What is Wrong with Feminism: The Movie, Part I

2015-4-9 Maleficent img01

Movie critics want to you why Maleficent, Disney’s 2014 retelling of their classic Sleeping Beauty, is magnificent. “[T]he film surprises,” Kate Taylor of The Globe and Mail gushes, “for the thematic richness of its story gloriously personified by Angelina Jolie in the title role.” What’s rich about it? The “feminist revisionist backstory.” What’s wrong with that? Look at how the movie treats its two major male characters, King Stefan and Diaval the raven.

If you don’t remember Maleficent’s minion raven having a name in the original Sleeping Beauty, you’re not wrong: It’s never mentioned. Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent meets the newly named “Diaval” when she rescues a raven from a farmer by transforming the bird into a man. He ends up being no more human than his animal predecessor, however. Throughout the movie, Maleficent changes Diaval into whatever is convenient at the time: a wolf when she needs to frighten someone, a horse when she needs to travel, a human when she needs company, a raven when she needs reconnaissance—or for him to shut up and stop disagreeing with her. In short, Diaval has one job: To be whatever Maleficent wants him to be. That’s the definition of a tool and not a person. What’s more, Diaval has no independent desires. He wants whatever Maleficent wants, which is the inverse of what bad writing often does to female characters. Feminists complain that female characters are constantly objectified. Then, instead of saying, ‘This is wrong and we should stop doing this,’ they say, ‘We want in on this, too.’ Diaval remains a useful tool for Maleficent whose job it is to affirm her and do things that are convenient for her, even though (or perhaps because) this film gave him the face of a man.

King Stefan suffers a similar dehumanization through the fragmentation of his character. His boyhood actor shows us a different person than the narrator describes: Stefan seems sulky, lonely, but ingenuous, until the voiceover narration informs us that he has succumbed to greed. His character continues to vary dramatically when he becomes a king, a father and a husband, and a lunatic. During the christening scene, he tries desperately to protect his daughter—but then he pays no attention to her on her sixteenth birthday. As a young man, he disregards his relationship with Maleficent so he can become king—but once he wins the crown, he can’t think about anything but Maleficent. He’s not a hypocrite; he’s a walking collection of contradictions. In the end, he’s just crazy, and the only way for him to fix things is to die, like a rabid dog being put down. The movie dehumanizes Stefan, because it implies that his thought process is not worth understanding. He’s a misogynist: a monster who hurts women for no discernible reason.

In a movie about redeeming villains, there is no hope of redemption for Stefan. Humans at every stage in their lives have the potential for growth, whether they are an unborn baby or a criminal. If a woman can do something wrong and be redeemed, then it follows that the same should be true of a man. But Maleficent tells a different story. The movie shows Maleficent killing men, being spiteful, doing bad things over and over—but at the end, she’s “a villain and a hero,” because her affection for Aurora redeems her. Stefan, on the other hand, not only betrays Maleficent, he deprives his servants of sleep, slaps his soldiers, locks his daughter in her room, and lets his wife die alone. When he decides as a teenager to sacrifice Maleficent to his ambitions, Stefan begins a downward spiral into unredeemable evil. The movie shows us that what ought to happen to someone like that: Once a man does something wrong to a woman, justice demands his death.

From the perceived lack of independence for women, feminists have engaged in a philosophy of over-correction. Instead of eradicating injustice, feminists make things right by reversing the injustices on the original perpetrators: men. This message has permeated the arts, which is why, when Maleficent portrays Diaval as a valuable tool and Stefan as irredeemable evil, critics call it magnificent.

The Green Monk

About The Green Monk

They say counting is easy, but the Green Monk has noticed that people struggle with it all the time. Life is full of these little contradictions that few people bother to observe. Stay tuned for intelligent analysis, dry humor, and unshakable conviction.

One thought on “What is Wrong with Feminism: The Movie, Part I

  1. Pallas Pallas says:

    Not only the feminism, but the whole idea of justifying the villains has lead to stories that are some of the best exemplars of relativism and post-modern thinking today. Once Upon a Time tries and tries again to find some way of explaining why the bad guys became that way, and they can be justified, which almost inevitably comes down to “my parents raised me this way”…only to then have to justify the evil parents. Similarly, Wicked (the book, I haven’t seen the play) tries to explain why the Wicked Witch of the West is thought of as evil, with the end result of the original good guys being either pretty bad themselves (Glinda) or simply rather dumb (Dorothy).

    I understand the desire to make one dimensional fairytale characters a bit more interesting, but this article is spot on in highlighting how modern retellings have been almost completely hijacked by ideologies like feminism and relativism.

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