4
From Peeping Swans to Little Cinderellas

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (henceforth Wonderful ), which had its theatrical release in 1962, was planned to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the earliest edition of the Grimm tales. Much of the hype surrounding the film related to the novelty of the medium, three-strip Cinerama, which projected the film in a widescreen format on a massive curved screen measuring 105 feet by 35 feet. The technological impressiveness of the film’s presentation arguably overshadowed the work itself; as Terry Staples surmises, “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm . . . is about Cinerama” (2008, 142). Critics largely dismissed the film’s representation of the brothers and focused instead on the creative narrative sequences dispersed throughout the film. The New York Post observed that “in some curious ways these episodes water down the story of the Brothers Grimm” (quoted in Lochner 2010, 4). Indeed, the interruption of the Grimms’ narrative by three live-action fairy-tale sequences results in a juxtaposition between the fantastic quality of the stories and the blandness of the biographical elements of the Grimms’ lives.⁵

Wonderful describes two brothers contracted to trace the family history of a duke. While Jacob (played by Karl Boehm) is dedicated to the task at hand and aware that income is needed to support Wilhelm’s family, Wilhelm himself (played by Laurence Harvey) is preoccupied with collecting local folktales, which he calls a “priceless literary heritage.” Wilhelm warns (on numerous occasions) that unless the stories are “written down and published, they’ll soon be forgotten.” The film is interspersed with three narrative sequences, which Wilhelm purchases, overhears, or himself recounts to children. He buys a rose to trade for a story from a female flower vendor; he eavesdrops on an old woman who “has the power to bewitch and beguile and create a world of beauty . . . she tells the most wonderful fairy tales ever heard . . . [and] only children are invited.” Away from these storytellers and his notes, Wilhelm often struggles to remember the stories. In one scene he observes, “Funny, I just can’t seem to remember any, they come and go, slip away, it’s a pity there isn’t someone to write them down.” Obviously, remarks such as these serve blatantly to promote the necessity of the Grimms’ future achievements.

Notably, Wonderful sets up a conflict between the brothers that reappears in the other two films, figuring one as the hapless dreamer and the other as the stern, fiscally oriented realist. In one scene, two old women remark that Wilhelm, a “poor moonstruck ninny,” is “off in the clouds again”; when “the whole world [is] on fire . . . he can’t even smell the smoke.” When Wilhelm overhears, he responds, “True, the whole world is at war, blood is flowing everywhere, real blood, not dragon’s blood . . . nor witch’s brew, which can turn an old hag into a beautiful young princess. That is my world, dear ladies. If you prefer yours, I beg you keep it with my fond blessings and a cordial good day.” If the film’s diegetical real world is coded as a masculine realm, an explicitly public sphere, the location Wilhelm describes, populated by hags, princesses, and witches, is feminine, where delusions that empower the oppressed can reign, albeit within the confines of one’s personal imagination. The pleasure Wilhelm derives from this feminine, unproductive realm is therefore coded as queer in the film, a preoccupation for ninnies, not real men.

In another scene, Wilhelm pleads with Jacob after destroying the duke’s entire family history for the sake of eavesdropping on an elderly storyteller: “These are pure gold. You can’t realize how valuable they are!” Jacob responds coldly, “You ruin everything you touch . . . I’m sorry for you. But much more sorry for your family with nothing to live on but dreams.” It is Wilhelm’s fragile health that reunites the brothers. In his feverish delirium, Wilhelm hallucinates numerous fairy-tale characters (including Tom Thumb, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel), who disclose that their “lives depend on you—if you die, then we’ll never be born!”⁶ Symbolically, the scene suggests that the oral tradition is outmoded and precarious; until committed to the supposed permanency of print, apparently, these characters risk extinction. Elsewhere, Wilhelm suggests that oral tradition is also less democratic (despite the aristocratic elitism of literacy!). He directly chastises an old female storyteller, credited with “the power to bewitch and beguile,” declaring to her, “Those stories don’t just belong to a few children, they belong to children all over the world now and forever after.” Wilhelm, therefore, is presented as the man who saved a “priceless literary heritage” that, unless “written down and published,” would soon have been forgotten.

Apart from the gendered hierarchy wherein the aristocracy’s masculinized “literary heritage” is privileged over the folk’s feminized oral traditions, in Wonderful, folktales are further trivialized as primarily for children. The film concludes after Wilhelm resolves to transcribe the stories while working with his brother on more scholarly pursuits. The book titles that fly across the screen range from Tom Thumb and Rumpelstiltskin to German Grammar and Legal History. In the final scenes, when the brothers are honored for their “literary and scholarly excellence,” Wilhelm is disillusioned when the praise excludes “frog and dogs and hags and dragons.” In spite of his admission that Jacob was “right about the fairy tales . . . quick reading, quickly forgotten,” children greeting their train begin chanting, “We want a story!” whereupon Wilhelm begins: “Once upon a time there were two brothers.”

These concluding words frame the film as a fairy tale retold and adapted from an oral tale (like the Grimms’ own Kinder- und Hausmärchen). The narrative infidelity in Wonderful, coyly framed within the conventions of the fairy-tale genre, is reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm who appear peripherally in Ever After. Although women are featured as the primary storytellers in both films—in Wonderful as the flower vendor and the bewitching old woman, and in Ever After as Danielle’s or the “real” Cinderella’s great-great-granddaughter—it is men, the Brothers Grimm in Ever After and the filmmakers in Wonderful (Henry Levin and George Pal), who have the authority to appropriate the story as they see fit for popular consumption. In both films, feminine oral storytelling is undermined by the determination of printed text; in Wonderful, this takes place during Wilhelm’s dream sequence when he learns he needs to give birth to the characters. Fittingly (though ultimately ironically), the film presents with supreme confidence the literary record—in contrast with oral tradition—as the prime technological apparatus. Yet the success of any medium can be somewhat precarious. Wonderful was made in Cinerama, itself predicted to trump all other media. However, given that so few films were ever made in Cinerama, one can reasonably conclude that it proved less profitable than print.

Once upon a Brothers Grimm

Similar to the conventional framing of Wonderful, Once upon a Brothers Grimm (henceforth Once) is framed by a large, gilded storybook, opened by a distinctively masculine hand. The live-action, made-for-television musical features Jacob (Dean Jones) and Wilhelm Grimm (Paul Sand) getting lost in an enchanted forest on their way to accept an award from the king. The film begins with the brothers gaily riding in a carriage singing of their work:

Of their popularity:

And finally of their future fame:

The song is particularly emphatic about the Grimms’ need for compensation (“sink or swim”), not for their romanticized folklore scholarship but for something that is measured “by the pound,” for tangible rewards like fame (enough to “need a pseudonym”) and fortune (“treasury”). Reminiscent of Wilhelm’s entrepreneurial spirit in Wonderful, the brothers in Once recognize that folktales are “pure gold.”

The carriage driver refuses to chauffeur the brothers into the forest after sunset because a family legend tells of a supernatural phenomenon that punishes anyone entering the forest after dark. Jacob declares that “fairy tales are just stories. They’re not to be taken seriously!” He repeats several variations of his incredulity throughout the narrative; however, his declarations are undermined and indeed punished because the forest really is an enchanted and dangerous place. Jacob’s position, as in Wonderful, contrasts sharply with that of Wilhelm, who is an ardent believer. Jacob supposes that Wilhelm has let “the folklore [he’s] been collecting take possession of [him]”; Jacob even serenades his brother on the subject in the song “Life Is Not a Fairy Tale”:

It is not until after their extensive experiences in the enchanted forest, in which Jacob is humbled in many ways (most memorably as a cross-dressed grandmother to Little Red Riding Hood, but otherwise as a man-turned-swan) that he is able to conclude the film with the song “Life Can Be a Fairy Tale,” where “magic carpets can sail to enchanted lands” and “things that I thought inconceivable all at once are quite believable.” The songs echo the narrative arc of Wonderful. Wilhelm believes in the timeless significance of fairy tales as a matter of “imagination,” “the dreamer’s way,” where “once upon a time is that happy rainbow only those who dream pursue,” and “you can be a child at eighty or be fully grown at ten.” Wilhelm’s position, in both Wonderful and Once, results in his characterization as naive, fanciful, and almost entirely reliant on his brother’s ability to problem-solve (or rather, to resolve the problems Wilhelm creates).⁷

Once effaces the intimacy and vulnerability associated with homosexuality and provides heterosexual alibis for both male leads. In both Once and Wonderful, Jacob’s stern attitude and reluctance to pursue women is excused by his devotion to his scholarship; in Once, for example, when Jacob meets a “sweet lady” (an ambiguously available single mother), he refuses her advances:

In another scene, Wilhelm wins the hand of one of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. However, when propositioned by one, he responds, “From my point of view the situation is impossible. I mean, how could I pick one of you when I love all of you?” As in Wonderful, it appears that neither brother can successfully maintain a healthy heterosexual relationship. Potentially, these failures can be attributed to their other primary affections: scholarship and each other.

Other campy⁸ moments oscillate between overt presentations of mutual affection and subversive dialogue between the brothers and within their respective musical performances. In one scene, for example, Jacob as half swan, half man, spies on his brother, only to refer to himself as a “peeping swan.” In another scene, when Jacob disbelieves that Wilhelm had been turned into a frog, the human Wilhelm inquires (with raised eyebrows), “Wanna see my wart?” The prospects of these respective transgressions are both comical and sexually loaded. That Jacob would experience sexual gratification from watching his brother’s exploits with the Twelve Dancing Princesses as a Peeping Tom or that Jacob might want to see Wilhelm’s genital warts (presumably transmitted during his time in the frog princess’s chamber) are doubly titillating as threefold taboos (homosexual, incestuous, and voyeuristic).

Many scenes between the brothers are perceptibly coded as romantic. When they are reunited after Wilhelm’s failure to measure up to the Frog Princess’s desire for a “green Apollo,” Wilhelm calls out to Jacob, “I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my whole life!” He subsequently runs and jumps into Jacob’s arms, and Jacob twirls him around and around. In disbelief, Jacob asks, “How did you get away from me without me seeing you go?” The brothers’ obvious delight in reuniting might have appeared less queer if it had not been sequenced directly following Jacob’s failed heterosexual escapade as a frog. Rather than a “Mama’s boy,” Wilhelm figures as Jacob’s boy, requiring gay consolation from his eternal heterosexual rejection.

In Once, the characters are fully aware and self-conscious of their scripts in the stories and complain about the limitations of their existence. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, tells Jacob—then cross-dressed as her grandmother and resisting his role in the fairy tale—how the story is supposed to go: “A handsome prince disguised as a hunter is going to rescue Grandmother and me and take me out of this dreary hut.” In disgust/astonishment, the wolf decries, “A hunter? You’re throwing me over for a hunter?” She responds blankly, in a mechanically even, high-pitched voice, “I don’t want a wolf. I want a prince.” His response: “But I’m a prince of a fellow.” Despondent, Red responds, “But you don’t believe in marriage . . . A girl wants stability, a castle of her own, a prince by the fire.” The Frog Princess, like Little Red, anticipates the Grimm script.⁹ Playing croquet, she sings that her “heart is beating so wildly” because the frog she “will revere” is on his way; she describes him as her “green Apollo” and asks, “Who needs a man again?” because her frog “is equal to any ten” and “tall and strong [who] fills my heart with song.” She then deliberately knocks her golden ball into the water and is greeted by a temporarily froglike Wilhelm. She throws herself at him, cheering, “Oh, goody!” as he hops into her bed; sitting beside him she asks, “Oh, froggie, would you mind very much if I kissed you?” She is disappointed, to say the least, when she discovers her frog prince is none other than the lowly scholar Wilhelm Grimm.

Ironically, each story Wilhelm witnesses in the film leaves him unsatisfied and alone. He apologizes to the frog-loving princess for his inadequacy, for as “a humble scholar,” he is unworthy of the princess he allegedly invented in his own folktale and fairy-tale collection. He complains, “It’s my fantasy, so I should have gotten the princess!” The film exposes an ironic tendency of the stories themselves; they often supported the aristocratic ideals that so frustrated the Grimms in their real lives.

Instead of controlling the fairy-tale creatures, as foreshadowed in Wonderful (through birth), the Grimms fail to exert any control over the scripts and find themselves trapped within them (hence Jacob’s role as the grandmother opposite Little Red and the wolf). Instead of the Grimms and their authorial powers, it is the “hags of the dark forest” who control this realm; and it is solely by virtue of Cinderella’s fairy godmother’s goodwill that the brothers escape. Because Jacob fails to perform any of the lead roles, he is ultimately forced into supplementary positions as the grandmother in “Little Red,” one of the six swans, and as a helper in “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin.” Wilhelm, in contrast, appears as the frog in “The Frog Prince,” the suitor in “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” and the “Dummling” in “The Golden Goose.”¹⁰ That each brother is unable to successfully integrate himself into the tales, despite his best efforts (Wilhelm, for one, works relentlessly), reveals the brothers’ failings as heteronormative masculine men.

The playfulness with which both Wilhelm and Jacob are treated in Once renders their folktales escapist entertainment as opposed to communicating their significance as cultural and historical documents. The king’s conclusion that it is “good to dream and to use your imagination, but even in dreaming good must conquer evil. Little children must be pure of heart and noble of spirit and purpose and . . . survive the peril to discover the value of truth and to live happily with love ever after” glosses over the culturally situated representations of good versus evil binaries. As with the oral folk traditions controlled by the storytellers in Wonderful, the enchantments in Once also take place in a matriarchal universe, wherein women appear as the authoritative agents. In both films, however, the brothers’ income is afforded by patriarchs (in Wonderful it is a duke, and in Once, a king). Although at the end of the film, the king emphasizes the tales’ importance to folkloric tradition, as “the ancient tales of Germany will now live forever,” the lack of Germanness among any of the characters underscores instead the American appropriation of German folktales and of the Grimms in the film.

The Brothers Grimm

Terry Gilliam’s idiosyncratic representation in his 2005 film The Brothers Grimm (henceforth Brothers) offers a prequel to the Grimms’ public lives. Set in 1811, one year prior to the publication of volume 1 of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the film reinvents its subjects as two conmen who travel the German countryside pretending to vanquish evil spirits. “Will” (Matt Damon) and “Jake” (Heath Ledger) are rejuvenated as wayward, morally questionable grifters. The pair’s infamy is one of the primary gags running through the film. In presenting the Grimms as con artists proficient in “subterfuge, theft, and buggery,” Gilliam creates an authorial team that cannot be trusted. Despite their convincing sales pitch, to “save your land from evil enchantments,” audience members know that the brothers are little more than traveling grifters, a dubious pair of nineteenth-century ghostbusters (lorebusters?). Their costumed armor, which they introduce early in the film as “enchanted,” is revealed as simply “shiny”; their oversized technological equipment is faulty; and their “expertise” in lore is revealed as inert as Will scans the forest in search of “trees on tracks,” “the forest on wheels,” or an elaborate “pulley system,” only to conclude that the perpetrators are “better funded than we are.”

Soon after the audience has ascertained the dubiousness of the brothers’ enterprise, Will and Jake are apprehended by the French general Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce) and dispatched to the village of Marbaden under the supervision of Delatombe’s Italian henchman and torture expert, Cavaldi (Peter Stormare). The primary narrative leads the brothers to resolve why countless young girls from the small village have mysteriously disappeared. They eventually discover that the supernatural force responsible is the Thurungian Queen (Monica Bellucci), a centuries-old witch who is attempting to restore her youth by killing the girls.

In the film, the Thurungian Queen is a powerful matriarchal figure, albeit a villainous one. She, like the “hags of the dark forest” in Once and the bewitching storytellers in Wonderful, has mystical powers bound up with fairy tales.¹¹ The enchantments in Once also exist in a matriarchal universe, whereby women appear as the authoritative agents, constricted to the scripted possibilities of their respective tales. In Brothers, the presence of powerful female characters emasculates the Grimms’ authority as fairy tale “experts.” When not attempting to flee or shrieking in fright, Will recoils in disgust or exhibits a pathetically weak stomach. He actually falls over at one point after witnessing a momentary frog kiss and gags into his handkerchief when the village’s female trapper callously skins a rabbit. The presence of the trapper, Angelica (Lena Headey), and the ways in which she interrogates the authority of the Grimms is strongly gendered. Edina Fecskó’s psychoanalytic reading of Brothers highlights Angelica’s “hermaphrodite nature” as she “bears both masculine (hunter) and feminine (she is capable of the rescuing kiss)” attributes (2008, 308). Following my analysis of the brothers’ nonnormative sexual performance, it is appropriate that s/he serves as a love interest to both. In a scene following Will’s admission that his enchanted armor is bogus (“I made that armor; it’s not magic, it’s just shiny!”), Angelica coyly emphasizes the absurdity of his costume. She asks, “So tell me, famous Brother Grimm, how exactly do you intend to save us?” as she licks her finger to shine his false armor (it squeaks loudly). Other feminized moments include the two separate occasions when Will dons women’s clothing; in one of the two he is referred to as a “little Cinderella.”

Despite his performance as the overbearing, protective older brother, Will falls short of the romantic hero archetype. On several occasions he simply tries to flee the scene, at one point abandoning his brother altogether, yelling, “Never fear, Jake, I will return for you!” Unlike the Jacob who literally carries and figuratively suckles Wilhelm in Once, or the Jacob who reminds Wilhelm to responsibly carry out duties related to his employment and personal relationships in Wonderful, Jake, like Will, is neither heroic nor particularly dependable in Brothers. In terms of masculinity and sexuality, however, the Grimms in Brothers are aligned with the oscillating representation in the other films.

Wilhelm Grimm is depicted as a socialite who, as Jake phrases it in the film, has “enough bullshit to fill the palace of Versailles.” Will uses his skills to defraud, pacify, flatter, and entice for self-interested, financial, and sexual gratification. At one point Marcusio Cavaldi urges the brothers to “go and sell your oil of snake, Grimmy.” Similarly, when the brothers visit the village of Marbaden, they are approached by a villager who immediately inquires about what the men are selling: “What’s your business?” Will, as though adopting the rhetorical strategies of a used-car salesperson, says, “Grimm’s the name. Two ‘m’s.” Later, he self-promotes by illustrating his latest endeavors to impress the film’s love interest: “the men who vanquished the mill witch of Karlstadt, the frog boy of Glutenhof, and the cannibal chef of the Schwarzwald in the gingerbread house of terror.” The audience, of course, knows that Will’s “a little chit, a little chat” is little more than, as Jake describes, “a little huff, a little puff.” Jake fares little better; even when he stands up to Will, he shrinks in pain from the force of his blow to his brother’s face. Although Jake is presented as primarily interested in “mythical damsels and princesses” in contrast to his philandering brother, his gift for scholarship and keen interest in popular lore lend credibility to the Grimm enterprise. Like Will, Jake is a skilled raconteur; in a drunken stupor, he proclaims, “I’ve got a story! I’ve got a story!” only to recount an obviously made-up adventure in which he and his brother journeyed “to hell and back.” The tall tales cited by the brothers each enlist adventures of grandeur that are little other than methods of overcompensation.

Audience members’ willingness to imagine the Grimms as romantic heroes on horseback venturing from village to village, either to gather stories from an authentic folk collective or to “save [the] land from evil enchantments,” is perhaps reinforced by the scarcity of English biographical works that set the record straight.¹² The representation of the brothers in the film could prompt readers to visit the Grimm texts for the first time or to revisit them with an eye toward the editorial interventions of the collectors and the rhetorical construction of the fairy tales. By extension, a reader might also interrogate the motivations and rhetoric of the director and screenwriter of Brothers. An audience might assume that the film is a prequel to the Grimms’ scholarly future, as is the case with other fictional biographical films.¹³ Similar to the foreshadowing that occurs in Wonderful, at several points in Brothers, Jake urgently declares that he needs to “write down” the events that occur in the film. Nevertheless, an accurate description of the Grimms is perhaps unnecessary for readers to appreciate their works. Furthermore, directors such as Gilliam characteristically dispense with historical accuracy in favor of pastiche. Rather than mock the conventions of film, in Brothers, Gilliam mocks the esteem of canonical authors. His film is ironic to the extent that its subjects are agents in their own story; Gilliam does not seek to revise or subvert the Grimms’ work or the conventions of such a fantastic retelling.

In the closing of Brothers, Will and Jake discuss their future prospects as a “turning point.” The brothers say they are “on the verge of an alternative career path, one that uses all our new expertise.” Their know-how early on, of course, is revealed as “lucrative”; as Jake explains, “There’s money to be made in witches.” Of the two, Jake is far less interested in money, but when offered his “half,” he resolves that he would prefer to “take the beans, thanks.” It is unclear, however, whether the “beans” refer to the magical, apparently noble pursuit of fairy-tale scholarship that the brothers presumably pursue after the adventure featured in the film, or the “beans” generated from the book trade. The ethical dilemma centered on popularizing and profiting from folktales—that is to say, appropriating the texts of others into a bound collection—is treated as commonsensical in each film. “Beans,” rather, are used to contrast the two brothers’ conflicting worldviews:

By the end of the film, however, the “magic” required for happy endings is replaced with brotherly love and good old-fashioned violence; beyond the final sword fight and shattering defeat of the queen, “believing” in one another is what enables the Grimms to walk out of the final frame of the German countryside in a brotherly embrace, “without a bean” to their name. The “beans” not only symbolize hope and the futility of “happily ever afters,” they also invoke financial security at the end of the film and signal a resolution between enlightenment and romanticism through contemporary capitalism.

In the closing of the film, Jake responds to Will’s suggested “career path” by reaffirming that “this is the real world . . . We are men without country, enemies of the state, and worst of all we haven’t a single bean to our name.” Will responds, “It’s a good name, though, isn’t it?” and Jake confirms that it’s “a damn good name.” The closing lines of the film do not interrogate the tenuousness of the Grimms’ future as storytellers or the controversies surrounding their transcriptions of oral folktales, but instead simplistically reduce the film to a namesake. Thus, the closing scene of the film reminds viewers that the only certitude offered here is a disembodied name with distinctly commerical properties. And yet, the authorial seal with which canonical texts are stamped is temporarily broken as audiences are shown the constructedness of authorship. As a construction of the past, Brothers can be conceptualized as pastiche, a form that Nicolas Haydock (2002) suggests is a practice of both assemblage and forgery. Because there is no real version of history that the film’s viewers have themselves witnessed, audiences judge the authenticity of cinematic representations in terms of other artificial, fictitious film depictions. As they are biopics, one might measure the accuracy of the films’ portrayals of the Grimms based on other Grimm films. Indeed, when the characterization of the respective brothers is consistent across films—or at the very least familiar—audience members may be more apt to trust the film’s accuracy. Blatant inconsistencies, such as the reversal of the brothers’ characterization, are what encourage an audience to remain skeptical of the Grimms’ authorial neutrality. Gilliam’s characterization of the Grimms as both real and constructed demonstrates the postmodern propensity for questioning truth.

The countless visual references to Grimm fairy tales are presented transiently in Brothers; that is to say, the Grimm fairy-tale characters do not serve any purpose in the film beyond a visual cameo. Similar to Wonderful ’s use of the stories as temporary digressions that interrupt the primary narrative, Brothers offers tropes for readers familiar with the resonance of a red cape, a glass slipper, and long billowing hair from a tower window. By framing the film with fairy-tale conventions that begin with “Once upon a time” and end with “And they lived happily ever after,” Gilliam does not interrogate the conventions of the genre or ironize the stories themselves. Of the three films, only in Once do self-reflexive fairy-tale characters explicitly interrogate the narrative conventions of fairy tales, and in particular how those conventions constrain their gender performance. All three films subtly interrogate gender conventions by underscoring the brothers’ inability to meet the standards of ideal masculinity as outlined in their own opus. In other words, either fairy-tale characters overtly question the gender scripts of the Grimms’ fairy tales or the Grimms’ performance does. In all three instances, the fictionalization of the Grimms dismantles the gender scripts of canonized fairy tales.

While audience members may recognize the fairy-tale tropes, the film does not demonstrate the liberating possibilities of the stories for the people. Literary scholar Susan Cahill, in one of the few articles that investigates Brothers at length, writes that by staging illusionary folk legends only to appear to defeat the chimeras, “the Grimms’ use and abuse of the spectacle, by staging the public’s fears and simultaneously constructing themselves as heroes within this fantasy, can be read as analogous to certain uses of the cinema” (2010, 63). Brothers’ story as fairy tale is hardly liberating in its interpretive possibilities—at least if one reads the overarching “Snow White” story affected by the mirror queen as central. On the other hand, if readers consider the focal narrative as the Brothers Grimm rather than their literary works, the process of fabricating stories becomes the crux of the film’s critical potential. The Grimm brothers as scam artists may not challenge readers with new adaptations of folktales, but the story does hold out for the deconstruction of authorship and its supposedly neutral, yet somehow sacred, authority.

The Grimms Read through Their Cultural Productions

The auteurial freedom exacted by Gilliam, Levin and Pal, and Campbell is not entirely unlike the editorial vigor with which the Grimms’ revised, edited, added to, and basically rewrote many of the classic tales to reflect what Haase terms their “own aesthetic and moral values” (1999, 360). The films, like the Grimms’ collection of “authentic” folktales,¹⁴ are subject to creative contamination. For Zipes, “To contaminate an oral folk tale or a literary fairy tale is thus to enrich it by artfully introducing extraordinary motifs, words, expressions, proverbs, metaphors, and characters into its corporate body so that it will be transformed and form a new essence” (2001, 103). Rather than simply preserving an oral tradition, Zipes posits, the brothers were “the greatest contaminators of fairy tales in the nineteenth century” (101). Rather than further pollute the fairy tales offered in the Grimms’ collection (which many other filmic adaptations have pursued),¹⁵ these filmmakers project their own aesthetic and moral values onto the scholars. What the films reveal is that the Grimms are subject to the same interventions as their folktales; paradoxically, they have become just as malleable as the stories they themselves collected and edited.

These representations of the Grimms provoke audiences to consider both the history of each figure’s public persona and how each is constructed in the popular contemporary imagination. Of the three films, Brothers is perhaps most creative in its reinvention of the Grimm Brothers as deintellectualized, depoliticized, and dehistoricized romantic antiheroes. In a featurette released with the film on DVD, “Bringing the Fairytale to Life,” Gilliam clarifies a crucial detail about the film: “Let me just say from the start that this has got nothing to do with the real Brothers Grimm, other than the fact that they were collectors of German folktales and we owe them a lot of thanks.” Rather than thank them, however, Gilliam clarifies that in his film, “we’re using them.” The brothers are reduced to their names, for as Gilliam suggests, the Grimms represent little more than an idea or “name” for contemporary readers.

The fantastic nature of the two later films, in contrast to the dramatization of the Grimms in Levin and Pal’s work, infuses the brothers’ biographical details with supernatural fairy-tale adventures. This infusion results in a postmodern interrogation of what is “real” and teases out the cultural constructedness (and instability) of the Grimms’ authority as canonical authors and “contaminators” of oral folk traditions. Although Wonderful certainly fictionalizes the Grimms, the genre within which it frames them offers the most serious treatment of the brothers as historical figures. The individual and oppositional traits given to them are arguably flexible and perhaps dependent upon the actor cast in the role.

Each film, by emasculating and bowdlerizing the Grimms, suspends the idolization of the scholars as authoritative historical personae and underscores the performativity inherent in their existence as public figures. By representing the Grimms with disreputable qualities, primarily as shady operators, Gilliam liberates the stories from their authorial reputation. At the very least, both of the most recent films sully the popular interpretation that valorizes the Grimms’ creative genius by playfully derogating them to a logical extreme. And by framing the brothers within the conventions of their work, each film interrogates the editorial efforts imposed by the Grimms as well as the cultural understandings of folktales. Thus, these cultural productions discourage a reading of the Grimms’ stories that is bent on the esteem of the brothers’ characters or in fixing the narratives to a particular category (children’s literature, for example). Audiences are encouraged to read with one eyebrow raised, mindfully considering the fabricated and forever-evolving nature of cultural production, apparently regardless of the medium.