Disney: 100 years of waiting for Prince Charming

Reflecting on the Disney centenary, Lauren Windle finds herself dis-enchanted with Prince Charming and reflecting on what might be a better kind of attraction.

Lauren Windle

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A plastic wind-up Snow White toy stands to the right of the photo, with hands clasped waiting

Photo by King Lip on Unsplash.

Picture the scene: you’re outside running an errand; maybe you’re taking the bins out or cleaning your car in the street. The sun is blazing and you’re in a great mood. Bolstered by the good weather, you start to sing to yourself. Maybe you’ve got Spotify on or the car radio’s playing. Just as you’re getting your groove on to Gaga, someone comes up behind you, about a foot away and joins in with the song . . . Startled, you stop singing and swing round to see the other half of your unsolicited duet.

The other person also stops and says: ‘Hello, did I frighten you?’ Clearly concerned, you back away towards your house. The person continues: ‘Wait, wait, please don’t run away.’ As you dash through the front door and slam it behind you, you hear your uninvited singing partner pick up the song where the two of you left off in an attempt to serenade you as you flee.

They never made a Snow White 2. Maybe that’s because watching the slow and agonizing breakdown of a relationship that was entered into prematurely isn’t very ‘Disney’.

Menacing, right? No one’s stopping to swap numbers with the creepy crooner. Except this is the exact interaction between Snow White and Prince Charming in the Disney film (1937). Word for word. I sat through it to check. Did she call the police? Was she embarrassed and uncomfortable with his invasion of her personal space? Did she drop a message to the other princesses to tell them to watch out for the crackpot future king? None of the above. The next time we hear her speak about the prince, Snow White is talking to the seven dwarfs and explaining that she’s ‘in love with him’, he’s ‘the only one’ for her and ‘there’s nobody like him anywhere at all’. Those are actual quotes.

When the prince and Snow White are finally reunited, she is woken from her unconsciousness by his kiss and he leads her away, wordlessly, into the sunset. In the whole film Snow White doesn’t say a word directly to the prince.

They never made a Snow White 2. Maybe that’s because watching the slow and agonizing breakdown of a relationship that was entered into prematurely isn’t very ‘Disney’. I, for one, would pay to watch as Snow White grows to realize that marrying someone who looms up on young women and breaks into song isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; and as the prince gets fed up with all the woodland creatures leaving their droppings as they traipse through the house to help with all the various daily chores.

Now this is key so listen up: there is no ‘the one’ and you do not have a ‘soulmate’.

The relationships we saw as children to model our hopes and dreams on were fundamentally flawed and Disney was at the heart of what I will be calling from here on in ‘The Great Deception’. In our treasured childhood films feelings of love didn’t grow from a deep and mutual understanding of who the other was. It was an encounter that sparked love at first sight, followed by some questionable courtship practices. It’s a sinister day in the magical kingdom when you realise Belle was a hostage with Stockholm syndrome; Ariel changed her species and gave up her voice in order to gain favour with the prince; and Sleeping Beauty was given a non-consensual kiss while unconscious.

We know all these are fairy stories, but the material we surround ourselves with has a tendency to stick, no matter how impervious we believe ourselves to be. Somewhere between Cinderella’s pre-midnight Waltz and Aladdin and Jasmine’s market stall encounter we fell for the idea that instant attraction is preferable to that which builds and develops more slowly over a longer period of time. The reality is that some of the best, most fulfilling relationships don’t kick off with irrepressible feelings of chemistry. In some cases, that chemistry wanes over time and in others it develops with greater engagement.

That said, those of us who are conscious that a pretty face or a banging body aren’t all they’re cracked up to be when contributing to a lifetime-length relationship, do forget that attraction is still important. The best depiction of a healthy attraction I’ve heard is Will van der Hart’s on The Dating Course. He compares a relationship to a church candle – one of those fat pillar ones. The attraction is the wick; you need it to get the thing going. But if you’re all wick, you’ll burn out quickly. The wax is the substance, the friendship, the deeper understanding of each other, the experiences you share. But if you’re all wax, you can’t get the flame going. However, if you have both, you’ve got a candle that will burn brightly and for a long time.

Another glug of Kool-Aid that Snow White had guzzled down was this idea of ‘the one’. Now this is key so listen up: there is no ‘the one’ and you do not have a ‘soulmate’. Neither of those things exist. Mr/Mrs Right is not out there. Get on with your life.

The entertainment conglomerate has done its best in recent years to repent for the generations of young girls with unrealistic romantic expectations.

Back in the ancient days of Athens, Plato shared some questionable insight into the origin of humans. Turns out, way back when, people had four legs, four arms and a head with two faces. Zeus, despite being king of the gods, was afraid of what these eight-appendaged, double-faced people could do, so he split them down the middle. Humans, now incomplete, walked the earth pining for their other half, throwing their arms around each other and intertwining their bodies in an attempt to grow together. In summary, the idea of a missing person to complete you is not founded on any scientific or biblical truth. It’s misinformation from Plato and Jerry Maguire. It is not a great premise to build your life and expectations on. It’s a waste of time.

What someone should have told Walt was that there are a number of people Snow White would meet in her life who would be a suitable marriage partner for her. She would have a different but fulfilling life with each. A person would become ‘the one’ when she chose to commit to them, because she would be making a promise to them to eliminate all others from the equation. Leaving just one.

The entertainment conglomerate has done its best in recent years to repent for the generations of young girls with unrealistic romantic expectations. They’ve produced a slew of powerful and sassy women, out for adventure with no love interest in sight; see Moana and Raya and the Last Dragon. But for myself and my millennial peers, the stage has already been set. If he doesn’t rock up on a valiant steed, quite frankly, we’re not interested.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

Music

5 November 2025

4 min read

Deliverance in the dark: Springsteen’s Nebraska and the scars that shaped it

His starkest album emerged from a season of pain, where family, faith, and music collided

Giles Gough

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

An actor playing Bruce Springsteen walks down a dark street, hands in jacket pocket.

Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen.

20th Century Studios.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen-White as the titular rock star, follows Bruce Springsteen's attempt to make possibly his most unconventional album, Nebraska. This also happened to be one of the most difficult times of Springsteen's life, battling with mental health. Before the film's release, let's briefly explore some of the root causes of Bruce's depression, and find out what part family and the church had to do with it.

When it comes to Springsteen's discography, there's something of a disconnect between the casual fans' favourite and the album favoured by critics. Born in the USA is the monster hit album, with its era defining hits and blue-collar Americana. But Nebraska is the one that musicians and writers wax lyrical about. Written and recorded in a small bedroom in Colt's Neck, New Jersey, Nebraska is an album filled with acoustic melancholy folk tracks. With no conceivable singles and no chance of getting radio play, this was not the album that Columbia records wanted him to make, but it's the album Bruce felt he had to make.

"Nebraska was the pulling back of the bow, and Born in the U.S.A. was the arrow's release" writes Warren Zanes in his 2023 book, Deliver Me From Nowhere. In it, Zanes tracks with loving detail not only the technical problems of turning recordings that were only meant to be demos into songs that you could feasibly release, but also the mental health struggles that had driven Bruce to focus on such dark subject matter. It marked a moment of the artist unpacking his issues and answering the question: what do you do when you realise that the things you've loved most have begun to do you harm?

That harm can be traced back to Springsteen's early life in 1950s New Jersey. His father, Douglas 'Dutch' Springsteen, also suffered from mental health problems, at a time when there wasn't even the vernacular to describe such things. Dutch would grow to become jealous of the attention that his young son would get from the women in his family, which would exacerbate his existing paranoia. As well as being neglectful and demeaning, Dutch would also become violent towards his son. Springsteen describes in his autobiography how on one occasion, his father was teaching him how to box when Dutch threw a few open palm punches to his face that landed just a little too hard. "I wasn't hurt" Bruce writes "but a line had been crossed. I knew something was being communicated. […] I was an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment". If this was young Bruce's experience at home, little respite was found in the outside world.

Springsteen grew up quite literally in the shadow of the Catholic church, and it permeated every aspect of his community. Bruce attended a Catholic school, where on one occasion he was hit by another student as a punishment from one of his teachers. This was compounded during his time as an altar boy, when the priest he was serving at a six am service gave him a public thrashing for not knowing his Latin. So before Springsteen started high school, he had been physically abused by his father, his school, and his religion. When these pillars of his life (who were meant to represent God to him) treated him this way, is it any wonder that young Bruce's take away from all this is that God is not a safe person to be around?

Years later, when Springsteen finally takes a break from the constant recording and touring cycle, he has no way to escape the damage done to him by the experiences of his early life. In Nebraska he illustrates the lives of down and outs, blue collar workers striving to get by, and even serial killers. The subject matter was so dark that when his manager Martin Landau first heard it, he started to worry about Springsteen's mental health. Thankfully, Springsteen would get the help he needed and forty years later, is a terrific example of someone who has done the work of tackling their own issues.

Where Bruce has landed on his relationship with God some forty years later is still quite hard to pin down. He's reluctantly adopted the adage of 'once a Catholic, always a Catholic' even if he admits he doesn't participate in his religion all too often.

There's no clear delineation point between him going from being a non-believer to a believer or vice versa, but that has not stopped him from creating some truly magnificent art with intense Christian themes. References to Jesus and the gospels pepper much of his musical output. Songs like Devils and Dust show the conflicted faith of a soldier in Iraq, whilst his song, The Rising, written in response to the terrifying events of September 11th, re-imagines the firefighters climbing the stairs of the twin towers as souls rising up to meet their maker. The finished product is a compelling anthem that would give even the most heartfelt worship song a run for its money.

It's quite possible that Bruce is interested in Christianity only in as much as it is woven into the thread of American life. How much the upcoming film will focus on his relationship with God or lack thereof is unknown, but the influence the church has had on him, for better or for worse, is undeniable.

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