies of this family's story is that the parents died before they could see their children through the problem that had such a significant impact on their lives. I like to imagine that the parents had a long term plan for how they would guide their daughters, and that they were nearing a turning point in that plan: one that would remove the secrecy between the sisters, hopefully giving Elsa and Anna a little more room to rebuild their relationship. Again, I don't think that they ever told Elsa to completely ignore Anna all the time, even as a child. But the instruction to hide her power at all costs was enough to make Elsa too afraid to take any risk, which basically had the same result. But that was when they were both children, when they needed that sort of strict protection. At the time of their death, Elsa was 18, and Anna was 15; 10 years since the accident, and Anna was on the verge of adulthood. Having both grown up, I think even their parents would have soon realized that they could trust their children a lot more than they could 10 years ago. There's certainly an argument to be made that they should have made that turning point even sooner, but I can see where they would be overprotective; partly by nature of just being parents, but partially because of the amount of danger behind the situation. 

Of course, I don't really have any basis for that line of thought, it's mostly just theorizing and wishful thinking. But I think that whatever their plan was for Elsa, even if it wasn’t the best plan, it was far more detrimental to her that they weren’t able to see it through to it’s completion. Then, at least, she could have had some sort of closure; an end to that chapter in her life, and the beginning a new one. As it was, she was left in a kind of limbo, a plan missing a critical component with no end in sight. Her chances of success in that plan were lower than ever, but it was all she had left to hold on to. All in all, it was an incredibly difficult place for anyone to try and move on from.

And their death came at a very bad time in more ways than one (not that there’s ever really a good time to lose your parents at a young age). When the sisters were children, the parents could be the source of love and nurture to both of them, even if Anna and Elsa were separated; it certainly wasn't ideal, but it wasn't like Anna and Elsa had absolutely no one in their lives. They both had parents who loved them dearly, which is more than a lot of children could say. But Anna and Elsa had reached the point in their lives where they needed more than that. When you suddenly yank the parents out of the sister's lives, not only are they left without the only meaningful relationship they had, they're left alone at what should be a critical time of growth, with no one to guide them.

Which brings us to the last verse of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” We can imagine that the funeral was a few weeks after they last saw their parents: some time to communicate with their destination to confirm they never arrived, some time to hope they somehow survived, and then some time to plan the ceremony. Either way, it hasn't been too long, in the grand scheme of things. Their parents instruction to Elsa, to hide her powers, was still fresh in her mind. I can almost imagine Elsa thinking that it would be a betrayal to her parents to throw off what they had asked her for, so soon after they passed away. In which case, the most obvious reason that she didn’t open the door was that Anna would notice that there was a small snowstorm in her room. 

Which is understandable, even if I believe it was the wrong choice. But while that moment was very symbolic, it was by no means her only chance to “open the door” to Anna. Even if she had taken some time to recover from the initial shock of grief and get a reasonable grip on her powers again, and THEN went to Anna, things would have still turned out very much for the better. Or even if she wrote Anna a letter and stuck it under her door, or done something to reach out to her sister, their lives may have taken a very different, much less painful course. But over the course of the next three years, she obviously refused to take any sort of meaningful steps to bridge the gap between her and her sister.

Again, there are multiple ways of looking at this. One is the ever popular theory that everything was her parent’s fault. She was living by her parent’s rules, just like she had all her life, and that’s why she never went to Anna. Which, again, is certainly a valid theory. But I still disagree with it. With all due respect to her parents, they were dead. Elsa was holding on to rules created under very different circumstances, in a very different time of her life, instead of living according to what was actually happening in the present. After all, how could Elsa know for sure that her parents wouldn’t have wanted her to go to Anna, considering that she didn’t have them anymore? I think they always recognized that there was a delicate balance between keeping Elsa away from people for safety reasons and ensuring that Elsa still had love and support. They could offer that in their time, so they didn’t want to risk Anna’s safety. But with them gone and both of their daughters grown up, I honestly think that they would have wanted Anna and Elsa to support one another; I think they would agree that the situation had changed enough that the benefits of them them being together outweighed the risks.. But even if I’m wrong, that doesn’t matter. Her parents did what they thought was best in their time, but now Elsa had a responsibility to start doing what she thought was best, for herself and for Anna. 

Although, I suppose that’s exactly the problem. What she thought was best was exactly what she did. Stay as far away as she could from Anna, for Anna’s safety. Which is admirable, in its own way, but also too much of an all or nothing approach. She could have at least told Anna why she had to stay away. Even if she still refused to be in Anna's presence, I think what ate Anna up more than anything was not even knowing why. Couldn't Elsa at least ease that burden? Of course, the obvious argument against that from Elsa’s perspective is that there’s no keeping Anna away from a problem that she thinks she can fix; if Anna knew what Elsa’s problem was, she would refuse to accept that as a reason stay away from her sister, which would (in Elsa’s mind) be way too dangerous for her. The only way to keep Anna away was to give her no hope that anything would, or could, change.

The way I look at it is that, as I said before, Elsa had chosen on her own that she needed to live in physical and emotional isolation. And I believe she would have reached that choice even if her parents had done things differently. She wasn’t lacking love for others, but she refused to accept love from others- we need both. We also need to support love with faith and hope, and I think Elsa had given up on those virtues. I think that was her real problem, not her parent’s restrictive rules. The most we can expect from others is for them to do what they think is best, so long as those decisions are born out of love. But that doesn’t mean they’ll get it right every time; I can promise you that no matter how much someone else on this earth loves you, they will still let you down. That’s where our responsibility to exercise our own agency comes in, even (or perhaps especially) if the choices we need to make simply are to never give up hope, never give up faith, and never give up on the love of those who would do anything for you, regardless of their mistakes. That, in my opinion, is where Elsa fell sort. 

Not that I’m trying to be too hard on her. The last thing I’m trying to say is that Elsa just needed to grow a spine and learn a bit of self control. In fact, I have to try really hard to not be personally offended when someone does say something like that, because that’s not how people with depression and despair work. Elsa’s pain was real, it was deep, it was present in every moment of her life, every breath she took. There are many people who suffer from similar pains, and trivializing them by saying that they just “lack willpower” can show a very pointed lack of empathy and understand. What I’m saying is that there was always hope for Elsa, there was always faith to be found, and there was always someone who loved her. She just needed to believe in those virtues. I make it sound so simple, and perhaps it is, but sometimes making those choices can be the hardest thing in the world. And in most, if not all cases, we will need a lot of help.

Which brings me to the last question: why was Anna able to help Elsa when their parents weren’t? Didn’t they love her? Yes, they did. I’m convinced that they loved both their daughters with all their hearts. But as I’ve said, someone to love her wasn’t the only thing she needed. This is a case where I don’t think there’s a straightforward answer, because it gets into too many “what if’s” and “maybe then’s.” We can never know what might have happened, although I’m convinced that even if they had done things differently during Elsa’s childhood, it would have brought up different challenges that we couldn’t anticipate; there was no easy answer that could make everything better. I am also convinced that there was a path to her healing that didn’t involve her parent’s deaths. All we know for sure is that Elsa hadn’t gone through the change that she needed to by the time that they passed away, and so she was very, very blessed to have Anna there when she needed someone the most. Had her parents survived, she still would have had to go through some sort of refiner’s fire, but I still think she would have made it down the path to healing- that path just would have taken many different turns. We could spend all day thinking of what could have been different and what might have been better, but if we did that, then we would completely miss the point: that there was always a path to salvation, and that she did find it in the end.