“Reeling In” Grimm Masculinities: Hucksters, Cross-Dressers, and Ninnies

In American films Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm appear as malleable as the folktales they collected and published. Not just framed by their cultural production, the Grimms are read through it. As a result, North American assumptions about folktales and fairy tales imbue the brothers with peculiar characteristics. The pliability of the brothers across mediated representations encourages viewers to interrogate the authority of storytellers and historical truth. I describe the filmed Grimms’ failure to meet American cinema’s normative standards for heterosexual masculine performance and explore the tension between feminized oral traditions and masculinized literary heritage that resurfaces in each film.