Rachel Zegler Part I: Snow Off-White

Love and Indifference at the Movies, comparing the Minecraft Movie to Snow White, and charting Rachel Zegler's career path from aspiring singer-songwriter to Disney Girlboss disaster ...

How did Rachel Zegler go from likeable aspiring singer songwriter to insufferable Disney girlboss?

Rachel Zegler has managed to become the caricature of Marxcissist feminism. The Hollywood magic machine ran out of juice; the country reached a breaking point and revolted against wokeness; and she was left holding the bag. She was an overnight success who soared suddenly and then crashed and burned spectacularly, but her story is more interesting than you would guess, if you only knew her from the controversy surrounding her role in the box office bomb known as Snow White. How did she go from happy and likeable aspiring singer-songwriter to bratty and insufferable Disney girlboss?

Love and Indifference at the Movies

You’ve no doubt heard it said that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. A few weeks ago, two movies, both aimed at younger audiences, opened around the same time: the Minecraft Movie and Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White. America’s youth loved the Minecraft Movie. They had the complete opposite reaction to Snow White.

I went to the cinema for the first time in forever when I took my kids to see the Minecraft Movie on its opening weekend. The place was packed, and the atmosphere was electric. Zoomers and younger Millennials were on the edges of their seats, even before the movie started, and they cheered and applauded wildly throughout it. I felt like I was at a rock concert instead of a movie. I didn’t get the film’s appeal, but that was okay. I still had a good time vicariously experiencing it through the energy and enthusiasm of the kids around me.

To give you an idea of how wild and crazy the youth were for the Minecraft Movie, here is a short video showing a typical audience reaction. Here, the kids are cheering as a character is re-introduced after an extended absence, as two separate plot lines merged together. This kind of audience response happened a lot during the movie.

I didn’t get it then, and I don’t get it now. Watching the Minecraft Movie in the theater was one of those big “generation gap” moments for me, despite the abundant 80s nostalgia sprinkled throughout the movie (the 80s references somehow seemed like they were aimed at Zoomers and younger Millennials, rather than at their parents who actually remember the decade). Generationally, I was a foreigner whose temporal homeland is in another era; I was a guest at someone else’s cultural celebration, in this case, the cohort of young people who grew up playing Minecraft. Every generation goes wild and crazy over something that their elders find ridiculous, and I actually felt relieved to see that this generation’s wildness and craziness is relatively innocent and positive, compared to previous generations. Gen X and older Millennials? Here are the kids from our era acting stupid and contagious:

Kids have been crazy at least as long as I have been alive, but there’s a carefree enthusiasm that today’s kids have that is a refreshing change from the snarky neuroticism of the Millennials and the disaffected nihilism of Gen X. (I’ll leave the Boomers out of this, since that generation’s sins have already been so extensively catalogued and analyzed elsewhere.)

Anyway, back to the two movies. While tween audiences across the country were going crazy over the Minecraft Movie, they mostly forgot all about Snow White. If it had not been for YouTubers like Critical Drinker, I doubt anyone would have even known this movie existed.

After the Minecraft Movie ended and the credits began to roll, all the kids in the theater gave the film one last mighty hurrah, like fans at a Rolling Stones concert hoping for an encore. Would the actors on-screen oblige? Yes, they did. (This movie was directed by the same guy that did Napoleon Dynamite, and adding “encore” scenes after the credits start rolling seems to be his signature style.) As the extra scenes were played alongside the credits, the kids reacted like fans seeing Mick Jagger and Keith Richards coming back onstage for another couple of songs. Not even Star Wars got this level of exuberant enjoyment out of its audiences in the theaters.¹

On our way out of the theater that night, I saw a large promotional display for Snow White, complete with life-size cardboard cut-outs of Gal Godot as evil queen and Rachel Zegler as Snow White. It looked forlorn and neglected, comically absurd, and wickedly grotesque. It was like seeing a banner for the wintry white witch in Narnia after Aslan had liberated the land, ended the wicked queen’s reign, and brought back the Summer Sun. It was like seeing an East German communist party propaganda poster after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Snow White display was out of place in a world that had suddenly and dramatically transformed into something happier and more hopeful; it remained as a stark and sobering warning of a dreadful fate to which our culture had very nearly succumbed; but now it was merely an object of ridicule, the punchline of a billion bad jokes.

I had heard so much second-hand chatter about Snow White and what it represented that I was curious to peek inside the room where it was showing and see what kind of audience reactions it was getting. I felt like I was entering a haunted house. Thick cobwebs covered the entrance. Fortunately, someone had dropped a cardboard Minecraft sword in the hallway, and it made the perfect tool for clearing the spider webs and other debris. The door creaked loudly as I opened it. It had apparently not been opened for quite some time. The only audience members I disturbed were a family of crickets chirping loudly at the images flickering on the screen.

Rachel Zegler — She Coulda Been a Contender …

Poor Rachel Zegler. How swiftly and suddenly her once-rising star has fallen! While doing this post, I briefly dropped down the strange and surreal rabbit hole of her career trajectory, from amateur singer-songwriter as a young teenager to Disney girlboss disaster as an adult. Something definitely went wrong along the way.

Young women are acutely susceptible to social contagion, and given the spiritually dangerous mind-viruses polluting the zeitgeist during the era in which Miss Zegler came of age, it’s small wonder that she went off the rails as badly as she did. In a psychologically healthier time and place and culture, she “coulda been a contender.” I think she had, and I hope she still has, the raw material to become a really great artist. In a prior era, she could have developed into a Carly Simon or a Chrissy Hynde (of The Pretenders) or a Sade (all of whom had the kind of shitlib political beliefs that were typical of entertainers in their eras, but nobody cared about those stars’ politics during their heydays). If they had come of age in the 2010’s, Carly Simon and Chrissy Hynde and Sade would have probably become insufferable Disney-esque girlbosses too.

Apparently, Zegler started out making homemade music videos, singing original songs while playing guitar or piano or ukelele, and posting them to her YouTube channel. She’s legitimately talented as a vocalist, as you can hear in this video from September 2017, so she would have been around 16-years-old:

And here she is a year later (around age 17) singing and playing ukelele, with a lot more theatrical-ness in her performance:

Again, she’s a really gifted vocalist and a charismatic performer, and you can see from the way she pantomimes and emotes that she was aiming to follow in the footsteps of Nickelodeon and Disney-channel starlets like Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter: step one, become moderately successful as an actress in children’s entertainment; step two, parlay that fame with younger audiences into mega-stardom as a pop singer.²

Also, in that video with the ukelele, she is giving off slightly crazy vibes, and that could be good or bad, depending on how she channels her inner psychological tension.

Great art is impossible without tension, because it gives depth and meaning and beauty to the harmony the artist can bring out of the apparently discordant chaos. The more tempestuous the chaos and the greater the tension, the more incredible the art can be. But chronically high levels of psychological tension are also dangerous, for obvious reasons.

Here she is in July 2018, channeling her inner tension into writing elegant but brooding songs in melancholic minor keys, and she balances the darkness with lighthearted humor. She still seems relatively stable and well-adjusted.

Most of us are lucky in that, when we’re young and immature and full of inner tension that we could easily channel towards self-destructive ends, we don’t fall into the orbit of slick Hollywood shysters.

There’s probably another timeline in which Rachel Zegler grows up to be an elementary school music teacher who is everyone’s favorite teacher because of how fun and engaging her class is. (Keep in mind, most elementary school music teachers probably share Rachel Zegler’s shitlib political leanings.) In that parallel universe, Zegler probably remains mostly unknown to the world at large, but this doesn’t matter to her, because her students love her and she sees the direct impact she has on their lives. She winds up getting married and having children, and then she enjoys being a mother despite having less time for her songwriting; but eventually her kids reach an age where she can teach them how to play music and sing, and she starts writing and recording her own songs again in her spare time. Maybe she posts a few of them to YouTube, and a few people find her videos and share them, and she develops a respectable online following. But her online life remains secondary to her life in the real world, where she is beloved by her children and her students. So in a parallel universe, at least, Rachel Zeglar is happy and well-adjusted. (And now, back to what’s happening on planet Earth …)

I don’t often listen to YouTube cover songs, but a couple years ago, the algorithm thought I would like some of the Alice in Chains and Smiths covers done by a young woman named Alicia Widar (whose work I previously wrote about). Her talent is really next level. Her version of Down in a Hole is so good, I think I actually like it better than the original.³

After listening to Alicia Widar, I would occasionally hear (despite my attempts to avoid it) the kind of noise that passes for popular music today, and I couldn’t help but wonder how on earth Alicia Widar, with that voice, hadn’t long ago gotten a recording contract with a big record label. But now, looking over the train wreck that Rachel Zegler became after she drifted from music (which seems to be her first love) to movies (which is a spiritually toxic industry, run by literal demons), I think Alicia Widar lucked out. Maybe Miss Widar will get to live the comparatively happier and healthier lifestyle of a young elementary school music teacher that could have been Rachel Zeglar’s dream life.

Here’s Rachel Zegler in March 2019 (around age 18), doing a cover of Whitney Houston’s How Will I Know:

This video shows off more expensive equipment and features higher-level production. There’s also an interesting detail at the very beginning of the video: someone offscreen has an image in mind for Rachel to embody, involving obviously forced gimmicks intended to evoke a bizarre combination of jaded streetwalker sexuality with girly innocence and vulnerability. By the time she was 18, Rachel had already fallen into the orbit of that infernal psychological blackhole: the Hollywood magic machine. She was being turned away from being a self-directed singer-songwriter, and towards being an actress — in other words, towards being a spiritual chameleon, a person with a rubber face who can become anyone and display any emotion on cue, but who requires a director or screenwriter to give her those cues, because she is increasingly untethered from any kind of strong inner identity or self-awareness.

It’s a shame in this case, because unlike many of the others who get ground up like factory-farmed beef in the mass-media slaughterhouse, Rachel Zegler had a spark of real talent that could have been cultivated into something great. Instead, she’s apparently become a shell of a human being with all the insides scooped out, so that she can be filled with the artificial personality of whatever on-screen character she happens to be playing at the time. It’s like the zombified blacks in Jordan Peele’s Get Out: it’s an extreme version of self-alienation, but on some level, the alienated self is still in there, ready to burst out and cause trouble at any time; so to keep everything neat and tidy, artificial constraints are piled on top of artificial constraints. Think about it like this, Rachel Zegler is in a cult (it is old news that Marxcissism operates like a quasi-religion, but one that is based on trauma bonding and misdirected anger and chronically inflamed and unmet spiritual needs), and once you see that, Zeglar’s pathologies make sense: they are a rational and natural response to a profoundly irrational and unnatural culture.

Here’s Rachel Zegler in 2021 (age 20), on the cusp of fame and fortune for her breakout role in Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story (today’s mainstream culture is so artistically bankrupt, not even Steven Spielberg can make an original movie anymore). At that point, she had still managed to retain a bit of relatability. She conveys a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor (like when she reads her IMDB page starting around 3:17), and she seems to be trying to keep everything in perspective. She demonstrates a kindliness and concern for the “little people” working in supporting roles off-camera. But she is also teetering on the brink. The title of the video is “life is exciting but i cry a lot.” And keep in mind how crazy that era was in terms of the scamdemic and social distancing and all that, and so there probably wasn’t a “normal life” outside of the Hollywood machine to which she could return and recalibrate her sense of what was normal. After a few swimming lessons, she was getting thrown headfirst off the high-dive into the deep end of the pool, by people who pretended to be on her side, but who really didn’t care if she ended up drowning.

I include all that back story in order to praise Rachel Zegler (at least as much as possible), rather than just bury her, like every other internet commentator has been doing since she went viral in a bad way for just saying and doing all the things she’d been conditioned to believe were socially correct and on the “right side of history.” Turns out, history can change seismically, and the line dividing those on the “right side” and the “wrong side” of history can move a million miles overnight.

If you’ve been online in the past four years and have seen the memes or watched any of the commentator videos, you already know how things turned out for Rachel Zeglar. Rather than rehashing all of those memes and videos, I’ll share another video from her YouTube channel that she posted during that time, a video of her looking melancholic and lonely as she listens to a song that she wrote and performed, about feeling cut off from the sunlight by impenetrable clouds:

I’m rooting for Rachel Zegler

After watching a few of her videos that showed a different side to her than the histrionic girlboss monster she’s reputed to be, I found myself really rooting for her. Hopefully the PR disaster she’s become will turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Maybe she’ll get so disillusioned by Hollywood and all the culture war craziness that she’ll get away from it all for a time and embark on the kind of harrowing spiritual journey from which she might re-emerge with some real insights that will expand her artistic vision beyond anything she’d ever dreamed of doing? Or maybe she’ll rediscover the pure joy of writing and performing her own songs again, just for fun?

As for the culture wars, I get it. The caricature that resembles her, that she instantiated during the making of Snow White — the race-swapping of historical or culturally specific characters that only ever goes one way (as with mass-immigration, the only common thread is a genocidal level of anti-white hatred), the open contempt for the original character and the original story, the smug lecturing of audiences about what their sensibilities should be, etc. — all of that has to be condemned and rejected and dumped onto the ash heap of history. There had been a revolving cast of public figures before her, any one of whom could just as easily have been the one playing that role when the backlash against Conformmunism started; it just happened to be Zegler’s name and face that will be forever associated with it. Somebody had to draw the short straw, because wokeness wasn’t going to last forever; anything that unnatural and inverted is doomed from the start. Our culture is finally healing, and we need it to heal, and that means dragging out the symbols of the old regime and dumping them onto the funeral pyre in full view of everyone.

The good news, though, is that Rachel Zegler the human being can be a part of that process, separate and apart from the caricature of Disney girlbossery that she instantiated. Love the sinner, hate the sin; love the person, hate the politics. Zegler can be delivered from the mind-virus that deluded her into believing that girlbossery was a noble ideal and that a gynocracy would be a utopian paradise. She can recognize that she, like so many millions of others, was lied to and manipulated by evil wizards and social engineers, and that at some point she agreed with the lie and chose to adopt the false identity that was offered to her. The culture can heal, and so can she. I’m hoping that she does.

[You may have noticed that I titled this post “Part One.” Stay tuned for Part Two, coming soon …]

1. If you want to read one of my movie reviews, check out the one I did about the Barbie Movie, which is surprisingly full of esoteric gravy:

2.

Yakubian Ape

has mined the dross of 2000s to 2010s Nickelodeon stars and managed to come up with some real gold in the way of interesting posts about it, such as:

The Tale of Dirty Dan - No Justice

3. Here’s another cover by Alicia Widar, Doin’ Time, her version of which I strongly prefer to both the original and Lana Del Rey’s cover: