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Maleficent at 47

MeleficentTHIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS!

You read that up there about the spoilers right?  Right.  Okay.

I saw the original Disney Sleeping Beauty in the movie theater.  I was 9.  Disney was doing one of it’s periodic re-releases of its classic animated features, and Mom took me as a reward for having memorized my multiplication tables  up to 6.  I never saw the ending (at least in the theater), because Mom also had to haul me out of the theater because when Maleficent turned into the dragon I started screaming in terror.

So, me and that bad fairy, we got history.

I took my son to see Maleficent this weekend, just in case one of us needed a hand to hold.  I’m 47 now, he’s 12.  He loved it and didn’t scream once, although he did hide his eyes a couple times.  Me?  I was deeply interested in what I was seeing.

It was a Disney production all the way, which meant it looked spectacular and plot-wise was about as subtle as a gold-plated brick upside the head.  I epxected that.  What I did not expect was to see a movie that would not have been made 20 years ago, possibly not even 10, DEFINITELY not when I was 9.  And I am not talking about the special effects, which were massively impressive.  Or the fact that I finally saw a Fairyland that really convinced me (God, I hope Brian Froud got royalties for those little guys).  I’m talking about the character arc for Maleficent herself.

Here we had a powerful woman, she is stated to be THE most powerful fairy of her time.  She’s is the protector for her people.  She’s good at it.  She is betrayed and she gets angry, fully, completely, furiously, vengefully, angry, and because of her anger, she makes a mistake.  A biggie.  She realizes it, eventually, and works to correct it.

Now, here’s the amazing part.  She does correct it.  She fixes her mistake and she regains all her powers.  She is not in the end damaged, weakened, chastened or dead, the traditional choice of movie fates for a powerful woman who has realized she has made a mistake.   She is never once lectured by a man (okay, maybe a little by her servant).  When she chooses to forgive the bad guy, it’s after she’s regained her powers and she knows herself to be strong and him to be weak and pathetic (he dies anyway because he can’t walk away from the fight, and I’m okay with that).  She is not rescued by a man, but by the other female lead and because she’s strong enough to hold out in the fight (and it’s a nasty fight) long enough for help to arrive.

She’s a mother figure who is competent at mothering, and yet does not have to die to save the child.  I was really afraid of that, because that’s what happens to strong mother figures in genre media.  They die for their kids.  She didn’t have to die.  She didn’t even have to live crippled.

Here’s the other reason I was afraid M. was going to end up dead or severely weakened at the end.  There’s a scene which is clearly a stand in for a date rape during which M. is drugged and has her wings cut off.  Now, in classic lit and a whole whopping great load of movies what happens when a woman is raped, or lets herself get seduced by the wrong guy, or falls for a guy who later trades his affections for someone else, or otherwise makes a mistake involving sex and/or love is she dies.  Maybe she lives for awhile weakened, and chastened in saintly retreat, but mostly she dies.  She doesn’t heal.  She certainly doesn’t come out on the other side with her full strength back, ready and able to not only face the world but love again.

Maleficent does.

This is new.  This is huge.  Not because it hasn’t been done elsewhere, but because it’s Disney doing it.  EVERYTHING The Mouse does is safe.  It’s audience tested to hell and gone.  It is calculated NOT to offend.  So when Disney thinks its okay to subvert the images of women with power, to show a full-blown traditional hero’s arc from anger to mistake to triumphant return to power, we know there’s been a real change.

This is also the second Disney Blockbuster in rapid succession (the other being Frozen) where it is acknowledged that the affection women have for each other (mother-stand-in/daughter in this case) is as strong, as real, as “true” as heterosexual love between men and women.  This is also new and huge in a medium that is still not comfortable with showing two women on screen at the same time having a conversation about something other than a white guy, or having an unequal power relationship that does not involve one of them being a stone-cold bitch who needs to be humiliated before then end.

Now, this was not a flawless movie.  As far as the writing went, it was a finely crafted piece of Swiss Cheese.  The 3 Pixies were a huge disappointment.  One of the things I loved about the original was those goofy little fairies when it came down to it were extremely powerful (turn a whole rain of missels into flowers?  No problem.  We got this.)  But in this they were just limp really limp comic relief.  And the king really needed to fire whoever was in charge of the spinning wheel destruction committee.  Also, I had to tell myself firmly that traditionally, fairies do not play well with each other, which might explain why none of them got together and said “Uh?  Mal?  You’ve been acting a little strange lately, anything you want to talk about?”

Still, I submit that in terms of shifts in the image of women and power, of whether women are worthy to hold and wield power even if they make mistakes, of the RIGHT of women to hold power, this movie, along with Frozen mark a significant pop-culture moment.

Plus, those wings?  Seriously, astoundingly kick-butt.

RIP Mickey Rooney

I am a huge fan of movie musicals.  I am an unabashed romantic.  I adore old movies, and vaudeville.  This would make me a natural fan of Mickey Rooney’s work.  He was a genuine trooper.  He fought hard against his demons and in the end, he won.

Given all that, though, my absolute favorite piece of work by Mr. Rooney, was his star turn in the Twilight Zone episode, Last Night of a Jockey.   Sad, lonely, utterly creepy, and all at the same time:

Last Night of a Jockey

 

The Frozen Zone

snowflakeI am a sucker for Disney Princess movies.  I am also a feminist.  These two things tend to clash.  Kind of a lot.

So, I really wasn’t surprised to get into a heated discussion with a feminist friend about Frozen.

I’m not going to reiterate the argument here, and I’m not going to defend the necessity of a love story remaining at the heart of a Princess movie (Brave was a Pixar movie, and doesn’t count as full-on Disney Princess, IMHO).  What I am going to point out is something interesting about Frozen and Disney which gives me great hope for pop culture in the US.

There is nothing, NOTHING in a Disney movie that is not considered 100% Safe.  If it’s in there, it must be as non-controversial as possible.  It’s gone through the kind of wringers and checks that OSHA only wishes they could muster.  This stuff is mega-super, appeal to lowest common demoninator, sparkly spectacle, family safe.

Then, take a look at two things Frozen does.  There’s a girl in there with superpowers.  She’s born with them.  They’re hers.  She wasn’t cursed into them.  She wasn’t given them by abusive males, or evil females who wished to get her into mischief and harm.  It’s just part of who she is, and she has to learn to deal with it  It has been judged okay by the guardians of cultural safety that for a girl to just be powerful…just because.  This is kind of new.

The second thing to notice here is obvious, but it’s that the sisters save each other.  Yes, there’s a male assist and eventual love, which I’m good with.  I like a love story.  But in the end, the sisters save each other.  There’s some plot flaws in there that I won’t go into, but the big thing is that when it comes down to brass tacks, it’s the girls who drive the action and the main plot, from conflict to resolution is driven by the relationship between the sisters, not the relationship between Hero and Heroine.

This has not only been deemed safe for a blockbuster to do, it’s proven to be highly profitable.  That’s kind of new too.  We haven’t seen that since the 1930s when folks like Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davis dominated Hollywood.

That also is really, really interesting.

Sarah Zettel and The Big Book — Part Three

FriendshipFRIENDSHIP

As you might expect, HUNGER’S BRIDES, otherwise known as The Big Book, is a complicated book.  Wow, is it complicated.

It’s a time-jumping novel.  Not time travel, but it divides its storyline between the story of a modern girl, mostly told from the point of view of her professor who was a self-excusing womanizer, and who was sleeping with her because she was pretty and didn’t think much of it (yeah, he’s a peach of a guy), and never bothered to understand that she had issues.  Okay, not issues.  She had subscriptions — abuse leading to anorexia and other self-destructive behaviors.  The other part of the story of Sor Juana Inez Delacruz, who was a scholar and nun in the time of Imperial Mexico and ultimately falls afoul of the Inquisition.

It’s an ambitious trick, and when you’re doing it in 1300 pages, it’s pretty natural that some bits would succeed better than others.  I want to talk about one of the places that really succeeds.  The depiction of friendship.

Female friendship is something a lot of authors seem to grapple with.  In SF, we’ve gotten used to seeing a woman paling around with the guys particularly if she’s a military officer, a kick-ass heroine of some sort, or a prostitute.  But she’s on her own.  She gets to be friends with the guys and fall in love with them, but friends with other women?  Nope.  Not there.

In The Big Book, there are lots of friendships for Sor Juana.  Her life is not ideal.  She’s tightly cloistered, but within the cloisters, she has a tight circle of friends, and Anderson portrays them very believably.  They’re genuine, complicated, have good days and bad days, little secrets, little confidences, big blow ups, small ones, attempts to help that are sometimes clumsy, sometimes successful and always human.  Not afraid of this strange world, not afraid to show these people as fully human.

It made me so happy.  It’s a simple thing, but I can’t help thinking that the portrayal of friendship is startlingly absent from a lot of genre fiction, especially for women.  It’s one of the reasons I love the Thor movies.  Dr. Jane Whose-last-name-I-never-Remember has a friend, one who is roughly her age and is also a woman.  They talk, they tease, they help each other out.  Stop a second and do a count.  What other genre movies have you recently seen where there’s a scene between women friends?  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.  I’ve got the most recent Hunger Games, and even there it’s sketchy, and Frozen, which is between sisters.  How about you?

Interestingly, the miserable, abused, self-destructive modern woman has no women friends, not currently.  She meets up with an old friend during the course of the book but does not let herself stay with that woman.  She doesn’t make any new female friends.

For all of us, gender aside, friendship is a huge part of our world.  We get so caught up in talking about sexual relationships, we forget about the complexities, the intricacies, the vitality and absolute importance of friendship.  We need to remember more, inside the genre and out of it.