Quick Thoughts: Ralph Breaks the Internet

Sally, the kids, and I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet over the weekend, and we all liked it.  Most of the reviews I’ve seen talk about the ways in which the movie cleverly captures the quirks of online life, and I agree that they did a nice job with that.  But the movie also went to kind of a lot of trouble to get into issues of toxic masculinity and girl power, and while I think those aspects are great in concept, it’s this that I wanted to talk about.  Bottom line, I didn’t love some of the movie’s basic premise nor the way the plot resolved itself.

*Spoilers Below*

No seriously.  I am gonna get straight into the movie’s climax right after the jump.

Ralph & Venellope from Ralph Breaks the Internet.

So yeah.  I thought that this was really a movie about Leaning In.  We open our story with two people living a simple life, but one that is based around mutually beneficial domestic tranquility.  Sure, things aren’t perfect, but real life so rarely is.  Ralph and Vanellope have found each other, neither is lonely, and if they’re maybe stuck in a rut in some ways, they are also still leaning on each other to make it through.  Adult life can be like that sometimes, even when it works.  But then Venellope finds Slaughter Race, and not to put too fine a point on it, but she pretty much leaves her husband for a job in another city.

I didn’t love it.

I mean, I get that professional satisfaction is important, and that there are a lot of couples that manage routine geographic separation as a basic part of their relationships, but I’m still not sure that this is as great a message for our kids as we might’ve hoped it would be.  I also think there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that one’s personal relationships are by far the most important aspect of one’s life, and the movie doesn’t do much to balance the sides on what should be a rather tricky, emotionally fraught decision.

In the end, Ralph is heartbroken, and y’know, he just has to learn to live with it.  I don’t say that to defend his actions towards the end of the movie because it’s pretty clear that the guy can be a controlling jerk when he’s at his worst.  We already knew that from the first movie.  Still, it’s not attractive, and the movie does a nice job of showing us why.  And yet, I walked from the theater thinking that life really sucked for Ralph, and there wasn’t a lot that he could do about it.  This wasn’t easy to swallow, especially considering the many, many ways that he’d turned his life completely upside down for Venellope.  At the end of the day, none of that mattered.

As a society, can we not somehow find a middle ground between “all princesses must get saved by shining knights on horseback,” and “follow your dreams, even if that means breaking up your marriage”?  Unfortunately, this particular movie was not overly interested in this most challenging aspect of a princess’s journey.  Part of this must surely have been intended to correct for the regressive stories of the past.  I get that.  However, it still doesn’t move us towards a more realistic model of interpersonal relationships in our children’s fiction.

Sally and I were driving home this afternoon, and I said to her, “Y’know, we’ve been tested a time or two in our marriage, but I feel like we’ll be okay as long as we stick together.  We could get caught in a zombie apocalypse, but as long as we face it together, we’ll make it through.”  We saw exactly this motif from Ralph Breaks the Internet, and not surprisingly, our heroes stuck it out as a couple once things got really bad.  They just couldn’t make it work on the good days, and that bothers me even now, two days after we left the theater.