Screen to Scream: The Lure and The Merry Spinster's "The Daughter's Cells"

People who have looked into fairy tales beyond Disney movies know that there is much more to them than princesses being awakened by true love’s kiss, or simply the notion of true love as some magical McGuffin or panacea capable of ridding prince and princess alike of everything from unsightly blemishes to Stockholm syndrome. Digging deeper finds worlds where the magic in fairy tales comes with a very high price tag and love can simply be complicated, or even lethal. One example of this is Hans Christen Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, later made by Disney into a feature film featuring a plucky animated mermaid and singing sea life, but the original tale is much darker. The Lure, a Polish retelling of the version set in the 80’s, and Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s book The Merry Spinster, particularly the tale “The Daughter’s Cells” looks at this particular story and gives insight into the disturbing dynamics in these tales.

The Lure starts off in a nightclub where the owner makes a fascinating discovery, two young girls who grow fish tails when they become wet. If you’re thinking Splash, the movie with Daryl Hannah and a younger, too-talented-to-be-here Tom Hanks, then you’d be forgiven, but The Lure is no comedy. It’s a surreal float through tides of 80’s nostalgia, synthwave heartbreak, and musical theater (yes, this movie actually is a musical where the musical numbers are sung in Polish). The sisters become not sideshow attractions but singers, using the same voices that were bait for unlucky sailors to bring in customers and as their fame grows, so do their tastes for the surface world. Rather than become interested in clocks and silverware, the two mermaids Silver and Gold take up smoking, doing drugs, and Silver even falls in love with a human singer. This movie dips into so many genres as to become avant garde or even a genre all its own. Relying heavily on magical realism and of the two mermaids becoming acclimated to their life on land as entertainers, this movie shows the sacrifice that one of the mermaids makes for true love tragic as well as surreal and ends with a horrific, bloody bang.

Fans of Mallory Ortberg’s blog Children’s Stories Made Horrific will know the kinds of stories that are in The Merry Spinster. “The Daughter’s Cells,” the first entry of the collection, takes apart “The Little Mermaid” by turning it into something voyeuristic and alien. The mermaid in this tale isn’t merely some lovestruck teenage girl who happens to have a fish tail, but an actual creature of the deep who wants a prince she has noticed. She is not so much infatuated with the prince in this story as she is fascinated by the many weird customs of those that live above the water. When she looks upon the prince, she studies him more like a lab experiment or something merely novel, like a new promotional item at your go-to restaurant. When the mermaid finally goes through with her devil’s bargain and walks on the land, she still has trouble understanding why so many people want to follow her around and put her in dresses. Ortberg’s greatest accomplishment through this story and the others throughout this collection, which is something The Lure does and what Disney will probably never do, is peel back the curtain and show the subtly horrific hierarchy and poisonous moral ideas inherent in these stories. Silver gives up her entire identity to be with the one she loves, who sadly doesn’t love her back (very much from the original Andersen-penned tale), but Ortberg’s mermaid doesn’t let emotions overwhelm her. In fact, she eventually forgoes using feminine guile to bewitch the prince and opts for methods that would seem brutal in the prince’s world of opulence and civility, yet she is the story’s obvious hero.  Ortberg’s Merry Spinster takes inspiration from tales ranging from “Beauty and the Beast” to the Bible to create stories that play with our expectations created by a steady diet of these tales. These and other stories that take the fairy tale into horror territory show the true price of happily ever after.