Frozen’s Princess Elsa and the fairytale of the plucky little cake that could
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Version 0 of 1. This week I laughed at a picture of a cake that was supposed to depict Princess Elsa from the Disney film Frozen. The image had spread like frosting across the internet. It showed a side-by-side comparison of “the cake that was ordered and the cake that arrived”. One was of an edible Elsa, recognisable as the film’s animated heroine, her blonde plait cascading over her shoulder in a thick wedge of icing. The other was Elsa, but as an older woman, a tougher broad who had lived a hard life before moving to Beverly Hills, perhaps, where she called on the services of a surgeon who nipped, tucked and hoisted those royal features, Hollywood-style. The internet was amused. People called it ugly, nightmarish, terrible. Other sites picked it up, repeated those criticisms and added their own. It may have appeared in your Facebook feed, as it did mine, nestled in the scrolling list of news, baby photos and that video of puppies meeting kittens for the first time. It seemed destined to be a new star of the site Cake Wrecks, which has tickled me for years, mostly for its collection of rockets that look like something else, but particularly for its very literal iced messages: “Happy birthday in blue” – written carefully on the topping, exactly as it was dictated on the phone. But this Elsa cake had a different fate. It was not the culinary catastrophe that people had assumed; in fact, it was the work of a baker, Lisa Randolph-Gant, who had made the cake for a sick child via a charity called Icing Smiles. If you feel guilty for laughing now, it only gets worse: Randolph-Gant explained that she knew the cake was, as she put it, “a hot mess”, but that was because she only had two hours to get it finished. Because her grandmother had just died and she had been busy comforting her distraught mother. And when she turned up to deliver it, it started raining, and Elsa got wet, and her features were smudged because her face had to be dried off. The internet thrives on pointing and laughing at strangers. We know this, but typically finding the humour in these situations involves ignoring the fact that our laughter is mean, even shameful – as was the case with Sean O’Brien, the Dancing Man, who went viral for the crime of tearing up the dancefloor while fat, which someone found objectionable enough to photograph and share. Or when a public sex act in the crowd at a music concert was captured by a stranger and used as a way of humiliating the people involved. Or when BuzzFeed posted a “you won’t believe these people exist” list, which invited mockery of a woman in a wheelchair eating a block of cheese, or a clearly young girl with a big, blow-dried haircut deemed too big. But I see the Elsa cake as a kind of Rubicon. Before the cake, a malformed gateau would have seemed fine, like kittens falling off tables (only small tables, so they don’t get hurt) or people screengrabbing iPhone autocorrects that cause them to accidentally send rude texts to their mum. Internet humour is not subtle; it largely relies on a childlike immediacy between image and reaction. An amusing graphic of someone falling over is a loop of an instant. There is no time for its backstory, and we do not seek it out. But when we are shown what made the meme it forces us to stop and consider not just that the funny thing happened but why – and perhaps the feelings of the people involved. Our laughter is suddenly less secure. After the Elsa cake, we are adrift: who could have guessed it would contain so much tragedy? That a wonky eye made of sugar came from sick children and bereavement and led to humiliation? It was impossible to know. It was just a funny-looking cake. It is not amusing that a charitable act was mocked around the world, nor that the baker had lost a family member. When the Dancing Man told his story, compensation came in the form of a glamorous party in LA, thrown in his honour by strangers, who took on the shame of those who had mocked him. And, as with the Dancing Man, a queasy combination of guilt and amusement makes the Elsa cake a fairytale of its own, proving a wider moral about judging without the facts, and what it means to be a good person. The charity involved must have gathered more publicity from this than it has had in its entire history, which should translate into more donations and more volunteers and more cakes of cartoon characters, competent and not. Ugly Elsa was the plucky cake that could. Disney’s crack team of writers will be hard at work on the plot for Frozen 2, but surely they can put their pencils down and call it a day. |