My wife and I got to see Maleficent
the other day. It was a spectacular movie, with really beautiful artistic
backgrounds, very well made special effects, and an impressive Angelina Jolie
(her English accent is MUCH better than in Tomb Raider!).
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it,
even if towards the end it was getting less exciting, still it was fun,
splendid, and mostly satisfying. I say mostly because there was nonetheless a
nagging feeling throughout the movie that I was being fed some ideology, and
that feeling hadn’t gone away by the time it was over.
If someone wants to understand how
to read a film, this might be a starting place. In the past few years, a
movement has been happening in the genre of fairy-tales, which consists in
rewriting them, retelling them from a different perspective. It is such a big
deal that in the faculty of English Literature at the University of Geneva last
year, there was a course entitled ‘Rewriting Fairy Tales’.
What happens in most cases is that
these traditional classics are retold from the perspective of a new worldview,
one which clashes with the classical setting they come from. This can be seen
in Wicked, Frozen and in the movie I’m reviewing here. Now don’t
get me wrong: I was riveted by Wicked, I was astounded at Frozen,
but when you see the signs a few times, you start noticing the trends.
What is the idea of some of these
stories? Make evil good and good evil. The first problem appears early on in
the film when you are told that the main character is called ‘Maleficent’. But
she’s good! No, but wait, her name means ‘doer of evil’. Oh well, we won’t
bother to go there, because people never open their dictionaries. In this
sense, there is the representation of the culture’s will to change the meaning
of words, and to make all definitions relative, based on individual preference:
like ‘love’.
See, people who don’t know the
original story will think the whole story is wonderful though weird. But they
won’t get the original telling. It is also interesting the way the narrator
tells it: ‘this is the way it actually happened, forget what others have told
you before’. It feels like it represents this desire to change history, to suit
one’s preferences.
What is positive about movies like Frozen
and Maleficent? They do not idealise ‘true love’ in the way so many stories
do, they exalt friendship and sisterhood. The flip side of that is that there
are no decent men, and women have to fend for themselves (though in Frozen,
it is not as extreme). There are no good kings, no knights and there is no
saviour. The problems created by the characters have to be solved by them, and
magically, everything is restored. Frozen maintains the need for
sacrifice, but in Maleficent, all wrongs are righted through deception. The
story excuses the behaviour of a woman who commits something awful just because
she was having a bad day. On the other hand, it does communicate the truth that
the evil of men is often the source of sorrow and pain in women, this is done
in a very touching way.
There is also a feminist ideology which
comes through. Kingdoms are bad, hippie life is good, and women should rule. It
doesn’t give us any hope for a true king, a great saviour.
The problem about this film, which is
the same of the ideology which drives it is that it ends up losing its basic
references to its own genre. That may also make it interesting, it makes it
more realistic and closer to its audience in some senses but it shows the
intention of forcing a change in European narrative culture. It should be
rooted in it, given its origin, but it is in a sense cutting the branch on
which it is standing.
I think it is interesting that in The
Hobbit, for the first time in I don’t know how long, people have a dragon
who is actually evil! All the dragons in other films are cool, cute,
good, but none of them come close to the power of Smaug’s character, rooted in
the oldest narratives. I like those other movies too (How to Train your
Dragon), but we forget, through them, that the dragon (and the vampire, en
passant ) is an image for Satan. As is Maleficent, with her horns. Now the
film wants to tell us that there is no such thing as good and evil, but at the
same time, there is evil in the tale and we don’t know where it comes from, unless
it comes from men, and in either case, we are left with the same despair. Life
may be good by the end, but there’s no way of saying ‘and they lived happily
ever after’, which is how tales end. Of course, in life, there will always be
challenges, but the point of a fairy tale is to show you that there is an
ultimate bliss, a selfless saviour, a clear difference between good and evil,
and here, it is all lost.
But maybe I’m reading too much into
it. After all, I really enjoyed it, it really was a spectacle for the eyes. But
I still had this nagging feeling…
