It's hard to watch good
guys turn bad. We don't want our heroes to fall.
But sometimes, it can be
hard to watch our villains turn good, too.
Take Maleficent, Disney's
re-introduction of one of its all-time best/worst evildoers. In Sleeping
Beauty, Maleficent is as bad as bad can be—the self-proclaimed "Mistress
of all Evil" who calls upon the powers of hell to help her do her nasty
work.
Let me be honest: I kinda
like that in a villain. It's nice to see someone who knows who they are and
really owns it, y'know? Forget the moral complexity, the makers
of Sleeping Beauty said in 1959. Give us a woman with green skin and horns.
So much to my shame, I
was ever-so-slightly disappointed in the positive moral trajectory in Maleficent.
In the 2014 film, Angelina Jolie's Queen of Mean isn't so much as a dastardly
diva as someone who's been really, really hurt—in more ways than one. The
result, we see, is a pretty interesting examination of what hurt and bitterness
can do to the human soul—and a hint of what is the only recourse out of it.
Be aware: There be
spoilers ahead.
Maleficent wasn't always
the towering figure of darkness we came to know in Sleeping Beauty. Once upon a
time, she was a little fairy girl with horns and wings, full of hope and
promise. When a boy named Stefan stumbles into her magical land and tries to
swipe something (a pretty little gem), Maleficent gently tells him that
stealing's wrong and winds up befriending the kid. The two become the best of
buds (an unlikely relationship, given that Maleficent's magic land and Stefan's
kingdom are constantly at war) and, eventually, even a bit more than that. In
fact, Maleficent falls in love with the lad.
But the two grow apart
and don't see each other for years. In that time, Maleficent becomes a powerful
defender of her realm. Stefan becomes a steward for the mortal king. But when
the dying king tells his court that he'll give the crown to whoever kills
Maleficent, Stefan sees his chance for rapid career advancement. He takes off
to the moors to rekindle his relationship with the fairy, planning to drug her
and kill her while she sleeps.
But he can't: He still
feels some affection for the girl (now a beautiful, winged woman). But he
really covets the kingdom, too. So he slices off Maleficent's beautiful wings instead,
taking them back to the king (misleading him in the process). Maleficent wakes
up and is, understandably, devastated. Stefan mutilated the two things that
made the fairy who she was: her wings and her soul.
Now, the potential
spirituality of all this is interesting. When you look at a whole
Malificent, your eyes are naturally drawn to the two things that make her so
different from you and me—her wings and her horns. Both are, for Christians, instantly
recognizable: When we think of humanoid-like beings with wings, most of us
think of angels. Horns, on the other hand, are shorthand for the devil and
demons. Neither horns nor wings are good or evil in themselves, of course, but
they do represent—and have for centuries—the good and evil in the universe and,
perhaps, the good and evil in ourselves (think about those angels and demons
that appear on someone's shoulders in the old cartoons).
Stefan takes from
Maleficent something angelic in her—something good. He steals what allowed her
to fly closer to heaven. And, now earthbound—even dragging around at first as
if the earth's gravity was pulling her closer to itself—she allows anger and
bitterness and her more evil, horned nature to seep into the cracks of her
soul.
She retreats to a
dilapidated castle for a while to prood. And when she leaves it, Maleficent is
a different person: Powerful in her anger, gorgeous in her hatred. She's a true villain in look and deed. She curses Stefan's little baby,
Aurora. She and the king are now irrevocably at odds now, literally warring
against each other. It reminds me of a really bitter divorce.
And that, I think, is at
least partly intentional. We see here the horrors of a relationship gone horribly
bad—how an act of betrayal can lead to an act of vengeance, a spiral of anger
and hatred that can spin out of control. Each word and deed becomes more
ammunition in this battle of … what? Wills? Control? Utter annihilation?
Perhaps they don't know. When this sort of hatred spills over, there
are no real goals, it would seem. Only the desire to hurt. We can get the same
way, too. Many of us may know friends or couples who've fallen to this
level—where they can no longer stand the sight of each other. In our hurt, we
wall ourselves away. And when we emerge, we sometimes come out different: Our
hate can make us strong (just like Darth Vader warned us), but it twists us,
too. It turns us into something we weren't before and were never meant to be.
In Maleficent and Stefan,
we see the corrupting power of hurt. The bitterness of loss. After Maleficent
lays the curse on Aurora, Stefan turns into a full-time brooder, so obsessed
with destroying Maleficent that he doesn’t even attend his own wife’s deathbed.
Maleficent is much the
same … until she grows close to the very thing she cursed. Throughout Aurora’s
childhood, Maleficent is never far away—watching, sometimes even caring for the
child. So close she is that Aurora recognizes her shadow, a constant presence
in her childhood. And she dubs Maleficent her fairy godmother. In the space of
who knows how long, the two become close. And somewhere along the line,
Maleficent realizes that she has room for something other than hate in her
heart. Aurora—a name which references a strange dance of light in the cold,
winter dark—has illuminated something of Maleficent’s black soul. Our
villainess discovers a capacity for love.
I think that Disney
missed a chance here to take this story of redemption and make it extra-special.
Stefan could’ve been redeemed too, it seems: He wasn’t always bad. I’d like to
think that he cared for Maleficent and loved his daughter. But here, Stefan
takes the mantel of the true villain—incapable of accepting love through the
iron hatred inside him.
But this, too, is a
powerful reflection of how love, particularly God’s love, works. We may be
offered love, even forgiveness. But we’re under no obligation to accept it. So
often, we refuse. Our pain and anger won’t allow us to. We’d rather nurse a
righteous bitterness than accept a little grace.
Toward the end of the
movie, Aurora finds Maleficent’s wings and, magically still flapping, they find
their way back to their mistress. She’s again whole, and powerful—a symbolic
healing reflecting what Aurora had already done in the fairy’s soul. No longer
the pure, horned evildoer, Maleficent spreads her wings, looking for all her
past faults and sins, a little more angelic. She’s been restored. Redeemed. Maleficent,
through grace, can fly again.
