Wednesday, September 30, 2015

A modern perspective for the witch: Maleficent

According to Palmer’s reading, witches represent evilness and cruelness in ancient times. “The generic witch was a mythological construction composed of vague attributes and a culture of fear.” “ They were said to cause not only natural calamities such as death and drought, but more prosaic hurt such as the infliction of routine sickness or the loss of animals.” However, the 2014 Disney movie Maleficent portrays the witch in a totally different angle, or we can say, in a modern angle. In this movie, Maleficent show her evilness after the king betrays her and destroys her home. She is not born to be a wicked witch due to the fact that in the beginning of the movie, Maleficent is kind, innocent and warmhearted. This is significantly different from the reading: The witch is not intrinsically immoral anymore, and there are good witches in the world.

Furthermore, based on the reading, since ordinary people believe that witches are born to be bad and will always attack and hurt them, they try to kill witches as much as possible.“Between 1450 and 1700, hundreds of thousands of reputed witches were put on a trial.” “Perhaps 200,000 formally investigated witches were drowned, hanged, quartered, pressed with suffocating weights, burned at the stake.” However, in the movie, ordinary people have their own judgments of right or wrong. Their bias toward witches has been corrected. In contrast to the classic fairy tale, this movie dose not classifies characters in simple black and white. Instead, the witch loses her mind and tries to revenge initially. Then the trust and love is formed between Maleficent and the princess so that the witch ends up helping the princess going back to her kingdom.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousOctober 1, 2015 at 5:27 PM

    If Maleficent in this new rendition of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tail is a witch, does that mean that society is starting to understand that not everything is black or white? If that is the case will we see more monster shown in a light where circumstances forced them to become "monsters" and will we see more movies about how human society is the monster that creates them. I defiantly like seeing this new movie compared to the cartoon. It helps show that even though we don't always understand why things happen, there is usually a story behind it.

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  2. Nick RandolphOctober 1, 2015 at 8:50 PM

    I really like looking at Maleficent as an example of the development of witches over time, because she herself is a progressed view of a classic fairy tale witch. In Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent is depicted as a purely evil and cruel witch, with the ability to shape shift into a dragon. The viewers generally feel ecstatic at her demise as it is seen as good conquering evil and the world becoming more pure, similar to how people felt about witch trials in the early modern period. In the new Maleficent film, it shows a lot more depth of character, and like you mentioned, shows how Maleficent as a witch was not initially evil, but loses her mind to revenge after being betrayed. Even after such cruel treatment however, eventually her good side is able to shine through once again, blurring the previous black and white line between good and evil, and developing the witch into a much more complicated and emotional character.

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  3. UnknownOctober 1, 2015 at 9:24 PM

    I also really enjoyed the movie. unlike other movies about witches, which witches are always described as evil or wicked. In this movie, the attitude of Maleficent towards the little princess was changed little by little. Maleficent became a really nice withes and she was protecting the little princess all the time without telling anyone. It is a comparison to show how people have changed their attitude towards witches, that witches only do evil magic, or related to all bad stuff. sometimes public opinion made them the way people see them. in other words, some people might be good inside, we can not just believe things by public opinion force, instead of really being there by ourselves.

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