Dionysusis?unmask

This brings us to our last pairing, Dionysus as Ariel. It's not a sacrificial pairing, and we didn't get here via a process of elimination. This is a high confidence match derived by our profile matrix and the Hungarian algorithm, and here's why.

Dionysus is the god of wine-making, orchards, fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. Unlike Artemis, who rules the wilds, Dionysus specifically exists to subvert authority and liberate his followers from social convention.

In Greek mythology, Dionysus is a god of foreign origin — the arriving outsider-god. Ariel exhibits obsessive xenophilia through the treasures she has collected. Ashore, Ariel is the perfect embodiment of the stranger. No one knows where she came from, who she is, why she is in Prince Eric's kingdom or how she got there. She doesn't speak a word. She has to mime theatrically to get any message across.

When Ariel dines with Prince Eric in his castle, she is completely unfamiliar with human customs. Mistaking a fancy porcelain finger bowl filled with warm water for a soup or tea cup, she raises it up and takes a confident drink from it, much to the confusion of Grimsby. She believes a common fork is used to style hair. She believes a smoking pipe is a musical instrument. She seizes the reins during the carriage ride and drives at reckless speed. She's ungoverned at the table, exuberant where restraint is expected. She's exuberant and unrestrained, the exact shape of Dionysus.

Dionysus is twice born. In the Orphic myth, Dionysus' old body was destroyed and he needed to be born in a new one. Unlike Tiana, who returns to her original form, Ariel ends her movie in a new body — on two legs.

But where's the wine? Dionysus is the god of wine. No wine, no Dionysus, period. I don't care if it's a G-rated Disney movie.

Where would the wine be? Dionysus' wine, music, and ecstatic dance were considered to free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. Wine could ease suffering, bring joy, and inspire divine madness. Well, if anywhere, it has to be at the point of Ariel's transformation.

Let's zoom in on that scene. It's a clandestine meeting frowned upon by any right thinking merfolk. Ariel is here on impulse, in direct defiance of King Triton, which sets the scene perfectly. The festivals of Dionysus are subversive and transgressed traditional social and moral constraints.

Something's brewing. Literally, as Ursula throws magical ingredients into a bubbling, steaming cauldron — a concoction for poor unfortunate souls who are miserable, lonely and depressed. That's pretty on-the-nose way of saying: it's drugs or alcohol. It promises Ariel happiness and freedom… at a cost. She surrenders the organ of self-expression — her voice. And it isn't just self-expression: her voice is how Prince Eric recognizes her so she's also trading her identity. Dionysian ecstasy dissolves the boundary of the self.

The scene escalates. There's smoke and flashes of light, like fireworks at a festival. Ursula's singing and dancing. Ariel sings. Now Ursula laughs madly. Drink the magic juice. But she doesn't drink it! In the Disney movie, smoke leaps from the cauldron and seizes Ariel, completing the transformation. What is so obviously a brew doesn't even act like a liquid, or go anywhere near her mouth.

To actually find the brew, I had to go to a story written in 1837 by Hans Christian Andersen, Den lille Havfrue, and found this banger of a line: "Den lille havfrue drak den brændende skarpe drik, og det var, som gik et tveægget sværd igennem hendes fine legeme, hun besvimede derved og lå, som død."

Or, in English: "The little mermaid swallowed the bitter, fiery draught, and it was as if a two-edged sword struck through her frail body; she swooned away and lay there as if dead."

There's the wine. And it is strong stuff. One might almost say it is 100% proof.

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Extra-diegetic. In his founding myth, Dionysus nearly died. Semele, his mortal mother, was incinerated by Zeus's true form while pregnant. To save the unborn fetus, Zeus retrieved the baby from Semele's ashes and sewed Dionysus into his own thigh until the child was ready to be born. This granted Dionysus the epithet "the twice-born god". Now, by 1985 Disney animation was effectively dead. The Black Cauldron had bombed so badly the studio considered shuttering the animation division entirely. No Disney princess had appeared in thirty years, since Aurora in 1959. The lights were going out. Then in 1989 a girl with a stolen voice came up out of the water, kickstarted with an injection of Broadway theatre talent, and the studio was born a second time. The Little Mermaid signaled the beginning of the decade-long Disney Renaissance, during which the animation studio was born again.¹

Footnotes

1. See Disney Renaissance. ↩