The Red Shoes was a movie about a ballerina who had to choose between two men, one who would support her dancing career at the cost of her private, sexual, emotional life and the man who loved her at the cost of her passion for the dance. The ballet she danced was a metaphor for women who would choose career over family life. Within the movie, the woman danced a ballet based on a story by Hans Christian Anderson, "The Red Shoes." In that story, the prima ballerina put on a pair of enchanted, red shoes which allowed her to dance like no other but the shoes turned into a curse when she found that she could never take them off and the dance would never end. The tale ends when a priest removes the red shoes, but the dancer still dies.
"The Red Shoes" ballet is a success but, in the climax of the movie, the ballerina is forced to choose between the two loves of her life and, torn between the two men and the two divergent life paths, she finds that, like her ballet character, she is unable to live with either decision and chooses suicide rather than disappointing either man. Before she dies, she begs her lover to take off the cursed red shoes.
Despite the tragic ending, after I saw The Red Shoes, I wanted to dance like a ballerina with my family's embedded belief system (memeplex) telling me that, "if you want something bad enough and work long enough and hard enough, eventually you will triumph." Along with my sisters, my mom enrolled me in weekly dance classes.
I studied dance for 7 years but I never got to study on pointe. It wasn't that I didn't work hard enough or long enough. My dance teacher noted that I had flat feet and would never be able dance on my toes. I never even had the chance to put on the red shoes.
The Red Shoes is ripe for deconstruction in feminist theory, with some women who aren't even given the chance to choose between wearing the red shoes or taking them off for a normal life. They just keep dancing and dancing and dancing, working long and hard to feel like they've triumphed in life, as if trying to balance perpetually on one toe while handling both family and career. I could make a note of the percentage of women with such belief systems who are keeping the anti-depressant and anti-anxiety pharmaceutical companies in business.
Wearing the red shoes is a bitch.