RAPUNZEL RAPUNZEL, LET DOWN YOUR HAIR
I am willing to bet $10,000 (take that, Mitt Romney) that in every culture, there is a Maid in the Tower myth. No matter the version of the tale, whether it’s Ten Things I Hate About You or Perisinette, the moral of the story will be: overprotective parents can lock up their little girls and keep them away from all the bad elements boys offer, but there is always going to be some prince who meets with her secretly, calls out her name, and the daughter ends up pregnant with a boy and a girl. Whooops! That’s the original Rapunzel story.
I was hoping for a discussion on gender and sexuality in the spirit of the original Rapunzel narrative from Grimm tonight, but alas, the focus was on a re-interpretation of the sins of the mother. What do I mean? Well, in the original Rapunzel stories, the mother convinces the father to steal rapunzel (a flower) or lettuce or radish (depending on which variant of the story you go with), vegetation that was irresistible. The writers of GRIMM cleverly made Rapunzel (Holly Clark’s) mother a drug addict whose daughter gets adopted. As it turns out, Holly is really a Blutbad like Monroe, who has really let her hair grow out. On a camping trip a long time ago, she bit a neighbor, the neighbor, Jim Addison shoot her with a buckshot and left her to die. Lost in the woods, the sins of the mother became the sins of the daughter. Holly becomes the stereotypical white female pot-smoking hippie from Portland. Hank and Nick re-open the missing persons case in order to find Miss Clark. In the episode, we discover that Eddie as a Blutbad can communicate with his kind, by glaring into their red eyes, sending them into a trance to persuade them to do what they want.
In Brothers Grimm’s ending originally, Rapunzel’s tears cure her blind prince; the television show, Holly’s red-eyed glare into the suspect line-up to point at Jimmy Addison as the perpetrator of her disappearance.
Moral of today’s story: people who are addicted to drugs are people too.
Not every culture’s Maid in the Tower myth has a Hollywood style happy ending. In Azerbaijan they tell of the princess who threw herself off a tower rather than submit to the wicked prince who wanted to “rescue” her. The ancient Maiden’s Tower, alleged site of this story, still dominates the old city of Baku.
Yikes!