One afternoon a few years ago, while I was strolling around Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World, I wandered by this at one of the gift shops…

…and I had to have it.  Sometimes these little random items of consumer art manage to tweak something deep down inside of you, despite themselves.

So romantic isn’t it?  And I am very much the romantic.  But look at it.  What do you see?  A beautiful young girl in love with her handsome prince charming, all dashing and heroic.  But all art, even pop culture commercial art, involves two creative acts.  There is the artist’s turn, wherein the piece is made.  The artist brings to it whatever is within themselves.  Then there is the viewer’s turn.  And the viewer brings to the piece whatever is within themselves.  And I am a gay man just one step away from 60, within arm’s reach of social security retirement age, whose love life has been pretty much one failed attempt after another.  Here’s what I see: she’s in love with a statue and she thinks the person she sees in it is real and it isn’t.

No, I haven’t actually watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid yet.  So if that’s all part of the Disney happy ending then okay…fine.  But I am a fan of Walt Disney all the same if not so much of one that I’ve had to watch everything that ever came out of his studios.  I like his happily ever after mindset, that There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Shining At The End Of Every Day way of looking at life.  That is how I want life to Be.  That is why I keep going back to Disney World these days…for that happy sense of life’s wonderful possibilities.  So never having watched it I can almost picture the story Disney made of that Hans Christian Andersen tale.  And they all lived happily ever after.  In one form or another that was the story Walt Disney always told and I am convinced he honestly believed it and that was why that song always came out of him.  But for the rest of us it isn’t so easy.

So when just the other day I ran across the story behind the story of The Little Mermaid, I saw why there was something about it I could see, even in that Disney figurine, that tweaked a very dark and lonely place inside of me…

The Little Mermaid was written as a love letter by Hans Christian Andersen to Edvard Collin.  Andersen, upon hearing of Collin’s engagement to a young woman, proclaimed his love to him.  He told him “I long for you as though you were a beautiful Calabrian girl.”  Edvard Collin turned Andersen down, disgusted.

Andersen then wrote The Little Mermaid to symbolize his inability to have Collin just as a mermaid cannot be with a human.  He sent it to Collin in 1836 and it goes down in history as one of the most profound love letters ever written.

The story originally ended thusly…

The prince and princess marry, and the Little Mermaid’s heart breaks. She thinks of all that she has given up and of all the pain she has suffered. She despairs, thinking of the death that awaits her, but before dawn, her sisters bring her a knife that the Sea Witch has given them in exchange for their long hair. If the Little Mermaid slays the prince with the knife and lets his blood drip on her feet, she will become a mermaid again, all her suffering will end and she will live out her full life.

However the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his bride and as dawn breaks she throws herself into the sea. Her body dissolves into foam…

Later, Andersen gave it a happier ending.  The little mermaid is turned into an air spirit and told she will gain an eternal soul after doing good deeds for 300 years.  But it seems tacked on and contrived.  You need a Walt Disney to turn that story around and Walt found his other half early enough on that he could believe in it.  Andersen it seems, never did.  A lot of us don’t.