https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uE65sE4168o
So this is the widow queen. Now, on the left you can see, I think, early 20th century illustration. It’s one of the many ones that I looked at, but this one really stood out to me because she’s, it says at the bottom, mirror mirror in my hand, who’s the fairest of the land. And I was like, okay, that’s different to what we’re all used to, right? You know, because we all know the mirror mirror on the wall. That’s the famous one. Heather literally had me change the way that I wrote it. She had such a great idea about this. When I saw the image also of the queen holding the mirror in her hand, I thought, this is amazing. She’s holding a cell phone. Like she’s literally taking a selfie. And I realized that this, for now, at least this was really the most powerful way to present the story. So it was a great change. Yeah, so that’s right. So it was like, there’s really, at first it was like, there’s really something about this that I need to pay attention to. And then eventually I realized, and I was like, okay, so we’re living in the age of narcissism, clearly. And, you know, we’re all captivated by these devices. And I know a lot of people have made comparisons between phones and mirrors. I think Paul Kingsnorth was talking about it recently. And I started to think about it. I was like, yeah, so let’s think about kind of the whole social media thing. And how is that? How is that like a kind of feedback loop? And I, you know, I’m on Instagram and, you know, now and again, I put up a design or picture that I’ve done or something. Basically, what you’re doing is you’re kind of looking for, you know, oh, did anyone like my picture? Let’s have a look. You know, it’s like a little bit of affirmation, right? So you’re asking the mirror who’s the fairest? Yeah. Okay. And what Instagram does, which is really dark, is it when you first join, it shows you a lot of the things that you want to see. But as time goes on, it starts pushing more and more ads at you, right? So it starts to become undermining. And, you know, these days, if I go on, I just get told, you know, that I’m kind of old and wrinkly and all of that stuff, because they know I’m 45. And so it’s actually an awful thing if you pick up the mirror and you just, you know, so so I was thinking, that’s an interesting relationship. So you’re basically looking for something and you get the opposite. And then I started thinking about it a bit more. And I think we all know stories of people who kind of got so into, you know, their TikTok accounts or Instagram that they’ve actually started to, you know, have surgeries and stuff, and they end up kind of destroying themselves, you know, because they become so captivated with the narrative of the mirror. Right. So this is what happens to the Queen. She starts to believe the mirror more than, you know, say her husband, you know, the king clearly loves her. But again, the danger we have in the modern world is we’re not seeking affirmation from our families, we’re actually seeking affirmation in the algorithms. And so there’s this very dangerous kind of thing that can happen that can destroy you. And I thought, okay, so that’s maybe this is one of the reasons we’re making Snow White now, because all these themes are so kind of present. And in our version, I really did try to push that, you know, it’s so weird that I had that intention in the story to bring about something like that. But I didn’t think of the mirror in the hand when you showed it to me. It was like, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. And so the idea is that the Queen, you know, ultimately ends up destroying herself, herself, she ended up destroying herself through this obsession that she has with finding out who’s the most beautiful. And so that image of the person, you know, looking in their phone or what, obviously, it’s not just that. But that’s a good example of what’s going on looking in their phone, and then becoming obsessed with the tropes of beauty, like you said, to the point where they will destroy their faces, destroy their body or become caricatures of humans. Sometimes it’s not just it’s like even these makeup, all these like makeup tutorials where, you know, people you can see like they’re just caking it on in a way that looks good on the phone. But you can tell even looking at the in the photo that if I saw this person in real life, I would run away from them, like with all their like really strong lines on the nose and all that. It’s like it’s this living for the mirror, like, yes, it’s wild. It’s like transforming yourself for the way that the phone takes a picture of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you’re so captured by the mirror. And then that’s what these images show that she’s you know, we never really see her interacting with humans. We only see her staring into, you know, well, she’s staring into the mirror or staring eventually at the apple, which becomes the kind of, you know, the end of things. Yeah. So yeah, that was a that was a really fun thing to to kind of weave through it.