Maleficent, and the rape scene that isn't

SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT * SPOILER ALERT

I'm not a huge fan of "the real story of" fairytale hatchet jobs, with the notable exception of Hoodwinked which is possibly the greatest CGI film ever. But my wife and daughter wanted to see Maleficient and, far more importantly, I needed to obtain closure on a Facebook argument.

In a Huffington Post blog entry by Hayley Krischer entitled The Maleficent Rape Scene That We Need to Talk About, we learn that

Rape has so permeated our culture that it ended up in a Disney movie

Krischer describes the rape scene (or maybe the rape metaphor scene) as follows:

Imagine you're drugged by someone you thought you trusted. You wake up in the morning with your face down in the dirt. You're aching. Your appearance has changed and you can feel that you're different as you try to stand through the pain. Beyond the physicality of it, your power was stolen from you. Your flight response. Your dignity.

I would say that this description of the scene is a little subjective, but more of that later. As for the interpretation:

My 5-year-old digested the scene as an act of betrayal. She flat-lined the reasoning for Maleficent's rage: "He cut off her wings." Maleficent was wounded. But she survived. More, she recovered -- physically and psychologically. [...] Grown women know better. I know better. I'm too familiar with the headlines about the boys who feel entitled to take from women and girls.

Disney doing rape scenes for children would indeed be a new departure, from the people who famously air-brushed Aladdin's nipples. So, armed with my wife and two teenage children as guinea pigs, we headed for the cinema. Please note that we saw the French dubbed version, so Your Names And Quotes May Vary.

The film exceeded my low expectations. Angelina Jolie plays her role brilliantly, to such an extent that the other actors look 2D by comparison. Actually, that may not be entirely Jolie's fault. My daughter said that she wanted to punch half the characters for being so annoyingly cheerful. My son said that the plot made some sort of sense until about halfway through, then went into a steep dive, and after it hit the ground it started to dig. My daughter and I started giggling uncontrollably around the time things were supposed to get really serious. My wife said she loves a happy ending. Not a great film, but better than most Disney offerings. (The most traumatic part of the trip was sitting through trailers for Planes 2 and Cute Dragons 17, or something.)

As we were leaving the cinema, I asked what they had made of the rape scene. My children both looked blank and said "What rape scene?" My wife knew she was looking for a rape scene and still failed to find it. I invited them to suggest some rape-like scenes. They mentioned Maleficent watching the young Aurore for every second of her sixteen years. They mentioned creepy "tucking comatose people into bed" scenes. They thought that the prince had been objectified. I thought that the scene where the anti-hero is trapped under a metal net, surrounded by men who poke her with swords while others beat out a rhythm on the floor, was quite dark. There's a moment when the two lead females almost end up mud wrestling... Eventually I told them that it was the wing-ablation scene, and they said "Oh, yeah, err, no, that's stupid."

"You wake up in the morning with your face down in the dirt." I hesitate to start with the detail, but there is no dirt. None at all. Not a single speck. The whole before, during and after scene is a Disney wonderland set piece. People sit and lay on earth by a river for hours on end, and when they get up they are cleaner than a prepped surgeon's hands. The amputation happens without a single drop of blood. And without even affecting the perfect hang of the victim's clothes. The loss of wings itself is horrible, but everything else is absurdly sanitised.

But the underlying metaphor could still be rape. Well, maybe, if it wasn't for the plot which, at this point, still retains some structural integrity. The prince sets out to kill Maleficent. He drugs her, picks up his dagger, which glints in the moonlight, he tries to bring it down on his prey, but he can't do it. He searches for another solution, and decides to cripple her instead. There's no pleasure or sexuality in this act. It's plan B for a wannabe assassin. And Maleficient confirms this later when she exclaims "He cut off my wings in order to become king!"

But the underlying metaphor could still be rape, because it's all about... "The wings. The wings give her the freedom to escape. To fly away. It's about her ability to retreat. And if you can't fly. If you can't run. If you're drugged and trapped."

Except that the whole point of the film is that Maleficient is not into running away. There is never ever the merest hint of a "flight response". When she stumbles to her feet after losing her wings, the very first thing she does is to start walking towards the castle where her attacker lives. (The film would have been shorter if she hadn't taken sixteen years to work out that she could conjure up a horse, but I digress.) The king wanted her killed, not because of some gender issue, but because she was the head of the army of a nation against which the king was at war, because she was the most fearsome warrior he had ever faced. She is a strong character with agency from start to finish. For once, this is a Hollywood production where the men engage with a female lead as an equal. And the wing-cutting scene is an example of that. The baddies take away the hero's superpowers, just like in every superhero film since the invention of kryptonite.

But the underlying metaphor could still be rape, because she is drugged. Well, I suppose a drugged drink might make some people think of date rape. But, when interpreting a fairy story, I think it's a good plan to start with the fairy story genre, and people get drugged and otherwise robbed of their free will all the time in fairy stories. Maleficient spends her time turning a male raven into a man and occasionally a wolf so often that I began to wonder if they needed to burn some unspent CGI budget. She sends Aurore to sleep at least twice. She sends the prince to sleep and then proceeds to drag him behind her in the air like a Mickey Mouse helium balloon in the Paris subway. Magic potions and spells are part of what make a fairy tale a fairy tale, and they predate date rape drugs by centuries.

But the underlying... No, just no! If I hadn't got to the film via this article about rape, I might be blogging now about how I'm getting bored with films about matriarchy. The wing-cutting scene, after about ten minutes, is the high point of male involvement in the plot. The lead character is female. The main supporting character is female. The comic relief fairy godmothers are female. The "kiss of sincere love" comes from a female. And the story arc concludes with the evil king being replaced by a queen of two nations, under the watchful eye of the former queen, with the Prince Not Quite Charming Enough and Raven-Man as their male fashion accessories. Oh, and then there are the soldiers who get to do a bit of violence before being tossed around in the air for a woman's amusement, exactly as she played with her dolls in the opening scene.

If this film is a parable of anything, it's a parable of how contemporary society struggles to find any role to which men are suited, other than as thugs. Or maybe it's about how really really sweet princesses can cause tooth decay. Or maybe, just maybe, it's just about Disney wanting to collect money from the public in return for ninety-seven minutes of vacuous entertainment, and we should save our sociological analysis for the real world.